Welcome to Cubium

Once upon a time, an Engineer mastered the secrets of the Ultracube. In an exhilaration of cube induced madness, he created a second Ultracube. The second cube resonated with the first, creating this celestial body – and one dead engineer. Stained in blue from cube-induced-destruction, this world is filled with Ultradense lava, stone, a bit of sulfuric acid, and coal. Here you can pump ultradense lava and mix it with stone to create ultradense substrate - which is used to make microcubes. These cubic remnants have but a fraction of the true cube's power, but can at least be used to make Cube jelly - yummy.

New Machine

Cube Smasher (Recolored Quantum Stabilizer from Hurricane). Used for cubic recipes. Can be used to make more Smashers - that recipes can take productivity modules.

Warning

While it is possible to visit this as your first planet and succeed, it is best to visit second.

Add to existing saves?

Safe to add. All the cube stuff is on the cube planet. No major vanilla overhauls. Only tweaks to make sure foundations can be placed in ultradense lava, and an alternative unlock for the carbon recipe.

Okay, how does this actually work?

Bring a bunch of supplies to get yourself jump started.
Use ultradense lava and stone to make ultradense substrate to make microcubes. Then you use the microcubes to make cube-jelly. Cube jelly spoils in 2 minutes into destabilized cube matter, which spoils into dream in 10 minutes. There are multiple recipes to make cube-jelly, the better ones require both the microcube and cube-jelly as input.

Cube-Jelly?

Cube Jelly is transformed into multiple resources. Steam, solid fuel, plastic, cube jelly, iron, copper.
Destabilized cube matter must be recycled - and gives you carbon,sulfur, ice, iron,copper
Dream can be converted into ice, and liquid dream.

What about multiple cubes?

There are two cube types - standard microcube and inverted microcube. Recipes that use the cube to make/transform stuff either always return a dormant cube or have a chance to return a dormant cube. Each provides a challenge to manage. While you get multiple cubes - you trade a single thread in the original mod for multiple partial threads that weave in and out of each other. The quick spoil time on the core resource brings back some of feeling having to do things sequentially - at least at start up or when things invariably break.

I don't understand

Original mod - single threaded Factorio. Need active cube to do anything. (Mostly). Most important resource: Cube time.
This mod - Smaller cubes that make a quick to spoil resource. Most important resource: Cube-jelly-throughput. AKA Jelly-time.

Why use the cube?

You get to craft items in bulk. Different time/resource balance cost. Should be possible to go even bigger.

Credits

Thanks for Hurricane for the graphics for the Cube Smasher. (Originally called quantum stabilizer) Link to Hurricane's work: https://shorturl.at/AFcDm

Thanks to raiguard for Krastorio 2 assets (matter cube) https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Krastorio2Assets

Thanks to grandseiken for Ultracube mod. Great inspiration. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Ultracube?from=updated