Dark Matter Replicators Reborn

Forked from nihilistzsche's Dark Matter Replicators Space Age — maintained by Jaer985

Adds replicators — machines that produce almost any item using only electricity. From ores to planetary science packs, almost anything that can be crafted can be replicated; the exceptions are listed below.

How it works

Replication costs are calculated from each item's ingredient chain and a per-tier time formula, so everything is balanced automatically for any modlist. Replication is not free: the energy is the cost — higher-tier replicators consume far more power, and rare ores cost more to replicate.

Replicator Tiers (1–5)

Every item's replication time comes from one formula — a base time that doubles per tier, scaled by how deep the item's own recipe chain is, and capped at 200 seconds for normal items. A short list of large structures takes longer — up to one hour — and anything that would need more than an hour is not replicable at all, so it has to be crafted. Tiers are fractional where the game's progression is (military science sits at 2.1, production at 3.2, and each planet has its own tier from Vulcanus 4.0 to Aquilo 4.6).

Higher tiers replicate faster (crafting speed 1×–6.55×) but pay more energy per item — the balance lives in the power grid, exactly like the original mod ("lower tiers are the most energy efficient"). Tier 1 can replace depleted mining drills. DMR's own machines — replicators, refiner, Accelerator Ring, Annihilation Chamber — are not replication targets: you build those.

Cross-tier replication: a tier-N replicator accepts items from any tier ≤ N — a tier-5 machine mass-produces basic inserters, but still pays 30 MW while doing it.

Machines pay differently: a recipe is priced by the machine that makes it in vanilla — a foundry or electric-furnace craft is about 3× cheaper to replicate than an assembler one, an oil-refinery craft about 1.6× dearer (the per-category factors live in lib/cost-solver.lua; it was never a per-tier multiplier).

Planetary Replicators (Space Age)

Specialized replicators for Vulcanus, Fulgora, Gleba, and Aquilo (40/80 MW — the most expensive machines in the game). Planet-specific items (tungsten, holmium, yumako, fluoroketone, scrap, asteroid chunks) route to their home planet's replicator.

Research Mirror (tech progression)

Each original technology gets its own "Replication: <tech>" mirror tech, unlocked by researching the original + the tier's raw materials. Five Replication Materials techs (tenemut → scoop → transducer → conduit) unlock the base materials of each tier. Tenemut itself is replicable at the tier where it appears: tier 1 when it spawns on Nauvis (or when the Dark Matter Synthesizer is enabled), otherwise the tier of the lowest planet that carries it.

Replicable: virtually every craftable item — including combat capsules, mines, combat robots (tier = vanilla unlock), turrets, ammo, solid fuel, seeds, raw-fish (tier 4, Gleba), quality-gated items via the Refiner.
Not replicable: weapons, armors, vehicles, vehicle equipment, personal equipment (except solar panels/batteries), wires/remotes/planners, filled barrels, internal step items, DMR's own machines, and anything that would take more than an hour to replicate.

Quality Refiner (with Quality mods)

The only DMR path to quality, and it needs nothing from you after the first click: pick the refining recipe once for the item you are working on, and the machine follows that item up the ladder by itself — after a success the item is uncommon and the recipe switches to "refine to rare", then epic, then legendary. One grade per successful attempt (never a jump): 5% → uncommon, 2.5% → rare, 1.25% → epic, 1% → legendary, with a 1% destruction risk per attempt. It is a normal crafting machine: 1 MW, a real progress bar, and one attempt per tier (1 s for tier-1 items, 5 s for tier-5), so a normal → legendary chain is ~240 attempts on average.

Dark Matter Power (endgame)

Tenemut is a crystalline mineral that resonates with dark matter when charged, and it is the only material that can be driven into the void between atoms. The Accelerator Ring does exactly that: 25 tenemut and one Nanophase Conduit are hurled into one another under 250 MW of superconducting magnetics until the debris collapses into a single unit of dark matter — 200 seconds of work, 50 GJ spent, for a fuel worth 25 GJ. The ring is the first machine that produces dark matter in quantity; the scoop, the transducer and the conduit are the instruments that measure and shape it.

That looks like a loss, and at first it is. The Annihilation Chamber is the other half: a dark-matter reactor that annihilates the substance with itself — metastable matter given permission to decay — and returns one unit as ten minutes of heat at 41.7 MW, feeding the vanilla heat exchangers and steam turbines. One unit is ~25 GJ of grid energy, and it burns nowhere else.

The fuel-duplication research (tiers 3, 4 and 5) adds productivity to every fuel replication recipe and to the ring's own collision recipe: +100%, +200%, +300% cumulative, so the ring returns two units per cycle where it returned one, then three, then four — 50 GJ of electricity in, 100 GJ of burnable matter out at tier 5. The catch is the burner. Priced against a plain boiler or furnace the line never pays — 0.80× of the fuel's burn value even at tier 3 — and only a high-efficiency burner such as a 2.5× heating tower turns it into a surplus (2.00× at tier 5). The real endgame loop needs no burner at all: the Accelerator Ring manufactures the dark matter and the Annihilation Chamber returns its full 25 GJ as heat on any planet.

The Annihilation Coil is the same decay, harvested as charge instead of heat: a 2×2 burner-generator that threads a phased lattice through the annihilation and takes the electricity directly — no water, no heat exchangers, no turbines, one machine of footprint. The ledger is the chamber's, unchanged: 25 GJ in, 41.7 MW out for ten minutes, effectivity 1.0 so a unit never returns more than it holds. Build it where the plumbing would cost more than the machine.

Rebalance v4.2 (cost model)

• Times: one closed form — 6.32 s × 2^(tier−1) × complexity, where complexity = 1 + 0.02 × production steps capped at 1.50 — capped at 200 s for normal items, and up to 3600 s for a short list of large structures; anything above that is not replicable and must be crafted. Fluids are clamped per LOT (water ~2 s/lot).
• Ore rarity: rare ores cost more (mining_time × 4).
• Research: 10×tier repetitions per tech (not per item), research packs per tier.
• Difficulty scales the result of that formula: Easy ×1.0 / Medium ×1.5 / High ×2.0 / Very Hard ×3.0 (the time cap is applied after the difficulty multiplier).

Dark Matter Synthesis (play without tenemut ore)

A new startup setting, Tenemut source, controls where tenemut comes from:

In the two synthesis modes, the Dark Matter Synthesizer (1 MW, 4 seconds per tenemut) produces tenemut out of nothing but electricity — it consumes no items at all, so a continuous 1 MW grid feed is the only requirement. Its energy-only recipe deliberately never accepts productivity modules. It is unlocked early by a technology that needs automation science packs only.

The setting only affects new worlds: tenemut patches already present on an existing map are not removed when you switch to "Synthesis only".

A second setting, Require DMR material packs for research (on by default), controls whether replication technologies demand the tier's DMR material pack (tenemut, dark-matter scoop, transducer, matter conduit) as a research pack. Turn it off to research replication with vanilla science packs only.

Compatibility

• Factorio 2.1 + Space Age (2.0 dropped in v4.0)
• Optional support: Quality, Elevated Rails, Bob's, Angel's, Krastorio 2, Space Exploration, Yuoki, factorissimo, AAII, omnimatter, bzgold, lane balancers...
• Replication recipes are generated dynamically for any mod's items (no per-mod tables needed)
• Load-order hardening: optional deps in info.json + data-final-fixes re-validates prereqs (moon-eneas, overhaul mods)

Settings (excerpt)