Steel smelting in this game costs 10 iron plates and 60 seconds to make a single steel plate (Angel's Smelting Patch mod, it modifies and/or removes a lot of vanilla smelting recipes to encourage using Angel's) and this mod is adding a recipe of 5 iron plate stacks to make 1 steel plate stack in 80 second, which is sooo much significantly cheaper and definitely shouldn't be in there. I'm betting this mod is just running too early to calculate and it might just need an optional dependency on: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/only-smelting

Well, vanilla recipe ratios are more efficient when your mods make the recipes intentionally more difficult. So what you're asking is for a variation of the recipe that tracks Angel's recipe, and for the normal recipe to be disabled if the related vanilla recipe is disabled by a different mod?

So what you're asking is for a variation of the recipe that tracks Angel's recipe, and for the normal recipe to be disabled if the related vanilla recipe is disabled by a different mod?

Or specifically for it to copy it based on the existing recipe's values (if the recipe is missing then don't create the stacked version there-of, if it exists then multiply based on the time/count/etc values of that recipe), not to just put in recipes straight. :-)

Should be fairly easy with a simple helper function that you can call with a recipe name, it would then read the recipe with that name, if it does not exist then just return, if it does exist then copy it with a new name (prepend "stacked-" or something to the name), multiply each of the time/input/output values by the stack amount, store it back into the data table, then return. That with a few optional dependencies to enforce proper loading order and then there is a setup that is trivial to extend, even automatically based on various criteria.

Based on https://github.com/shanemadden/factorio-deadlock-experiments/blob/master/prototypes/directsmelting.lua it seems that everything is hardcoded right now, which is both very difficult to upkeep and very difficult to extend in comparison to the above suggestion. It is also running during the data stage, it should probably run during the data-final-fixes stage so it gets the full represented views of the recipes that it is making stacked versions of as well in addition to a proper smattering of optional dependencies. :-)

Yup, they're pretty hardcoded at the moment - agreed that they should link to the ratios after adjustment by any other mods, but I'm wondering if there's any other 'stuff' I'll need to account for in that same vein - I imagine some mod combos might mean it's more appropriate for this mod to avoid creating certain recipes at all?

Eh, in general if the base recipe exists then simply multiplying it should be sufficient, if it doesn't exist then just don't create it, when unlocked via the same research it seems balanced for any setup then?