Hi i'm 80 hours or so into the playthrough, i've had another one with Exotic industries already, so i knew where i was going and set the tech to cheap scaling.

I have reached the late game to the point where i have unlocked the space ace tech pack, but i am still unable to find some seed or resin to quick start the process for odd plating.

I am not using explosive nor toxic biters, only the regular one and have been able to only find 1 alien flower in a range that correspond to the radius of an artillery with 12 or 13 level of research from starting location. I only found 3 or 4 area that looked burned in the water but none of the broken alien beacon yet alone a functionning one.

So far my map is around 7 MB i have way more space that i would ever need , but i feel forced to wander around in water for the resin/seed.

I don't know if this meant to be, maybe had i not made tech so cheap i would have a larger area revealed and found enough. Maybe i've messed up by not using the appropriate ennemy biters mod, i can share save game if you think it can help because i think something is not right, maybe a balance issue.

I am going to use the black market mod i think to cheat a few seeds and remove it later, i don't want to increase save sive when not necessary, it feels not fun to just wander around with the jetpack for hours not being sure there is a way to find soemthing, if i could suggest something maybe the rare biters nest that spawn could drop alien seed ? my world mosty is home to worms only larger islands have nests.

Apart from that i had fun using the modpack

Good work on going so far. I had 3 saves so far and in all of them I got all that I needed really close, but I do understand that not everyone can be so lucky, so in next update there will be a way how to make these late game things from water.
I am still working on balancing that, since it has to be expensive enough to not make it worth it over any EI specific recipes for replicating.

Any suggestions are welcomed :)

So i've run a bit more experiments : took my save, went in editor, and revealed lots of land, then reloaded, done the same again several time, i've also done this with additionnal mods like toxic armored and explosive biters to have an idea of how much land was required revealed to hope to find stuff. But it was quite saddening, i couldn't find any structure ( beacon/stabilizer), although i was able to find some alien flower and resin ( few and it took long time). I still think it's unintuitive to have to wander above water to find stuff. I resorted to use the black market mod for the stabilizer which is the only thing i needed.

It occured to me that the mining fluid isn't used in the seablock version, so if it was used to generate a seed or a resin, one player would have to set it up for that particular purpose, say something very expensive like 100K mining fluid for 1 seed, something like "deep underground biologic traces research"

I have no idea how difficult it is to edit factorio mods, but the more advanced integration could be an alien planet destination, or maybe another satelite called "biologic sampling satelite" that would yield some organic material (resin or seed )when sent into planets that are not gas giant or "the sun" and very rarely one would receive a building from that planet instead ?

Anyway, it was a fun play ! I found it faster/easier compared to the angel+bob seablock. With the cheapest tech i could finish in around 100 hours while regularly removing and rebuilding part of the base to include newer beacon or module or receipes which i don't generally do, as i just expand and expand.
I made use of the concentrated solar offensive tower heavily as it outrange the worms i had to kill, that may be a "cheese", i died several time before finding out the routine to casually expand with them. Then i used artillery when available, i had one in the middle of my squarish island that fired every 30 sec or so for its entire existence.

I ended up using dirty water as soon as possible and removed all my mineral sludge based ore, only keeping oil from algae. I had the mod "Greentec" too, which adds way of doing bio-based concrete wood fuel or oil product which i found worked well with the seablock to propose alternative receipes in early-midgame.

I only ever used landfill made of stone, turned my slag into it at first, later turned slag from glass into dirty water to void it.

At the end i think i have around 7K/sec production of dirty water installed, but i'm using only 40% or so for science & modules which are taking a high % of ressources. Energy before BHG related was around 20 GW of fusion power, initial 5GW deut/tritium later complemented by 15GW tritium tritium, and a small deut/deut to generate neutrons. I had removed my previous uranium based nuclear plant and all the solar and concentrated solar pannel to make room for more buildings because my island was overall quite small, entirely visible from map view zoom with a grid of 12-16 radars or so.

I think the seablock space constraint is working well with the exotic industries feature of always being able to improve a build with newer modules, newer assemblies, and then swapping an assembly for beacon, and then new beacons and again new module, and new receipes. I had the mod cargo ship active, i had somewhat of an idea to make several island for different things, but i found it more fun to try and not make massive landfill production and many islands and instead trying to fit everything in a single small one and manually tweaking ratios by using the rate calculator mod to handle the math very fast for me ingame. Which retrospectively, again, may explain why it felt exploring a lot of empty water compared to if i had made a larger base with several islands spread apart to make sure i have room to extend them as game goes, in such case i would have found probably a few alien seed or resin "naturally" and then it would have felt logical to continue more exploration for structures.

Anyway, it was a fun game, i added shrek character mod and RP item anarchy, and pretended i was in messy swamp throwing fertilizer from the greentech mod to grow plants while expanding my dirty water production because a playthrough centered around dirty water, made me think of shrek for some reason :).

Amazing mod review. If you do not mind I would put it to the main page of this mod, because it is well written and some of the stuff is better explained that I am willing to :D

It occured to me that the mining fluid isn't used in the seablock version, so if it was used to generate a seed or a resin, one player would have to set it up for that particular purpose, say something very expensive like 100K mining fluid for 1 seed, something like "deep underground biologic traces research"
- This is great idea and works better that my original idea so I will implement this

I have no idea how difficult it is to edit factorio mods, but the more advanced integration could be an alien planet destination, or maybe another satelite called "biologic sampling satelite" that would yield some organic material (resin or seed )when sent into planets that are not gas giant or "the sun" and very rarely one would receive a building from that planet instead ?
- You might want to look into ExoticIndustries discord to know whats planed next :)

Anyway, it was a fun play ! I found it faster/easier compared to the angel+bob seablock. With the cheapest tech i could finish in around 100 hours while regularly removing and rebuilding part of the base to include newer beacon or module or recipes which i don't generally do, as i just expand and expand.
- 100 hours is great. Expensive tech make things surprisingly harder that expected (Amount of resources for late game is mental)

Anyway, it was a fun game, i added shrek character mod and RP item anarchy, and pretended i was in messy swamp throwing fertilizer from the greentech mod to grow plants while expanding my dirty water production because a playthrough centered around dirty water, made me think of shrek for some reason :).
- I am glad that you had fun and hopefully it will be even better after bit more balancing

Amazing mod review. If you do not mind I would put it to the main page of this mod, because it is well written and some of the stuff is better explained that I am willing to :D

Thank you ! Do as you wish , feel free to edit or correct the mistakes and/or appropriate/modify the sentences x)

• 100 hours is great. Expensive tech make things surprisingly harder that expected (Amount of resources for late game is mental).

I had choosen "linear" increase for tech cost and started with the cheapest options, so tech cost was something like 1 then 2 then 3 then 4 science packs so VERY cheap and slow increase, but with many mods, i still ended up with around 500 techs to research, only the infinite research cost were normal, and i was researching robot speed most of the time since the other tech were so cheap. This is not my first exotic playthrough though and i f i was not planting trees in alley i could have finished much faster :) maybe it is not the intended way to play since it's a very extreme setup, but i somewhat still think the seablock version plays overall faster than the non-seablock exotic industries. Maybe it has to do with the mining fluid logistic and spread of different ressources which is not a problem in seablock also defending/expanding base is simpler when on island. This is to my liking i wouldn't have choosen those settings otherwise :)

again 100 hours with the cheapest settings and no other mods and a knowledge of exotic industries, is not super fast, i'm a slow builder i wouldn't be surprised if someone manage to do it in half that time or less , but that's definitly not what i expect from normal settings i don't want to give misrepresentation on the mod page if you quote me :D

About sea block being faster that normal ExoticIndustries:
- I was playing with expensive research and I have to say that first 10 hours are harder, but after that It is easier. There is plan for endgame research for sea block that will make things harder again, but for now that is still only plan.

One small note that I forgot last time.

There is no need to breed fish in this mod. You can just gather all fish before expanding your base. This should be thousands of fish for free.

I agree with both of your remarks, my early game was indeed disproportionnatly easy, because at this point the tech were so cheap i past the burner phase which i dislike without really automating things, which is also where the seablock part is the hardest.

I generally dislike handcrafting and playing with low tech where you have to do a lot of it because you don't have access to proper automation yet is not my favourite, so my settings allowed me to somewhat skip what could constitute a much longer part.

I used a jetpack to fly above water and just grabbed fish with robots :)