Hi,

I was wondering whether there are fish positive loops that do not require smelting? The chaotic energy of the mod seems to be "limited" to resource transmutations as far as I understand the recipe mechanics so far (doing red & green science atm).

My current source of income is "fish -> iron (ore) -> iron chest -> disassemble" for a 250% ROI including running cost of the loop.
"Fish -> Water Barrel -> Disassemble" would be 268% (322% with modules).

Turns out size is the more useful metric for factory blocks.
Water Barrels require more assemblers/furnaces for the same fish production than Iron Chests. Using Advanced Fish Processing and turning it all back to fish is even worse.

btw, my favourite recipe is 42 Fish to Nuclear Fuel!

Indeed fish profit per unit area should be the most important metric for most of the game. Keep in mind though that the recipes are actually generated algorithmically based on the seed in settings.

I tried to design the recipe algorithm so that most would be roughly even, while giving a slight edge to ones with more ingredients to reward and encourage more complicated loops.

Thanks for playing my mod! I always enjoy hearing about how people are thinking about the game.

Uranium-238 and Uranium-235 can be produced from fish. Spare U-238 can be unassembled to Uranium ore.
But there are no recipes which use Uranium ore, so it is a dead end that cannot be got rid of (other than
blowing up a chest).

Yeah, I'm using the default seed. Or rather, have been, because I finished the game by now.

Advanced Fish Processing doesn't feel like it has a better yield, while adding a lot of extra complexity. Because of this I set out to launch a rocket without any oil stuff. It is possible, with the exception of sulfur for blue science. There simply us no disassembly recipe that gives sulfur back.

Advanced Circuits can be made by crafting Efficiency-III modules and disassembling them back to fish. This is 10x more space efficient than the regular way without modules. If I remember correctly, making BC via Power Armor (dis-)assembling is potentially fish-positive, which creates a new problem: Not using that fish will block the loop.

For fish generation I didn't have any breakthrough. Fish to Iron Chest takes ~100 ASM-II per Yellow Belt of Fish. Steel Chest or Water Barrel are equal or worse, while being available later. The advantage here is that they require steel, which can use productivity modules. Steel adds some crafting time though. Water barrels are only 1 steel/barrel, so we need a higher amount of ASMs tasked with disassembling them.

I was looking for an item with a low total crafting time, that is also somewhat expensive so we require few disassemblers (disassembling is always 3 seconds). Not many items disassemble into fish only, but Steam Turbines do. ~80 ASM-II/Electric Furnaces fill a Yellow Belt, which can be reduced to half of that with fully moduled ASM-IIIs. Steam Turbines take lots of gears, which are fast to craft and are made in ASMs. This means twice the productivity modules compared to steel!

In the end I only used Iron Chests and Steam Turbines for fish production. Cargo wagons are also good candidates, but same as with steel chests/water barrels, they don't offer much of an improvement.

My factory has reached a steady state of 226 science per minute with 80k fish per minute and 2.4 GW of power. I have a basic block for fish production which makes copper plates, iron plates, green circuits and a few gears to produce filter inserters which are disassembled back into fish. The basic version of this block used only level 1 modules, but has now been "upgraded" to a modified version using level 3 modules (since I can now make level 3 modules at a reasonable rate). Most oil products are produced via "coal liquifaction": which uses fish instead of coal!

I had a couple of huge iron ore loops, using gears to resupply the fish and turning the extra iron into steel, but I was still running low on steel, so I switched to a heavy armor loop: Fish + 100 copper -> heavy armor -> Fish + 50 steel.

So instead of 5 iron to 1 steel in a huge smelting array, I can turn 2 copper to 1 steel in a couple of assemblers.

My map (seed 1234) has steam turbine -> 50 gears + 63 fish, which is fewer fish than needed to create (89 fish + 50 copper + 20 pipes)