I know you said standalone and not solar system mods but where does Metal & Stars and packs like it fit in your methodology?

The mod adds 3 planets at once, and in my light testing, seems to be enabling and working decently well with currently available planet mods, especially lignumis and its gold as well.

Appreciate the mod, and it's existence even though it was never meant to be playable, it's doing a good job of it xD

(I had to disable it aside from actual testing because I didn't like what ERM does/found that it made too much changes to general base combat experience and not self contained planet wise)

+1

I tried looking into that mod yesterday (or the day before) and got an error on loading; I forget exactly what, but it was related to one of the planets in this pack (or one of the dependencies, can't remember off the top of my head), and wasn't resolved after removing said mod, just caused a different error.

I can try checking again tomorrow; updates for all planet mods have been coming out constantly, so things may have changed between tests. If I can safely include it, I think I will, but if there are too many issues, then not. (though I will still add support for it to my other space-related mods)

EDIT: Metal and Stars appears to be incompatible with Tiberium (causes an error about dynamic ore or something, caused by a Tiberium script, but considering it works by itself and alongside the other planet mods, means there must be something unique about the Metal and Stars mod that breaks the script for some reason) and Lignumis (science packs need to be removed from certain technologies, or Lignumis mod author needs to add another compatibility patch to work with Metal and Stars)

Lignumis update from 3 days ago, Lignumis mod author is aware of the issue between itself and Metal and Stars mod.

Tiberium update from 3 days ago, the dynamic ores issue has been reported to Tiberium mod author, but no response from them yet (last mod update was 30 days ago)

As of Jan 30, 2025, Metal and Stars mod is compatible with all of the planets in this pack. But it does lean a bit into the solar system level, as it currently adds 4 unique space locations, with plans to potentially add more in the future, so I'm leaning towards not adding it.

I'm very tempted to make a similar mod pack like this one, but that is more tailored to an actual gameplay experience.

Arrakis, the Protoss and Zerg planet mods would be first on the cutting block, as they add basically nothing of value. After that, I might cut either Muluna or Lignumis, possibly both, since they add quite a lot of extra fluff to the pre-space part of the game (which is not quite as interesting imo). That should also open the door to Any Planet Start compatibility, which I don't think is currently compatible with Lignumis (due to its hijacking of the player spawn during runtime), or Muluna (due to its hijacking of initial space science crafting). Metal and Stars would be a likely inclusion as well.

But considering many of the other planet mods are constantly in flux, or have plans to add more content, possibly breaking compatibility with each other, or with existing saves in general, I'm not sure I could finalize a modpack like that just yet. Even now, there are some interesting new planet mods releasing...

So my system is also out of question, after it left alpha? (tenebris is basically an alpha at this point, especially compared to any of my planets)
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/dea-dia-system

Wow, that looks impressive. Might be the first new star system mod I've seen on the portal? Unless I'm misremembering..

Two planets and a distant space location (edge of the new star system) should still be small enough to fit the criteria; 4+ locations from Metal and Stars, each with their own science pack, was just pushing it imo.

Though I don't see why everyone picks on Tenebris, when there are 3 other planets that (currently) add even less content than that one... but anyways, I'll test it out and add it to the pack when I can

I mean, I have 3 locations with 3 science packs, all with their own resource chains. That might be too much for you, but I specifically put it around my own star to not disturb other mods adding to the base system.

Metal and stars is also its own system now and that was my reason for asking. :)

Tenebris gets picked on because it is slim, and mostly abandoned. I hope Meteor can add more to it soon, last I know it would be content from the other abandoned mod terra paulus as it would just fit. :)
It also adds some things that just feel like bloat.

I decided to implement both mods as of the latest v1.0.10, which surprisingly.. just worked, at least without any errors on startup.

Updated the description and information tab to include mods like these, since they do fit the theme of being standalone, especially after MnS moved their planets outside the base game solar system. Yeah, that's that excuse I'll go with, to justify this complete 180 :D

I do have a quite long modlist when I develop it, just to see what crashes (not even alien biomes does, after cleaning out what it breaks). :) Moving them out of the system is one of the right calls then.
MnS not adding it to a place where like 4-5 other mods existed in the past is a plus.

I plan on building another system out of existing planets later, specifically because the selected mods (maraxsis and corrundum) have some things in common, and can push more obscure mechanics into being more prominent.

Oh yeah, one random question, since I can't ask on your mod's discussion page, is it intentional for the new Dea Dia system to be a comically short distance away from the Nauvis system?

Last I checked, it seemed to be about twice the distance from Nauvis to any of the other inner planets, which feels.. a little bit ridiculous, considering how far star systems are from each other in general, though I'm guessing that distance was more for balancing reasons? So the system wasn't impossibly difficult to get to? I would assume that's why MnS chose to use a stargate-like object to truncate the travel time between the two systems.

As for that new proposed new system, sounds pretty interesting, I wouldn't mind seeing it when it releases (though I think that would fall out of scope of this pack)

The distance is personal taste. When you only have this system it ensures that you don't pan the map for that long, and it also removes a LOT of the empty space that is normally there.

As for that new proposed new system, sounds pretty interesting, I wouldn't mind seeing it when it releases (though I think that would fall out of scope of this pack)

Most of that will be a compatibility layer between those two mods, with possibly +1 extra zone as needed.

I get an error message when trying to load modpack.

Below is the message received:

"Failed to load mods: ...Prototypes/dependency-updates/armored-biter-updated/lua:32: attempt to index field 'armored-biter-spawner' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
...prototypes/dependency-updates/armored-biter-updates.lua:32: in main chunk
[C]: in function 'require'
metal-and-stars/data.lua:1: in main chunk"

I have armored biters enabled and all mods are uptodate

There is a setting on armored biters to enable the nests.

@Simkiller, modpack still seems to load up just fine for me, using all default settings

@Simkiller, same issue here

same.

The people having the issue. I had to enable the armored biter mod by itself and enable the setting it needed and it worked after

I just wanted to update here that I've fixed the main issue that happens with a pre-existing installation of armoured biters.
download the latest version of metal and stars, leave feedback on my side if you notice any more problems