Why is utility science twice as expensive as production science and why is chemical science 4 times as expensive as military science? They are supposed to be equally expensive.

I think this is a bug, because the balance is bugged. It's not a balance topic. I'm not saying if it should be lowered or increased here, I'm just stating that the equal cost packs cost differently.

Interesting point. Many players will have different perspectives in how they want to balance this mod. I have done my best to give the player tools to configure the mod to fit their taste. I do have my reasons for the out of the box state of the mod, but will leave that out for brevity.

I suggest you go into the mod settings. There you can set the ore requirements for each recipe from 1 all the way up to 100000. With that you should be able to set the balance of the recipes as you wish.

I don't believe there is a bug to be fixed necessarily. If you think you lack the tools to configure the mod how you want to let me know what could be added!

Thanks for the feedback.

I do have my reasons for the out of the box state of the mod, but will leave that out for brevity.

But I want to know why :o

I suggest you go into the mod settings. There you can set the ore requirements for each recipe from 1 all the way up to 100000. With that you should be able to set the balance of the recipes as you wish.

Ok, thanks! Didn't know that was available.
Not sure what's balanced though. I just know I want them to be the same. Maybe I'll try to match regular recipe cost. Maybe I should add a bit exta since I need less factories to get the science.

But I want to know why :o

Ok! So the default state of the mod's goal is to give a good starting point from which the player can balance in either direction they want. With that, the map gen settings for all the ores are the same as iron, so perhaps the player can make space science more rare, while increasing the amount of blue science etc.

With all of the ores map gen settings the same, and the complexity being removed from science pack production (only require one item to make a pack rather than multiple tiers of processed items) the mod makes the game a lot easier. To counter act this I made the ores a throughput problem, hence the ever increasing amount of ores per science recipe.

Now you are right in that the values are pretty arbitrary, but given the default map gen settings I thought they were reasonable default values. I still wanted chemical science to be a large hurdle as it is a classic brick wall in the game.

I think I still stand by the default values, I don't think they are perfect by any means, but they capture the general idea I want to hit as blue science is considerably harder(more complex) to set up than military, and I would say the same when comparing utility and production science. To make up for the lack of complexity, I compensated by upping the throughput requirement.

However, at the end of the day, that is why I put settings for this mod, so ultimately the player can choose.

Thanks for bringing this up and giving the mod a try!

Edit: fixed markdown formatting + typos

That actually makes quite a lot of sense. You should probably set this topic to "general" instead of "bug" q:

I just assumed you had misunderstood the cost of the packs and didn't get that it was 3 tiers instead of 6. My bad.

So my next questions are:

Why are there several types of science ore? Why not have 1 science ore and the recipes just differ by input amount (and result pack ofc)? And Morphite could be the "science ore" used in all the recipes.

Or if they are different ores, why not mine science packs directly and adjust their cost by making the mining time different? That would eliminite the logistics of the ores, but you can just convert them on site anyways so it is already a mostly a non-problem.

You were correct, I didn't know that there were three tiers, when I reread the FFF I understood your point. However, even though the sciences are on the same tier, the complexity behind them I still would say is not the same. Setting up oil for the first time with chemical science is still considerably more complex than a military setup. You are using different ingredients, new buildings, new ingredient type etc. That extra complexity in my opinion should be accounted for in the recipe, which I do by increasing the throughput requirement.

The primary reason I went for one type of ore to one science is so that folks can pick and choose the ores they want in the game. Maybe someone only wants chemical science ore so it isn't such a huge hurdle when they get to that stage of the game, otherwise they don't want any other ores. It also lets folks tune ore rarities by science type. Ultimately, they get more granularity with having things separated out. Plus I thought the graphics would look cool having ores in the ground that look are bright and attention grabbing that looked just like the science packs.

As for a single universal ore that can be made into any science, I think that is a great idea, I didn't think of that when making the mod, and if you want perhaps I will work that into this mod.

As for mining science packs directly out of the ground, that too is a good idea. Again it wasn't something that I thought about. I don't think I would add that into this mod since it wouldn't really mesh well/it would add a lot of complexity. I could see a new mod named "Buried Sciences" perhaps. You may want to look into this mod All Minable. This already has science packs minable in the game I believe.

All Minable doesn't have minable science packs. Or flying frames (I think), solid fuel, any barrel, sulphur (but all the liquids exists so it doesn't matter) or anything on the rows below circuits. But I'm planning on using it together with this mod, just building a big railnetwork :)

I already have megabases and most of my time in Factorio is currently doing research and blueprint designing in creative mode so a pure logistics map seems like a way to enjoy some actual "play" while I'm waiting for my new blueprints to be completed.

I think that it could be fun if you mine the packs directly. The ores don't really do much but it might be kind of interesting to look for different kind of resource patches and not just 1 science ore. And if you have both Morphite and Science ores installed all the recipes that currently exists in this mod would still exist but use Morphite instead. Morphite is the ore that can transform anyways. And it would be a bit weird this mod had 1 science ore that could become any science pack when that's Morphites role. Morphite would just need an optional dependency on this mod and the recipes moved to that mod (and trivially altered) and the science patches would then be modified to give science packs directly. Morphite as the single ore that can be used for all packs means that you still need to find some specialised science pack patch if you don't have extreme amounts of Morphite so you get a little bit of morphite processing and a little bit of pure direct science mining.

Not sure how that would affect the bottling mod, but I'm not really interested in using that atm so I can't comment on that.

how about an optional step that takes the ore and makes it into a fluid and a mod integration with bio-industries glass but if no bio-industries installed it will still go through the chemical plant. I know that there is a fluid science mod out there but that had you place items in the chemical plant and thus it is not as simple as, place ore in, getting science magically out.

the ore-science ratios are 1, 10, 25, 100, 250, 500, 1000 for red, green ... That means a 1 million white mine yields 1000 white science packs and you need to harvest 10 white mines for a 10000-research project !!! That doesn't pay but maybe it's justified because it replaces a rocket launch.
The other ratios are in fact too disbalanced. Normally you need 3, 7, 25, 52, 154, 163 units of crude ores for red, green, ..., yellow science packs. That should be a realistic orientation for the ratios how it should be - you can easily change this numbers inside the file.

You make some great points. Thanks for running the numbers, does that include oil for blue science and up in those ratios?
I do agree the ratios can be refined, for now they are guestimated, and trade a complexity problem for a throughput problem. There are settings the player can configure to change each recipe that is added. Though, I very much agree red science is too cheap, and space science too expensive by default.
I will probably switch over to these ratios, and remove the per ore recipe settings, and add a multiplier setting instead, so players can still balance the mod as they wish (1x costs, 2x, etc.). Great ideas and thanks for the feedback, very helpful!

...thanks and yes, oil was counted, too. But nevertheless your mod is very helpful in the space exploration mod where science is so complicated to manufacture that it's nearly impossible to get higher research when you need it. With the Texugo Ta-miner it is possible to harvest even large amounts of your science ore, so this helps a lot.