First off I absolutely loved this mod all the way through. I've always preferred building compact factories so being forced to do so was great, as was finally interacting with recursive blueprints which has always seemed cool but less practical for most applications. I see myself adding this planet to the small list of must includes and visiting it early each playthrough for the technology it offers now that I've mostly solved it and could run it with minimal time on planet while I work on other planets like the vanilla ones. For my first run I do what I always do when a planet has a start option and started a fresh save here.
Feedback:
I loved the interaction with LORAX but I was admittedly confused on how to get into the facility on my first attempted playthrough a few months ago. I'm not sure if this is a case of me just missing the message or it getting added after that initial run. Either way on a more recent playthrough I added this to it and when I landed and saw the message and did the initial exploration I knew I had to start a fresh game.
Since you already set certain technologies as already researched on Any planet start please consider adding the following:
- Bulk Inserter - Without the actual technology bulk inserters are just really energy inefficient fast inserters since they have a hand size of 1 without the tech and admittedly there were points where I just used speed up cause the factory was producing items far faster than the inserters could handle.
- Logistic system - Either full unlock or just adding requesters and actives as part of the logi/contstruction bot researches. It didn't take long for me to max out my effective limit on the build floor expansions that were unlockable because there wasn't enough starting ones. If not this than maybe some way to buy some limited amount from LORAX after 3 or more expansions are unlocked.
- A Linox version of the foundry recipe for Any Planet start only. While what I had was enough for how many requesters/actives that were available if you do give a way to get more then this will quickly become just as much of a bottleneck. On non-APS runs there's not really an issue cause you can just ship some over from vulcanus after grabbing a few of the drop upgrades which would be pretty fast to get when not trying to also build/research all of the other sciences on Linox itself
As someone who always relies on completely basic circuit logic, I was pretty happy when I got the power converter to work but I was admittedly stumped for a bit cause I didn't notice there were separate inputs and outputs like a combinator, I don't think it would give too much away to mention that in the tips page for it
Two things that I don't feel need changing but I'll mention just in case:
After 2.1 the Advanced Acid Neutralization is going to be even better compared to the normal one. Currently its 50% less acid for 50% more steam, but with the patch it will also be 1/10th the calcite cost. This is probably fine since its restricted to Linox anyway but I figured I should at least mention it.
In the corridors you can place offshore pump/outlets. This is also probably intentional, but I figured it doesn't hurt to say something in case it's not and you intended to have us pipe waste water to the surface to dump into the lava