I've been tinkering with the mod and I tried changing it to use the car, vehicle grid that the Bob's Vehicle Equipment mod adds and I rather like it. It's tidy and fitting for the carts to use such gear. My curiosity is if you can add a supplemental mod to have bob's vehicle equipment work in the cart grid. It requires literally just changing "Armor" to "Car", "Vehicle" and the game immediately starts allowing and using Bob's Vehicle equipment which feels really slick. I haven't tried it yet but I'm curious what a cart with a laser gun on it would do.

Next, I've been playing around with trunk size. Can you look into adding a 1-5 research that uses each subsequent level of science to increase the capacity? Heck, they could even be done like the train cargo where you just take the previous cart and add some steel and chips to it. 20/30 slots could take additional green chips and steel, 40/50 could take red, and 60 could take blue. That'd scale it towards the end game. I've been playing around with 60 slot trunks and it seems pretty fair assuming it would be a 500 count of red, green, blue, grey, yellow, and purple science. Perhaps make each science require 100, 200, 300, 400, then 500 and increase the colors each time. R/G for the first, then R/G/B, third R/G/B/Gr, fourth R/G/B/Gr/Y, and finally all six sciences. Each research would increase the trunk size by ten until the last one fills out the screen with 60 slots.

Also would it be possible to have the cart's speed be affected by concrete? I think if they were to do 7.5 on brick, 10 on concrete, and 15 on refined concrete it would be perfectly reasonable and would make them scale well into endgame since the high levels of concrete require quite the investment.

I don't know how you have it set up but neither exoskeletons with the base or the tiles beneath the carts change the speed from 5km/hr. I'm confused as to why you won't let the cart speed change at all. I'm not well-versed in the modding systems yet, but I assume it's another way to reduce the UPS hit that a large number of carts would cause. If not though, would any sort of speed change be possible? I'm not looking for train speeds or even car speeds, but I don't like how the carts interact with belts so I'm not a fan of using them to increase the cart speed. It's too inconsistent and causes too many problems. Namely, the carts stop when they reach the end of the belt and there's a pause before they start rolling again. This often causes a line of carts to cram together.

Heck, if you did the Mk 1-6 carts I was mentioning above with storage space, you could make each subsequent cart go 1km/h faster so the Mk6 carts would have 60 slots and do 10km/h. That way you could keep your speeds still constant but allow us some speed increases.

All in all, I love the mod and I love the idea of it. I've been using it to try and set up a really effective ribbon world by lining the top and bottom of the map with paint arrows to have them using the edges as a sort of cart highway travelling back and forth. Then I use off-road paint to direct them up and down from the highway towards their targets. Perhaps I'm intending to use them over a longer distance than you had in mind, but it's a great concept. Instead of belt constants, they allow transference of large lump sums and allow you to use the sticker system to have your entire main bus travel through the same three or four tile wide strip. I want to make an entire factory based around these neat carts and if I knew anything about modding in this game myself, I'd love to make an addon that would expand it with these ideas. But it is your mod, so I hope you take some of these into consideration!

Thanks for all the work on it!

Haven't looked at Bob's Vehicle Equipment recently. Personal preference is to skip most of Bob's mods except the minimum ores and intermediates required to make Angel's mods more complex. But if someone wants to do an add-on or contribute a patch here to support BVE, feel free.

The trunk research might work. A possible blocker is the code iterates over inventories looking for filtered slots, in order to emulate logistic request slots which can't be added to a vehicle inventory. More slots would mean more load, though perhaps only briefly when entering a cart stop...

The cart speed is a bit of a challenge to get right, and yes, it's currently limited due to UPS. There are two main considerations:

• A slow speed allows the on-tick handler to schedule position checks for each cart as infrequently as possible, as low as 1 per second. Increasing the speed too much would mean checking every cart more often, which doesn't scale well in Lua.

• A constant speed means a cart only needs to know another cart's position in order to avoid future collision. Adding in factors like surface material, grid equipment, fuel type, acceleration etc, makes the process much more expensive.

Your suggestion of researching up to 10kph in 1kph increments might be doable though, if each change applied uniformly to the whole fleet. An early version of the mod had a 10kph limit but was never tested with a decent size base.

Well fair enough. I can change to the Bob's stuff myself. Already have. Don't know how to turn it into a mod myself but it's only a single line so I'll just change it myself everytime the game updates.

Post your patch? So long as it doesn't break games for those without Bob's, no problem...

Can't. I don't have it written that way. I hard changed the gear used by the carts and if you don't have bobs, it would definitely break it. I don't know how to write it variably so it would check for bob's or not.