First of all, thank you for the mod! This has been a very refreshing way to play that game that actually forced some wildly different optimizations and creativity~. I thought i'd take the chance to give a review of my experience, gameplay solutions, and issues I've encountered
My playthrough:
SPOILER FACTORY SETUPS BELOW
I started a new run with market science, some minimal quality of life modes, and MAXIMUM SCIENCE MULTIPLIER (1000x). Its crazy, yes, but I like being forced to really optimize and scale my solutions at each stage of the game. So then right away, the biggest challenge here was being bottlenecked on a single market place.
At game start, I was forced into doing a lot of manual item management at the market to try and maintain having a single full stack of each item in the market. I put 12 individual belts leading to the market, each inserting items that are requested in the largest stacks (iron pipe, smelted plates, gears, chips, etc), and then I had to manually insert stacks of anything else requested every 20 or so seconds. No screenshot, pretty self-explanatory.
Rushed research for long inserters, then managed to find a setup where I could get 24 belts inserting items into the market! (I have a bobs mod that allows for changing angle of inserters). Then I rushed basic circuits and wired up logic to only insert items if a full stack isn't present in the market already.
https://imgur.com/LmE4Wk9
Then after unlocking filter inserters, the real work began. Ended up settling on a configuration of 4 distinct belts approaching each side of the market, each leading into a small sushi-belt that will organize items into a variable amount of stacks in chests right outside the market. Inner filter inserter circuitry will then only put items into the market on demand; with the exception of a few large stack items (looking at you 175x iron bar requests). As items are emptied from chests, circuitry spans out all over my base that will put items onto one of these 4 belts to be replaced as needed.
https://imgur.com/ekZSCRV
and then.... I stopped playing. I realized that even with more and more advanced logic such as spreading items stacks between multiple chests, logistic bots down the road, I'll always be bottlenecked on two things: how fast these 12 inserters will operate, and how frequently the marketplace refreshes its item requests.
Issues and suggestions:
Once again, this was a very great and refreshing mod; in no way am I complaining or trying to be entitled. As a game developer myself, I understand how important feedback can be and so hopefully this can assist us if we continue to develop this mod further.
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Inability to scale
If you read my playthrough above; the single market place is the largest unsalable bottleneck here. I assume we restrict the single marketplace due to technical ease, but if we want to develop this mod more this would be the biggest thing to tackle. From a gameplay perspective, perhaps there could be a tradeoff where having more markets makes item worth less overall? Or somehow make each marketplace increasingly more difficult to craft?
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All items needed to progress science, item requests are very small.
Right at the get go, it became obvious that I had to automate basically every single item a tiny bit to get any research done at all. It makes that first 'reward' of getting that first research done very hard to obtain, but then all subsequent researches are significantly easier. I would consider perhaps making each research only accept a few types of items that are constantly accepted. This way we can automate item production in sets, as well as force us to optimizing/scaling these few specific items more.
Moreover, completing any research subsequently makes all further research harder due to new recipes. It'd be a nice quality of life thing to have each research only request items from dependent researches, to encourage (not punish) filling out the tech tree.
Thank you for the mod! Its been a blast :)
