I thought about that, but giving new quality bonuses to items is a lot more problematic than entities (there is no way to seamlessly make them "just work").
With entities, you can leave the items itself untouched and only replace the entity when it's placed into the world. With items, you'd either need a script-based "activation" machine, or need to let the repair packs "spoil" into the correct quality variant. The major issue with both of these approaches is that once the item "spoils" or is activated, you can't use it in recipes that require the original repair pack at a certain quality (since internally, the modified item with the improved stats (eg. repair speed) can't be the original one). This means that either I'd also have to dynamically change all recipes that use repair packs as inputs, or there would need to be a way to convert between the "empowered" and the original item.
You also can't use the "any quality" condition on splitters or inserters - each quality is considered a unique item when activated.
I guess I could make an addon mod for these item quality changes - if I do, which option would you prefer to be the default?
- items instantly spoil into their improved variant, and all recipes that require it are modified
- items spoil into their improved variant after some time; all recipes that require it or splitter routing has to be completed before that timer runs out
- "empowerer" machine that converts items into quality-specific variants - after conversion, these items can't be used in crafting (unless I also add a "depowerer")
- additional crafting recipe that creates "empowered" variants for >normal outputs (via instant spoiling upon removal from the machine)
"Empowered" items behave as if every quality is a separate item (because they actually are different internally), so it's something that players would have to be aware of to make use of the mod.
Possible scaling for such a mod:
- repair pack speed
- better bot scaling application(currently, you have to place down bots into the world manually to get improved stats, instead of putting them into a roboport)
- fuel value for fuel items
- ammo range bonus (/AoE?) for cannon shells
- AoE for artillery shells
- maybe firing speed bonus for magazines
- grenade AoE
- maybe speed/homing boost for missiles (might reduce waste with explosive missiles in spidertron??)
- AoE for explosive missiles
- maybe railgun ammo width or range????
There are also a few cases of items where manual empowering would not actually be necessary, ie. these might even end up in the main mod:
- grid equipment improvements (mostly just damage of lasers and discharge defenses - might be quite OP)
- armor stats (eg. resistances) (might also be quite OP - offset would probably scale with +30%, percentages with p_new = 1-(1-p)/(1+0.3*lvl), ie. legendary mech armor would have 88% instead of 70% acid resist (and 25/80% fire resist instead of 10/50%))
In both cases, the exchange could simply be applied when inserting the equipment into the grid/equipping the armor.
