i came here with questions but i've realised the answer to all of them is "stop playing" so, as a warning for anyone else who came here with the same hopes as me:

i'm 200 hours in. i haven't planted a single tree, there's no indication that's anywhere in my future. it's just normal factorio but way way more complex.

of course if you're here for "factorio but way more complex", go nuts, you'll love this. this is intended as a warning to anyone who expects "build forests not factories"

powerful mod. not what i wanted it to be.

You can check the tech tree to see exactly when it happens. Terraforming is the end game, in the final tech tier. The full tech tree is visible from the start, and it's pretty clear if you scan ahead at which point you start seeing plants and animals and DNA icons start to appear.

Some people beat the mod in under 150 hours, there's even an achievement for doing that. At least one streamer posted their entire run as a Youtube series, which they completed in around 130 hours on their first playthrough. A few other streamers have also finished runs, though I don't have all of their times. Skipping through these could also give you some preview of the end game biology. And you start in with biology well before the final victory screen, so it should be possible to start with creating life around the 75% finished mark of a playthrough, not including extended post victory goals.

Some designs or play styles will take longer than others. A big factor in how quickly you will progress through the late game is how you manage scale. You'll need to scale up a lot as the research costs grow, and the game gives you a lot of tools to be able to do that, such as allowing productivity on every recipe, large beacons, which are easier to use than regular ones, high pressure chemistry, 4x speed tier 3 machines, and more efficient versions of many key recipes. If you resist using all tools available to you, then scaling will become harder and slower. On the other hand, trying to scale up to megabase levels at too early of a stage will also slow you down. A flexible design with room for expansion and a gradual ramp up of production will get you to the end game far more efficiently.

i appreciate the explanation.

and to be clear, i don't want you (or anyone) to think of this as negative. i don't think this is a bad mod. i think it's really cool. the amount of time and research that's gone into it is incredible.

but it wasn't what i'd hoped it would be. at first i was okay with that, because having to figure out my way around new obstacles was interesting. but at a certain point some mechanics became a frustration, and i was enjoying myself less and less the more i had to deal with those mechanics.

i realised that i wanted to be playing a completely different mod from the one you've built.

and if you're curious, it was having to scale up that made me realise this wasn't fun any more. it took me weeks (with a couple of hours of playtime a day) to build factories that assemble three of the eight ingredients for the next science. the thought of having to setup a blue underground factory from scratch filled me with such dread that i closed the game, and i haven't played since.

the biggest frustration was recipes that make more than one thing. if i could remove just that from this mod, i would.

clearly there are people to enjoy this, and good for them, but i'm not one of them. what i wanted was to experience something similar to vanilla factorio gameplay but instead of dieselpunk, i'm growing plants.

FWIW, one of the things that has always bothered me about Factorio is that every production chain is basically set. Copper makes wires, iron makes plates, wires plus plates make green circuits, etc.

I always wanted there to be multiple paths to making the same thing, like the way there is in this mod. By the late game, for instance, you have about 10 different ways to make graphite.

I also really liked the challenge of figuring out how to deal with byproducts, once I got used to it.

All of which is to say that the exact reasons you state for not liking the mod are the reasons I do like the mod. Games are funny that way.

All of which is to say that the exact reasons you state for not liking the mod are the reasons I do like the mod. Games are funny that way.

absolutely! i'm glad you enjoy it.

maybe if i could improve my own skills i could make the mod i wanted to be playing here, but that's a long way off.

My way to approach this, is to build mini factories and link them with trains (LOT OF TRAINS). Mall is made out of bots, with +50 trainstations for all the ingredients needed. Once every input and output is a train, and everywhere has "if overflow, dump/burn it/send to recyclying", you're one an highway of pleasure. Building and expanding and just dealing with electricity. But yes the road to trains and bots were slow 40/50 hours of pain.

My way of dealing with this supply issue (don't know if it was the intended way) has been to say everything in a box is the desired product. Any byproducts are either never boxed or are unboxed before feeding them into train stations. Then I have an LTN network that hauls everything that is unboxed to a recycling center. This boxes it up and makes the boxes available to LTN as supply, and anything excess it disposes of.

Otherwise I was having problems of LTN not knowing whether something was supposed to be the supply or whether it was a byproduct that needed to be disposed of.

I dealt with byproducts by having 4 train stations for prioritizing one item. Byproducts should be recycled (byproduct station -> supply station), and something needs to be done if there is too much or too little byproduct (primary and disposal stations).

Two train stations receive input: byproduct and primary. Primary is where new products are sent when byproduct is empty.

Two train stations provide output: supply and disposal. Disposal is activated when byproduct is full.

While this is complex to set up, it's only needed when byproducts are handled in different areas. Most byproducts are produced and consumed in one area so they have lighter weight handling.