Hi there, great mod so far. I just researched the second recipe for the Mechanical Prototype (red bottle science).

Ok, I kinda get the feeling that being a new recipe, it might be more efficient to craft the red bottle this way. However, since the ingredients are so different, I have no idea if this is so; or if maybe this is just a different/unrelated way to craft them.

First recipe takes 1 motor and 1 iron gear for 1 red bottle.
Second recipe takes 1 pump 3 and 1 steel cable for 25 red bottles.

Should it be obvious to me that the second one is more efficient? because those pump 3's are kinda expensive. Is there a way to calculate or prove that it is more cost-effective?

I have the same question about the chemical sample (green bottle). The second recipe requires four different barreled fluids. And barrels are NOT easy to make in this mod so I wonder if it is cost-effective enough to justify creating that mini barrel factory for all those fluids and then also handling the barreled byproducts; which are also unique to this recipe as far as I've gotten in this mod.

Thank you for your feedback!

YAFC is one tool used to analyze costs of things in Factorio. According to YAFC it's significantly cheaper. That's the intent of it. Complex recipes like that tend to get cheaper over time as your module tech improves. More crafting steps means more places to insert productivity bonuses, which makes it exponentially more efficient higher up the pyramid. So it may be marginal if you have tier 2 assemblers with tier 2 modules, but become a bigger improvement with tier 3 assemblers and tier 3 modules.

Barrels may not be few steps, but they're actually quite cheap, since the steps make multiple of them. And the second recipe actually uses up fewer barrels per science anyway. The first recipe uses 1 barrel per research pack. The second recipe uses 4 barrels per 25 research packs, which is less, and it returns 3 barrels, so it only consumes 0.04 net barrels per research pack, compared to 1 for the original recipe. And with productivity modules it approaches zero.