Why change the byproducts?

When I played my ATOM game with SE Ore Integration, I was able to supply my entire demand for manganese and chromium with byproducts from sorting iron and nickel. I felt this was less than ideal. Indium byproducts, while not produced in such overwhelming quantity, still provided for the lion's share of my use for a long time, and similar with gold byproducts. Gold in particular is a balance issue, since gold is supposed to be hard to get until getting to space.

Why is the bismuth research amount so high?

Bismuth smelting is deep enough that by the time someone reaches it, they'll probably have sorted quite a bit of copper. 100 was my guess at a number that would be fairly trivial to reach once chlorine becomes available and bismuth can be sorted directly.

Why am I running out of ore so quickly?

This mod doesn't increase ore patch size or density from their original sizes, and now you're using some of them for three or four different ores, some of which don't sort very efficiently. There are multiple possible ways to handle this, so please select one that suits your needs and preferences.

What settings should I use?

There is, of course, no one answer to this, or else there would be no need to have all of them. However, I can offer a few points to consider on top of what the descriptions already say...

• Byproducts from sorting are not tremendously hard to deal with once you have a decent amount of electric automation, but they can make the burner phase from AAI Industry a bit of a slog, with even just sticking presently-useless ores in boxes adding a fair amount of overhead. For me, it's a bit much early on even if I like the way it works in the later game; if you're not sure trying a game with them turned on will probably let you figure it out pretty quickly. (And it's safe to turn off in midstream if you get far enough that you don't want to start over.)

• If you weren't already annoyed by the unrealistic colors of copper and iron ore while playing vanilla, turning on realistic colors will probably make you annoyed.

• Cracking tweaks don't make a whole lot of difference either way.

• Fischer-Tropsch synthesis seems to me like more of a carbon black sink than a practical source of anything you can make with it.

• My personal preference is not consolidating the things that aren't really 'ores', which is to say diamond, graphite, sulfur, and natural gas, but I realize that's pretty arbitrary. (And not completely supported yet.)