Patchwork — Cross-Mod Compatibility Fixes

Big modpacks are stitched together from mods that never met each other. Patchwork is the thread: fifteen targeted compatibility fixes in one mod, each one solving a real seam between popular mods — and each one silently disabling itself if you don't have the mods it fixes. Install it in any pack; it only ever touches what's actually there.

No settings, no UI, virtually no runtime footprint — fourteen pure data-stage fixes plus one tiny event guard.

What it fixes

🔬 5Dim labs accept every science pack

5Dim's lab and biolab tiers copy their science pack list at generation time, so packs added or changed by other mods (Krastorio 2, Space Exploration) are rejected by higher tiers. Patchwork syncs every 5Dim lab tier to accept exactly what the base lab accepts, and every biolab tier to match the base biolab.

🔥 Every furnace can smelt everything (including K2 coke)

A furnace-type machine has one input slot and can never craft a multi-ingredient recipe like Krastorio 2's coke (coal + wood). K2 solves this by converting furnaces into assembling machines — but it misses furnaces created after its pass (Mini Machines' mini furnaces) or ones lacking the right category at the time (5Dim's industrial furnace, Advanced Furnaces 2's kiln-less category list). Patchwork grants the full smelting category set to all 5Dim furnaces, mini furnaces, and Advanced Furnaces 2, and applies the same furnace→assembler conversion K2 uses — but only in packs where smelting is assembler-based. In vanilla-style packs, furnaces stay auto-smelting furnaces.

🎯 Sniper bullets that actually reach their targets

Krastorio 2 turns bullets into real projectiles capped at 30 tiles of flight. Long-range turrets from other mods (5Dim sniper turrets see up to 79 tiles) then shoot at things their bullets physically cannot reach — turrets locked onto targets, doing nothing. Patchwork scans every ammo-category/turret combination and raises each projectile's max range to the longest turret range that fires it (plus margin). Fully generic: works for any turret mod, any ammo mod.

📏 5Dim tiers follow base-game rebalances

5Dim generates its tiered machines from vanilla's numbers. When another mod rebalances the base entity (Krastorio 2 does, heavily), the 5Dim tiers keep vanilla-scale stats — and "upgrading" hands you something weaker than the tier-1 base machine. Patchwork measures how much the base entity changed and rescales every tier by the same factor, so each tier keeps its intended progression over whatever balance your pack runs. Five families are covered:

• Solar panels & accumulators — with K2's solar 60→100kW and accumulator 5→10MJ / 300→600kW rebalance, 5Dim tiers 2–3 were below the base entity they replace.
• Locomotives — K2's base engine (2MW, weight 10000, braking 30) out-pulled even 5Dim tier 10 (1.5MW), so every "upgrade" accelerated worse. Tiers now scale 2.33MW up to 5MW with matching weight and braking — acceleration climbs with tier again.
• Underground belt reach — K2 extends the base express underground to 20 tiles; 5Dim's faster undergrounds kept vanilla's 9. (5Dim's dedicated 30/50-reach long variants are their own design and are left alone.)
• Gun & laser turrets — against K2's base gun turret (range 25) and laser turret (range 30, ×3 damage), the first 5Dim tiers had less range than the turret they replace, and every laser tier did a third of its intended damage.
• Nuclear reactors & heat exchangers — K2's 250MW base reactor out-produced every 5Dim tier (60–220MW). Tiers now run 375MW–1375MW, with the neighbour bonus and steam temperature following the base entity so the whole nuclear loop stays on one balance system.

🚤 Hovercrafts you can actually fuel

Hovercrafts' vehicles use the vehicle-fuel category, which only exists if certain other mods define it. Without them, hovercrafts can't burn anything. Patchwork falls back to the standard chemical fuel category when vehicle-fuel doesn't exist.

🕷️ Spidertron equipment grid size that sticks

some-spidertron enlarges the vanilla spidertron grid — but Krastorio 2 points the spidertron at its own grid, and Spidertron Extended re-sizes that one from its settings at the last moment. Patchwork runs after all of them and copies the enlarged size onto whichever grid the spidertron actually uses.

🧱 Productivity modules on Advanced Furnaces recipes

Advanced Furnaces 2 predates Factorio 2.0's per-recipe allow_productivity flag, so its wood→coal and direct ore→steel recipes reject productivity modules with the confusing "Only intermediate products" message. Patchwork sets the flag on both.

🔁 One loader family for the upgrade planner

Your pack's 1×1 loaders (Deadlock beltbox loaders, Krastorio 2 loaders, Advanced Furnaces 2 loader-pro, 5Dim loaders) live in different fast-replace groups with different collision geometry — so the upgrade planner refuses to offer them as targets for each other. Patchwork normalizes every land 1×1 loader to one group and identical geometry: any loader can now be upgrade-planned (and manually fast-replaced) into any other. Space Exploration's space loaders are deliberately left separate.
Side effect you'll probably like: all 1×1 loaders become walkable, like belts.

⚡ Circuit wires on every loader

Factorio 2.0 supports circuit connections on loaders natively — but several loader mods never set the wire-distance field, leaving their loaders unwireable. Patchwork grants the standard 9-tile circuit wire reach to every loader missing it: enable/disable conditions, circuit-set filters, and transfer reading on all of them.

🚧 Smart belt dragging for ported belt mods

Factorio 2.0's smart belt dragging (auto-placing underground belts when you drag a line over an obstacle) only works when the belt declares its underground partner via related_underground_belt. Ported belt mods often never set it. Patchwork pairs every belt missing the field with its underground by exact name convention — and only when the speeds match exactly, so it never guesses a wrong tunnel.

📦 AutoDeconstruct spares chests that feed loader chains

AutoDeconstruct's "remove drill target" option deconstructs a depleted drill's output chest unless a drill, inserter, assembler, or furnace still drops into it — loaders are invisible to that check (they attach to chests through a different mechanism), so a chest relaying a loader→chest→loader transport line gets torn out with the drill and the whole line goes dead. Patchwork cancels the chest's deconstruction order when a loader is connected to it and a depleted drill feeds it. The drill itself is still removed, plain drill→chest→inserter cleanups still happen, and your own deconstruction-planner orders are never touched. (This is Patchwork's only runtime piece: one event handler, filtered to containers, acting only on script-made orders — you will never notice it in your UPS.)

Compatibility & design notes

• Safe in any pack: every fix checks for its target prototypes and mods, and does nothing if they're absent. Vanilla + Patchwork alone loads clean.
• Safe with the original standalone fix mods: if you have one installed, Patchwork defers to it — nothing is applied twice.
• Data fixes run at data-final-fixes, ordered after all the mods they touch via optional dependencies.
• No prototypes are added or removed (except the furnace→assembler conversion, only in packs that already do that) — safe to add to or remove from existing saves.
• Known limitation: restoring Mini Machines' mini-drill generation for 5Dim's drill tiers can't live in this mod — that fix must load before mini-machines while Patchwork must load after, and one mod can't hold both positions.

Plays well with: Krastorio 2, Space Exploration, 5Dim's, Mini Machines, Advanced Furnaces 2, Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes & Compact Loaders, Hovercrafts, Some Spidertron, Spidertron Extended, Load-Furn-2-SpaceAgeFix, AutoDeconstruct.

Found a seam Patchwork should stitch? Report it in the discussions.