I was comparing ways to make engines and noticed that the engine casting recipe was giving some strange numbers. It was using more molten iron than using foundries for the steel/pipes/gears and assemblers for the engines, on top of needing the activated carbon.

This seems to be mostly because it has no scaling with steel productivity, which because of the repeatable research ends up very large. It also loses the foundry productivity for pipes and foundry + potential prod module productivity for gears.

I initially tried just adding it to the steel productivity research which does help but its still not quite enough. It's also a bit odd to have engines in that technology and could cause some weird scaling with other mods.

My second attempt (which seems like a better option) is to take out the 30 molten iron that is the steel part or the engine casting and swap it for a single steel input. While this does make the recipe a bit more complicated, it fully decouples the steel productivity and makes the recipe scale as you would expect.

I did still need to lower the remaining molten iron cost to the 10-15 range to compensate for the lost pipe/gear productivity. This makes it properly use less molten iron than the normal way of making engines which seems fair given you need the activated carbon.

Thank you for the great mod by the way. I did the initial science setup on pelagos over the last week and its a really cool planet with lots of interesting mechanics. I love how you made me hate electricity and it's really fun using liquid fueled versions of everything.

My only very minor feedback is I did find myself missing non-crane diesel bulk/stack inserters for dealing with high throughput nutrient production, and spoilage removal from titanium sludge processing. This may be a design issue on my part, and I could probably use less compact designs with direct insertion using the crane inserters.

I was also thinking about maybe a post science pack way of automating sand production? I can see you've carefully balanced things around the lack of stone and I like the excavators, but for scaling up sandfill production post decomposition science it currently seems easier (and more automatable) to ship stone in from off-planet. My idea for this is a dredging boat the produces silt that can be washed/processed into sand. More boats seems a good match for the theme of the planet and having it only make sand means it doesn't directly affect the stone balance. I am working on a library for this since I think the generic idea of a moving entity being able to produce items into its inventory could be used more widely for other things as well (local concrete production on aquilo via dredging is one other idea I had).

Compare it to lds casting.
It is intentional, and was already tweaked a bit to be more benefitial

LDS casting is also wore than using parts, with idea behind it probably being that you trade single step process and convinience for producrivity

I had wondered if that was something you had factored into the balancing, that makes more sense. Thank you for the explanation.

Is it meant to be for use on pelagos or other planets like nauvis? I wasn't sure since it uses the foundry. On nauvis the simplicity becomes more of a trade off between managing the intermediates and having to produce activated carbon somewhere. On pelagos activated carbon is a nearly free byproduct so its not really an issue, but the EM waves from the foundry certainly would be.

Calcite from fish originally was added as stone substitute.

After a while, I noticed calcite recipe makes foundry easy to use for planet, and I kinda liked that integration so I added engine unit casting to make it feel more intended

If you use activated carbon for at least one more recipe, moving some to engine casting should not be too big deal, but again similar to LDS its goal is to make casting itself single step.

As another side effect it makes it easier to make quality iron and steel.
This was not intended, but something I kinda like, so I left it

Recipe will be moved to ferros or separate mod in future, as it will add new building that will be closer to metallurgy than any pelagos tech

also I have "Burner Foundry" in my mod list if you want foundry to not generate any pollution :D

I had wondered if that was something you had factored into the balancing, that makes more sense. Thank you for the explanation.

Is it meant to be for use on pelagos or other planets like nauvis? I wasn't sure since it uses the foundry. On nauvis the simplicity becomes more of a trade off between managing the intermediates and having to produce activated carbon somewhere. On pelagos activated carbon is a nearly free byproduct so its not really an issue, but the EM waves from the foundry certainly would be.

Also yeah, I had in mind that it could be used elsewhere, and so far I think it works best on gleba. At least on my save

My only very minor feedback is I did find myself missing non-crane diesel bulk/stack inserters for dealing with high throughput nutrient production, and spoilage removal from titanium sludge processing. This may be a design issue on my part, and I could probably use less compact designs with direct insertion using the crane inserters.

also to add to that
You can use regular stack inserter.
Electricity is not straight up prohibited on planet. If you overuse it it will be problematic, but I had in mind some use of it.

I was also thinking about maybe a post science pack way of automating sand production? I can see you've carefully balanced things around the lack of stone and I like the excavators, but for scaling up sandfill production post decomposition science it currently seems easier (and more automatable) to ship stone in from off-planet. My idea for this is a dredging boat the produces silt that can be washed/processed into sand. More boats seems a good match for the theme of the planet and having it only make sand means it doesn't directly affect the stone balance. I am working on a library for this since I think the generic idea of a moving entity being able to produce items into its inventory could be used more widely for other things as well (local concrete production on aquilo via dredging is one other idea I had).

I will probably change excavation recipe eventually to give a bit of sand and stone, not just stone.
For now I don't want ability to make sand and stone from nothing to be allowed in any shape or form.
Some sort of machine to mine sand from depths was proposed and rejected 3 times at this point.

Excavator and sandfill are intended to reshaping environment, not to add more land to the planet.

Thank you for the great mod by the way. I did the initial science setup on pelagos over the last week and its a really cool planet with lots of interesting mechanics. I love how you made me hate electricity and it's really fun using liquid fueled versions of everything.

also appreciate feedback, happy you like it. I am currently working on second planet

also I have "Burner Foundry" in my mod list if you want foundry to not generate any pollution :D

ohh, I was wondering why there wasn't a diesel foundry. That explains it. Thanks for telling me about that.

I will probably change excavation recipe eventually to give a bit of sand and stone, not just stone.
For now I don't want ability to make sand and stone from nothing to be allowed in any shape or form.
Some sort of machine to mine sand from depths was proposed and rejected 3 times at this point.

Excavator and sandfill are intended to reshaping environment, not to add more land to the planet.

My bad, I didn't know the idea had been suggested so many times.

I think it's probably because you've done such a good job with the terrain generation that filling in some of the quite limited shallow water around islands to get a little more space seems like a natural progression in-line with design patterns used elsewhere in the game. I guess I can build around the natural shapes of the islands, but the temptation to cargo drop stone in to sandfill all the gaps is very strong.

If I do end up doing any mods around the dredging idea I'll leave pelagos out to respect your desired design and balancing.

also I have "Burner Foundry" in my mod list if you want foundry to not generate any pollution :D

ohh, I was wondering why there wasn't a diesel foundry. That explains it. Thanks for telling me about that.

diesel foundry is most requested entity for Pelagos.
Ferros, new planet I am working on will have "Smeltery". Building made for creating alloys and melting metals, with very limited casting capabilities to make sure it's complementary to foundry.
Burner foundry was made to make Vulcanus more balanced, as electricity is dead simple there, but burnable fuel is more difficult to make, and provide

I will probably change excavation recipe eventually to give a bit of sand and stone, not just stone.
For now I don't want ability to make sand and stone from nothing to be allowed in any shape or form.
Some sort of machine to mine sand from depths was proposed and rejected 3 times at this point.

Excavator and sandfill are intended to reshaping environment, not to add more land to the planet.

My bad, I didn't know the idea had been suggested so many times.

I think it's probably because you've done such a good job with the terrain generation that filling in some of the quite limited shallow water around islands to get a little more space seems like a natural progression in-line with design patterns used elsewhere in the game. I guess I can build around the natural shapes of the islands, but the temptation to cargo drop stone in to sandfill all the gaps is very strong.

If I do end up doing any mods around the dredging idea I'll leave pelagos out to respect your desired design and balancing.

Similar to electricity, stone is not prohibited. I feel like importing it is hard enough to make it feel balanced, it would be also silly to block it.
Intended way to make it easier is to spam landfill productivity research.

Lack of stone is my ultimate sollution to ships/train balance problem
And because it's separate planet I can do it. It would be compatibility nightmare for changing vanilla similarly to how pelagos work

It is like that because if you remove deepwater and make it possible to automate landfill people will eventually start using trains, because they are faster and more convinient to use even making correction to landfilling cost, so this planet should be as resistant to it as possible.

If dreadging mechanic would be present it would be wierd to skip planet (pelagos), also it would kinda not make sense for planet where you can just mine stone from patches, because what gives making it harder, beside that it would probably look cool.
I am not sure if you are aware of arig water condensator thing. but it works like that that it enables it to make water on desert planet, and it can also be used on other planets,but on other planets you can easly access water so it's not a problem at all so it's only used on arig, and I feel like stone miner would endup similarly. So it solves lack of stone on one specific case while ending up being kinda not needed elsewhere.

Planet itself was made after I played dreadgeworks, and what might not be obvious at first, but balancewise dreadgeworks is in my opinion anti ship mod, because of landfill concrete thing, and need for land infrastructure on water

I mean you can pretend that ships are needed. But I wanted to have place where they feel right. Not to pretend.
Making ships feel good is basicly half of my modlist so you can trust me on this one XF.

Yesterday I released barreling machine
so now I will be updating depths on nauvis in a way you can use
wooden platform + barreling machine + oil rig + galleon before going to pelagos for cargo ships
oil rig is currently is locked behind this planet, and I don't want to move cargo ships outside of planet

so unlocking oil rig before pelagos/making possible to use it without tanker and cargo ship is kinda big deal in my opinion

Ferros will be build around huge oil rigs and I want it to be possible to play without pelagos or with any order
so you can go for advanced oil rigs to ferros first and use galleons and then go to pelagos for cargo ships
or get cargo ships first and upgraded oil rigs to ferros next

also you could join my discord if you would like to talk for longer. I usually use discussion tab for bug reports

Don't respond to me if you don't want to. I understand if you want to keep discussions to your discord. It's 100% on me for not joining it (my anxiety is just too bad, sorry).

If dreadging mechanic would be present it would be wierd to skip planet (pelagos), also it would kinda not make sense for planet where you can just mine stone from patches, because what gives making it harder, beside that it would probably look cool.
I am not sure if you are aware of arig water condensator thing. but it works like that that it enables it to make water on desert planet, and it can also be used on other planets,but on other planets you can easly access water so it's not a problem at all so it's only used on arig, and I feel like stone miner would endup similarly. So it solves lack of stone on one specific case while ending up being kinda not needed elsewhere.

While I don't want to take up any more of your time, I want to point out that there is a potential solution to this, make the resource produced different for each planet.

The library/API I'm writing very intentionally supports this by having (optional) per surface definitions for the same entity and options to not be scalable/spammable. The idea is to allow any entity with an inventory (a boat for example) to produce any combination of items at whatever rate per second, but it can be different for each surface/planet. There would also be an optional cap on the amount of that entities so that you can hard limit production per surface (also performance). That's why my suggestion was for a single boat prototype that could make sand on pelagos or stone and iron on aquilo. I just hadn't worked out good resources for nauvis and fulgora. (there's even more to the API than that, such as minimum distances between the entities and a system to prevent going in circles)

The main issue is communicating this complexity to the player. There would probably need to be a list in the tips and tricks of resources and their rates per planet.

(I really like arig but I would personally remove the water condenser. There's already the much better solution of cactus farming in the mod and I agree its pretty pointless elsewhere)

Don't respond to me if you don't want to. I understand if you want to keep discussions to your discord. It's 100% on me for not joining it (my anxiety is just too bad, sorry).

oh it's not time thing. It's convinience thing. No worries.

While I don't want to take up any more of your time, I want to point out that there is a potential solution to this, make the resource produced different for each planet.

Yeah,that could work, and it would be interesting sollution.

That's why my suggestion was for a single boat prototype that could make sand on pelagos or stone and iron on aquilo

I would say it would be better to make calcite for pelagos. Even if that does not make a lot of sense. It would still be improvement over burning tons of nutrients to make fish to burn them for calcite.
Similarly for aquilo it should rather be something like raw lithium not iron. As Iron should generally be imported to planet because that's part of it's design and ability to mine it would probably break it a bit.

as for fulgora it could be raw iron maybe? or some sort of basic resource that is valueble

also have no idea for nauvis but gleba could have coal.
Maybe just make new resources that blend in progression with new recipes?

Also what you try to do sound rly similar to excavator. Maybe it would be good to reach him for ideas?

(I really like arig but I would personally remove the water condenser. There's already the much better solution of cactus farming in the mod and I agree its pretty pointless elsewhere)

i think i ll just ask syen to yoink it out or maybe rework it a bit XD