WARNING: This mod assumes that ice is obtainable before any research that requires a spoilable science pack. This should not be an issue in most cases but certain combinations of mods may break this assumption and softlock your progress until you disable this mod. If you still wish to use this mod then please report the incompatibility and I can try to add a patch.

Summary

This mod add recipes for "preserving" spoilable science packs that can only be crafted on Nauvis. This preserves the challenge of making the freshest science possible and getting it back to Nauvis fast, but removes the annoyances of it decaying or spoiling before it is actually used in a lab.

The preserved version of the science packs have a spoil timer of 6000 hours (the maximum due to internal limits). With a good setup spoilable packs should be getting preserved with 5000+ hours left on their timers and are unlikely to ever spoil. This also means you should consistently get 80%+ research value out of every pack, reducing how much you typically need to overproduce spoilable sciences.

Recipes

The simple preservation recipe unlocks at the same time as the original pack (e.g. agricultural science) and uses ice as the preservation medium. The preserved form of the pack replaces the normal pack in all researches and in all labs.

A more advanced preservation recipe that uses a closed loop of fluoroketone and is even faster is unlocked with cryolabs for all spoilable science packs in the save.

The recipes are designed to be very fast and are meant to be easy to support high science throughputs. Preserved packs also have a custom recycling recipe so they can be destroyed very fast with minimal recyclers.

Example Workflow

I've provided an example setup in the first image but the general idea is you preserve all the science dropped to nauvis and simply destroy any excess. This way your ships and science production on the planet where you make the packs never needs to stop.

Settings

There is a startup setting to change what surface/planet the recipes are restricted to. While the default is Nauvis, you can also lock the recipe to either space or remove the restriction entirely. This should help if you're using a mod that changes where labs are allowed to be placed or just want to make the process a bit easier.

If you need another planet option added for compatibility with other mods please open a discussion thread.

As of 1.0.1 there is now also a setting to manually set the spoilage time of the preserved packs. Changing this does not change the current spoil timer on any existing preserved packs, only for newly created ones.

Compatibility

This should generally work with any new spoilable science packs and new labs added by other mods.

Mods that make existing science packs spoilable is where there may be some real compatibility issues. There is a manual blacklist in place to avoid this mod creating preserved versions of any of the non space-age sciences (automation through to space science, inclusive) which should help in some cases. If you run into any issues like this please open a discussion thread and I'll see what I can do.