Printertron - Alternative construction bots (3D printer)

by Vyl

A Spidertron that 3D Prints. Can be used as a quickstart mod to quickly print early game items and structures without construction bots or nanobots. Put filament in a printertron to get started.

Content
4 days ago
2.0
76
Logistic network Manufacturing Cheats
Owner:
Vyl
Source:
https://github.com/VylSet/printertron/
Homepage:
N/A
License:
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Created:
7 days ago
Latest Version:
0.0.6 (4 days ago)
Factorio version:
2.0
Downloaded by:
76 users


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3D Printertron

3D Printertron is a follower that uses filament to build structures like inserters and assemblers for you, instead of construction bots. Think of it as a mod similar to nano bots or quick start mods that give you construction bots and personal roboports, except you're using filament to print structures instead. It speeds up the early game.

To get started, build a printertron and load it with filament.

Features

  • Construct items using filament
  • Deconstruct items (if they weren't printable items they'll get returned to your inventory)
  • Somewhat UPS optimized a little bit

Construct nearby structures

Deconstruct nearby structures

Filament tiers

tier 1 filament printables: stone furnace, electric inserter, burner inserter, long haded inserter, transport belt, underground belt, splitter, pipe, small electric pole, assembling machine 1, burner mining drill, lab, offshore pump, rail signal, straight rail

tier 2 filament printables: fast inserter, fast transport belt, fast underground belt, fast splitter, curved rails, medium and large electric poles, assembling machine 2, electric mining drill, oil refinery, chemical plant, rail ramp, rail support, train stop, pumpjack

I avoided anything directly related to power generation or combat (like turrets and turbines) for balance reasons

coming soon

  • More UPS optimizations
  • Faster printing
  • Tier 3 filament (maybe? or I might not allow endgame printing for balance reasons)
  • Improved sprites
  • Support for various mods (did brief testing in Py's, will test more overhauls later)

Misc

This is the second mod I've ever made (also my second time using blender). Hopefully everything works (all functionality is working for me) but there will probably be bugs I didn't notice, let me know if you find any and I will fix them. I tried to make it intuitive to use, the follower just prints nearby ghosts if loaded with the right type of filament.

The mod is pretty powerful, but that's the point. I want to speed up the early game, printing large factories, and then when I reach the mid to late game I can switch over to construction bots.

It's not super UPS optimized for the endgame, but it's designed for use only in the early to mid game where the performance impact shouldn't be an issue, at least it wasn't an issue in my testing. If you have a particularly bad computer and 200 other mods then it could be a problem, that being said I do think I can improve the performance a fair bit, the way I scan now isn't ideal. I get about one millisecond of time usage in worst case scenarios.