Just a couple thoughts:

1. You mentioned in a previous discussion that you were going for 'piping pollution away' via the steam. An option here would be to make the steam be its
   own special 'liquid' (ex: pollen-infused steam) and create a 'coolant tower' or similar that consumes that steam and releases pollen pollution as a result. If the coolant tower cant be beaconed/moduled then you can guarantee the amount of pollen released is as you want it.

2. you might want to remove module slots and beacon options from the cultivation building, along with the 50% productivity bonus (adjust recipe accordingly) - currently with modules and beacons as an option its quite easy to set up a net-positive loop via productivity, decrease pollution via efficiency and speed things up via speed. Removing all that would make it be more like 'planting' as in scaling up means finding lots of plantable area.

3. seed looping recipe for getting higher quality seeds is a good idea, but it has to be balanced against just running a recycling loop. Maybe make it require pentapod eggs instead of nuclear? would definitely need to tune the balance here.

4. an option for balance might be to make seeds from processing not be impacted by productivity - so 1 fruit would give 0.03x seeds regardless of productivity bonuses, making regular planting be 1.5x positive (as it is right now without prod modules), but quality loops be inherently negative and requiring an extra inflow of seeds - which will have to be crafted via either your radiation looping recipe or recycling loops. At the moment minimal productivity is necessary to make the seed loops net positive, so once you get legendary seeds you simply switch your factory to run everything legendary with no lower quality items at all...

Hi Saienai,

Love the input, and yes many of these things I have been thinking about and I have been intending to make some balance changes as well based on my own play testing with the mod since release.

Just to address your points.

1. What you describe is exactly the solution i was going to implement. Originally I was going to just make steam turbine release spores instead of polution, but that breaks too many things in the game, so itd have to be its own fluid, and own coolant-tower-esque building. However, there's nothing currently to stop the player from storing the spore fluid in big tanks, and deleting the tanks, permenantly removing the spores, and breaking the difficulty and balance. I have yet to think of a good solution for that.

2. The cultivation building is going to be reworked, it will keep its beacon slots, but the 50% standard prod bonus will be removed, and the output number of fruits will be changed to 15. This - according to some testing, with productivity in both the tower and the processing steps, would allow someone to break exactly even with legendary seeds. You would need to supplement legendary seeds a little bit still however.

3. The seed looping recipe isn't really working as intended. The idea is nice, but practically its too grindy of a use for legendary Uranium, and its hard to get to that level. Furthermore, its just easier to perhaps grind away regular seeds in a recycler to get the seeds needed to supplement the green-houses needs. I was going to remove this feature until a better re-work came to mind. I like the idea of pentapods, as it gives you a reason to try get legendary ones - and they are also easily reproduced, and it ties everything back to needing legendary nutrients, so thanks, great idea - I think that might be the way forward.

4. Kind of addresses with my response to 2 too. Yes the Green-house -> Fruit processing loop needs to be tinkered. I don't want to change the processing recipe at all and keep it as default ingame, so that its not another thing the mod adds, and keeps everything simple. So changing the way greenhouses work, with their prod bonus, and number of modules is my desired fix for this balance. And that is in the works, as described above.

Thanks again for taking the time to give some feedback, and absolutely some of these ideas are intended to come out in the next release, which I am hoping to find time to do this week =)

See the new update where I've incorporated plenty of your feedback.
Still working on the steam/spores issue however!

Interesting changes, but dont forget that the seed looping recipe has an in-built 50% productivity boost, so even without any productivity modules the current 'meta' for legendary fruits would be to run the seed-fruits loop via cultivators and supplement the seeds with the seed looping recipe (1 seed -> 1.5 seeds), with the pentapod eggs also falling into the same 1 -> 1.5 ratio and thus not needing to be supplemented.

The way I see it the pentapod eggs should be inherently negative; so a recipe of 1 -> 0.5 will be an effective 1 -> 0.75 due to the +50% prod and require the player to add more pentapod eggs of the correct quality via the regular pentapod egg recipe.

In terms of the seeds though, keeping it at 1 -> 1 (1 -> 1.5 effective) means quality rolling is unnecessary as its a positive loop - which is fine - as making it negative would require a very complicated setup of quality rolling the seed recirculation recipe and multiple qualities of nutrients that make recycling loops much better by comparison.

As for the cultivation building, the recipe should be changed to output 10 fruits instead of 15 in order to break even with legendary productivity modules in both the cultivation building and the fruit processing building. That way during mid-game you can get consistent legendary fruits via seed recirculation, and end-game you can remove seed recirculation entirely if you can make legendary productivity modules at scale, but not before that point.

Good points,

I was thinking of the pentapod recipe almost being an alternative recipe to the original pentapod one, or you could use the output to supplement your science too.
Maintaining legendary pentapod eggs is trivial with legendary nutrients - and that hasn't changed with the seed cultivation recipe - so having the pentapod eggs be consumed by the process didn't feel like a worthy difficulty bump as you'd just belt or bot them in, and simply subtracted science outputs of a base, which felt not fun. I figured maybe having another place where you might accidentally make too many eggs and have them hatch (and probably legendary ones at that), or use as a potential additional egg source for science might be more interesting? Perhaps I am mistaken.

I suppose your proposed quality production chain would be ... Seeds -> Fruit -> Mash -> Flux -> Nutrients -> Eggs -> Seeds... I can see the vision. I will continue to ponder and maybe make the change, or play with it a bit and see how it feels.

Regarding the seed recipe with the inbuild quality - yeap that was as intended - I wanted to remove "quality rolling" from the process entirely, and instead encourage another build to solve that problem. Taking legendary Seeds / nutrients / pentapod eggs is a nice way to grab from the start and end points of a Gleba production chain.

Re the how many fruits to make per seed:
Oh so true, I did the wrong calc and used the wrong prod module cell on my spread sheet opps haha. That would be a good change.

For planning things out with prod modules and the rest I would recommend foreman 2 - you can edit the recipes directly from the preset file (its a json txt) by searching the recipe name and editing the values, so you can test out the chains and see how it will all work out and how many buildings / modules you need.
Its what I was using to test out the production chains for this mod.

Oh neat, I should of assumed tools such as that would exist, I'll give it a look when I'm next delving into mod balance

Hi Saienai,

Love the input, and yes many of these things I have been thinking about and I have been intending to make some balance changes as well based on my own play testing with the mod since release.

Just to address your points.

1. What you describe is exactly the solution i was going to implement. Originally I was going to just make steam turbine release spores instead of polution, but that breaks too many things in the game, so itd have to be its own fluid, and own coolant-tower-esque building. However, there's nothing currently to stop the player from storing the spore fluid in big tanks, and deleting the tanks, permenantly removing the spores, and breaking the difficulty and balance. I have yet to think of a good solution for that.

2. The cultivation building is going to be reworked, it will keep its beacon slots, but the 50% standard prod bonus will be removed, and the output number of fruits will be changed to 15. This - according to some testing, with productivity in both the tower and the processing steps, would allow someone to break exactly even with legendary seeds. You would need to supplement legendary seeds a little bit still however.

3. The seed looping recipe isn't really working as intended. The idea is nice, but practically its too grindy of a use for legendary Uranium, and its hard to get to that level. Furthermore, its just easier to perhaps grind away regular seeds in a recycler to get the seeds needed to supplement the green-houses needs. I was going to remove this feature until a better re-work came to mind. I like the idea of pentapods, as it gives you a reason to try get legendary ones - and they are also easily reproduced, and it ties everything back to needing legendary nutrients, so thanks, great idea - I think that might be the way forward.

4. Kind of addresses with my response to 2 too. Yes the Green-house -> Fruit processing loop needs to be tinkered. I don't want to change the processing recipe at all and keep it as default ingame, so that its not another thing the mod adds, and keeps everything simple. So changing the way greenhouses work, with their prod bonus, and number of modules is my desired fix for this balance. And that is in the works, as described above.

Thanks again for taking the time to give some feedback, and absolutely some of these ideas are intended to come out in the next release, which I am hoping to find time to do this week =)

An idea that popped into my head while reading this (point number 1):
To prevent the player from just barreling something, or destroying it what about the Heat mechanic, like a nuclear plant (won't keep going if it's full) but sort of in reverse, where if the player wants the building to keep producing, it has to 'pipe away' the "spores" (maybe make a custom heat pipe look like those flexible Dryer pipes or something, idk) and then a custom heat Exchanger that simply emits a high amount of spores when active, but just burns this fake 'heat/spores' into an empty recipe (kinda like nutrients in a biochamber). Doing this shouldn't break too many things i wouldn't think, i'm no programmer though... but you would need to make sure it can't simply connect to a heat system and be used for boiling water xD

Hi Xeonight, you'll be pleased to know that I figured out a way to do it with Fluids, and its in the current release! You can now move your spores away from your plantations and release them in safety, or get really really scared and do your best to store it all away in thousands of fluid tanks haha