Industrial Alchemy: Real Ores & Chemistry
Industrial Alchemy: Real Ores & Chemistry is a Factorio industrial overhaul focused on making raw resources feel like the start of a real production chain.
Instead of treating ore as a simple one-step path into plates, RIC builds a heavier progression around real ore fields, crushing, concentration, metallurgy, chemistry, waste handling, petrochemicals, and electronics manufacturing.
The goal is not complexity for its own sake. The goal is to make industry feel more grounded, mechanical, and satisfying to scale.
Stable Playthrough Focus
RIC is intended to be a playable overhaul baseline, not a constantly shifting experiment.
The current direction is to keep the main playthrough stable and avoid forcing players to update every few days just to keep a save working. Updates are intended to focus on important fixes such as crashes, migration issues, hard progression blockers, missing prototypes, or serious map-generation problems.
Larger experiments, major system rewrites, new machine chains, and heavy balance changes are intended to be kept separate from the stable playthrough experience until they are ready.
The aim is simple: players should be able to start a RIC save and actually play it.
True Orefields
RIC is an always-on overhaul. Vanilla iron and copper ore fallback routes are removed from the intended progression.
New games use real ore fields directly:
- Hematite and magnetite for iron progression
- Chalcopyrite, bornite, and malachite for copper progression
- Limestone, quartz, gypsum, graphite, salts, and other industrial minerals for supporting processes
- Later ores for aluminium, lead, tin, zinc, nickel, tungsten, titanium, precious metals, rare earths, and uranium-family processing
Vanilla iron ore and copper ore prototypes are kept for compatibility, but they are no longer the intended map-generation or progression path.
The intended early route is:
```txt id="98swhx"
hematite ore → crushed hematite → iron
chalcopyrite ore → crushed chalcopyrite → copper
No vanilla ore-to-real-ore conversion route is used.
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## Core Identity
RIC is built around a few simple ideas:
* ores should feel like real mined materials, not generic colored rocks
* processing should move through clear industrial stages
* chemistry should matter before the late game
* waste streams should become part of factory design
* electronics should require believable materials and component preparation
* early industry should remain readable and playable
* machines should have clear industrial roles
The long-term progression is:
```txt id="s3jjz2"
raw resource extraction
→ ore preparation
→ metallurgy
→ chemistry
→ petrochemicals
→ electronics
→ advanced industry
What RIC Changes
RIC adds and restructures industrial chains around:
- real ore and mineral resource fields
- raw ore versus crushed ore visual identity
- hand crushing and early ore preparation
- crushers, sorters, washers, furnaces, reactors, separators, and process machines
- dry ore processing, washing, flotation, concentration, and metallurgical progression
- early metallurgy and steelmaking
- sulfur, acid, solvent, and wastewater handling
- petrochemical bootstrap routes
- electronics materials and component preparation
- packaged electronics logistics such as reels, trays, and assembly kits
- clearer Recipe Book grouping and machine-role separation
- existing-save migration support for older ore patches where possible
The factory should feel more like an industrial site: crushers, furnaces, chemical plants, waste treatment, component assembly, and specialist intermediate production all become meaningful parts of progression.
Gameplay Style
RIC is for players who enjoy:
- larger production chains
- more realistic resource processing
- slower, more deliberate progression
- chemistry and metallurgy systems
- planning around byproducts and waste streams
- factory design beyond simple plate throughput
- Recipe Book / Factory Planner style exploration
- overhaul-style play without jumping straight into extreme endgame complexity
It is not a small quality-of-life mod or a simple ore reskin. It changes the structure and expectations of early and midgame industry.
Recommended Use
RIC is best played in a new save.
Recipe Book, Factory Planner, or similar planning tools are strongly recommended because the mod intentionally expands the number of intermediate materials and process steps.
Existing saves receive migration support where possible, but a fresh save is still recommended for the cleanest True Orefields experience.
Dependencies
RIC uses Forgeworks Core as its shared library foundation.
Other graphics and compatibility dependencies may be used where appropriate to keep the mod visually consistent and maintainable.
Development Direction
RIC is still actively developed, but the stable playthrough experience is meant to remain usable instead of constantly changing underneath the player.
Future development may expand advanced systems such as deeper oil processing, rare earths, uranium chemistry, high-temperature alloys, advanced electronics, and late-game industrial production.
For the current stable direction, the focus is reliability, migration safety, progression correctness, and a playable True Orefields experience.
Design Philosophy
RIC aims for industrial believability, not strict simulation.
A recipe does not need to be a laboratory-accurate chemical equation to belong here, but it should feel like it belongs in a real industrial process.
The factory should become more interesting because materials have identity, machines have purpose, and each production stage gives the player a reason to expand.