Hi hello, so I played Rubia and I actually found it thoroughly enjoyable... right up until I actually finished all the research doable on the planet. Laying it out, at least when it comes to me (and the few friends I played on the planet with), Rubia is kind of more annoying than it's worth, it feels as if it's almost more difficult than Aquilo because of the fact that not only are you forced to build in a certain manner which makes actual space-efficient mass-production an immense hassle but there are also the trashteroids that can easily ruin your base if you don't place enough snipers or gun turrets, and what can start as a single gun-turret failing to fire can result in your entire ammo belt being cut off and therefore exposing your base to more trashteroids. It feels like Rubia, unlike all the other modded or vanilla planets, has TWO different enemies rather than just one: Those being the wind forcing a base-building playstyle and the trashteroids forcing turret coverage. For example, Nauvis has the biters as enemies, Vulcanus the demolishers, Gleba the pentapods, Fulgora the lightning and cramped space and Aquilo's enemy is the cold, needing heat in order to actually build a base. Not to say that either of the Rubia enemies are unmanageable, but frankly, they just come across moreso as annoying than challenging- the solutions are simple, they're just not really fun or engaging to implement, at least in my opinion. Bots being disabled makes, well, makes sense, but if logistic bots are barred from doing anything useful, then I honestly don't see the reason for the exorbitant bot energy consumption (4 times normal consumption), which just makes building in general THAT much more of a hassle. I suppose my main gripe with the planet is how much it constricts the player into a certain style, and adding more customization options in the startup configs could certainly make it more bearable. I'm not going to get into how the humour is crass or whatever, I kind of don't care, but I wouldn't be writing this rant if I didn't find Rubia's core concepts engaging and interesting. I adore the bacterial sludge and it's recipe-chain, it's actually really interesting, but at the same time I can't stand how restrictive the planet is and, now that I think of it, how big a pain exports would be on it, if you'd even WANT to export things.

Tl;dr: Ples more startup config options (just do something about the combination of trashteroids and wind rotating buildings), I'm not going to ask the whole mod be remade from a different vision, just expressing why I think more startup config options would be good. Oh and also, that "Recycle that trash" song is absolute fire, it cured my depression.

Thank you for playing Rubia, and for taking time to provide feedback. My response is going to be a bit of a mixed bag:

First, I will not be adding options to disable either core mechanic of Rubia (wind or trashsteroids). The main reason is that this would greatly violate my vision for the planet, and I would sooner make these mechanics easier OR add cheat mod support, but I would never package this in the main mod. People have shown me that if difficulty options would allow them to turn it off, they would—not because they tried it, understand, and simply prefer to go without those mechanics. But rather because some people initially struggle to figure out the mechanic, and allowing them to skip it before figuring it out means they will never experience even a fraction of Rubia the way I had envisioned.

Second, the robot power on Rubia was mostly for flavor, as robots would spend more energy flying against the wind. The choice to make it 4x vs 3x was mostly arbitrary, and I stayed with 4x just because I didn’t see substantial issues with that number. I am open to buffing it as 4x => 3x. However, I don’t see you looking at this change and saying “Wow, that’s a gamechanger!”.

The last part is where I think we can find more common ground. Right now, it is unintentionally difficult to export a variety of goods from Rubia due to logi bot restrictions. The only reason why rocket silos are so restricted is because it took discord users < 5 minutes to automate leftward movement by logibots by abusing automated requests using a space platform. As a result, I had to impose the draconian restriction of blocking logistic access to all rocket silos to stop this from wrecking the planet (it would become a matter of how to abuse silos, as opposed to playing around the wind). This had the highly undesirable side effect of making it a pain in the ass to export a variety of goods from Rubia. I am open and willing to make it easier to export mixed goods from Rubia. However, I would need a reasonably achievable way to do this without introducing cheese for the wind mechanic. If you have such an idea, I’m all ears.

I completely understand the first point, I can see how it'd mess with the core idea of the mod, it's mostly a personal gripe, maybe I'm just not used to these kinds of challenges yet, as for changing robot power consumption... eh? From 4 to 3 it's not the biggest change but does make it not nearly as punishing as Aquilo, which would make building in the early game via scavenged logi bots easier in general, I was playing with Cerys installed and had 4 mixed oxide reactors in my mech armor and even so (smaller AND better portable nuclear reactors), building or clearing an area was an immense pain, I had to resort to using the blueprint shotgun, which is, well, meant to be an early game tool. Hypothetically exports can be done just by sheer scale, but that's not very interesting, and kind of a non-solution, just plopping down 40 silos and routing things into them isn't really a solution. I'm not a modder myself so I have no idea if any potential ideas I have can be integrated, but at a first thought I suppose you could just make it that when a rocket silo is placed upon the surface of Rubia it is converted into a different entity that cannot be accessed by inserters or, really anything other than logi-bots and by hand (?). Then again, I have no idea if what I'm saying is complete balderdash as the brits would put it or actually feasible, and what I'm suggesting has no basis in the base-game as far as I'm aware, as there isn't a single entity that has an inventory that can't be accessed by inserters except the character themselves.

I discussed the possibility with some other modders, but it doesn’t seem very promising. Players are too smart, and factorio has too many features that could be abused. I cannot make something that would be restricted enough to be safe while also doing the job.

The robot energy change is live.

It maybnot be obvious why, but Wube decided that robot energy usage would be based on the planet’s gravity and pressure (instead of its own variable). So everyone will now be feeling a little bit heavier on Rubia.

Packing a few more pounds is a small price to pay for more usable bots! When I eventually rebuild my Rubia base around a different design philosophy, the redesign should be less painful. I don't think anyone will mind less bot power consumption