This mod is great, especially with all the planets and how few infinite technologies use all of them. That said, there's very little feedback to the player that it's actually working. It seems to override all vanilla research functionality to implement its own thing, but this leads to several places where it looks to the player like nothing's researching at all. All the labs appear to shut down being "disabled by script", and both the SPM graph and the production graph show 0 SPM. Even the consumption graph doesn't report any science packs being consumed.

In addition, there's no indication which techs are being worked on. If the first technology in the queue is being contributed to, then the progress number will go up, though not as smoothly as normal, For other technologies, you have to rely on the tiny progress bar in the technology screen to check the progress, which won't even change while watching it without multiplayer or disabling pausing in the tech screen. There is a "researched" percentage attached to technologies on the screen if you select one, but it only works for technologies currently in the list, which doesn't include infinite technologies that are in the queue.

Between these factors, despite how much I want to use this mod to be able to use every available science pack at a similar rate, it's very difficult to trust that it's not eating my science packs or giving me research points for free. At the very least, the consumed science packs should appear on the production graph. As for other information, probably a small GUI showing each technology being worked on, its progress, and estimated SPM or eSPM.

Sadly, it's not truly solvable due to modding limitations. I have to completely disable vanilla functionality and emulate it with scripts, there is no other way. I cannot make labs appear to work when they are disabled, I cannot add script-consumed science packs to the consumption statistics and I cannot modify vanilla GUI.

But I could add a small custom GUI somewhere with all that info. I'll think about how to do it.

Of course you can delete items from inventories, but not "consume" them. Why would you want the player to know that items are being deleted? /s

There's probably the option to replace the labs with custom assemblers that look like labs, but then you'd basically need separate recipes for each technology, and it wouldn't work with quality since assemblers can't mix quality inputs.

This isn't the first time I've been disappointed by what's available for scripting, but not being able to record item consumption feels like a very jarring omission. I'd honestly expect the default behavior to be that consumed and spawned items appear in the production graphs.

Taking a closer look, it seems that LuaFlowStatistics.on_flow() can be called to add items produced or consumed. So you'd need to get the instance for the specific surface each lab is on, and then call that function with the item stack each pack was consumed from as well as the number of packs consumed, but negative since it's consumption rather than production.

It might be possible then that you could set production statistics for the "science" "item" and eSPM could get shown as well.

Oh hey, I missed it somehow. Yeah, it's possible to add consumed packs / science to statistics then.

Alright, I'll push an update today or tomorrow with stats and GUI.