Add Slipstacks to your agricultural options, as an alternative stone and spoilage source on Gleba. Slipstacks do not emit spores when harvested. Splitstack polyps (The equivalent of a seed) is obtained by filtering the swamp water.
Mods introducing new content into the game.
Furnaces, assembling machines, production chains.
Currently, the polyp recipe takes 7.5s in a biochamber (2.0 speed), and yields an average of 0.15 polyps, with innate productivity included. That's an average yield of 1.2 polyps per minute per biochamber. An agricultural tower can realistically have at most 47 of it's 49 tiles planted (since 1 tile is for the tower itself, and 1 must have a power pole and probably belts or chests for feeding it and getting stuff out of it), and the 10m growth time means it needs 47 polyps every 10m, or 4.7 per minute. That means you need nearly 4 full biochambers running flat-out (costing a combined 1 bioflux worth of nutrients every 8s) to feed a single agricultural tower. Each biochamber requires a bit more than 1 offshore pump, because 10,000 water in 7.5s is 1,333.33 water per second, vs. an offshore pump's 1200. And that agricultural tower yields a net of 5 stone per minute per plant, or 235 stone per minute per tower, which is about equal to 8 electric miners.
I'd argue that the whole setup should provide a lot more throughput for an entire agricultural tower and biochamber setup worth, and should be closer to 1:1 biochambers to agricultural tower in polyp yield. Biochambers should also consume at most 1200/s water, so it can be 1:1 with offshore pumps.
My local rebalance patch set the growth time down to 8 minutes instead of 10 (note that jellystem and yumako are both only 5m growth, though), reduced the polyp crafting recipe to 3s (1.5s in a biochamber), and reduced the water demand to 1800 per recipe (1200/s). Now it makes 40 crafts per minute instead of 8, producing an average of 6 polyps per minute per biochamber. At 8 minutes growth time, 47 tiles requires 5.875 polyps per minute average, so the biochamber is now 1:1 with the agricultural tower (and also 1:1 with offshore pumps). I also increased the harvest yield of the plants from 50 stone to 120. At 8 minutes growth, that's 15 stone per minute per plant, or about half of an electric miner each, for a total of 705 stone per minute per agricultural tower, or a bit less than 12 per second (ie. a bit less than 24 electric miners equivalent) I think an argument could be made that that's too much, but if the yield were at least 60 instead of 50, it would at least be a more even ratio compared to electric miners (ie. 4 plants per effective electric miner).
Really, though, the key for me is the ratio of pumps to biochambers, and biochambers to agricultural tower. Both seem high, especially the latter, and the pumps to biochambers ratio honestly seems more a product of arbitrarily assigning nice round values (15s craft time, 10k water per craft) than an intentional design choice.
All perfectly reasonable points.
This is one of my first mods, and surprisingly has become one of my most popular. I think there are two reasons for this:
a) It doesn't break the vanilla gameplay in a hard manner, stone is a rare resource on Gleba, and this requires and investment of buildings, space, Nutrients (which often you are looking for ways to use anyway) and you get a method for infinite stone production.
b) The recipe is a little fun with the excessive water requirements - unique to anything comparably in vanilla - but easily dealt with by the infinite fuel transfer of 2.0, and an excessive number of pumps.
You are quite right that many of my values were picked out of my brain, however there was a design choice there - I wanted 2-4 biochambers per ag tower, and I wanted a net input of nutrients.
When I put in the current set of values, I quite liked how there was nothing at a perfect ratio - you just add more of each thing until you have an excess of seeds, they refreshing don't spoil, so you can get away with it too. But it obviously helps to design with scalability in mind.
Whilst i like your suggestion to perhaps think more carefully about the exact numbers, and get smoother ratios - I disagree with how much more efficient your version of the recipe is.
The main reasons for which are:
* Stone should still be 'hard' on Gleba.
* The stone source is infinite, and the tilesets allowing Slipstacks are very generously generated.
* Stone is often not even used as much as the other materials.
In my playthroughs, I have found it very easy to set up 20+ towers and have biochambers with speed modules to easily generate the necessary polyps to feed my stone consumption. (Also the plants themselves act as stone buffers that cushion demand).
If anything, I think they perhaps need to be more difficult?
Would love to see others opinions on these points too.
When I put in the current set of values, I quite liked how there was nothing at a perfect ratio - you just add more of each thing until you have an excess of seeds, they refreshing don't spoil, so you can get away with it too. But it obviously helps to design with scalability in mind.
Oh god, I don't know how you do that, tbh. One of the things I like most about Factorio is that it's so much easier to compute perfect ratios than many other factory games. And many of the mods I use, or local patches, are specifically with the intent of rounding off ratios to be more perfect (like a local patch that drops the Steam Turbine power consumption to 5 MW. Makes a very not-round steam per second of 51.546..., but makes the heat exchanger to turbine ratio a flat 1:2, and nuclear plant to turbine ratio 1:4 per plant/neighboring effect).
Whilst i like your suggestion to perhaps think more carefully about the exact numbers, and get smoother ratios - I disagree with how much more efficient your version of the recipe is.
The main reasons for which are: * Stone should still be 'hard' on Gleba. * The stone source is infinite, and the tilesets allowing Slipstacks are very generously generated. * Stone is often not even used as much as the other materials.
Your point about stone being "rare" on Gleba is solid. It's pretty well the only material that isn't inherently infinite on the planet, and this mod allows it to be. Still, I think the investment might be a bit too high atm, but that's just my personal opinion. Perhaps a 2:1 chamber to agritower instead /shrug. I do think that the pump to chamber ratio should be much more even, though. Dropping the water consumption from 10k to 9k would innately do that, as that's 1200/s over 7.5s.
In my playthroughs, I have found it very easy to set up 20+ towers and have biochambers with speed modules to easily generate the necessary polyps to feed my stone consumption. (Also the plants themselves act as stone buffers that cushion demand).
If anything, I think they perhaps need to be more difficult?
Would love to see others opinions on these points too.
Solid points. Perhaps a mod settings, then? Could have settings directly for the ratios (from a dropdown, so you don't have to futz too much with weird ratios), like biochamber-to-tower at 1:1, 1:2, 1:4, 1:8, and then pump ratio and output. Probably a lot simpler, though, to just "difficulty" setting dropdown, with like:
Mechanically, those would just multiple or divide the crafting time of the polyp recipe, the amount of water needed by it (so it stays 1:1 with pumps), and the stone yield per harvest by factors of 2. Everything else (like the spoilage ratio and such) already balances out, so those would be the only values that need adjusted for such settings.
Hmmm Perhaps dropping the water to 9K is warranted, as 1:1 biochamber to offshore pump is quite tidy, I agree.
Another option regarding the Polyp recipe to make its efficiency higher, so that it still takes the same time but burns through nutrients at a slower rate, such that if you use all the spoilage from harvesting a slipstack, you can generate 1 or more polyps in return, creating a self-sustaining feedback loop... which separates the nutrient loop of your base from the slipstack loop - although this may be too much of a good thing - what do you think?
Technically, the innate productivity of the biochamber already makes the polyps net-positive, but only because of that productivity. The recipe generates an average of 1.5 polyps per 100 spoilage, meaning you get either 0.5 polyps or 33.33 spoilage, on average, per slipstack harvested. I've personally tuned the recipe down so it's 1.5 polyps per 50 spoilage, as I needed a way of generating spoilage en masse for certain other modded recipes (notably, the spoilage-to-carbon-to-coal recipes being tuned to not suck so hilariously much, but taking wood input from stingfrond and boompuffs so it remains closer to energy-neutral), but I think the current balance is actually fine. The two vanilla fruits are also only seed positive due to productivity, otherwise you get exactly the same seeds out of processing the fruit as it takes to grow it (ie. 1 seed per 50 fruit, on average).
I can't get that much water into a single machine :(
I had 52 legendary quality offshore pumps before I noticed it no longer mattered. machines have a hard cap on the amount of liquid per port they can accept.
any chance you can make the recipe "longer" longer craft time. eg instead of 15 seconds for 0.1 make it 30 seconds for 0.2
I simply can't pump 44,000 water into a machine without hitting the hardcoded limits
I look into this capping problem. Thanks.
Specifically, any individual liquid port is limited to moving no more than 100 liquid per tick, or 6000 per second. That's a hard cap, but even getting anywhere near it usually causes throttling. Google searches suggest that an average of more than about 4000 fluid per second can't really be maintained, but it can be tweaked a bit in the recipe definition. Some of the production buildings (example, the Foundry) cheat this a bit by setting an input volume multiplier, making the game try to stockpile more in the input than the standard multiplier on the recipe input (2x), but even that can't get around the hardcoded 6000/s flow cap. The only way around that is to use more input ports on the building (since the limit is per port, not per pipe system or building), but there's only so many ports available for that.
As for the above mentioned "cheat" to get around that, you can set fluidbox_multiplier = # in the fluid ingredient definition in the recipe to increase how much it tries to stockpile of the input fluid. This helps avoid throttling that occurs due to the input box becoming "full". Fluid flow rate (as of the revamp where they got rid of explicit pipeline flow) is proportional to how "full" the source volume is and how "empty" the target volume is, so if you make the input volume for the machine bigger, it means the minimum fluid required to craft counts as much "emptier" on the input volume, and thus the soft throttling from the volume filling up is drastically reduced. This cannot get around the 6000 fluid per second hardcap, but it can reduce the throttling seen below that. The devs added a multiplier of 10 to a number of the foundry recipes several patches back for exactly this reason. For example, here's the ingredient block for the molten iron to iron sticks recipe in the game files:
{type = "fluid", name = "molten-iron", amount = 20, fluidbox_multiplier = 10}
This makes the game treat the input slot capacity of the machine as if it were 10x the size when this recipe is selected, meaning the input volume is 1/10th as "full" when it has the minimum necessary to start crafting. This avoids or at least reduces downtime between crafts as the machine refills in heavily moduled situations.
Side note: increasing the length of the craft won't fix the hardcap issue, because the limit is per tick, not per craft. If you just, say, double the recipe crafting time and the fluid requirement for the recipe, you still need the same amount of fluid per second to meet that requirement, so you're still hitting the same hardcap. The only way to avoid the hardcap is to reduce the amount of fluid required per second.
Side note: increasing the length of the craft won't fix the hardcap issue, because the limit is per tick, not per craft. If you just, say, double the recipe crafting time and the fluid requirement for the recipe, you still need the same amount of fluid per second to meet that requirement, so you're still hitting the same hardcap. The only way to avoid the hardcap is to reduce the amount of fluid required per second.
Found that out the hard way, doing Acid Neutralisation. With enough speed modules, a single Chem Lab can produce a truly unconscionable amount of Steam... Far more in excess of what it can push to its output. Generally speaking, high-fluid-throughput recipes are problematic even with (or especially with) the new pipe changes.
Water is free on Gleba, with functionally infinite throughput now that pipes no longer restrict flow. As, anything approaching 6000 fluid per second really ought to just not be using that much fluid. Players can always increase fluid throughput per building via Modules on their own.
Having finally gotten around to growing Slipstacks (Gleba's been kicking my ass), and I have to agree with the OP: Slipstacks are WAAAY too conservative in terms of production relative to cost. Water input is absolutely absurd, easily exceeding the 6000/s hardcap with even minor use of Modules and in general just being incredibly tedious to work with. Placing eleven million pumps isn't particularly challenging given water is functionally everywhere and the 2.0 fluid system imposes functionally no limits. What we're left with is a giant clump of water pumps for the sake of just having more entities on-screen and little else. I understand this can seem fun at face value, but it becomes a chore when attempting to scale up production.
But to me, the more egregious aspect is the Slypstack polyps recipe having a 10% chance to produce an item and 90% chance to do nothing at all, on a 15 second craft time. What you've created is a recipe with disproportionately massive input and virtually nothing for output, so as to feed a plant that has disproportionate output with very little input. The result is an item that's hard to transport by train as it takes forever to build up enough inventory to merit that, while at the same time packing so much "value" in a single train that it's hardly worth moving.
Was the point to enforce "build in place" rules? As in, the player is expected to generate and plant polyps within close proximity and with no large-scale logistics in-between? Because if that's the case, then the stupendous water requirement is a major limiting factor in terms of space. Agriculture Towers already take up a massive area as it is. Having to also budget for massive farms of water pumps on top of the Biochambers needed to breed new spores just feels like a "belt spaghetti" nightmare.
If you want to make the recipe low-return then that's fine in principle. I don't agree with it, but it's consistent with Vanilla farming on Gleba so it makes sense. But you could have done that with a shorter grow time and a faster churn of seeds. You're already generating a duplicate Slipstack plant for Agricultural purposes, so you could simply lower the Stone and Soilage gained from it by half, halve the growth time cut down on the water requirement. I'm not saying you have to, but it would put less of a hard cap on building at scale. As it stands right now, I don't really see a practical way to grow Slipstacks on the kind of scale I'd need if I'm actually going to rely on them for stone. And if that's the case, then I'm not sure what else to do with them.
Apologies for the tone of this. I love Bioflux and was really hoping to like Slipstack as well, but... I don't think I can deal with the water requirements and the "90% chance of nothing at all".
I hear your concerns, I suppose I didn't want things to be too easy - Gleba isn't meant to be a truely great source of stone in vanilla - I was ultimately just providing additional infinite stone trickles that didn't require maintenance. I think that inkeeping with vanilla essence of it is why slipstacks is one of my most popular mods.
The water use definitely needs tuning, although I quite like my big arrays of water pumps, haha, but it could be toned down a bit. In my own play throughs I had been using bots to deliver the polyps to the ag towers which are floating in lakes, and they burn their spoilage and craft landfill next to the tower, I never considered the scale of trains for the design much.
I will have a think on it all, and unfortunately have been really busy with real work of late so havent gotten a time to address many of my mods balance and bugs etc.
Thank you for the feedback though, it is appreciated, and glad you found the bioflux mod fun too!
Oh, certainly. This is a lot more popular than anything I've ever made :) And you're right - your mod is both difficult and in-keeping with Vanilla. I think my own personal issue is that... I kind of don't like Vanilla Space Age, and especially Gleba. Most of the mods I've been downloading or making have been ways of reducing the tedium of the place. Your Fluroflux is absolutely amazing in this regard, both in terms of spoilage and in terms of just being a good Biochamber fuel. The plants grow fast(ish), they're generous with their seeds (3-8 nettles per plant = 3-8 seeds, plus some wood) and they're still compatible with train transportation. Trying to set up a Slipstack facility was quite the culture shock compared to that.
I think this is less of an issue with the mod being "badly balanced" and more a clash of what we want out of the game. Gleba is spaghetti nightmare, where everything has multiple inputs and multiple outputs, with facilities expected to have multiple production chains all on top of each other. I suspect Slipstack would work if I did water extraction, polyp extraction, agri tower planting and heat tower burning all in the same place, but that's far more complexity than I'm willing to do in a single facility. Hence, trains.
Idle chatter aside, I have two general recommendations:
I like the idea behind Slipstack farming, but right now it feels vary railroaded. There's one practical way of doing it, and every other way is cumbersome or unworkable.
edit And no rush :) I absolutely understand what it's like to be busy with real life while people are asking for mod updates.