I can't figure out how to improve the -80% speed bonus. I have all clockworks living within the area of the HQ, have the HQ positioned with miners and assemblers in range. The building is functioning. The people have all green numbers.... But the productivity stays at -80% no matter what I do. Help please.

Because of this, i am going around and chopping acres of trees just to feed my boilers. It's a weird situation where burning 1 coal in a miner barely gets you one coal mined... It's been a very rough start.

You need more Clockworkers (or less machines for the start). The workers that are not working in a building provide caste points, depending on their happiness. Each machine needs one Clockwork point to stay at full speed. If you hover over the Clockwork icon at the top left corner of the screen, the tooltip gives some information about that.

The HQ is just a production building on its own. It has no effect on the maintenance of its surrounding. Although that would be a nice feature.

In the settings you can give yourself more startup points that allow for more machines at the start. Or you can disable this mechanic altogether.
I'm sorry this mod is in a kinda unbalanced state. I'm working on it. :)

Heya! Thanks for the quick response! No need to apologize: you clearly labeled the mod as in Beta, so it's expected to have some unfinished balance, etc. I'm really excited to just play and explore.

About the tooltip: I had read that one. I think my misunderstanding comes from not knowing where the "Clockwork points" come from: are they are function of better food/housing? Or are they dependent on population? That wasn't clear on looking at the calculation. From your inference, they seem to be a combination of both. But when I was playing, I thought, yeah, 20 people should be able to maintain these machines (IRL you really wouldn't need one person per machine... that seems staggeringly high). Anyway, to my mind, I thought that providing the best for the entire caste would bring my score to -0%, since all clockworks would be happy.

And also, in my thinking, if a percentage of them were less happy., the score would be lower. Anyway, I'll get it going! Thanks for the reply, and watch for a series soon.... no TM... starting today! :D

As a side note, I love all the narrator's comments, the dreams of endless belts of iron and such! It's so factorio ;D