Fish, or at least fish breeding, and probably buying from nauvis. Aside from their magical healing properties, they are required to manufacture spidertrons, and fish breeding is required to produce legendary fish for the corresponding legendary spidertron.

Combat robots, much like the spidertron, are highly useful for ground combat if you can't turret creep, or use artillery/spidertron. Given the landing, extermination missions, adding those back in would be nice.

Construction robots. While the platform construction is instant, due to the ability to physically walk around and build, I often really wish I had construction robots to build things from my own inventory, due to deconstructing going to my own inventory.
Though, I suppose, you could instead, much like with logistic requests, flag any construction with missing items, and automatically steal them from the player (and passive provider/storage/buffer chests) so as to remove that friction.

Fish is done — both parts.

Breeding is back. The technology is the vanilla one.

Your math on legendary fish was right: quality modules are disallowed on that recipe by vanilla, but quality is inherited from the ingredients — two legendary fish yield three. And to raise the quality in the first place, run them through a recycler with quality modules: fish recycles into itself, though three quarters of the catch burns up in the process. Breeding is exactly what lets you multiply whatever you manage to roll.

Fish now shows up in Nauvis stock — it had a price defined but never made it into the shop; that was an oversight on my part. It sits in the random part of the counter rather than the permanent one: there's no reason to keep buying it — pick up a few, and breeding takes it from there.

Combat robots I won't be bringing back, my apologies. The spidertron, the tank and the car are all available here, as is every other weapon apart from artillery.

Construction robots — I'm fairly sure they're not what you need. The platform builds itself from the hub, so there's only one real friction point: after deconstruction your items sit in your backpack. Ctrl-clicking an empty slot dumps the whole backpack into the hold at once — give that a try, it may settle the question.

Done in 0.9.120

Aww. Why no combat robots? They are a major piece of the combat puzzle. Is this just so that you have to do all the fighting as manually as possible? Unless you are in multiplayer, they make weapons other than the smg much more practical, because they can act as point defense.
Are you also going to remove the personal laser defense?

Construction robots: The main thing is the, uh, delay and mild vanilla bugs that show up when you both have platform construction and a player there at the same time. Inserter filters for instance cannot be set until the animation finishes, for some reason. I have no idea why.
But yes, setting logistic requests to send items back to the hub works.

A guild contract can pay out as a technology, and it picks the cheapest one — and the follower-robot-count line was one of the cheapest infinite researches in the game. That's part of why the whole branch went. Personal laser defense stays.

I couldn't reproduce the bug. Filters apply to the ghost and survive the build — I checked with several ghosts at once, every one came out with its filter intact. If you run into it again, tell me what you had open at that moment and I'll take another look.

you could disable the robot capacity upgrade, boost the cost of the techs, and make, say, 20 cap for defender research, 50 for distractor, 100 for destroyer. or w.e. the equivalent would be.

As for the bug, it seems to be the filter helper mod (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FilterHelper) which either doesn't work with space age, or specificly with this mod. Not sure which.

Disabling follower bots was a good idea, but construction bots and personal roboports should stay for vehicles to provide planetary repairs and restocks, you could just disallow it in armor to show that they are not ment to be used on a platform

Ranakastrasz,

Glad the bug got tracked down — thanks for following it through to the cause.

On combat robots: I understand the point about point defence, and the idea of fixed caps instead of the infinite line is a neat one in itself. But I won't be bringing them back. A planet is exactly as dangerous as you came prepared for; a follower swarm would be doing that job for the player. Personal laser defence stays.

MikroPik,

Thanks — on combat drones we agree. Construction bots I'm not planning to bring back for now, even for vehicles only: that would mean putting the whole construction robotics branch, drones included, back into the tree for a single case — repairing a spidertron on a planet. And repairs there aren't really needed: clearing nests is a short sortie, not a siege, and a planet shouldn't become a place where things get serviced. A spidertron can be patched with a repair pack in hand and restocked from the hub on return. That's how it stands for now.

Construction bots are not only for repairs but also picking up dropped ammo or equipment wihtout dropping on a planet. On top of that worker bot speed it given as a quest reward so it hurts that I can lose rewards on bot speed, laser and fire techs instead of something I can use.

how about, free tech skips any infinite techs. those with multiple levels, unless those are all that remains.

That too much power, just avoiding partialy completed tech is all we need

Construction bots are not only for repairs but also picking up dropped ammo or equipment wihtout dropping on a planet. On top of that worker bot speed it given as a quest reward so it hurts that I can lose rewards on bot speed, laser and fire techs instead of something I can use.

MikroPik, do I get this right: you mean that after a spidertron or a tank dies, its ammo and equipment get scattered on the ground, and personal bots would collect it all with a deconstruction planner instead of picking it up by hand, pile by pile? If so, it's the same question of bringing back the construction branch, and the decision stays as it was for now. On worker bot speed: on difficulty levels without bots that branch is hidden, and since 0.9.123 hidden technologies are never given as rewards, so it won't come up for you anymore. If I understood you correctly.

how about, free tech skips any infinite techs. those with multiple levels, unless those are all that remains.

Ranakastrasz, I looked at the numbers. Out of two hundred-odd finite technologies only fourteen cost more than the first level of an infinite one, so infinite ones already come last: as long as anything else is left in the tree, the reward picks that. They only show up at the very end, when the remaining finite ones are spidertron, railgun, atomic bomb and the like. I don't want to hand those out instead of a laser level: that's no longer a trifle, that's half the tree. So I'm leaving this as it is. What's already done for 0.9.124: the reward no longer completes the research in progress.

by infinite I mean including the pre-infinite parts. shooting speed, damage, robot speed, etc.

meaning combat robot capacity is excluded, and can be safely re-added.