Timber & Industry

Alpha Release Recipes, costs and balance will still change. Feedback is very welcome.

Instead of being something you burn or ignore, timber/wood goes into most of your buildings as plywood and boards (combined with boxes of screws.) Alongside it come new intermediates, a new ore, and big "Operations" buildings that each hold up to a stack (or more of) machines.

Works with or without Space Age.

Wood

• Plywood and boards, sawn by hand from the start, or in batches in the Sawmill (researched). Sawdust comes out as a by-product.
• Boxes of screws go into every recipe that uses wood. Each such recipe also has a "with glue" version that needs no screws, made in assemblers with glue (from heavy oil and water).
• Glue Press: presses sawdust back into plywood and boards.
• Greenhouse: grows wood from water and power, and soaks up a little pollution. Chain them along one water pipe.
• Harvester: a tank-sized vehicle that clears forests and collects the wood (and other plants) in its trunk. No weapons, and it doesn't damage your own buildings when it bumps into them.
• Sawdust uses: wood pellets and briquettes as fuel, landfill from briquettes and stone bricks, and a sawdust floor tile.

New intermediates

• Steel frames replace the structural steel in many recipes
• Copper housings go into modules, accumulators, engines, logistic chests, roboports and more.
• Concrete structures take the place of large amounts of concrete.
• Explosive dust, ground from coal, solid fuel or carbon, is used in ammunition, grenades, explosives and capsules.
• Hover frames are used in defender capsules and flying robot frames.
• The chemical science pack is reworked around steel frames, copper housings, plastic, sulfur and solid fuel.

Magnesium - A lightweight alternative to aluminum

• Magnesite ore: a new resource on Nauvis (including a small starting patch), Vulcanus and Gleba, also obtainable by crushing carbonic asteroids.
• Magnesium plates are smelted from it and used in low density structures, rockets, flying robot frames, heat pipes, the tank, the electromagnetic plant, superconductors and more.
• Hydrogen: magnesium and steam make hydrogen gas, which becomes hydrogen fuel cells (high-energy fuel) and an alternative rocket fuel recipe.

Operations: 50 machines in one building

Each Operation holds to several machines and works as all of them together, at the same speed and some additional power (a 25% overhead).

• Mining Operation: up to 50 electric mining drills over a 21x21 area.
• Smelting and Electric Smelting Operations: up to 50 furnaces.
• Assembly Operation: any mix of assemblers 2 and 3.
• Chemical Processing Operation: up to 20 chemical plants.
• Research Park: up to 10 labs, at 75% of their speed.
• Industrial Boiler and Industrial Steam Tower: 50 boilers and 50 steam engines.

You add machines through a side panel, or set wanted counts and let construction robots deliver them. Blueprints, copy/paste and settings paste keep the wanted counts, and machines of any quality are supported.

Power and water

• Windmills (60 kW) and Large Windmills (150 kW): steady power with no fuel.
• Solar Array, Accumulator Array and Advanced Solar Array: store your panels and accumulators in a single building, with output and charge available on the circuit network.
• Atmospheric Water Generator: water from the air, wherever the climate allows.

Logistics, storage, defence and light

• Conveyors: wide loaders that move items between a machine and a belt, in all four belt tiers. (with thematic magnet visuals to attach them to structures)
• Large Wooden Chest, Storehouse and logistic storehouses: 3x3 chests that can be fast-replaced over one another, keeping their contents.
• Steel, Concrete and Tungsten walls.
• Lamp Post and Light Tower: lamps with twice and three times the light radius.
• Expanded Toolbelt research, plus 10 extra inventory slots by default (a startup setting).

Space Age

• Foundry casting for magnesium plates, copper housings and steel frames.
• Fulgora: scrap occasionally yields boards, plywood and magnesium plates.
• Repair packs and explosive dust from carbon, and space platform foundation from magnesium.
• Some buildings have planet restrictions. For example, the Sawmill can't be built on Vulcanus, and the Greenhouse only works on Nauvis and Gleba.

Known issues

• The Assembly and Chemical Processing Operations draw power in bursts when fed slowly.
• This is an alpha, so expect balance changes between versions.

Feedback

Bug reports and balance suggestions are welcome in the discussion tab.