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.)

New intermediates (steel frames, copper housings, concrete structures, explosive dust) and a new ore, magnesite, smelted into magnesium. Operations hold up to 50 machines each and run as all of them together: mining drills, furnaces, assemblers, chemical plants, labs, boilers and steam engines, filled by hand or by robots. Also windmills, solar and accumulator arrays, an atmospheric water generator, hydrogen fuel and a hydrogen gas generator, a void chamber for unwanted fluids, capsule and grenade launchers, conveyors (loaders), storehouses, large chests, new walls and lamps. With Space Age, an electrolyser makes thruster fuel from water on space platforms.
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.