First of all, I would like to thank you for this great mod.
I have not played with it for that long and just set up my first ADCMD, but I noticed some things:
A. Deep Core Chunks have a different graphic on a belt (bug/intended?)
https://imgur.com/4zr6uUs
When in an inventory, recipe or pretty much everywhere else they have a graphic similair to Deep Core Ore Chunks but when placed on a belt they suddenly change graphic. I do not know if this is intended to increase visibility but it confused me a lot at first and still does. I never came across an item in factorio that does that.
Should this be intended, then please at least change the coal graphic to a very dark gray instead of black because right now that icon looks like it is bugged.
B. Non of the added recipes take productivity modules (bug/intended?)
I do not know if this is intended to keep the ratios more balanced but I personally think they should accept productivity modules, at least the ore chunk refining recipes in the chemical plant.
If you reach the point in the game where you can prod-3 module all your buildings you are in the late game and in the late game I find the effort of setting up the mining and refinement of ore chunks no longer worth it compared to the small returns you are getting.
Allowing productivity modules would improve that a bit.
C. Speed Modules in DCMDs and ADCMDs
To improve the viability in the late game where UPS start to matter and the resource requirements of your base increase greatly, allow the use of speed modules in the miners. I understand the decision to disallow beacons from affecting the miners but allowing 2 speed modules with their +100% speed boost does not really affect the game balance, especially considering how rare the Deep Core Cracks are with default settings.
D. The ratios of the Focused Deep Core Refining and Sorting Process are (ridiculously) unbalanced
Here is an overview of the yield of the Focused Process compared to the normal one:
https://imgur.com/ZewZxdV
The ratios of the individual Focused Processing recipes are unbalanced and should be more like the Normal Sorting. For example, why does Focused Coal Processing only yield 1 Coal Chunk for every 100 Deep Core Ore Chunks but if you do normal sorting you get 7.5 Coal Chunks instead of 1.
Furthermore, it requires a LOT more sulfuric acid for the same output combated to Normal Processing.
Additionally, 100 Deep Core Ore Chunks can be processed into 25 Iron Chunks + 15 Copper Chunks + 7.5 Stone Chunks + 7.5 Coal Chunks + 7.5 Uranium Chunks.
The yield of Focused Processing is way to low to make it viable in any scenario. I agree that the yield of the Focused Processing should be lower then the Normal Processing, but the yield of the Focused Processing should only be lower then the COMBINED yield of all chunks of the Normal Processing, not of the single Ore Chunks.
100 Deep Core Ore Chunks ➜ 62.5 Ore Chunks COMBINED
that is the number that the yield of the individual Focused Processing should be compared to.
Change the output of the Focused Processing to something like 150% of what it would be like with Normal Processing.
Here another example to show how ridiculous those numbers are:
https://imgur.com/GuNA3AY
To get 1 full blue belt of stone you require 1500 full blue belts of Deep Core Ore Chunks. 1500! It takes 1447 ADCMD to produce that many Deep Core Ore Chunks and over 11k chemical plants to process them.
That is a lot more buildings for 1 blue belt of stone then it takes to produce 1k Science / minute.
Additionally, the 22725 sulfuric acid / second the mining and processing would take is more then the 16800 / second that a 1k Science / minute base would need.
E. This leads me to my final point: The amount of Deep Core Ore Chunks that are used in the process are too high in general.
I feel like transporting that many intermediate items will cause problems in the late game when UPS start to matter.
It forces you to process them on site, instead of allowing you to collect them from all over the map and transport them to a processing block that turns the chunks into ores and finally plates.
In the version I am playing right now I reduced the number of both Deep Core Ore Chunks and Specific Deep Core Ore Chunks by a factor of 10. Of course I also increased the mining time by a factor of 10 to keep the balance the same.
F. The balance of the ratio of the normal Deep Core Refining and Sorting Process
This is more of a personal preference but I also tweaked the ratio a bit.
Here is the final output of 1 ADCMD with +40% Mining Productivity, fully moduled with Productivity 3 modules and with the output looped into the input:
https://imgur.com/FOBvu6W
As a reference:
A 1k Science / minute base needs fully moduled 59100 Iron Ore, 47248 Copper Ore, 7539 Stone and 6251 Coal, meaning a ratio of approximately:
59 Iron : 47 Copper : 7.5 Stone : 6.2 Coal
The ratio of this mod loans more towards Stone and Coal until you get your mining productivity a lot higher.
About Uranium: I personally only use nuclear power in the mid game and transition to solar in the late game. Meaning all that uranium just gets stockpiled or destroyed. I reduced the ratio of uranium quite a bit to balanced that out.
To conclude, it is a great mod but with a bit more fine tuning it could be an even better mod.
edit: The formatting was messed up so I tried to use letters instead of numbers to organize all this.
Sorry about the formatting. I could not figure out how to make paragraphs and bold letters.