A not cheaty infinite ore mod. Adds ore patches that appear when ore fields are depleted that can be mined with a pair of advanced mining drill to upgrade mining outposts and provide source of expensive but steady infinite ore. Adds an high tech infinite ore mining from rare deep core cracks spawned in the world that require heavy refining. Now with automatic mod support !
Mods introducing new content into the game.
New Ores and resources as well as machines.
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?)
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:
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:
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:
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.
Hello,
Thanks a lot for this detailed and well though feedback. It's going to take some time to take into account but here's a quick response about your points.
A. Chunk icon/graphics being different
Somewhat intended, but kinda not happy with it either so I'm not surprised it feels confusing. I actually would like to improve this but I struggle with GFX :D
The idea is that I like the variation of raw ore items before the processing step that makes identical manufactured items (like vanilla ores > plates process) but also wanted to have something looking similar to the deep core chunk icon.
Ideally I'd like to have something looking like the icon with variations for items on belt.
B. No productivity is intended more as a safeguard by fear of deep core mining being overpowered as an infinite source of ore. However as you showed it could indeed be added without being op and makes sense as it's already super expensive and high tech.
C. Same for speed module, but I have to review the beacons limitation that doesn't work anymore, but it's probably not that big of a deal anyway.
D. & F. Refining ratio were the most hard to calibrate and clearly still need tweaking indeed, thanks of that input that helps a lot. Especially noted for Uranium to lower and Focused refining to "un-nerf".
E. Big number of deep core ore is intended to have a feeling of flowing raw ore to sort out. Might be too much right now indeed :D
Again thanks for your time, this kind of feedback is precious to improve the mod !
Hello,
I've pushed a new version 2.1.0 taking much of your feedback into account, please take a look and let me know how it feels now !
I saw the Deep Core Crack GFX in discord. They look nice. I will take a look at the changes and try out the mod soon.
I tried out the mod in a test world and I focused mainly on the ADCMD. Some feedback:
I know it is difficult to balance a mod, so thank you for your effort.
I've fixed some of your points already, namely recipe sorting, Krastorio2 rare metals, Uranium yield and Chunks refining time.
Chunks GFX yeah I feel they look much better but there is always room for improvement ! Good thing is that technically the layering work fine, so it's only a matter of making better GFX now :D
Regarding beaconing, I actually did a feature to prevent it before, might code it back but we'll see if I get more feedback about it.
For editor issues I think I experienced some aswell but couldn't just now. It seems some event are (not) handled in a special way in the editor, not sure this is fixable unfortunatly.
Thanks again for your help to improve the mod !
I don't know the current state of ACDMDs, so I leave that to the other posters who use them to determine what the proper balanced output might be.
I think if modules and beacons are made to affect the DCMDs, then the fully-beaconed output should be balanced to match the current output. The initial amount being produced without beacons or modules should be greatly reduced to compensate. The yield from a depleted ore patch is already very good, but being able to increase it further with modules and beacons would just make it ridiculous IMO. So I think either not allowing speed bonuses at all on DCMDs, or balancing the effect so that it caps at current levels (adjusting balance as required) is good. I have no strong feelings on those two solutions, so I leave it to you to determine what you feel best represents the intent of the mod, or if there's another option you think would work.
I don't think it really affects the balance of progression much either way, since by the time you deplete your first ore patches, you probably already have the capability to produce level 3 modules and beacons. It just makes it slightly more of an investment to set up full-yield ore patches, which is fine.
As far as productivity in refining recipes, I mentioned in my thread it should probably be disallowed. Let me explain why here to facilitate a conversation on the matter. The mod generates free infinite ore from depleted ore patches, so effectively 100% of ore generated from the mod is already a productivity bonus. So long as the amount of ore generated is sufficient to invest in extraction and refining, I don't think further productivity is needed. But I also don't feel especially strongly about this issue either. All I will suggest is that, if productivity is added, it should be balanced for the final output to resemble the current amounts (at least for DCMDs except for any balance adjustments, I understand ADCMDs may need rebalancing).
So basically my opinion is that you don't need to try to compensate for balance inefficiencies in refining and processing stages by playing around with beacons and modules. You should balance the core processes first, then tweak them to balance out with modules and beacons later if you want to add complexity and up-front costs to setting things up. That is what modules and beacons add, some complexity with having to produce the beacons and modules, and then some cost of having to produce the actual modules to fill out a mining outpost. They aren't intended to be used to achieve baseline balance themselves.
Yeah the more I look at modules, the more I feel like when I just removed them in the first place : they don't add much meaningful gameplay and wack balance out of the window. Hence why I settled by only having Efficiency modules in miners that at least reduce pollution and energy usage (and now DCMDrones consumption in ADCMD).
Also single Drills fully beaconed kinda look dumb :D