I want to focus on Deep Core Mining Drills specifically here, as I tend not to use the ADCMDs (I feel the logistics costs of setting up chunk mining were too high already, and this appears to have become even more the case since the update).

Let's talk about what made DCMDs useful. Once you mined out a patch of ore, they allowed you to keep producing a small amount (that grew with mining productivity research) of that ore infinitely. But when does that happen? When do you start mining out ore patches? Well, we know that you can launch a rocket in vanilla with default settings without running out of ore in your starter patches. Therefore, this mod was primarily useful during the part of the game following the initial rocket launch. So this mod was primarily a mod to help megabasers exploit their depleted ore patches for some nice extra ore. I feel that it fulfilled that role rather well before the update.

What about now? Instead of generating actual ore, now we have ore chunks that must be refined into usable ores. Okay, that adds some complexity to the game, which isn't ideal for a megabase, but if it's efficient then I can get behind it.

So is it efficient? Let's take a look. We need:

• 3 belts of iron chunks for each belt of iron ore.
• 6 belts of copper chunks for each belt of copper ore.
• 15 belts of stone and coal chunks for each belt of stone and coal.
• No one cares about uranium because it's effectively infinite even without this mod. But it's 30 belts of uranium chunks per belt of uranium, in case anyone is keeping score.

On top of that, we now need:

• 450 sulfuric acid per second per belt of iron, copper, and coal ore (which means we now need ~56 iron per second to produce one blue belt of iron ore, and 9 iron per second per blue belt of copper or coal ore).
• 225 acid per second for each belt of stone
• 9000 (!) acid per second for each belt of uranium, although I'll probably never mine out a single patch of uranium.

And in terms of infrastructure, for each belt of a resource we now need:

• 11 fully 12-beaconed chem plants per belt of iron ore (56 iron per second).
• 17 fully 12-beaconed chem plants per belt of copper ore.
• 43 fully 12-beaconed chem plants per belt of stone or coal.
• 85 fully 12-beaconed chem plants per belt of uranium.
• 2 fully 12-beaconed chem plants producing sulfuric acid per belt of resource.

Assuming that we are willing to do the above to extract infinite resources, we obtain the following over a regular mining drill (with 0 mining productivity):

• 30 iron chunks every 4 seconds = 10 iron ore every 4 seconds, vs 2 iron ore every 4 seconds from a vanilla drill. Subtract 2 iron for 100 sulfuric acid and that's +6 iron per second per drill.
• 30 copper chunks every 4 seconds = 5 copper ore every 4 seconds at the cost of 2 iron, vs 2 copper ore every 4 seconds from a vanilla drill. Subtract 2 from 5 and that's +3 copper per second per drill.
• 30 stone or coal chunks every 4 seconds = 2 stone or coal every 4 seconds at the cost of 1 or 2 iron, vs 2 stone or coal every 4 seconds from a vanilla drill. Here the vanilla drill wins out because it produces the same amount of stone or coal, but without costing iron for sulfuric acid.
• Not even going to bother with uranium. It's clearly much worse than just using vanilla drills.

With the above information, it logically follows that:

1. Most players won't mine out any resource patches prior to launching the first rocket.
2. Since most players won't mine out prior to launching a rocket, they won't use DCMD until they are working on a megabase.
3. Even if they do use DCMDs, they won't use them for stone, coal, or uranium patches, because it's cheaper to just set up a new vanilla outpost than it is to refine the DCM chunks for these resources.
4. Since most megabasers are concerned with UPS, they will seek to reduce the number of entities on the map.
5. Since refining chunks is highly inefficient, megabasers won't benefit from this, because it will greatly increase the number of entities required.
6. Since neither megabasers nor pre-rocket basers will benefit from this mod, no one will use it (unless it's more useful in modded games, but that is a discussion for another thread).

The good news is we already know how to fix this:

1. Change the balance for refining ore chunks into usable ore so that it favors the usable ore. For example, 1 ore chunk into 8 iron ore. This means you get multiple belts of ore out of a single belt of chunks, which justifies the hit to UPS from having to refine ore chunks. I suggest 8 ore per chunk because 8-8 balancers are nice for loading onto trains.
2. Change the recipe for refining ore chunks to be faster so that it requires fewer chem plants. For example, 2 seconds default per refining operation. This reduces the burden on UPS of having to refine ore chunks.
3. Change the cost of refining ore chunks to be less expensive so that it's not such a drain on iron. Ideally this would be free (only water as input), but if we must use acid, then at least balance it so that we get a decent amount of resources per iron spent. Either add diluted acid like in Industrial Revolution, or use only 1-5 acid per refining operation.
4. Change the yield of chunks to be greater than the yield of raw ores from vanilla drills. If you want to balance the amount of ore generated by each drill, this is where I would do it. You can reduce the number of chunks per second from each drill until you feel it's balanced with the other changes. But keep in mind that it should still be favorable to use DCMDs over vanilla drills, otherwise why bother with the whole refining process?
5. Alternatively, just revert it back to how it worked before. Since before you got "free infinite ore" there was a different set of pressures. It was convenient, so it had to be limited in order to be balanced. Now that there is a refining process, there are multiple hidden costs that must be addressed in order to bring things back into balance. Rather than limiting free ore, you need to justify the costs that have been added into the mod by providing something back to the player to make the mod worth using.

Prior to the update, you could seemlessly transition your mining outposts from vanilla ore patches to infinite ore patches once they were mined out. Since DCMDs produced the same ore as vanilla mining drills did for each outpost, all you had to do was plop down some DCMDs where your vanilla drills used to be. You didn't have to adjust train schedules or retire locomotives. You didn't have to add any new stations. You didn't have to set up any new processing. You just put down the DCMDs, a few new belts, and let it do its thing.

Refining with acid now has an additional logistics cost compared to the way things worked previously. Not only does it need balancing, but it needs some compensation for the additional complexity of having to set up chunk processing, handling logistics for acid distribution, having to reroute trains, having to set up additional stations, taking up space on the map, and adding trains to your rail network.

There aren't really that many ways a mod like this can address that deficit. It's a pretty huge hit to the quality of life that this mod used to provide, and really the only thing you can do to compensate is to increase the efficiency of the refining process. So if, say, a single mining outpost, once it's mined out for vanilla mining drills, were to keep producing the same amount of ore through your refining process, that might be adequate compensation. Before, you only got roughly one quarter of the resources per mine, but it was basically free (minus some cost and complexity of building the DCMDs in your mall).

But if we consider this from a megabase perspective, then it's clear that this probably isn't adequate. If we ONLY get one mine's worth of resources out of our infinite mining outpost, and we have to set up additional logistics and entities for refining infinite ore, then what is the benefit of using DCM instead of just finding some 1G+ ore patches and basically never mining those out anyway? I'd say you would need to be receiving at least double the amount of ore from a DCMD mining outpost vs a comparably sized vanilla mining outpost in order for this to be worthwhile. This allows a reduction in the overall number of entities (mining drills), which would be something megabasers would appreciate.

Of course, these are just my suggestions. I'm sure there are other ways to address some of these issues that I haven't thought about. And perhaps some people like having a completely impractical infinite mining mod and will play it just for the novelty. Personally, I was a big fan of the mod before, and so I feel like I lost something with the update. Rather than just uninstalling it or reverting to a previous version, I thought it might be worthwhile to contribute my thoughts and hopefully bring it back into what I would consider a usable state. Thanks for the hours of fun I've gotten out of this so far.

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your feedback and your time to write it down. This gives me a lot of food for tought on what to improve in the mod, this is really appreciated.

I should to be able to have time to work on improving the balance and push a new version soon.

Regards

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 !

Just loaded into my Whistle Stop save to check. Looks like I can get thirteen belts out of one of my depleted iron patches that were generating roughly seven-to-eight belts prior. I'm not sure exactly what the "balanced" amount of ore is, but I'm confident it's between 1.1x and 1.9x, possibly closer to 1.5x than 1.9x.

One thing I noticed is that my starting ore patches generate much more ore now. This might actually be a positive unintended consequence. Before I was managing maybe 2-3 blue belts out of the mined-out patches around my starter mall. But with the changes, I can get significantly more ore now. This would be great for a megabaser, because more resources would allow the starter mall to more easily furnish the player with the needed gear, such as module 3s, solar, and blue belts, compared to how things were before. This makes it much more viable to keep your mall in the starting area, which I would think is a pretty big plus for most players.

It looks like you now only need 0.3 iron per second per blue belt of resources, which is great. The cost of producing ore is negligible, which provides a great incentive for processing your ore chunks.

Looking at the depleted ore patch mentioned above, it appears I'd need 146.3 acid per second to continuously produce those thirteen belts of output. That means a single acid tank would last just shy of three minutes before being depleted. I'd also need three (unbeaconed, unmoduled) chem plants to generate that amount of acid. But with a fully beaconed setup, I could run almost three mines on just one chemplant producing acid. That seems reasonable to me.

As a side note, I'm also not sure if it makes sense to allow productivity modules for the ore refining process, since you're already generating ore for the cost of processing. Personally, I'd recommend disabling productivity modules.

ACMDs are also probably significantly buffed after these changes, although I haven't gone through to check the exact numbers. I also noticed on a sandbox world that cracks are spawning in small clusters now, which is also great for making them more usable.

Thank for your review of the changes ! It feels things are looking more balanced ! I already push a few more changes and some more are on the way if you take another look.

Thanks again for your help improving the mod !

Looking at the changelog I see the Moho addition, which makes me happy that there's an option to go back to the old way if people want, or if they don't want to deal with processing. Is the name a Total Annihilation reference?

But with the other changes to DCMDs I think it's more likely I will engage with the more advanced processing. Right now I feel the balance is in a good spot, if anything maybe too OP. But if no one else complains, I'm fine with leaving it the way it is currently.

I am becoming more and more curious about ADCMDs after seeing they spawn in clumps now. I see that they are supposed to be balanced for vanilla games to produce the same ratio of ores used for science. I'm curious if this includes gray science, or if it is just the usual base six. Perhaps there should be multiple processing recipes for each type of megabase. You can have Productivity-focused deep core processing for the typical six-science megabase that doesn't research military, then you can have Military-focused deep core processing for a megabase where you want to alternate between military research and productivity research, and then you can have Military + Productivity-focused deep core processing for people who want to do a full megabase with seven-science-pack production. Although I'm not sure who uses the mod, or if any of them would be interested in using this type of feature.

I'm also curious which mods this is compatible with. It would be a fun alternative to angel's infinite ores, and I was also sad to disable it starting my Krastorio2 save before I knew it was compatible.

I also saw in the changelog that you were considering letting modules and beacons be an option for people who wanted a really OP setup. In my opinion, this mod is and has always been about balanced infinite ore production, so I am against this idea personally. There are lots of mods out there to generate OP infinite ores, and I don't see why someone would prefer this mod to just using /editor and infinite chests if that's what they wanted.

Absolutely a Total Annihilation reference :) The ore patches are also inspired on TA metal spots !

For module we are now 3 thinking they are better off DCMiners so I'm going to revert them out as before. Doesn't add meaningful gameplay and becomes too OP anyway breaking careful balancing or being mandatory to have usable ore output.

There are many mods supported already, I tried highlighting it in the mod description, short description and it's also visible in optional dependancies. Krastorio 2 is indeed one of them, you could add DCM after your gamestart but yeah as patches will only spawn on newly depleted ore it might be too late to use it to its full potential.

Your idea of different Deep Core Refining recipes depending on different megabase types and their SPM ore ratios is very interesting, I can see adding a few of thoses it should be quite trivial to do now!

I had another thought with regard to the ACDMD processing recipes.

Right now they contain uranium in the mixed result recipes, but uranium isn't used in any science packs in vanilla.

Maybe they should only produce uranium from the uranium-focused ore extraction recipe?

I'm not sure how much uranium ore you consume with nuclear power, but it doesn't seem to be very much compared to the amount of resources you have to produce for science, even pre-megabase. So what do you do with all the extra uranium? Make nukes and then nuke all your full boxes every few hours?