I love the concept, especially now that solar panels are finally viable on a planet with a short daylight cycle, cheap solar panel and battery parts, and a 500% solar productivity bonus, and getting sulfur on volcanus just feels right
but my main complaint is i feel like coal liquefaction using tungsten carbide is a bit too much. tungsten carbide is valuable on volcanus, and only becomes more valuable on nauvis and in space where coal liquefaction is also useful, but needing tungsten carbide makes researching it feel unrewarding. like it's more worth it to import rocket fuel and plastic from gleba or nauvis.

on a somewhat related note, the silicone lubricant seems well intentioned but using it doesnt feel right. it feels too unrealistic.

and given the foundries use so much water, to make the metallurgy planet competitive with the other planets, it might be reasonable to make the lava refining recipe need a lot less water and not take productivity modules, as productivity can make a water-positive loop.

(tried to edit but made a reply

Definitely agree with this. The mod creates a lot of really interesting trade-offs, changing vulcanus from "the free stuff planet" to a logistics and scaling challenge where you need space to effectively convert water<-steam<-sulfuric acid into any resource. Solar dependency and the amount of chem plants you need makes space a real limiting factor, which makes demolishers more impactful. It also makes efficiency modules super useful, since every kW you shave off reduces your space needs.

I also agree though that in some ways it's somewhat of an over-nerf. Coal Liquifaction requires multiple materials made from sulfuric acid, both steam and tungsten carbide require sulfuric acid when acid output is already nerfed. Aside from the effects on coal-liquifaction, you also basically can't use steam power at all and have to rely exclusively on solar, which is a huge pain before getting cliff explosives or reaching the point you can churn out enough turrets and bullets to kill your first demolisher and claim territory.

Also agree that silicon lubricant feels weird from a flavor perspective, and acts as yet another tax on your sulfuric acid production since if you get coal-liquifaction you need something to do with the heavy oil since fracking it would consume even more water.

For the productivity making water positive, I think you can set outputs of a recipe as "catalyst" which means they're ignored by productivity, though I don't know if this works if the input and output aren't technically the same.

Honestly my biggest complaint is probably that I didn't realize steam power is effectively a trap. With the reduced acid output and steam production from neutralization your factory ends up fighting over steam/acid for power vs production. It was really frustrating until I decided to completely cut steam power and only use solar, at which point everything clicked together. (Though producing enough steel to mass produce 100+ solar panels was also a point of frustration, but that's mainly due to limitations from other mods.)

Some kind of warning, either in the mod description or in-game, making the steam incompatible with steam engines by default, or maybe producing water instead of steam (very little requires steam directly, turning acid into water at the same ratio steam condensation does now wouldn't affect most recipes), would help a lot with avoiding frustration and "getting" what this mod wants you to do.

Deleted duplicate message.

I, too, agree that the Tungsten carbide requirement for Coal liquefaction is the weirdest part of this. Not only does it create so many practical pain-points, it doesn't even make any thematic sense to begin with. It's not like Coal liquefaction was an excessively powerful recipe anyway...

I sat down and did the math for this mod and confirmed that steam power using steam engines is a complete 100% trap that can just barely produce enough power for bare-bones science (1/s) production only if you have max (80%) efficiency via modules. (Which means no prod/speed/beacons.)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iuRvVvMtxIUUT7joocbJlaEuwgVbTMnZIZx8qYJ7mTg/edit?usp=sharing

It takes more power to produce steam than steam can produce only using steam engines. Honestly if the steam temperature change is going to stay I would consider blocking construction of Steam Engines on Vulcanus to prevent anyone from falling into this trap so it's clear you need solar. (Steam turbines still would be allowed for other sources of 500*c steam.)

I also noted that in the comments for the data.lua file it seems like the author was aiming for a ~30% nerf to sulfuric acid richness (on top of cutting the base output in half) but checking in-game the actual output of acid geysers is nerfed by ~80% (again, before the base output reduction). Adjusting the numbers to be only ~30% reduced acid output results in much more reasonable production numbers that should still help make Vulcanus more interesting thanks to the additional liquid input/outputs for molten metals, SLW processing for water, and space needs for chem plants and solar panels.

Considering the author hasn't replied to this thread yet I'm considering forking this to make those adjustments after my current playthrough. (I don't want to mess with the numbers too much in my active game and I'd like time to math out and test any changes.) I really like the idea of this mod and it really did a lot to make vulcanus more interesting instead of the "free stuff" planet but it's a little too much in the current form. I could also take the opportunity to try and find a different option for lubricant (one of my mods has a recipe for electric engines from carbon, that could be place to start.) and probably remove the carbide requirement from coal liquefaction since that hurts other planets. (Maybe make it use sulfuric acid? So it's still possible to loop on other planets without imports but keeps the acid tax on vulcanus.)

Also sorry for hijacking a thread about coal liquefaction and lubricant to complain about power production.

Foot in my mouth, my calculation was missing a multiplier for power and was wildly off, power production isn't net negative.

In that case instead of forking the whole mod I may just make a patch to add a different option for lubricant and replace the tungsten carbide in coal liquefaction with something else.