Simple Silicon

Introduction

This mod introduces a whole new production chain for a more challenging and realistic way to produce red and blue circuits and solar panels. The complexity of the recipes is increased as those products now also need silicon wafers/solar cells. The production of silicon requires a lot of stone, thus turning stone into a resource of strategic value. While stone demand is condsiderably increased it is still low compared to iron/copper demands for balancing reasons.

Details

Production chain

Items

Simple Silicon introduces four new items:

Quartz (SiO2) is the base resource that is later processed to silicon. It's obtainable quite easy, you just need some stone and water. The new quatz ore patches introduced in version 1.2.0 provide another optional way of getting quartz.
To get silicon you need to smelt multiple units of quartz in a furnace. The process takes as much time as the production of steel.
Solar cells are the main component of solar panels. Each cell needs one unit of silicon, copper and electronic circuits. You'll need ten solar cells for one solar panel.
Silicon wafers are the main component of all integrated circuits. You'll need one wafer for an advanced circuit and eight wafers for a processing unit. One unit of silicon yields five wafers.

Technology

To obtain the ability to turn stone into quartz and smelt quartz into silicon you need the "Silicon processing" tech. "Solar Energy" as well as "Advanced electronics" require now silicon processing.

Effects on gameplay

This mod is designed to fit into vanilla gameplay. I recommend to use this mod in a new game, but it is also possible to install it in your current game. In this case you will need to reconfigure your supply chains because of the altered recipes. To support you in this specific case, the mod will output the amount of affected assemblers.

Current language support

EN (English)
DE (German)

If you like this mod and you've created a translation of your own, please do not hesitate to send me this, so that it can be made accessible to all in the next version. Thanks in advance!