Loving Industrial Revolution so far; behold my science!
Posted Sep 25, 2019, 9:31 AM UTC
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IR looks hella complex, like a new bobs+angels mod
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I've played like 3 hours of both AngelBobs Seablock and Industrial Revolution (then put them on hold to finish the Achievements), and IR is much easier than AngelBobs.
Industrial Revolution is basically Vanilla with more moving parts, and with the tech tree stretched out and filled in. In Vanilla, it's possible, easy even, to hand-feed your way to red+green science, solar, and steel electric poles/furnaces. And then you can directly move to automating oil and blue science, into bots. At that point you're basically done most of the tech tree. In IR, you're going to get almost no where if you try to handcraft and hand-feed your way up the tech tree. You don't even get electricity in IR until you're at the equivalent of solar+oil in Vanlla.
In AngelBobs... well... most production is almost entirely new, not just larger applications of production methods you already understand, and includes waste management to boot. It's a completely different monster.
My overall impression of Industrial Revolution is this: basically it's a vastly improved version of Marathon Mode in Vanilla, with all the waiting downtime replaced with discovering and automating cool new steps.
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And them you spend 100 coal in your monowheel trying to find rubber.
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Them rubber trees. I don't mind that they are rare but the low sapling drop chance coupled with their rarity just makes them a nightmare. I spent two hours on my IR world collecting rubber trees. I had 7-8 stacks of rubber wood before I got ten rubber saplings. I'm still operating on that rubber wood and the saplings are sitting in a chest for now. Just getting into power though so i don't expect the wood to last much longer.
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You need to start growing more saplings ASAP. The growth process is very slow, best to start it early...
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I started wood and rubber production pretty quickly, had no problem getting 10 rubber sapling to feed a single greenhouse and I don't even have a use for rubber yet (except a few large wood poles)
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As I understand it they're highly moisture-dependent, and I got a map seed that's almost all arid terrain which means lousy pollution absorption on top of it. And there was much frustration.
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I handcrafted my way to electricity in IR, and REALLY liked how the "coal ecosystem" felt. It feels far more "realistic" to have to power stuff with coal until power takes over. Really like it!
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While I agree with you that AngelBobs is a whole different can of worms, I found that IR gets more complicated later on as well and it has some similar mechanics as Angel Refining does. Getting lead seems to be a pain in the ass so far.
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i would say its in between. not super complex like bobs+angel but sure more than vanilla (im at Bronze age so not sure how big it will get)
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I have done iron and steel and now starting gold. Theres more intermediates every stage, but nothing crazy complex ( yet anyway) so I would agree, more than vanilla, but not angel/bob
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I like the side unloading assemblers. I was so conditioned to have them load and unload on opposite sides that I overlooked that.
Btw, do you have a long inserter feeding copper plates into a tin gear assembler?
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Btw, do you have a long inserter feeding copper plates into a tin gear assembler?
Whoops! Yeah I do, good catch :D.
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Also, you could save one space every two assemblers if you switch sides that you unload from so you have pairs facing each other.
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Yeah, nifty, didn't think of that.
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I knew I shouldn't have opened up this subreddit so early in the work day. Thank you for posting this - IR mod looks like exactly what I need to be playing in my next new game.
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It's definitely a good natural progression if you're coming from vanilla, but I'd suggest you also add a couple of QoL mods.
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I'm playing it right now, I almost shed a tear reaching electricity...the simple things in life haha
On a side note, as pretty as this mod is I need more tiers of stuff...I wonder if I can throw in another mod that adds that
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Krastorio is a late game mod and plays really nicely with IR. Try it out. Just remember to set the Krastorio recipe settings to "Industrial Revolution"; it should just work on an existing save!
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Oh really, thank you I will definitely try it out!
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Krastorio recipes green science on IR is almost the same as vanilla, requiring a burner inserter and transport belt segment. That's a significantly bigger production block, but I kinda needed to stock up on those anyway :)
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I just got to electricity last night too after like 8 hours and was so excited. Even just getting little things automated, especially with all of the extra coal routing, is such a fun challenge and feels almost as good as launching rockets in vanilla.
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Yeah who knew something as simple as boiler could bring so much happiness.
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What does it do? The IR mod?
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Its whats considered an overhaul mod which changes gameplay pretty dramatically. For instance, getting to electricity takes as long as some speedruners take to launch a rocket in vanilla. You start with copper->tin-> bronze ->iron->gold->steel. You dont get electricity till iron (which IMO makes the early game much more tedious since you either automate coal feeding into everything or handfeed) but it introduces more interesting early game stuff and spaces out the tech tree quite a bit. If you have a bad habit of handcrafting everything... this mod will move you towards automating everything since there are dozens of intermediate products that you need. Instead of just plates to rods, you start at ingots to plates, reinforced plate, ball bearings, rivets, pistons, tubes.
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Oh damn. That's intense
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Depending on what you've been playing it might be. It's probably 2x what a vanilla game might be. The start is rougher and slower than AngelBobs but late game its much simpler.
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Only vanilla for a week or so
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I have blue science half automated, so much work! I think I'm at 20 hours already. Also i spawned into a forest which is soooo cumbersome to deal with.
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Sort of note to self since the mod board is closed right now, I can research Photon Dmg 4 before Photon Dmg 1 by researching Space Science, then clicking on it then Dmg 4. Dmg 4 does not show up as researchable from the tiles on the left, but it is reachable from the tree.
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Do you have modified inserters too? Are they part of the IR mod?
See the gear inserter at bottom putting on the near side of the belt.
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Yup, that feature is native to IR. It lets you set which side of the belt inserters drop off their goods (thankfully, otherwise it wouldve been an even greater mess).
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That's helpful. Thanks for the info!
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Could I ask you how & where do you set this feature?
EDIT: No need to bother thank you, I've just seen the feature on the highlighted tool tip.
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Just in case people miss it ... highlight the inserter and press E to change which side it delivers the item to.
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I wish it just changed the graphics
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Haven't reached electricity yet and routing coal everywhere is proving a nice challenge. Came up with this wacky setup for red and green science.
As for automating burner motors, I just pretty much gave up trying to find a solution without hand-feeding some burner inserters ;).
In the last release, there's a mod setting to enable "burner leach", which allows burner inserters to take fuel from something behind them to sustain themselves (but they won't daisy chain fuel to other machines), which is great for reducing the need to belt coal all over the place and inserters fuelling inserters on every machibe
Ooh, interesting! Not sure yet I'll switch that on, I rather like the artificial difficulty of it so far.
That's why the default is "stupid burners" I guess. I always felt it did in fact make the game harder since all the machine arrays get larger, you need a significantly longer defensive perimeter, which means more ammo production (and you are where this is going...)
The factory must grow?
Isn't that always where we end up
AAI(I?) has a long burner stage too, and when I mixed it with bobs/angels I gave up on doing burner fidgeting.
At some point the "difficulty" of feeding burner inserters just becomes tedium.
I've tried this and for some reason it doesn't work. Maybe my assumptions about how it works are completely wrong, but I always thought burner leech should work like this: 1 inserter puts coal into a furnace, 2nd inserter puts ore into the furnace and leeches coal, therefore not running out?
I'm not sure if it's something related to the fact that furnaces are actually reskinned assemblers in this mod but for me it doesn't seem to work on .69, vanilla + IR, and the setting enabled :/ Issue here
That's what I did with mine - inserters feeding inserters, all the way down the line.
Thankfully I'm out of the bronze age and have electricity. I had a mini-base at first, that built only crushers, assemblers, and furnaces, powered by hand-fed bronze miners. Now I've torn that down and I'm in the process of building out into a proper iron age factory.
That's a lot cleaner of a burner motor setup than the one I had. I got mine working with no hand-feeding, but it was EXTREMELY disgusting.
Ha! What a glorious mess, I love it.
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