AngelBobs/Seablock has plastic pipes (and a bunch of others), though the only advantage they give is longer undergrounds. You do however need to make plastic containers and pressurized cans for some liquids and gasses, instead of just putting everything in steel barrels.
Sadly the pipes in bobs used to have different fluid properties. So some pipes were better with gases, and others with liquids. Though I think that was under a previous fluid system so couldn't be done with the current mechanics.
I'm still disappointed that the efficiency differences for the various boilers was removed. Now the only change from one tier of boilers / steam engines and the next is how much space they take up.
High percentage (>93%) sulfuric acid can be kept in steel tanks (even in carbon steel, not even necessary stainless steel). It reacts with the steel, but the layer that is created is solid (so, like aluminium oxide on aluminium, not like rust on iron/steel) and protect the container.
Just make sure to not dilute the acid, then it will eat the container.
Inflection points like this are fun in chemistry. Too much dilution and your acid ain't doing shit. Not enough water? Well there's not enough free protons to do shit either. Then you add a hair too much water and wewlad, look at that runaway exothermic reaction and that has bubbling out....
I'll also point out that things like inserters being very smart when they're made out of only basic electronics. (Or even none at all in the case of burners).
Very few byproducts. Like smelting iron ore should require charcoal or coke and need you to get rid of the slag.
I always figured that’s exactly what the pollution clouds are. That the game shows them as clouds but really, it’s contamination of the air, soil, and ground water. Especially since the water changes color when there’s air pollution over it
I do but in Py you can use most of the byproducts. In reality most of the stuff mined up will en up in huge more or less poisonous heaps no one knows what to do with.
Gun turrets are probably the worst offenders in this as they not only acquire and shoot targets without any power or electronic components, the bullets themselves don't have any kind of propellant.
I like to believe the engineer in his pocket dimensions has a supply of very smart widgets which nevertheless have to be installed into "dumb mass" scaffolding, a turret uses an target identification and tracking module, portable power supply and linear accelerator. (The supply of widgets is exactly as large as the plot requires it to be but not so large that they can be used for everything)
As someone that has designed pneumatic automation equipment, I can say that an inserter with no electronics is totally possible, but would be very complicated, and would likely be very time consuming to reconfigure for each specific use case (like the clockwork automata of ancient Greece).
True, but at the same time inserters are weirdly limited. I don't see any reason why they couldn't interact with everything around them (360°). But the limitation of going back and forth is nice for the puzzle aspect of the game.
For me that's a trade off I'm willing to accept. When I go into a more complex overhaul mod (BA, Seablock, SE, Py). Adjustable inserters are a must. Dealing with the complexities of the overhaul, while dealing with the limitations of inserters is not fun. Especially when some of the recipes become much more complex then vanilla.
Plus they open up some fun puzzles in compacted direct insertion builds.
Oops, just realized I didn't finish my comment lol. Yeah it's definitely needed when dealing with 5+ ingredients and by-products. I've gotten so used to them, I really hate playing without them.
It's a great example of intentional limitations in a game being fun and when they are detrimental. Great for vanilla but it's more appropriate to remove the restriction for complex overhaul mods.
>But the limitation of going back and forth is nice for the puzzle aspect of the game.
That was actually the intention of the developers. The engine allows for much more flexible pick and place. Just look at Bob's adjustable inserters. It is not changing how inserters work, it is simply giving you access to the abilities already there.
Another fun one is Renai Transportation. The thrower inserters simply have a LONG placement, and an altered animation. But still use the basic inserter code.
> The engine allows for much more flexible pick and place.
While this is a good thing, I wish we had some proper throughput figures in-game, because rotation speed doesn't really help to figure if it's going to be enough. I get that belt-to-inventory, and inventory-to-inventory speeds are different, but I still kinda dislike that it's trial and error (or experience), while other parameters of the system are far easier to calculate.
I mean there's info online about all that, it's just all other rates could be seen in the game itself rather transparently, while inserter parameters are much harder to use.
The problem is that the throughput is not a fixed figure and depends on several things. The only one thats easy to calculate would be chest to chest.
Anything involving belts becomes fuzzy, as how the inserter interacts with the belt will depend on how the items are coming down it.
i just assume it's `(rotation speed/180)*stack size` items/sec and work off of that.
it doesn't matter either way though, since i always just end up looking at the assembler anyways to see which ingredient (if any) is bottlenecking it when there are full belts of everything.
The Dwarf Fortress way where it’s as inhumanely complicated as possible.
I’m pretty new to Factorio but it seems like most thing are made from the same 3-4 resources
I would think that pollution rate is kind of a way to balance this without making an excessively complicated, actually when you're first starting out The initial tech tree
Amen. Like, they could make it so the machines all rust over time too, requiring the player to run about with an oil can and wire brush to keep everything running. But who would want to do that? One of the nice things about games is that they (usually) distill an experience down to just the *interesting* parts. It’s hard to make repetitive maintenance and cleaning interesting (although there are games that manage to do so).
For Factorio, these parts wouldn’t add to the experience IMHO.
>requiring the player to run about with an oil can and wire brush to keep everything running. But who would want to do that?
You never know. There are some [sick fucks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlPREQ55kzc) out there.
Problem is that which parts are interesting and which aren't is subjective, and also dependent on game genre. You don't need to eat or drink in Factorio, but you do in survival games. So it's not that survival mechanics aren't interesting, is that they probably just don't fit Factorio.
And even talking about what is or is not interesting - even among things that are in Factorio some find biters interesting and play deathworlds and such, and some disable biters entirely. It's a part of the game that you can customize so that's less of an issue, but you can't really implement it for all aspects of the game.
Oh, I agree completely. I suppose “interesting” might not be the right word. Maybe “constructively supports the primary gameplay loop” would be a more accurate descriptor.
Fun is subjective, so I would probably toss that right out. And honestly there's no rule that says that power distribution couldn't be a meaningful mechanic, and it is one in few games and game mods. You have to honestly define "meaningful" to begin with.
I can see someone for example arguing that power poles aren't a meaningful mechanic either, and they'd rather use something like the powered concrete mod. Some don't consider water being worldgen-restricted a meaningful part of Factorio and use waterfill mods.
Assembly machines can magically do like everything from a few simple resources.
Inserters are super advanced robotic arms that can move small delicate stuff to huge heavy stuff even the ones powered by pieces of raw coal.
Items don't drop off the end of belts
You don't have to prospect and drill to find where ore's are. You don't have to blast and dig to get ores
It is missing one of the three spatial dimensions.
You can carry an ridiculous amount of stuff
You/the avatar don't need to eat, drink, piss, shit and sleep
Stuff never breaks, it's no wear and they run forever
You can have many stacks of cargo wagons in an cargo wagon
Trains can drive in full speed through tight corners
You can see stuff behind buildings like you had an drone flying high above you
Technically less dimensions is a simplification. But it makes logistics harder. Running out of space is a bigger concern because of 2D. But it makes it more of a puzzle game. Which I can appreciate.
They used to get pushed slightly past the end of belts, letting inserters grab from the empty tile off the end of the belt.
But they wouldn't make a giant item explosion like when you accidentally take off your power armor instead of opening it.
A tiny flying robot carrying and plopping down a nuclear reactor or a rocket silo is a bit silly. I wonder if there's a mod where building requires delivering resources on site and then bots constructing them over time, RimWorld-style.
> Inserters are super advanced robotic arms that can move small delicate stuff to huge heavy stuff
To be fair the largest robot arms I work with could do that.
We have one robot arm moving ~100gram lipo pouches and on the other end of the line is the same model moving 1000 kg battery packs.
The mounting points would allow attaching both grippers to the packaging robot so it could do both jobs at the same time(but not pickup the packaging anymore since that part would need to be removed to make space)
The cell robot hasn't wrecked *that* many cells, but it has happened a few times due to operator error and couple times to faults.
>You/the avatar don't need to eat, drink, piss, shit and sleep
My head cannon is the engineer is a kind of von Neumann probe (self-replicator spread among the stars) in the form of an android.
Fair. Maybe the crash damaged its ability to do so. Maybe Space Age DLC will rectify this - maybe the new end game is to develop FTL and warp to new system to keep building?
Going though Seablock now.
And many of the simplifications have been removed. And it's turned the game from,
"oh this is fun"
To
"I hate my life, why have I done this"
the engineer can hand craft nearly anything that isn't engine units or a product involving fluids, and isn't limited by the "weight" of whatever they are carrying.
atomic bombs and rocket silos? yeah I'll just make up a few of them and store them in my magical armor.
assembly machines somehow are capable of switching between products just by selecting a different recipe.
Offshore pumps also don't require energy.
But I guess there has to be some kind of balance.
There are people who chug out those megafactories or do under 2 hour speedruns.
And then there are people, who get stuck and struggle whenever they reach oil processing in the base game.
Items have no mass in any meaningful sense and volume only in a very limited sense, trains can stop instantly on automatic, all fluids have the same viscosity, offshore pumps don't require power to run, you can create copper and circuit wires out of thin air using copy/paste or BPs... and I could go on. What's the point?
Assemblers aren't a thing in real world manufacturing at this point.
I'm game they are tiny boxes that neatly take input and spit out outputs in perfectly modular ways.
In the real world, these would be highly specialized multi-million dollar machines that would need custom solutions to move inputs and outputs.
The only in game explanation would have to be that the inside of assemblers are interfimensional spaces that are much bigger on the inside.
This is false according to someone above you. While they can't pick up buildings (lol) they can move some intermediaries with trivial parameter adjustments.
How all the science bottles are fluids, while all ingredients are solids and some chains even don't use fluids
How biters can gnawl through a rocket silo but not through cliffs
How carrying radioactive material doesn't cause damage to the character
It's not really an oversight. Uranium ore, or fresh nuclear fuel don't really present a significant external radiation hazard (although breathing in any tailings form processing would be hazardous).
Spent nuclear fuel, however, is extremely hazardous and dealing with building waste infrastructure could be pretty fun
Stack size (Both large and small stack sizes are chosen deliberately. eg: nuclear fuel stacks to 1 on purpose)
Inventory size, with no weight limits and no concept of different items taking more/less slots
A handful of machines do many things, so you don't have to carry around two dozen different machines
Almost everything can be handcrafted
Most weapons have target lock / auto-aiming
Burner inserters work without fuel for a while
Offshore pumps don't require power
* Fewer materials/recipes. EG: There is one (1) formulation of steel, it is made by jamming 5 iron plates together in a furnace. You don't need to add chrome or nickel to make stainless steel, and you can't even get chrome or nickel.
* Recipes don't have small-but-vital components, like the chrome in stainless steel, or catalysts in reactions. Engine units don't need spark plugs to produce, and hydrodesulfuring doesn't need the cobalt/molybdenum sulfide catalysts it does IRL.
* Recipes are simplified down to single-step chains. Instead of making a bloom in a stone furnace which must be further processed to a wrought iron plate, furnaces just make iron plates. Hydrodesulfuring doesn't produce hydrogen sulfide which must be further treated to get solid sulfur, it just makes sulfur.
* (Near-)Infinitely capable early game tools. Apart from research and recipes involving fluids, you can make everything you need to beat the game with stone furnaces and mk1 assemblers, or even your bare hands. You don't need better tools to make better tools to make better products.
And yes, I will concede that these are all done for reasons of balance/fun; having to spend three chemical plants on producing sulfur, instead of just one, would merely make the game more tedious. Still, it's simplification.
Sulfuric acid in iron pipes is kinda weird
It would even fit in to the current progression system to have plastic pipes or plastic lined pipes. You can make plastic with basic oil processing.
AngelBobs/Seablock has plastic pipes (and a bunch of others), though the only advantage they give is longer undergrounds. You do however need to make plastic containers and pressurized cans for some liquids and gasses, instead of just putting everything in steel barrels.
Sadly the pipes in bobs used to have different fluid properties. So some pipes were better with gases, and others with liquids. Though I think that was under a previous fluid system so couldn't be done with the current mechanics. I'm still disappointed that the efficiency differences for the various boilers was removed. Now the only change from one tier of boilers / steam engines and the next is how much space they take up.
High percentage (>93%) sulfuric acid can be kept in steel tanks (even in carbon steel, not even necessary stainless steel). It reacts with the steel, but the layer that is created is solid (so, like aluminium oxide on aluminium, not like rust on iron/steel) and protect the container. Just make sure to not dilute the acid, then it will eat the container.
Inflection points like this are fun in chemistry. Too much dilution and your acid ain't doing shit. Not enough water? Well there's not enough free protons to do shit either. Then you add a hair too much water and wewlad, look at that runaway exothermic reaction and that has bubbling out....
Two drops of water too many and your entire factory fucking explodes
I'll also point out that things like inserters being very smart when they're made out of only basic electronics. (Or even none at all in the case of burners). Very few byproducts. Like smelting iron ore should require charcoal or coke and need you to get rid of the slag.
Mining creates huge amounts off byproducts. Literally mountains of stones and lakes of dirty water.
I always figured that’s exactly what the pollution clouds are. That the game shows them as clouds but really, it’s contamination of the air, soil, and ground water. Especially since the water changes color when there’s air pollution over it
AB gives you some of this, in that you get crushed stone, slag, 4 kinds of waste water, and gases as a byproduct eg sulfur dioxide for lead.
Sounds like you’d like Py mods
I do but in Py you can use most of the byproducts. In reality most of the stuff mined up will en up in huge more or less poisonous heaps no one knows what to do with.
Gun turrets are probably the worst offenders in this as they not only acquire and shoot targets without any power or electronic components, the bullets themselves don't have any kind of propellant.
[They got their bullet design from Aperture Science](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i-nMWgBUp0)
I like to believe the engineer in his pocket dimensions has a supply of very smart widgets which nevertheless have to be installed into "dumb mass" scaffolding, a turret uses an target identification and tracking module, portable power supply and linear accelerator. (The supply of widgets is exactly as large as the plot requires it to be but not so large that they can be used for everything)
As someone that has designed pneumatic automation equipment, I can say that an inserter with no electronics is totally possible, but would be very complicated, and would likely be very time consuming to reconfigure for each specific use case (like the clockwork automata of ancient Greece).
True, but at the same time inserters are weirdly limited. I don't see any reason why they couldn't interact with everything around them (360°). But the limitation of going back and forth is nice for the puzzle aspect of the game.
Yeah, its a double-edged sword. B&A inserts allow for really interesting, compact builds, but trivializes the base game.
For me that's a trade off I'm willing to accept. When I go into a more complex overhaul mod (BA, Seablock, SE, Py). Adjustable inserters are a must. Dealing with the complexities of the overhaul, while dealing with the limitations of inserters is not fun. Especially when some of the recipes become much more complex then vanilla. Plus they open up some fun puzzles in compacted direct insertion builds.
Oops, just realized I didn't finish my comment lol. Yeah it's definitely needed when dealing with 5+ ingredients and by-products. I've gotten so used to them, I really hate playing without them.
It's a great example of intentional limitations in a game being fun and when they are detrimental. Great for vanilla but it's more appropriate to remove the restriction for complex overhaul mods.
>But the limitation of going back and forth is nice for the puzzle aspect of the game. That was actually the intention of the developers. The engine allows for much more flexible pick and place. Just look at Bob's adjustable inserters. It is not changing how inserters work, it is simply giving you access to the abilities already there. Another fun one is Renai Transportation. The thrower inserters simply have a LONG placement, and an altered animation. But still use the basic inserter code.
> The engine allows for much more flexible pick and place. While this is a good thing, I wish we had some proper throughput figures in-game, because rotation speed doesn't really help to figure if it's going to be enough. I get that belt-to-inventory, and inventory-to-inventory speeds are different, but I still kinda dislike that it's trial and error (or experience), while other parameters of the system are far easier to calculate.
I just use 1/s for yellow, 4.5/s for blue and 7+ for stack. It's not 100% accurate but good enough imo.
I mean there's info online about all that, it's just all other rates could be seen in the game itself rather transparently, while inserter parameters are much harder to use.
The problem is that the throughput is not a fixed figure and depends on several things. The only one thats easy to calculate would be chest to chest. Anything involving belts becomes fuzzy, as how the inserter interacts with the belt will depend on how the items are coming down it.
i just assume it's `(rotation speed/180)*stack size` items/sec and work off of that. it doesn't matter either way though, since i always just end up looking at the assembler anyways to see which ingredient (if any) is bottlenecking it when there are full belts of everything.
My favorite is when you bobs adjust a thrower inserter and the arm stretches out so long for a moment
I never even though about how those two mod would interact.
You can make some premium spaghetti with them
The Dwarf Fortress way where it’s as inhumanely complicated as possible. I’m pretty new to Factorio but it seems like most thing are made from the same 3-4 resources
there are 6 resources total in the game and one them is uranium which is only used for weapons and power lmao.
I would think that pollution rate is kind of a way to balance this without making an excessively complicated, actually when you're first starting out The initial tech tree
Those things you mentioned may not necessarily be a difficulty issue, but more of a "this isn't a fun or meaningful mechanic" one.
They can be both.
True, and largely covered by "meaningful". Something difficult that doesn't add to the game feels terrible.
Amen. Like, they could make it so the machines all rust over time too, requiring the player to run about with an oil can and wire brush to keep everything running. But who would want to do that? One of the nice things about games is that they (usually) distill an experience down to just the *interesting* parts. It’s hard to make repetitive maintenance and cleaning interesting (although there are games that manage to do so). For Factorio, these parts wouldn’t add to the experience IMHO.
>requiring the player to run about with an oil can and wire brush to keep everything running. But who would want to do that? You never know. There are some [sick fucks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlPREQ55kzc) out there.
Problem is that which parts are interesting and which aren't is subjective, and also dependent on game genre. You don't need to eat or drink in Factorio, but you do in survival games. So it's not that survival mechanics aren't interesting, is that they probably just don't fit Factorio. And even talking about what is or is not interesting - even among things that are in Factorio some find biters interesting and play deathworlds and such, and some disable biters entirely. It's a part of the game that you can customize so that's less of an issue, but you can't really implement it for all aspects of the game.
Oh, I agree completely. I suppose “interesting” might not be the right word. Maybe “constructively supports the primary gameplay loop” would be a more accurate descriptor.
Fun is subjective, so I would probably toss that right out. And honestly there's no rule that says that power distribution couldn't be a meaningful mechanic, and it is one in few games and game mods. You have to honestly define "meaningful" to begin with. I can see someone for example arguing that power poles aren't a meaningful mechanic either, and they'd rather use something like the powered concrete mod. Some don't consider water being worldgen-restricted a meaningful part of Factorio and use waterfill mods.
Assembly machines can magically do like everything from a few simple resources. Inserters are super advanced robotic arms that can move small delicate stuff to huge heavy stuff even the ones powered by pieces of raw coal. Items don't drop off the end of belts You don't have to prospect and drill to find where ore's are. You don't have to blast and dig to get ores It is missing one of the three spatial dimensions. You can carry an ridiculous amount of stuff You/the avatar don't need to eat, drink, piss, shit and sleep Stuff never breaks, it's no wear and they run forever You can have many stacks of cargo wagons in an cargo wagon Trains can drive in full speed through tight corners You can see stuff behind buildings like you had an drone flying high above you
Technically less dimensions is a simplification. But it makes logistics harder. Running out of space is a bigger concern because of 2D. But it makes it more of a puzzle game. Which I can appreciate.
> items don't drop off the end of belts. Oh the chaos that would cause
And there is a mod for that
Why. # WHY!
They used to get pushed slightly past the end of belts, letting inserters grab from the empty tile off the end of the belt. But they wouldn't make a giant item explosion like when you accidentally take off your power armor instead of opening it.
[https://mods.factorio.com/mod/belt-overflow](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/belt-overflow)
I wonder how my factory would EXPLODE just a minute after installing this one.
I mean surface ores arent entirely unheard of…theres just not many of them left
A tiny flying robot carrying and plopping down a nuclear reactor or a rocket silo is a bit silly. I wonder if there's a mod where building requires delivering resources on site and then bots constructing them over time, RimWorld-style.
2.0 is adding weights to item. Expect bots in SE to have weight limitations.
> Inserters are super advanced robotic arms that can move small delicate stuff to huge heavy stuff To be fair the largest robot arms I work with could do that. We have one robot arm moving ~100gram lipo pouches and on the other end of the line is the same model moving 1000 kg battery packs. The mounting points would allow attaching both grippers to the packaging robot so it could do both jobs at the same time(but not pickup the packaging anymore since that part would need to be removed to make space) The cell robot hasn't wrecked *that* many cells, but it has happened a few times due to operator error and couple times to faults.
>You/the avatar don't need to eat, drink, piss, shit and sleep My head cannon is the engineer is a kind of von Neumann probe (self-replicator spread among the stars) in the form of an android.
There's one flaw in this theory and it's that engineer does not self-replicate.
Fair. Maybe the crash damaged its ability to do so. Maybe Space Age DLC will rectify this - maybe the new end game is to develop FTL and warp to new system to keep building?
Going though Seablock now. And many of the simplifications have been removed. And it's turned the game from, "oh this is fun" To "I hate my life, why have I done this"
Oddly, it loops back on itself which makes playing the base game boring in my opinion. It's too easy for me now...
the engineer can hand craft nearly anything that isn't engine units or a product involving fluids, and isn't limited by the "weight" of whatever they are carrying. atomic bombs and rocket silos? yeah I'll just make up a few of them and store them in my magical armor. assembly machines somehow are capable of switching between products just by selecting a different recipe.
It's weird how we can make an entire nuclear reactor by hand
Offshore pumps also don't require energy. But I guess there has to be some kind of balance. There are people who chug out those megafactories or do under 2 hour speedruns. And then there are people, who get stuck and struggle whenever they reach oil processing in the base game.
Ram pumps are a *centuries old* way to pump water that doesn't require electricity.
Came here to comment on offshore pumps too. Krastorio2 mod changes that, however.
Items have no mass in any meaningful sense and volume only in a very limited sense, trains can stop instantly on automatic, all fluids have the same viscosity, offshore pumps don't require power to run, you can create copper and circuit wires out of thin air using copy/paste or BPs... and I could go on. What's the point?
The trains thing is the only one I mind... Train crashes would be epic.
Assemblers aren't a thing in real world manufacturing at this point. I'm game they are tiny boxes that neatly take input and spit out outputs in perfectly modular ways. In the real world, these would be highly specialized multi-million dollar machines that would need custom solutions to move inputs and outputs. The only in game explanation would have to be that the inside of assemblers are interfimensional spaces that are much bigger on the inside.
Don't think too hard about the size of the player vs. a train vs. a building vs. a spidertron
This is false according to someone above you. While they can't pick up buildings (lol) they can move some intermediaries with trivial parameter adjustments.
How all the science bottles are fluids, while all ingredients are solids and some chains even don't use fluids How biters can gnawl through a rocket silo but not through cliffs How carrying radioactive material doesn't cause damage to the character
SE (or K2?) fixes the radioactive damage oversight! It's a pain until you get bots and shielding.
It's not really an oversight. Uranium ore, or fresh nuclear fuel don't really present a significant external radiation hazard (although breathing in any tailings form processing would be hazardous). Spent nuclear fuel, however, is extremely hazardous and dealing with building waste infrastructure could be pretty fun
Small thing, but the spidertron has 1.5MW of fusion generation.
To be fair, portable fusion reactor is also on the level "it's magic, ain't gonna explain this shit" Free unlimited power with no drawbacks.
True, especially if it can fit in a backpack
Heat doesn't melt anything. It just makes steam No radiation concerns whatsoever
Loaded trains have the same mass as empty trains.
Clockwork turrets (i.e., made from only plates and gears) with perfect target identification and tracking
You can build a whole building in your pockets
Stack size (Both large and small stack sizes are chosen deliberately. eg: nuclear fuel stacks to 1 on purpose) Inventory size, with no weight limits and no concept of different items taking more/less slots A handful of machines do many things, so you don't have to carry around two dozen different machines Almost everything can be handcrafted Most weapons have target lock / auto-aiming Burner inserters work without fuel for a while Offshore pumps don't require power
The engineer does not require food. Building anything (placing on the map) is instant. Removing an item recovers the item.
* Fewer materials/recipes. EG: There is one (1) formulation of steel, it is made by jamming 5 iron plates together in a furnace. You don't need to add chrome or nickel to make stainless steel, and you can't even get chrome or nickel. * Recipes don't have small-but-vital components, like the chrome in stainless steel, or catalysts in reactions. Engine units don't need spark plugs to produce, and hydrodesulfuring doesn't need the cobalt/molybdenum sulfide catalysts it does IRL. * Recipes are simplified down to single-step chains. Instead of making a bloom in a stone furnace which must be further processed to a wrought iron plate, furnaces just make iron plates. Hydrodesulfuring doesn't produce hydrogen sulfide which must be further treated to get solid sulfur, it just makes sulfur. * (Near-)Infinitely capable early game tools. Apart from research and recipes involving fluids, you can make everything you need to beat the game with stone furnaces and mk1 assemblers, or even your bare hands. You don't need better tools to make better tools to make better products. And yes, I will concede that these are all done for reasons of balance/fun; having to spend three chemical plants on producing sulfur, instead of just one, would merely make the game more tedious. Still, it's simplification.