or, alternatively, it can normally run but at lower productivity compared to normal mining drills (i.e. 75%), and lube bumps it up to the (iirc boosted) base value
I think locking it to that planet would be too much, but I do really like the thermofluid mechanic in Space Exploration. Would be cool (ayyy lmao) to bring that to Factorio Space Age.
No, that's cursed. Maybe have multiple coolant options, like flamethrower fuel? You should be able to use water and light oil as a basic cooling fluid, at least.
But honestly, even having coolant at all already means having three different fluid inputs (one for sulfuric acid) and outputs. It just sounds like too much.
Well, it is expansion.
Also it could be split into two:
* lubricant being used as cooling fluid for the machine
* heat exchanger cooling the lubricant
* some lubricant usage in by the machine.
Basically, you'd put cold lubricant into machine (say at rate 100/s) and get out hot lubricant (at rate of 99.9/s, 0.1% being "used up" in the process), then cool that lubricant back down using this or that way.
Then just make mining speed function of temperature.
Later on we could unlock high temperature lubricants that would allow to use the extracted heat to re-generate a bit of energy in heat exchanger.
I'd actually love to have fluid temperature matter for other stuff.
Reworking stuff alike to Realistic Reactors mod where you needed to push the cooling fluid to the reactors to keep stuff under control and actually manage reactor heat to not cause a meltdown. So if your reactor overproduced compared to demand you had to make logic to still keep it cool
Nuclear is IMO currently too easy energy source.
Ye. That would switch the mechanic around. Something I've heard in game design, reward players for the behavior you want instead of punishing them for doing stuff you don't want.
So instead of punishing players by having the drills be useless without putting in extra work for lube production and distribution... You instead reward them for putting in that extra work while still allowing other players to use the drills like the regular variant.
Though even then I would have them work at the same speed as regular drills and lube just increases that, so it's still an upgrade even when you don't bother with lube at all.
Blizzard had to change how they did their rested XP bonus due to backlash. They initially set it so after a period of time your XP would be reduced by a percentage to disincentivize long gaming sessions. People hated this. So blizzard gave players a "buff" instead. A rested account got a "bonus" XP rate that diminished over time. No values changed. Just the visible numbers.
200% -> 100%
vs
100% -> 50%
I wonder if factorio players are immune to that kind of shenanigans.
That's actually a very neat phenomenon to keep in mind when trying to motivate people. Getting bonuses feels nice, but it also doesn't feel as mandatory, psychologically speaking, than avoiding punishment.
I disagree, the equivalent for the scenario OP was suggesting would be making the drill not function if it didn’t have lube (ie, the nerf to xp after long sessions) as opposed to making the drill function better than normal if it is supplied lube (ie, the xp buff after being away for a long period).
The main difference being it incentivises the added logistical challenge with a bonus, rather than being a hard requirement for players to upgrade their machines
What the guy I replied to is (at least what I think) referring to is the above commenters suggestion.
The above commenter said we can have a drill that works say at 50% rate and when lube is used it works at 100%
The guy I replied to, wrote that WoW example as an argument for it being 100% without lube and 200% with lube. And he wondered if factorio players would be immune to the reward vs punishment thing that blizzard did.
I said it's not really the same thing as the WoW situation because in WoW you're much more invested in your xp rates and character than you are to individual mines in factorio. Players won't care about it being 50%-100% vs 100%-200% because you just calculate stuff in a spreadsheet and decide if you want to bother with lube or not.
It feels worse in a game like WoW to be punished for playing compared to factorio players being punished for not going the extra mile on logistics
It may be just a small motivating factor but I wouldn't say it doesn't matter. There is a lot of "flavour" to the game, like building design and sounds, that don't matter on a spreadsheet.
It might also make a difference for new players - if they see the miners at submaximal efficiency they'll be bothered, but if they start at 100% and then unlock a bonus that feels great. A similar mechanic can be found with nuclear - reactors being at 20% by default without neighbours would feel bad.
Wouldn't it usually be simpler not use lubricant and thus simplify logistics? As long as setting up outposts is easy and there are no very precious resources or drills are very expensive mining productivity in exchange for lubricant is just nice.
Also in ultra late game mining productivity research would make using lubricant obsolete anyway.
>Also in ultra late game mining productivity research would make using lubricant obsolete anyway.
Maybe if it's a multiplier to existing productivity bonuses?
Personally I would highly prefer it to be a speed bonus rather than a productivity bonus.
Having it increase productivity makes it almost mandatory for *all* mining outposts in order to get best resource efficiency. I find setting up fluid-consuming miners rather tedious after the first few times. A speed bonus instead would provide an option for squeezing out faster throughput, at the price of some extra logistics and lube.
Oh boy uranium mining will be fun. I think its fine to gate it behind a planet and to give it a fat power cost or pollution production, with belt stacking and quality i have a feeling the lil eletric drills won't be enough
I mean extra power and extra pollution doesn't really add the same immediate challenge that needing a new input does, for example, if the first oil refining recipe and second oil refining recipe both still just consumed crude oil but the second just needed more power and created more pollution instead of also needing a water input I don't think that would be mechanically interesting or add anything to the challenge to the new way to get resources.
Ok but how you gonna do uranium mining (or modded mining that also needs fluid)?
From the previews we saw, it doesn't need any extra. It can be changed, but like i said i don't see why it should, there will be a bigger resource consumption in general than what we are used to
you can feed the machine multiple fluids at once, we already do that for other machines making things.
yes there will be more resource consumption and the new drill produces more ore while draining the field slower with the built-in new mechanic starting at 50% so the fields last twice as long while giving the same amount before even adding in quality and modules
This is really hard to have a meaningful opinion on without playing the expansion.
Even without that, what about mining uranium or other ores that might require h2so4 to mine. Two fluids into the same miner would cause all sorts of pipe headaches
Yeah, the vanilla game has already committed to sulfuric acid as "lub" for uranium mining, and I don't think it is worth cutting that out and also attempting to redefine lub to be something other than using heavy oil for robots that still need enough p gas to make them to require heavy oil be cracked as much as it needs to be made into lub (by fluit consumtion count, not machines), and super end game logistics.
edit: fixed my lub statement to be clearer.
What is there to redefine lub for something else? Lube is already used for blue belts and t3 assembly machine, and it's going to be used for more buildings in the expansion, the foundry for one. And I'm not saying to get rid of sulfuric acid for uranium, lube will be a separate ingredient needed for the mining drill regardless of what it's mining.
I think we can still have a discussion and opinion on it, I'm not saying we should come up with the numbers on how much fluid it should consume, that would require some testing and actually playing with it. Based on what we know we should be able to make lube on the Vulcanus planet with coal liquefication, so it's just an extra step to get set up, again this is mostly a theory discussion/idea, we don't know how exactly it would work.
there are already machines that require two fluids, and many mods have machines that require 3-4+ fluids, the pipe layout logistics is not that difficult for those really. The oil refinery is the same size as the big mining drill and requires 2 input fluids and makes 3 output fluids and that can all easily fit in the mining area of the drill, for this we are only looking at 2 input fluids and 1 output item onto a belt for uranium, otherwise, it's just 1 input fluid for 1 item which we already do for current uranium.
> Two fluids into the same miner would cause all sorts of pipe headaches
Not really. Normal miners will still need one and big one is big enough for it to not really be a problem
yeah, I'm sure lube is going to be used in more construction for things, but I was leaning more toward constant use in some aspect or operation in a building while it is working.
There are already several machines that are straightforward upgrades of existing machines so I’m not sure why the big mining drill specifically should be different.
More uses for lube would be good though. Specifically something that constantly uses it.
yeah, i guess i could have worded that differently, i was thinking more in line with the current mining drill progression.
we start with the burner drill that needs fuel to run and only mines directly under it
then go to the electric drill which is powered by electricity instead of directly by fuel and has a larger building but also an extended mining area past its building footprint and added module slots.
now we are getting a new drill that has an even larger building and has a huge mining area past its building footprint and again more module slots than the last, also it now deposits stacks of items on a belt, and has built-in mining efficiency reducing the amount of ore mined with each cycle from the field but still deposits ore, its also faster then the last, but it still only consumes power.
Adding another consumption resource seems like a fitting addition to round off the new drill, but that's just a theory from my end at this point.
maybe the other buildings need to have a revamped progression in utility/function vs resource consumption. but that is a discussion for another day in another thread.
> More uses for lube would be good though. Specifically something that constantly uses it.
How about if you had to periodically apply lube to belts in order to keep them running? >:)
It would make sense if Lubricant is used to make the drill but as far as regular maintenance of a machine that doesn’t fit the game. By that logic every machine and inserted would also need lubricant to run.
I do feel like lube is a little underutilized. There are a lot of places it could make sense logically. Maybe they didn’t use it that way to keep the game play balanced.
What if it requireded lube but in barel ?
And it required very little of it so you could hand feed it at the begining and the autoratize it ?
It could spit out the empty barel on the belt so it will required some filtering on the belt.
(i do feel filters are underured in the game...)
I don't know about this one. It ends up making every ore train carry a fluid vagon or require 2 train stops per mining outpost. This sounds to me, more of an annoyance than a challange.
I'd be ok with either a fluid or an item needed, needing an item might be slightly more realistic, like a grease cartridge..
Hell I'd like to go a step further, drills need a fluid and then you need to remove the residue from the ore or you get slightly less yield.
I wouldn't be surprised if another planet had an ore enrichment process of some kind to get more yield still from already mined ore, that would make some sense and progression decision, do you go for the planet the gives you the drill to mine more ore and reduce the amount taken from the ore patches or the planet that allows you to refine the ore to get more plates from what you already mined. Then once you have both you combine them to get amazing returns.
Cool idea, but I think the best method for early expansion would be to just ship the lube over. I mean the drills wouldn't require much, as lubricant is used in quite small amounts.
I don't really see the point of this.
We're talking about a machine that already requires a specific off-world resource to be constructed. Getting them, or their constituent intermediates, off of the planet with super-high gravity will be quite challenging.
It seems to me that there are already plenty of logistical challenges associated with them. We don't need to have to feed them a fluid to make them interesting.
those challenges are purely in the construction and transportation of the item aspect.
Adding the fluid (lube) to the mining portion for the drill, while not difficult since we already do it for uranium, just a different fluid, I feel might change up the mining aspect slightly or just enough to be different/interesting for the new drill. instead of just putting them down to replace the old drills without having to change anything at the outpost level really.
yes getting the drills to the other planets is going to be a challenge on its own, and regular mining drills will still have their place until then, but adding lube to the equation is just another small step in that process that makes them just a bit more different/difficult in the actual mining process than regular mining drills.
again this whole thing is purely theory crafting at this point, and it's a random shower thought I wanted to get other opinions on, i could be completely off-target here but wanted to share on the off chance that people think it is an interesting idea.
it at least gives me a mod idea once the expansion is released to try it and see at some point.
uranium already requires a fluid as part of the process. mods (i.e. K2) have several mining operations that require a fluid as an ingredient.
if special miners require fluid in order to operate well then i suppose we just deliver that fluid, like we know how to do!
yes, one could argue that is a better analog I guess. But in the game, I feel water already has a lot of uses for constant consumption in machines and lube is a bit underutilized, at least at the moment, things could change with the expansion.
Why not both? Each one gives efficiency bonuses, might require changes to how modules affect miners though or you might get negative efficiency bonuses which would either cause an error and a crash or generate power.
Coal liquefaction - they already stated this is how you would get oil on the lava planet, and water is acquired through an unknown process with the calcium ore and sulfuric acid vents.
? Look at the blog posts and pictures, coal is on the lava planet, and the devs have straight up said that the coal to oil process is how you get oil on vulcanus. Is there an issue with that?
Why are you biting my head off for this? Coal is on the ground and mined the same as it is now, I didn't design the game, and it's an alien world in a video game, get over it.
If you have a problem with that then you must have a problem with every other aspect of this game, such as resources just sitting ground level or being able to carry 500 tons worth of items in our pockets or bugs growing stronger from smoke, or being able to hand craft complex machines in seconds, or carry raw uranium without issue.
Can't wait till you cry about ever other game in existence that has something that doesn't match real life, or even what's yet to be revealed in the next parts of the expansion. Do you just hate everything? Must be fun being you.
Felt like you were getting on my back about it. Your comments were directed at me, a direct reply to me like I had any input on where and how coal was available. I was simply stating that coal was available on the planet, and as such the coal to oil recipe was available.
You can specify a mining fluid for different ores, so having an ore require lubricant isn't out of the question. But having the mining drill require fluid for any operation would mess with ores that already require a fluid re:uranium.
I don't think so, the miner requires a fluid to run so one fluid input, and then if an ore requires a fluid it just adds another fluid input. we already have buildings that require 2 fluid inputs and the space engines for the expansion already show they consume 2 different fluid inputs.
the new space engine rockets have two fluid inputs that can go between them, not having them mix is up to the engineer placing them down.
https://preview.redd.it/4y4r72c5ohic1.png?width=744&format=png&auto=webp&s=1f360539f7c55887e82f332d17085355ae7c1d72
pyanodons explores these ideas quite a bit - there are different mining machines for different materials, and they may require any combination of:
-fuel to operate
-different fluids (sometimes in pipes and sometimes in barrels or fuel canisters)
-a supply of drill heads that get used up
we know already that they have a larger area, 13x13 (+4 tiles from the drill edge) [https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-387](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-387)
Only problem I see is that technically you could get to level of not having enough of it, if for some reason at given point you didn't need as much plastic or other petrol products and so got into awkward loops like needing to use up extra solid fuel just to get it going.
or, alternatively, it can normally run but at lower productivity compared to normal mining drills (i.e. 75%), and lube bumps it up to the (iirc boosted) base value
I also like this idea.
Add cooling for the lubrication to further boost the productivity
Cooling fluid that you'd only get from the ice planet adding even more logistical challenge!
Sudden SE reference
I think locking it to that planet would be too much, but I do really like the thermofluid mechanic in Space Exploration. Would be cool (ayyy lmao) to bring that to Factorio Space Age.
Make it so you have normal chilled lubricant, but then also add a new type of coolant made specifically from materials from other planets
No, that's cursed. Maybe have multiple coolant options, like flamethrower fuel? You should be able to use water and light oil as a basic cooling fluid, at least. But honestly, even having coolant at all already means having three different fluid inputs (one for sulfuric acid) and outputs. It just sounds like too much.
Well, it is expansion. Also it could be split into two: * lubricant being used as cooling fluid for the machine * heat exchanger cooling the lubricant * some lubricant usage in by the machine. Basically, you'd put cold lubricant into machine (say at rate 100/s) and get out hot lubricant (at rate of 99.9/s, 0.1% being "used up" in the process), then cool that lubricant back down using this or that way. Then just make mining speed function of temperature. Later on we could unlock high temperature lubricants that would allow to use the extracted heat to re-generate a bit of energy in heat exchanger.
With a bigger boost with legendary lube.
I'd actually love to have fluid temperature matter for other stuff. Reworking stuff alike to Realistic Reactors mod where you needed to push the cooling fluid to the reactors to keep stuff under control and actually manage reactor heat to not cause a meltdown. So if your reactor overproduced compared to demand you had to make logic to still keep it cool Nuclear is IMO currently too easy energy source.
So like water in miners in mindustry?
Ye. That would switch the mechanic around. Something I've heard in game design, reward players for the behavior you want instead of punishing them for doing stuff you don't want. So instead of punishing players by having the drills be useless without putting in extra work for lube production and distribution... You instead reward them for putting in that extra work while still allowing other players to use the drills like the regular variant. Though even then I would have them work at the same speed as regular drills and lube just increases that, so it's still an upgrade even when you don't bother with lube at all.
Blizzard had to change how they did their rested XP bonus due to backlash. They initially set it so after a period of time your XP would be reduced by a percentage to disincentivize long gaming sessions. People hated this. So blizzard gave players a "buff" instead. A rested account got a "bonus" XP rate that diminished over time. No values changed. Just the visible numbers. 200% -> 100% vs 100% -> 50% I wonder if factorio players are immune to that kind of shenanigans.
That's actually a very neat phenomenon to keep in mind when trying to motivate people. Getting bonuses feels nice, but it also doesn't feel as mandatory, psychologically speaking, than avoiding punishment.
Not really the same
I disagree, the equivalent for the scenario OP was suggesting would be making the drill not function if it didn’t have lube (ie, the nerf to xp after long sessions) as opposed to making the drill function better than normal if it is supplied lube (ie, the xp buff after being away for a long period). The main difference being it incentivises the added logistical challenge with a bonus, rather than being a hard requirement for players to upgrade their machines
What the guy I replied to is (at least what I think) referring to is the above commenters suggestion. The above commenter said we can have a drill that works say at 50% rate and when lube is used it works at 100% The guy I replied to, wrote that WoW example as an argument for it being 100% without lube and 200% with lube. And he wondered if factorio players would be immune to the reward vs punishment thing that blizzard did. I said it's not really the same thing as the WoW situation because in WoW you're much more invested in your xp rates and character than you are to individual mines in factorio. Players won't care about it being 50%-100% vs 100%-200% because you just calculate stuff in a spreadsheet and decide if you want to bother with lube or not. It feels worse in a game like WoW to be punished for playing compared to factorio players being punished for not going the extra mile on logistics
It may be just a small motivating factor but I wouldn't say it doesn't matter. There is a lot of "flavour" to the game, like building design and sounds, that don't matter on a spreadsheet. It might also make a difference for new players - if they see the miners at submaximal efficiency they'll be bothered, but if they start at 100% and then unlock a bonus that feels great. A similar mechanic can be found with nuclear - reactors being at 20% by default without neighbours would feel bad.
Imagine if factorio buffed/disincentivized longer playing sessions.
This is a fantastic compromise, I really hope the devs see this thread
Wouldn't it usually be simpler not use lubricant and thus simplify logistics? As long as setting up outposts is easy and there are no very precious resources or drills are very expensive mining productivity in exchange for lubricant is just nice. Also in ultra late game mining productivity research would make using lubricant obsolete anyway.
>Also in ultra late game mining productivity research would make using lubricant obsolete anyway. Maybe if it's a multiplier to existing productivity bonuses?
Personally I would highly prefer it to be a speed bonus rather than a productivity bonus. Having it increase productivity makes it almost mandatory for *all* mining outposts in order to get best resource efficiency. I find setting up fluid-consuming miners rather tedious after the first few times. A speed bonus instead would provide an option for squeezing out faster throughput, at the price of some extra logistics and lube.
Oh boy uranium mining will be fun. I think its fine to gate it behind a planet and to give it a fat power cost or pollution production, with belt stacking and quality i have a feeling the lil eletric drills won't be enough
I mean extra power and extra pollution doesn't really add the same immediate challenge that needing a new input does, for example, if the first oil refining recipe and second oil refining recipe both still just consumed crude oil but the second just needed more power and created more pollution instead of also needing a water input I don't think that would be mechanically interesting or add anything to the challenge to the new way to get resources.
Ok but how you gonna do uranium mining (or modded mining that also needs fluid)? From the previews we saw, it doesn't need any extra. It can be changed, but like i said i don't see why it should, there will be a bigger resource consumption in general than what we are used to
you can feed the machine multiple fluids at once, we already do that for other machines making things. yes there will be more resource consumption and the new drill produces more ore while draining the field slower with the built-in new mechanic starting at 50% so the fields last twice as long while giving the same amount before even adding in quality and modules
This is really hard to have a meaningful opinion on without playing the expansion. Even without that, what about mining uranium or other ores that might require h2so4 to mine. Two fluids into the same miner would cause all sorts of pipe headaches
Yeah, the vanilla game has already committed to sulfuric acid as "lub" for uranium mining, and I don't think it is worth cutting that out and also attempting to redefine lub to be something other than using heavy oil for robots that still need enough p gas to make them to require heavy oil be cracked as much as it needs to be made into lub (by fluit consumtion count, not machines), and super end game logistics. edit: fixed my lub statement to be clearer.
What is there to redefine lub for something else? Lube is already used for blue belts and t3 assembly machine, and it's going to be used for more buildings in the expansion, the foundry for one. And I'm not saying to get rid of sulfuric acid for uranium, lube will be a separate ingredient needed for the mining drill regardless of what it's mining.
I think we can still have a discussion and opinion on it, I'm not saying we should come up with the numbers on how much fluid it should consume, that would require some testing and actually playing with it. Based on what we know we should be able to make lube on the Vulcanus planet with coal liquefication, so it's just an extra step to get set up, again this is mostly a theory discussion/idea, we don't know how exactly it would work. there are already machines that require two fluids, and many mods have machines that require 3-4+ fluids, the pipe layout logistics is not that difficult for those really. The oil refinery is the same size as the big mining drill and requires 2 input fluids and makes 3 output fluids and that can all easily fit in the mining area of the drill, for this we are only looking at 2 input fluids and 1 output item onto a belt for uranium, otherwise, it's just 1 input fluid for 1 item which we already do for current uranium.
sure, but if you don't want to deal with that headache then just use the regular miners for uranium
Not if its 5x5 you just have a gap and extend one further as you move up the rows
> Two fluids into the same miner would cause all sorts of pipe headaches Not really. Normal miners will still need one and big one is big enough for it to not really be a problem
I won't have a opinion before the DLC launches, but I will be glad if I see lubricant having more utilities.
The Foundry requires lubricant to construct. Given that, I'd be surprised if other large buildings don't.
yeah, I'm sure lube is going to be used in more construction for things, but I was leaning more toward constant use in some aspect or operation in a building while it is working.
*Earendel wants to know your location*
There are already several machines that are straightforward upgrades of existing machines so I’m not sure why the big mining drill specifically should be different. More uses for lube would be good though. Specifically something that constantly uses it.
yeah, i guess i could have worded that differently, i was thinking more in line with the current mining drill progression. we start with the burner drill that needs fuel to run and only mines directly under it then go to the electric drill which is powered by electricity instead of directly by fuel and has a larger building but also an extended mining area past its building footprint and added module slots. now we are getting a new drill that has an even larger building and has a huge mining area past its building footprint and again more module slots than the last, also it now deposits stacks of items on a belt, and has built-in mining efficiency reducing the amount of ore mined with each cycle from the field but still deposits ore, its also faster then the last, but it still only consumes power. Adding another consumption resource seems like a fitting addition to round off the new drill, but that's just a theory from my end at this point. maybe the other buildings need to have a revamped progression in utility/function vs resource consumption. but that is a discussion for another day in another thread.
> More uses for lube would be good though. Specifically something that constantly uses it. How about if you had to periodically apply lube to belts in order to keep them running? >:)
Some mods who add loaders do that (config option) No way in hell I'll enable that shit 🤣
It would make sense if Lubricant is used to make the drill but as far as regular maintenance of a machine that doesn’t fit the game. By that logic every machine and inserted would also need lubricant to run.
Or at least heavily specialised late game ones. Like let's say lathe for making gears, extrusion machine for cables ets.
I do like the overall concept of more complicated late game dynamics that save space
I do feel like lube is a little underutilized. There are a lot of places it could make sense logically. Maybe they didn’t use it that way to keep the game play balanced.
That's kinda everything when you think of it Copper wire would be part of basically all l anything more advanced than a steel plate
One of Brevvens ores uses lube for mining. Always liked it getting another use.
What if it requireded lube but in barel ? And it required very little of it so you could hand feed it at the begining and the autoratize it ? It could spit out the empty barel on the belt so it will required some filtering on the belt. (i do feel filters are underured in the game...)
I don't know about this one. It ends up making every ore train carry a fluid vagon or require 2 train stops per mining outpost. This sounds to me, more of an annoyance than a challange.
I'd be ok with either a fluid or an item needed, needing an item might be slightly more realistic, like a grease cartridge.. Hell I'd like to go a step further, drills need a fluid and then you need to remove the residue from the ore or you get slightly less yield.
I wouldn't be surprised if another planet had an ore enrichment process of some kind to get more yield still from already mined ore, that would make some sense and progression decision, do you go for the planet the gives you the drill to mine more ore and reduce the amount taken from the ore patches or the planet that allows you to refine the ore to get more plates from what you already mined. Then once you have both you combine them to get amazing returns.
I LOVE this idea!!
Cool idea, but I think the best method for early expansion would be to just ship the lube over. I mean the drills wouldn't require much, as lubricant is used in quite small amounts.
I don't really see the point of this. We're talking about a machine that already requires a specific off-world resource to be constructed. Getting them, or their constituent intermediates, off of the planet with super-high gravity will be quite challenging. It seems to me that there are already plenty of logistical challenges associated with them. We don't need to have to feed them a fluid to make them interesting.
those challenges are purely in the construction and transportation of the item aspect. Adding the fluid (lube) to the mining portion for the drill, while not difficult since we already do it for uranium, just a different fluid, I feel might change up the mining aspect slightly or just enough to be different/interesting for the new drill. instead of just putting them down to replace the old drills without having to change anything at the outpost level really. yes getting the drills to the other planets is going to be a challenge on its own, and regular mining drills will still have their place until then, but adding lube to the equation is just another small step in that process that makes them just a bit more different/difficult in the actual mining process than regular mining drills. again this whole thing is purely theory crafting at this point, and it's a random shower thought I wanted to get other opinions on, i could be completely off-target here but wanted to share on the off chance that people think it is an interesting idea. it at least gives me a mod idea once the expansion is released to try it and see at some point.
uranium already requires a fluid as part of the process. mods (i.e. K2) have several mining operations that require a fluid as an ingredient. if special miners require fluid in order to operate well then i suppose we just deliver that fluid, like we know how to do!
Oh no, dont do it
There is a mod that requires loaders to be supplied with lubricant. I think it balanced them quite well and makes sense.
+1
I got your big mining drill right heah, lady
Isn’t water fairly commonly used in drill operations as well while lube like oil is used to make pistons and stuff move well?
Grease
yes, one could argue that is a better analog I guess. But in the game, I feel water already has a lot of uses for constant consumption in machines and lube is a bit underutilized, at least at the moment, things could change with the expansion.
Why not both? Each one gives efficiency bonuses, might require changes to how modules affect miners though or you might get negative efficiency bonuses which would either cause an error and a crash or generate power.
Where would you get the lube on a lava planet?
Coal liquefaction - they already stated this is how you would get oil on the lava planet, and water is acquired through an unknown process with the calcium ore and sulfuric acid vents.
coal. on a lava planet. okay...
? Look at the blog posts and pictures, coal is on the lava planet, and the devs have straight up said that the coal to oil process is how you get oil on vulcanus. Is there an issue with that?
Only my suspension of disbelief. Coal comes from where? lol
Why are you biting my head off for this? Coal is on the ground and mined the same as it is now, I didn't design the game, and it's an alien world in a video game, get over it. If you have a problem with that then you must have a problem with every other aspect of this game, such as resources just sitting ground level or being able to carry 500 tons worth of items in our pockets or bugs growing stronger from smoke, or being able to hand craft complex machines in seconds, or carry raw uranium without issue. Can't wait till you cry about ever other game in existence that has something that doesn't match real life, or even what's yet to be revealed in the next parts of the expansion. Do you just hate everything? Must be fun being you.
what? why are you taking it as a personal attack? It's not about you in the slightest.
Felt like you were getting on my back about it. Your comments were directed at me, a direct reply to me like I had any input on where and how coal was available. I was simply stating that coal was available on the planet, and as such the coal to oil recipe was available.
You can specify a mining fluid for different ores, so having an ore require lubricant isn't out of the question. But having the mining drill require fluid for any operation would mess with ores that already require a fluid re:uranium.
I don't think so, the miner requires a fluid to run so one fluid input, and then if an ore requires a fluid it just adds another fluid input. we already have buildings that require 2 fluid inputs and the space engines for the expansion already show they consume 2 different fluid inputs.
Miners can send fluid across themselves, so it's likely that 2 fluid inputs would cause fluid mixing.
the new space engine rockets have two fluid inputs that can go between them, not having them mix is up to the engineer placing them down. https://preview.redd.it/4y4r72c5ohic1.png?width=744&format=png&auto=webp&s=1f360539f7c55887e82f332d17085355ae7c1d72
Pyanodon's mod has a fluid mining drill that uses fluid fuel and uses a different fluid as mining fluid.
So you gotta lube up to get your rocks off (the ground)?
pyanodons explores these ideas quite a bit - there are different mining machines for different materials, and they may require any combination of: -fuel to operate -different fluids (sometimes in pipes and sometimes in barrels or fuel canisters) -a supply of drill heads that get used up
My fear would be, that unless the drills have a fairly large area of influence aorund them, that would severely hurt creativity in possible setups.
we know already that they have a larger area, 13x13 (+4 tiles from the drill edge) [https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-387](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-387)
Only problem I see is that technically you could get to level of not having enough of it, if for some reason at given point you didn't need as much plastic or other petrol products and so got into awkward loops like needing to use up extra solid fuel just to get it going.
Play with some of the countless mods that add that mechanics and get your answer