Adamo Chemical

There is a lot to discover in this mod, so I am not going to cover it all. Discover what Adamo Chemical can do for you.

Big picture, this mod introduces a number of new ways to interact with chemistry, mostly based on stone processing and a programmatic categorization of all available recipes. Only silicon processing is required: everything else is optional, and offers some benefit over the vanilla version with some associated cost. Stone can be used as a raw resource, like oil, which is separated into multiple products that can be used and mixed in many recipes. This won't interrupt your game or blueprints, but will introduce alternative recipes to increase efficiency and provide new types of logistical challenges.

There are a few clusters to this concept.

First of all, this mod requires Simple Silicon. This is the only fundamentally game-changing alteration. Simple Silicon introduces quartz and requires that silicon wafers are used to make red and blue chips and solar panels. It introduces a quartz resource you can mine directly, but also has a recipe to turn stone into quartz. Under Adamo Chemical, the latter recipe is disabled, and replaced with basic and advanced mineral processing, which yields quartz as well as other minerals by processing stone. This adds great value to stone as a resource, which is in line with both added logistical fun and realism: in real life, for example, limestone is often used in ore smelting to create slag for extracting impurities, then used to make cement.

Beyond that, everything else the mod does is an extension of the vanilla game: all recipes are introduced in parallel, under a new tab, and the vanilla recipes are left intact. Generally speaking, to access the new chemistry chains, you run stone through mineral processing, then send the minerals off to your production machines. It is similar to how oil works. You can use alternative smelting recipes in the blast furnace to use up abundant limestone and harvest more valuable minerals.

The mod introduces hydrofluoric acid, made from fluorite, an advanced mineral available after materials processing 2. Fluorite and hydrofluoric acid can be used to make blue chips and batteries, for a cheaper resource cost balanced against more complicated logistics relative to the vanilla recipes. Hydrofluoric acid is also needed for my Nuclear mod, and now you know where it all began. Cheers to MadClown01 for the fluorite icon.

The mod introduces a new, more sensible, way to make concrete, using waste materials from mineral processing. You will need to establish some level of concrete and brick production so that limestone and gypsum do not back up mineral processing, thus preventing you from getting the higher-valued minerals. I have taken great care to ensure that the minerals come out in the correct ratios to allow for smooth production, and this is achieved programmatically, so that I don't fool myself. Still, if you find a problem or have any concerns or questions about balance, do let me know.

Third, there is an element I call "chemical reverse engineering". This mod has an algorithm that crawls through the entire recipe tree, copying and categorizing every recipe that may be related to chemistry, firing, mixing, vaporworks, stone separation, and a few other things. It makes many recipes available to you in new ways. I will leave it to you all to explore how this works. The goal is to have the algorithm crawl through all mods installed in your game, including all relevant crafting categories, and normalize chemical production. The intent is to support all recipes from all mods (that my algorithm recognizes as a valid recipe that does chemistry).

The program is very much a work in progress, and I will appreciate feedback. In order to facilitate the support for mods, do share with me any crafting categories that my algorithm should be aware of. I use the druglab mod for testing, since it contains a huge number of chemistry-related recipes across a number of crafting categories. I want to support as many as I can!

There are many ways for you to interact with Adamo Chemical's recipe paradigm. The mod automatically adds chemical-vaporworks recipes to the vanilla refinery, chemical-manufacturing to the mk3 assembler, and chemical-separation to the vanilla centrifuge, along with additional pipe connections and graphics on the mk3 assembler and centrifuge.

Beyond that, if you have a mod that introduces a crafting category called "screening", Adamo Chemical will add to this category any applicable stone or material separation recipes it can recognize. Any recognized separation recipes that use water will be copied to the screening category, with its water ingredient removed and an applied efficiency loss.

There are also several entity "interfaces". Take a look in the settings. If you have a mod with an entity that you think works well as a kiln, still, mixer, reactor (chemical reactor, not nuclear reactor), or screener, put the entity name into the applicable startup setting. I've seen some excellent candidates out there in the mod community. When the mod can find the entity named in the setting, it will include the appropriate crafting categories in that entity's table. It does support furnaces, but, it's complicated, because furnace order works backward from recipe menu order convention. I've opened a suggestion thread about this on the forum.

Adamo Chemical will handle some recipes differently depending on what machines are available. Download my Heat Processing mod -- https://mods.factorio.com/mod/adamo-cinefaction -- for immediate access to additional recipes in those machines, plus the ability to do some chemistry using heat as an energy source. Find yourself a mixer entity and add it to the settings for further immediate results. To test this, you could use the centrifuge, but it looks weird.