Let's get some mod discussion going. Finally launched my first rocket early this year and have discovered the wonderful world of mods.
Personally, I've been playing a lot of seablock. For me, it is the best mod for doing it in small chunks. The lack of biters, the fact that I need to place landfill to start up a new area, it makes everything feel very intentional, I guess you could say. Versus normal factorio where expansion is the default.
Also have small SE and py saves going. SE only have the first few sciences and py only have basic power, so haven't really explored deep at all into those.
I got about 100 hours into Space exploration. Its not bad, but it can feel quite tedious at times.
Right now I'm doing a bobs and angels playthrough, but without angels refining. I just dont like the "one ore makes two different metals/resources" kind of thing. makes it difficult to balance stuff.
Yeah I really enjoyed SE for a while, but I gave up towards the end game once it stopped introducing new mechanics and started just making you do the same things in different combinations. I really liked the Arcospheres though, I thought they were a really clever and novel challenge. Overall I would say it's worth the time to experience all the interesting new mechanics, but I don't think I'm missing out from stopping before I beat it
I never even got to arcospheres, I gave up at the sheer tedium of automating the space sciences. A shame, because I love the new smelting stuff and interplanetary rockets and stuff. But the space science stuff was just painful.
I've done a few Angels/Bobs runs in the past. While the added complexity of Angel's Petrochem provides a lot of complexity, it doesn't really add a lot of challenge. It's mostly just a chore.
My favourite for my last 2 playthroughs has been Krastorio 2 + Rampant, really focus a lot more on defense and fighting your way to resources.
SE and py scare me, don't think i'll ever touch those lmao.
K2 and SE with LTN thrown in. I find the opinion on LTN is pretty mixed. I absolutely love it though. Other mods I'm running are miniloaders, fluid must flow, dectorio, and some various combinator mods.
I'm having a lot of fun with this one.
I started a Krastorio 2 world, with biters set to max on everything, but without them spreading.
To survive, I have been managing my pollution using trees and Krastorios Greenhouses.
I also did enable cheat and "show_pollution_value" to make it a bit easier.
My main modded save is a Bob's+Angel's run, currently about 85 hours in and I finally got modules and purple science. Next up is making cobalt for blue belts, which is needed for pink science, and then lithium-ion batteries. The base is one heck of a spaghetti mess.
I also have a lightly modded megabase with 260 hours. The mods are mostly just small stuff like aircraft, moar infinite research, and power armor MK3.
Just yesterday I started a playthrough of Warptorio 2. I don't know if I will actually ever finish it. But it is a very fun idea.
I am used to the more complex and very slow mods. Nullius, Bobs+Angels, Krastorio, Space Exploration. And often play without Biters.
But Warptorio is... at least for me... like a ride on a near nuclear missile. Constant time pressure, constant pressure from heavy Biter aggression, scrambling to get a few materials before you have to abandon the place again and warp. But also not wanting to warp as much as the timer you need to wait increases with every warp. The slow increase of "space that warps together with you" is so satisfying. Finally having a iron smeltery in your warp-space, and a mining-patch you can just plot down outside and that will auto-warp with you.
I don't know how the balancing works out in the long run. Will the increasing warp-timer be a hurdle I can not overcome, or will it get "easy" at some point? I don't know jet, but I might find out as it is very fun at the moment.
Ignoring mods that add just small things or add quality of life stuff.
Krastorio 2 was my first major overhaul mod, and it is a perfect start for that. Very vanilla mostly, limited amount of alternate recipes or byproducts you have to deal with, introduced slowly as not to overwhelm you. It just expands a lot more than vanilla Factorio.
I didn't really get along with some mods I tried that either expand the burner phase a lot (Industrial Revolution 2) or introduced a lot of different fluids with lots of byproducts very early on (Nullius?).
I'm currently on a vanilla run, I realized I didn't have 20m green chips or 100 followers achievements.
One I got that I added in only MaxRate calculator and am working on a megabase. I have 4k spm of red, green and blue science. Working on purple... that's a lot of railroad segments.