As a whole, the mod currently is a mid-late game mod as a result of the resource/advancement requirements. I feel like the mod should move to a early-late game range instead.

Secondly, I feel there are some annoyances with some mechanics in the mod.

Both of these I'm explaining and trying to address with my proposal. Feedback on this is very much appreciated.

A nice view:
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And a way to add comments:
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Either add comments to that linked commit, or put them down here instead, preferably referring to the point numbers.

Feedback from @yueh (on the PC discord), there are some good ideas in here, mainly (TL;DR):

1. moving down the Assembly machines to a lower tier, and doing more with them.
2. I also like having more use for the Vacuum Pump, to create higher grade plastic.

Added here for inspiration, "most are just random ideas and you can probably throw 50-80% of them away":

"i can't really speak about the iron requirements. never found them particular heavy for being a mid game mod. but probably fine to reduce them to move it to an earlier stage. (but then not much earlier)
2.) is actually somewhat interesting imo. there was always the block recipe, it was never the input for anything pressure chamber related. but iirc some uses with the assembly machine
did you consider splitting into a few more levels? e.g. move the assembly machine down to the second tier and have it act as some sort of cheap 3d printer? (pressure chamber when looking at the image)
and then have some different grade of plastic quality (instead of colors). e.g. low grade for the logistic drones, some industrial grade for the basic drones + puzzle pieces and a high tech one for the advanced puzzle pieces"

"or something like a "3d printer" assembly machine for the logistic drones. than add some cutter/drills for processing rotor blades for the real drones
and have the machine grow as you progress through the tiers. but it would probably invalidate the pressure chamber somehow."

"the idea with splitting it into more tiers is mostly oriented with the programmer in mind and the 3 modes. so instead of just locking them behind a random radio box, it's actually some game mechanic
so you'll start with simple logistic drones, then have some more fine grained ones for specialised item/fluid/etc transport or logistics for a well defined area and so on"

"regarding the pressure chamber. depending on how far you want to go with it, you could make it viable for a couple of tiers
e.g. have it by default idle at 1 pressure and use both direction. so high pressure for compressing iron and low pressure/vacuum for treating molten plastic into high grade plastic or similar
say always design it around raw material -> pressure chamber -> intermediate material -> assembly machine -> finished product (or another intermediate)"

"this might be overkill, but i kinda dislike these one size fits all approaches
yet it somewhat overlaps with the different assembler programms
so how about making it a bit more flexible. say you can combine a 3d printer, laser, and drill in one setup and can craft a drone from the most basic materials in one go.
or have distinct assembly lines per type, which will only craft a drone frame, rotor blades and dunno. say a motor and you have to combine it afterwards
and balance it around the first one being 50% slower and wasting more mats vs. the more efficient setup needing more effort to put into
or something like the 3d printer needing either hot fluid plastic or the item variant and an external heat source"

Mentioned these in the discord, but just to keep stuff in one place...

2ii) Suggest black dye (oredict "dyeBlack") rather than coal here.
2iii) Suggest "dyeBlue" rather than lapis here.
2) (generally) using bricks to make electronic components feels a bit weird :) How about gold (say, 2 or 3 nuggets per item) ?

11. I like this but I'd like to see more uses for etching acid - there could be some interesting in-world possibilities with it dissolving or transforming blocks (bit of a griefing risk though). I think using a small amount of acid in the Etching Tank here is fine, but keep it small - don't want to force players to be continually making the stuff.

Separately, I'd like to see plastic blocks (either a 2x2 or 3x3 recipe). Serving 3 purposes:

1. compacting for storage
2. for building - I have some thoughts about baked model work to make them render like some well-known plastic block building sets...
3. also like some well-known plastic block building sets, these blocks would damage entities who step on them without footwear
   Should be possible to colour them, which conflicts with the goal of removing colour from plastic items, but this could be done with a separate recipe (say, 8 plastic blocks & a dye = 8 dyed plastic blocks)

Tekstack mentioned about the Pressure Chamber Interface issue (issue 2):

"I have always gotten around the filter of compressed iron issue by using iron blocks to make compressed iron blocks that are then broken down to ingots since the blocks are not used in any pressure chamber recipe. It makes for easy automation with AE or refined storage without worring about the ingots being pulled out prematurely."

So knowing this, one solution would be to better convey this strategy to players, maybe by even removing the iron ingot -> c. iron ingot recipe altogether, and just leave the block recipe. That would allow removing the whole requirement for having filters in the Pressure Chamber Interfaces altogether, as they then could just filter on items that are output items of recipes.

Was wondering about Speed Upgrade in the machines...

Why do I use Speed Upgrade ?
I use them to increase the process speed of I/O Interface (Pressure Chamber), Assembly Line and my Heat Production (Flux Compressor → Refineries).
The I/O Interface is slow, so putting some helps to make my circuits without losing 5 minutes.
The Assembly Line is REALLY slow, horrible.
The Heat Production uses more compressed air than the Flux Compressor produces without upgrade, that's why I need some (instead of making another flux compressor, I was out of iron).

(I also put many Speed Upgrades in my Drones, I like seeing them flying everywhere)

What's wrong with Speed Upgrades ?
The power consumption. Maybe the heat production, but I don't check my Flux Compressors.
You simply can't put 10 Speed Upgrades in a regular machine : it uses too much power ! As soon as I put 10 upgrades, the flux compressor runs out of energy, the assembly line loses all pressure and I can't compress everything I want (but I can do it quickly !).
So, I simply can't use the max speed upgrade allowed.

Suggestion
I don't know how are PowerUsage & SpeedIncreased curves but I think it's pretty linear. Why not use a non-linear curve instead ? Something like this :

Increase low-upgraded machines' efficiency and decrease high-upgraded ones ? At least the machines don't run at the speed of light (the assembly line drank too much coffee. really.)

I'm very new to the mod, but it seems to me that the advanced (air / liquid) compressors are actually at quite a disadvantage compared to non-advanced ones with speed upgrades. With 10 speed upgrades in my liquid comp. I get 576 mL per tick, and while it does go through fuel quickly, it doesn't go through it nearly as fast as it can pump+process oil. I get the roughly the same output with 6 speed upgrades in a adv. liquid comp., and while there's a significant fuel savings, I have to deal with cooling 34 degrees every tick, which I found impossible--no matter what combination of vortex tubes, ice, comp. iron blocks, and heat sinks I added--at least not with a reasonable footprint. Trying to run an adv. comp. with 10 speed upgrades seems like an exercise in futility.

In effect adv. comp. gets punished twice by the speed upgrade. Once in the normal fuel burn, but then again in the heat accumulation. The non-adv. comp doesn't, and still gets all the advantage of the speed upgrade.

I think either the heat generation of the adv. comp. needs to be turned down (maybe logarithmic scaling of the increase? Or maybe just reduce the effect of speed upgrades on it?), or the non-adv. comp. needs to have a matching (secondary) disadvantage that also scales exponentially with number of speed upgrades.

But, I'm new, so I'm probably just missing something. :/

@stephen-smith While you might be a new player (welcome :D), I think you are right. The only benefit the Advanced Air Compressor has is that it can take >5 bar, and that it has a base speed of 50mL/tick instead of 10mL/tick. The other traits are disadvantages, and it's too much, yes.

@Sewef
Adding to this, let me give you some info about how it's currently working, it comes down to an exponential increase:
The output/speed increase Speed Upgrades give in any machine (Air Compressor, UV Light Box, Assembly system) is defined as: 1.5^SpeedUpgrades, so 1 for 0 speed upgrades, 1.5 for 1, 2.25 for 2, etc.
The air usage is defined as 1.8^SpeedUpgrades, so more speed upgrades is less fuel efficient (as it should). Heat production is also defined by this 1.8^SpeedUpgrades*SomeConstant.

I think a linear curve should work better, but we should play around with to evaluate this. It should at least prevent the tier one Air Compressor to easily beat the Advanced Compressor by simply shoving in many speed upgrades.

Thanks for the input both :)

Ouch XD

Speed Factor in blue, Energy factor in red.
So, with 10 speed upgrade we have :
EnergyUsed*357 and Speed*57

I think it's too much... just a little.
Why not go for EnergyUsed*150 (using 1.65 instead of 1.8) ?

New power usage :

At least a 10 speed-upgraded machine is more usable ^_^

Edit -
With cheaper speed upgrades, we could decrease Speed gain, something like *35 at the end ?

For 8 (2nd tier being too high-tier), one thing that confused me is that the pressure chamber is strictly tier 1 and there's no equivalent advanced version - this seems to imply that it's expected that you don't connect together everything into one system, and just have small setups for each specific machine. Either that or build a huge matrix of pipes to abuse their internal buffers, or add volume upgrades in everything. That doesn't seem quite right.

You can connect your pressure chamber to your main (tier 2) line with a Regulator Module.

Adding volume upgrades in everything is also a pretty good idea (at least once you have the resources to produce enough air), since it'll smooth out pressure drops a lot when you're using air-hungry machines. That's a better solution than loads of pipes just to store air, bearing in mind that pipes are ticking tile entities and need to do calculations to move air around (nothing too CPU-intensive but it can add up).

I'd like to propose a partial rebalance for the next major update of the mod (0.8.0?), incorporating some of the ideas from MineMaarten's document. A full implementation would need to wait till the 1.13 version of the mod, since there are some quite fundamental changes. But some things can be easily added now:

• Reduce the air usage and heat multiplier of speed upgrades from 1.8 to 1.65. Make both the speed multiplier (keep default of 1.5) and usage multipliers configurable.
• Double output of the Pneumatic Cylinder recipe (2 cylinders per craft)
• Double output of the Programming Puzzle recipes (8 pieces per craft)
• UV Lightbox exposure rate dependent on progress:
  • 0-20% : 20 ticks per 1%
  • 21-40% : 40 ticks per 1%
  • 41-60% : 80 ticks per 1%
  • 61-80% : 160 ticks per 1%
  • 81-100% : 300 ticks per 1%
  • That still adds up to a total of 12000 ticks (10 minutes) without speed upgrades. But makes for a more interesting choice of speed vs. failure chance.
• Only allow (automated) extraction from UV Lightbox of PCB's with exposure > configured redstone success rate. Manual extraction via GUI would not be affected.

Also, logistics frames are overly expensive IMHO. I know @MineMaarten suggests replacing these with a new recipe (8 x compressed brick + dye) in the full rework, but as a stopgap I propose changing the existing 8 x plastic = 1 frame to 8 x plastic = 4 frames.

The above set of changes will be in the 0.8.0 release.

Mentioned in #262: the Refinery's heat mechanics are a definite source of confusion for people new to the mod for two reasons:

• It's not obvious that the Refinery really needs to be clad on all faces to work efficiently
• The Refinery has up to four blocks, but the bottom block works as both an input and an output which is a bit counter-intuitive.

Suggestion from @IOmicronl: have a separate Refinery base block, and place up to four output tanks on top of it. The base block would take the input fluid (oil by default) and carry out all the ticking logic, and the output tanks would accept the resulting fluids. In theory, any fluid container could be used for the outputs (Liquid Hoppers, Thermal Expansion portable tanks...); need to consider if we should allow that or require a specific refinery output tank.