[Suggestion] Silicon Circuits

I like realism too, i'd like to have this in game.
But, it would lower the cost of pretty much all devices. For example: solar panels would become much cheaper (8 iron compared to 10 iron). If we would use "circuit base" (silicon + refined iron) to make circuits instead of just iron, it would be better imo. Sand is negligible if you find desert or coastline, which is almost everywhere.

And maybe having to extract the silcon to get igh enough purity and making this a bit more balanced.

Quote from Alblaka

Glass > Macerating > Silicon = Alternative for circuit-crafting sounds reasonable to me.

Wouldn't that be too cheap compared to current recipe ?

Quote from Alblaka

Why? 95% of circuit costs are getting redstone and rubber :O

I actually always had more trouble with Iron than redstone or rubber. Rubber farms can be easily set up earlygame and redstone... well, i always have shitloads of it, I even sometimes find redstone before iron. (and can't mine it...)

Would like it to be a little bit more expensive too.

Rubber is difficult at the start, but later it is so incredible abundant (exspecially if you plant some rubber-trees near your house).

I was playing on Enderville and I made a decent amount of money by mass-producing rubber. Apparently a lot of people don't bother to set up a rubber farm early on and are always short, especially when it comes time to make a solar array. But once you have the infrastructure it's not so hard to produce as much as you need. That being said, I don't see anything wrong with decreasing the iron requirement of solars from 10 to 8.

I get that solars were OP before and needed to be brought down a bit, but the current cost feels just a little too high. I didn't have enough resources to start messing with lots of solar panels until I was already at the early mass fab stage. When you want to get just 32 EU/t out of a solar array, that's a difference of one entire stack of iron.

How about this!
Sand => Macerator = Silicon
Silicon => Extractor = Purified Silicon

= Silicon Circuit Base(Iron replacement:D)

= Purified Silicon
= Redstone

Quote from nupanick

I was playing on Enderville and I made a decent amount of money by mass-producing rubber. Apparently a lot of people don't bother to set up a rubber farm early on and are always short, especially when it comes time to make a solar array. But once you have the infrastructure it's not so hard to produce as much as you need. That being said, I don't see anything wrong with decreasing the iron requirement of solars from 10 to 8.

I get that solars were OP before and needed to be brought down a bit, but the current cost feels just a little too high. I didn't have enough resources to start messing with lots of solar panels until I was already at the early mass fab stage. When you want to get just 32 EU/t out of a solar array, that's a difference of one entire stack of iron.

Yes, but they have to be a bit more expensive because of their ease of use. If you are limited by space, solars are very good option and they don't even need much wiring.

Quote from Shiding

How about this!
Sand => Macerator = Silicon
Silicon => Extractor = Purified Silicon

= Silicon Circuit Base(Iron replacement:D)

= Purified Silicon
= Redstone

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Much better I think.

I like the idea of silicon being used in circuits, and that mascerator+extractor idea sounds good. Perhaps the ner ingredients could be used for other things as well, using refined silicon in the glass wires as well as diamonds or something, and possibly for making luminators? There was also a neat idea for fiber optic cubes to help move light sources placed in odd positions or to make them look nicer that sounded promising, or another for programmable robots where silicon chips could maybe be used for the different command chips. I wonder if we could make lenses for things using it... maybe make some fun things like lasers for things (at least things the laser mod doesn't already cover). I can foresee plenty of places this could be used for fun and chaos

The diamonds shouldn't be replaced.

But the Coal + Glas in the Solars should be replaced by silicon. Redstone in the advanced circuit should also be replaced by the above silicon. The advanced machine should be also need one purified silicon at each corner (making them slightly more expensive). Upgrade-Modules should waste a lot of silicon somehow.

So production would go:

Sand -> Macerate -> SiO2-Dust -> Furnace -> Silicon -> 8 Silicon + Redstone -> Purified Silicon -> Furnace/Compressor (neither is that realistic :P) -> Monocrystalline Silicon (we need this).

This would be used in circuits (3 in the middle row, 6 cables around it), 6 of this would replace coal-dust and glass in solars (or only the coal dust, leaving 3 glass on top) etc.

This would also increase the amount of time needed to set up solars, since there are many steps necessary to produce silicon for solars. The original circuit-recipe is still needed (for first machines), but if you use a lot of silicon you might always have some around.