Canal Excavator Mod

The Canal Excavator Mod is a mod for the game Factorio. This mod introduces a way for players to dig canals. Contrary to previous water mods, the canal excavator mod can only create water nearby other bodies of water. Bringing water to a desert will be a large undertaking.

Key Features

1. The Canal Excavator The centerpiece of this mod is the Canal Excavator: A large 7x3 structure that serves as tool for digging canals. This machine can be placed on special tiles and once powered will begin excavating the designated area.

2. Excavatable Tiles To facilitate the creation of canals, the mod introduces special excavatable tiles. These tiles be placed like any other tiles, but unlike other tiles, they can be mined for stone.

3. Water Transition After an excavatable tile has been depleted by the Canal Excavator, the tile transitions into a dug state. If the tile is connected to a water tile, the dug tile changes in the same water tile as well. It then checks if other neighbouring tiles are dug which in turn will transitioned as well.

Space Age

The mod is fully compatible with space age. When placed on other planets a different kind of resource will be spawned corresponding to that planet. Excavating on Fulgora, for instance, will mine scrap and places the Heavy Oil tiles once fully dug. Modded planets do have to support my mod before the tiles can placed on those planets. See the Modding Interface chapter for more information on how to support your planet or how to modify the configuration for the vanilla planets.

Mod Compatibility

Space Exploration This mod was created with Space Exploration in mind. Other water mods often allow you to create water on planets where no source exists. This mod limits you to only create water nearby existing bodies of water.

Cargo Ships The size of the Excavator was decided such that it stretches the complete width of a canal that fits the cargo ships nicely.

Other mods This mod should be compatible with most other mods since it only adds new objects and doesn't modify any existing ones. Though this mod does add two tile prototypes and currently Factorio has a hard limit of 255. If you run multiple mods that add a lot of types, you might encounter this limit. For this reason there is a world setting called "Don't introduce new tiles". By default this is off but when enabled it reuses the "Yellow Refined Concrete" and "Brown Refined Concrete" that are already in the base game. If the mods you are using don't touch these two, you can enable this setting without any problems although it won't look as pretty.

Known Issues

• Items don't get picked up when an excavator gets build on top of it. I can't add the "item-layer" collision mask to the excavator's mask, since water tiles have that layer as well which would prevent the excavator from being placable on water and it will be destroyed when a water tile gets created under it.
• When the Excavatable Surface is removed by another mod, it leaves the ore/stone behind. A workaround is to place the tiles again and remove them by hand or by using bots. After 2.0 releases I want to look into fixing this.

Q&A

Q: A tile won't transition into water even though it is touching another water tile
A: Open console with the ` button and type "/canex-transition-dug" without the quotes and press enter. Did it transition? If not, please contact me at the Github page bellow.

Q: I get the message "Cannot excavate landfill"
A: By design you cannot excavate tiles such as Landfill, Foundation, Ice Platform and such. You should be able to mine those by hand. If you encounter this message while you cannot mine the tile, please let me know. See the Issue section bellow on how to contact me.

Q: I get the message "Unable to dig on this planet"
A: This means the planet you are on isn't configured to work with my mod. If this happens on one of the vanilla planet (Nauvis, Vulcanus, Fulgora, Gleba or Aquilo), please let me know. If this happens on a modded planet, you should request that mod maker to support my mod. Link them to the Modding Interface section bellow. That should contain all the information they need.

Encountering an issue or have a suggestion?

If you do encounter any issue, due to mod compatibility or otherwise, please open an issue on the Github page or if you don't have Github account or if you have a suggestion for new features and such, please open a thread on the mod's discussion page. Want to help translating, please open a pull request with the added locale files.

Modding Interface

This mod has an interface modders can use to modify the configuration of existing planets or add support for their new planets.

Supporting a new planet

Adding support for a new planet:

1. Anywhere in your mod folder create a new file that returns a table<string, CanexPlanetConfig> table where the keys are the PlanetPrototype.name of your planet(s). The file will be loaded both during the data-final-fixes stage as well as at the start of my control script in the runtime stage.
2. In your settings-update.lua or settings-final-fixes.lua file call the following function: canex_settings_register_config_file("your_mod_name", "path.to.the.config.file")

And that's it. No need to add a mod dependency or anything.

I use this interface to register the vanilla planets as well. You can look at the implementation of this to get an example if it isn't entirely clear yet.

Modifying config of existing planets

If you want to modify the config of an existing planet. For instance, you want to change the mining result on Nauvis from stone to iron ore, you can do the same as above, but instead return table<string, CanexPlanetOverwriteConfig> but make sure your mod gets loaded after mine (or if you want to modify a third party planet, load after that mod) but setting an (optional) mod dependency on it.

Do you add a planet and modify another planet, you can of course return a mix of the two config types: table<string, CanexPlanetConfig|CanexPlanetOverwriteConfig>.