Are there any plans to remove cyclic dependencies from building ingredients?

Question

By cyclic dependencies I mean the fact that many buildings require an item to build it which also requires that building to craft it. Which means that before you can automate the crafting of that item you're forced to manually craft a bunch of them at a craft bench. Currently practically every production building in the game has this problem, and while it's fine for early buildings (You obviously need to use something to build them) I feel like it really shouldn't be the case for later buildings.

As an example, I've just got to the point where I need to start making Heavy Modular Frames. Those have 4 ingredients, so to craft them I need to build a Manufacturer, but to make one of those I need to use Computers, and to make those I need to make Plastic, which requires me to make Oil Pumps and Oil Refineries, which both require Heavy Modular Frames to make.

So now I'm in a situation where to automate the production of any of these things I need to sit here holding the left mouse button at a crafting bench for ages to craft a bunch of these things, before I can actually start making the buildings I need to automate them. Honestly it kinda puts me off continuing up the tech tree and playing the game at all, I'd say it's by far the biggest issue I have with the game currently.

Personally I would suggest shifting the ingredients necessary for every production building, from at least the Assembler onwards, one 'tech tier' upwards to avoid this problem, and make it possible to actually automate everything without being forced to craft manually. You could increase the amount of each ingredient required to compensate a bit, but honestly once you have things automated the cost of making buildings feels pretty negligible anyway, so I don't know if it's even necessary.

Unlike Factorio, the buildings aren't created in crafting buildings themselves, so making this change wouldn't mess up peoples' existing factories, and I can't really see any argument for it being this way other than to slow down progression and make it more frustrating. (Which I assume is not desirable)

Answer 1

"By cyclic dependencies I mean the fact that many buildings require an item to build it which also requires that building to craft it. Which means that before you can automate the crafting of that item you're forced to manually craft a bunch of them at a craft bench."

No this will never be removed from the game. This is a design point of the game to make you work manually for to make an item and to both encourage the player to automate things and to make us appreciate and be happy/excited about automation once something is automated and we don't have to make it manually anymore. 

Comments

And I think that's a problem. I much prefer factorio's design principle, which makes things like it's lazy bastard achievement possible. Once you get basic automation up and running, you should be able to ditch the craft bench and from there on all of your crafting should be able to be done automated.

---

You are basically asking for the core concept of the game to be removed, won't happen , if you want that experience then use one of the mods available.

---

I really appreciate that I have to build each item a few times before I can automate it. It went a long way to solidifying the basic recipes for me before I moved on to automation and alts. Also, it makes absolutely no sense that I could build a machine capable of producing large complex parts like computers without having computers running it...

P.S. This isn't 3D factorio and it should be different.

---

Not a 3D factorio, and I wouldn't want it to be a carbon-copy of factorio translated to 3D, but that doesn't mean that there aren't things to be learned both ways. The game has a tremendous amount of incentive to automate without requiring every new tier of stuff to first be manually crafted. Technically accurate in many cases? Yes. Fun & enjoyable...? That's the question. I'd say no, but I understand that people are going to disagree with me.

---

Fair enough Darinth. I can respect that.