I was looking for star trek themed mods and found this discussion chain.
I have practice with design documents, and wanted to write this as an exercise for myself.

I have not used the mod yet, but in reading your suggestions above, I noticed a pattern.
You have a narrow defined scope to just making these chips.

This is not bad, and generally a rigid scope is all you can do to prevent scope creep. But I think you need to raise the scope a little.
I want to heavily caveat this in that I do not know the programming level of you or your cohort. So please keep your scope tight enough to have realistic goals.

I mean, you admit you want to add a whole production chain to produce a single item, which currently, only removes the need for food production. A replicator could in theory replicate anything, so I suggest adding a bunch of other terminals that are specialized for different things.

The balancing to them would be some mix of the following:
1. If you make the central computer need a higher resource version of the chip, and EACH terminal need the regular chip, this whole chain has continuing value over time. It would also have value if you implement the chips as high value trade items that normal traders buy, but never stock.
2. negative trade modifier to replicated items (like dropped weapons or tainted apparel) so you don't just spit out a million items to clean out traders with.
3. Static quality for replicated goods. Quality the same as the rimworld quality tiers, with different replicator tiers only able to produce goods at a given quality.
4. Require research for each terminal type
5. Inefficient replication feedstock costs improved by research
6. Building tiers for replicators (for example, crude, basic, glittertech, and archotech versions of each terminal, each more expensive to setup, but cheaper replication costs).
Such terminals could be:
1. Food (which you already have)
2. Meds/Joy Goods
3. Raw Materials
4. Intermediate goods
5. Tools
6. Finished commodity goods with no quality
7. Finished goods that carry quality, with higher tiers of quality tied to increasing expenses
8. Buildings

Instead of the above, in theory the game can pull the lists of goods from the various stockpile item lists and build the recipe bills based on the silver values of the items. Meaning each fold down menu is created as a terminal. You could make it a single code that is dynamic, so it can take modded items too.

As for the big long production chain, there is already a mod that is similar, but for a lower level of tech, UN-Colony. You could talk to that guy about making what would essentially be the glitter tech level of his mod. I don't know if the game can handle this many buildings in it though, so you might want to make small inefficient 1x1 buildings as a basic chain and bigger ones only for more efficient mass production.

I do suggest not going TOO deep into the specifics of the intermediate goods, look at how UN-Colony has uses for intermediate goods for a variety of purposes.

As for feedstocks, you could make a general one tied to item mass, probably tempered by research tech for efficiency. Any replicator pulls from this feedstock, and a cost tied to building tier efficiency/research tier efficiency/quality/etc. You could also add pure energy conversion as a research option, though I do not know what cost to set for energy. It would also probably need nuclear power to run something so energy intensive. The output bills would not be based on mass, but on the value of the item, and tempered by research modifiers and/or the replciator tier scheme.

Originally posted by Howdy Pardner:

I mean, you admit you want to add a whole production chain to produce a single item, which currently, only removes the need for food production. A replicator could in theory replicate anything, so I suggest adding a bunch of other terminals that are specialized for different things.

Sorry, but your suggestion is outside the scope of the Replimat mod.

Replimat Terminals essentially work like the vanilla Nutrient Paste Dispensers, and actually shares similar JobDrivers for fetching meals and/or fulfilling food needs.

On the other hand, an industrial goods replicator system would require completely different code/JobDrivers for scheduling manufacturing of goods, as well as its own raw material storage system (I'm purposefully avoiding pure energy conversion). This isn't something Dubs and I are interested in, and there are other non-food replicator mods out there that will meet your needs already.

To be honest, I'm not really that keen on implementing the semiconductor manufacturing production chain for the Isolinear Modules - I mainly described it here in an attempt to justify why Isolinear Modules in general shouldn't be craftable.

Update 1.0.11 now adds the ability to salvage one Iso Module (plus several components) from AI Persona Cores.

Originally posted by sumghai:

• Salvaging Iso Modules from AI persona cores - disassembling an AI persona core could yield up to 1 Iso Module (2~3 if the Iso Module's market value was nerfed), along with dozens of standard and advanced components

I think this is as far as I will go with regards to improving the availability of Iso Modules, so I'm closing this discussion.