Repeating a question, because I am genuinely curious.
Speaking of which. I'm kinda disappointed that there are only two means to put something together. Duct tape, and welder+goggles. In reality, there is at least one other one - power drill and bolts, especially true for vehicle construction. You already need a wrench to put stuff together. How hard would it be to add a power drill + bolts attachment method?
Having looked at the raws jsons, it seems that in regards to vehicle construction at least, it's hardcoded.
This is fairly high on our TODO list, specifically adding components/tools (a la construction recipes) to vehicle part definitions, so you can say e.g. that attaching a "headlight" (flashlight) or rear-view mirror with duct tape works, but you need a welder to attach metal frames, doors, etc.
On save files - we recently moved to a modularized map system, so it saves/loads in many small chunks rather then one huge file, granting a huge speed up in saving/loading times (and removing the old map size limits)
Does that mean we're going to have several dozen of thousands of small files again like in the original Cataclysm early versions if we explore a lot of the world ?
Yes and no. There will be thousands to millions of files generated depending on how much you explore. However the game does not load them all at once like original cataclysm did, and it breaks them up into subdirectories so the number of files per directory doesn't get out of hand (which is what was causing problems on windows in original cataclysm from what I understand). It loads the files on demand as you approach the area, and if it becomes an issue I can have the game write them back to disk and free the memory as you move away. If that does become a problem, a save/quit/start/load cycle will write your map data to disk, and post here, IRC, github, or the DDA forums to let me know it's becoming a problem and I'll take a look at implementing that. I don't want to waste time on it if it's not a problem.
Hitting an odd issue while trying to mod. I'm trying to modify the recipe for the rebar_rifle in a mod file, but it says that it's hitting an id clash. This confuses me, mainly because the recipe has no id, it only has a result, and there's other items with multiple crafting recipes, such as tentacle stockings. So, what do?
You got the correct answer already, (thanks Greiger), but the "result" of a recipe is an item id. Maybe we should have called it recipe_id.