There may be some merit in launching your science labs to space and making a roaming platform. That way it can fly around picking up packs from all the other planets as needed.

Yeah, that's the one. Who knows if it'll actually work out, but it does take a very novel approach to the fusion problem. Building the sun is very hard, building a very tiny nuclear bomb is easy by comparison. So just do that. One of the neat parts is you can justify using a far different range of i...

The tokamak is certainly a very recognizable and "sci fi" fusion design, but there was another one in the works that was pretty cool in a brutish way. It worked by taking small fuel pellets, dropping them, and shooting them mid air with a cannon. Shockwave magic happens, it explodes, and t...

That is the fun part of doing it proportionally. Nah, not a fan of doing proportional flow. Fractions and division are hard calculations and need to be done every time. Pipes don't need to get better with size, if anything they should be getting worse. The simplest system (probably) is to throttle ...

Wait, all pipes are just one gigantic magic storage tank? A single string of spaghetti solves everything, everywhere? I get that the devs place high priority on CPU cycles, but that's going too far! There may be a good way to simulate pipe flow limits. Take a single long line of pipe. A certain amou...

I don't understand, why not make the updates per game tick dynamic? Ever played an unrealengine game with physics? The game skips a frame, and everything starts flying? Dynamic FPS is like that. It's also useless in this scenario, because everyone has to run the same calculations to avoid desync. D...

Using lightning itself as a recipe ingredient? Sure, sounds pretty cool. You can't control when it happens, so the factory needs to be actively ready to use as much as it can get. How might a player scale it up? Pollution might affect planet weather by causing more lightning blasts (the lightning co...

[...] it consumes additional 300kW/s. Speed of train regardless. Consumption 300kW is per wagon, which means a train :1 loco plus 3 fridge wagons standing on red lights is consuming 900kW per second. I don't want to sound too pedantic (a little pedantic is OK though), but the watt is already a &quo...

I'm surprised there's no mention of trying to run two pipes next to each other. Several mods have pipe variants simply for the purpose of splitting pipes apart, it's very handy for managing the huge spaghetti of dozens of fluids. Factorio may not need such a thing, thanks to the R key. Select a pipe...

Floats can represent all integers, no problem. Floats arithmetic is about as fast (if not equally so) as integer arithmetic, since there are specific float CPU instructions. What the programmer needs to remember, is to round their floats when are done calculating. Working with two decimals in float...

I stand corrected; what an odd choice. Considering the values of fluid, I thought it was to avoid floats entirely. I do not see any need for the fluids to be floating point numbers. Edit: Unless, of course, that they are really integers below, and then divided by 10 or 100 for show, but I doubt it....

The quality loop for normal items is to build them, shred them up, and try again. Compost is pretty much the same loop, isn't it? You grow thing, it was bad, let it rot, then fertilize the next crop to try something better. The compost system gives a reason to deliberately rot things as part of a la...

Well, I have no clue how the save files or particular algorithms work. If a 500mb megabase ends up generating a daily delta like 20-50mb, then the delta solution might do the trick. Such a huge level of efficiency is hard to ignore. If the deltas are looking more like a quarter of the master size or...

It should be relatively trivial to test how well the various delta algorithms work; grab a big multiplayer save, load it in single-player and wait to generate a set of autosaves, then use those saves to test how small a delta file can be created by rsync/xdelta/etc., and that you can reconstruct a ...

For huge saves, it would be nifty if the delta from the last save could be sent instead of having to download the entire save, given that we know the last time any given player was last connected; perhaps a utility that builds and maintains a set of delta files between saves allowing any player to ...

I wonder how devs will hit that "easy to learn, hard to master" gameplay for spoilage. If the time limits are simple and accessible, then they'll become trivial at the high tier. If the limits are challenging, they'll become too oppressive and crush newbies. The skill tiers are spread so f...

Non interactive preservation like coolers wouldn't be that exciting. Preserved storage is storage, and decaying items aren't meant to sit in storage. But what about active preserving? Consider a loaded concrete truck. It very clearly is a time limited product, but the truck has a spinning drum to ke...

Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Players have a chance and incentive to build in new ways and experiment. You build huge factories on all the other planets, Gleba is where you can try something different. Hmm, that's the thing. Any player can build small, I mean, every factorio player in the wo...

Spoilage without refrigeration? Curious. Haven't the devs heard of salt, or one of the countless chemical preservatives/anti oxidants/inert gases/raw radiation that serve to stifle bacteria and organic decay? That would mean spoilage is just a problem with a straight forward solution, having item t...

Spoilage without refrigeration? Curious. Haven't the devs heard of salt, or one of the countless chemical preservatives/anti oxidants/inert gases/raw radiation that serve to stifle bacteria and organic decay? The lettuce analogy is a strange one. The organic food we are familiar with tends to decay ...