Huh, I didn't know that. So I can't keep researching, say, laser bonus?

The overall 300% cap applies to this productivity bonus too (and is probably the reason it was added). If you somehow manage to exceed it then it might free you up to replace a productivity module with a speed module, so there is still a benefit. o'rly? I missed where that was said. Do you have a s...

I don't see how any of these things would make me play less. There's a pretty big culture around creating blueprints and factories that optimize SPM. Let's say for example there is infinite prod research on RCU, and like you say, just play for a long time and you've got massive SPM, regardless of h...

Contrary to popular beliefs, inserters are not that great VS loaders when it comes to UPS. And this system is not loaders but something new. You also need 4 stack inserters to make a compressed belt, 3 if you also use splitter but those aren't UPS free either. So sushi belts and splitters, then? I ...

I don't know if I like the change of endless productivity on labs. It would completely break how SPM work in the game. I know that SPM is very dependant on infinite technologies, and you need to play a world over hundreds of hours if you want to reach a point where you can get the most out of it, b...

One rather large change, again Quality related, was the recyler and how it's self-direct-inserting. There's nothing in Vanillla that does this for heterogeneous items (unless you count straddling resource patches). This would be OK in the DLC if we got some bigger containers to put our inserters aro...

We're not talking about thousands of an inch variances here, we're talking about significant advantages over lower quality items. If you want a car to run at 100 mph and it can only run at 90mph because of substandard manufacturing, that is a failure. Particularly if what you paid for was a car tha...

Well they wrote themselves what the point is. I probably should have clarified, it's an improvement, without a doubt! It's all great. I am literally quivering with anticipation. Ok, not literally, but you know. Take my $$$$$ I post because factorio is awesome. If it wasn't, I really wouldn't bother...

Is it just me, or did kovarex bring some of the RNG h8 on himself with that graphic

We also wanted to let you unlock something super powerful for the end-game, which led us to the idea of the research productivity. One of the things I found interesting with SE was that some late game technology is too OP, like teleporting resources. It's possible that making those things reduced y...

What really surprised me was this statement:

In our playthroughs, the parts of the factory which were dealing with the quality were less then 5% of the whole Factory, so don't worry about being forced to solve all the mixed quality items everywhere.

5%? I mean.. is quality everywhere or not.

The new research thing seems like a pretty minor change, imho. Not clear to me that will make much of a difference in the game.

If you are moving along with reasonable efficiency, you generally like to start drilling/mining/crafting/producing ahead of time anyways before the science gets unlocked.

I'm still not sold on the implementation of quality. Primarily, in what world is a 90% failure rate acceptable when manufacturing a product? There is no failure rate in quality/factorio. No DOA. so, it's 0% failure rate, not 90%. As for variance in quality, getting it exactly right is nearly imposs...

correct me if I am wrong, but one massive implication of Quality will be the importance of the satellite base. For throughput you want to pack as much as you can into a train before shipping it off. One pattern that I think works well, is singular resource intermediates are always built at patches. ...

If I had to guess, the factorio folks will strongly encourage folks to complete the base game first before doing the dlc. So things like quality probably won't be too much of a shock.

Reviewing some stuff from all those pagess: Overall I'm really looking forward to it, but there's a couple things that need improving. The first is the quality names. What is this, an RPG? They should be given industrial names, like "basic", "refined", etc. The second one is that...

Super awesome! So much more you could have done with this but probably good that you didn't. This will be an endless source of complexity as is. However, for SE a very cool addition might be - machines which temporarily and significantly degrade in quality and only a combinator setup will summon a r...

If you use a controller (say switch version), bots are kinda awkward, so I find I use them less. It's a lot of fun, but lots of things about factorio are fun, all in different ways.

so tempting to hijack this thread and just talk about SE.

Pushing pre-existing content down the tech tree is lazy. I've seen mod authors do it, and it always strikes me as an attempt to just stretch out stuff that already exists. Like, come on. That said, not a deal breaker. Irritating, but hardly the end of the world. Though seriously, how hard is it to j...