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 ...

Kinda neutral on the target priority thing. Strong defenses are already strong, so making them even better isn't really breaking new ground. It could have much more potential in mods, but I dunno how well explicit priority is going to work when mods have hundreds of "prefix, suffix" permut...

An ooey gooey planet! Gross! I wonder how much of the planet is actually solid ground. On our planet, many underground regions are filled with thin tendrils of mycelium that stretch for miles. Consider an alien world where these tendrils grow so thick, so massive, that they are no longer in the grou...

I dunno. Changing the operating behavior of a third of the factory just to make a graph look pretty seems kinda... overkill? A minor smoothing tool for small duration graphs would get the job done, practically for free.

In terms of "data points", there's no point in having more than one data point per tick. Nothing happens between ticks. There is also very little value in storing a completely new stream of data, when it is simply the original data but with a short term average. It really feels like someth...

Graph? You mean the production graph feedback? A few things on that: 1) The production graph does not feed into the sim, like, at all. It doesn't change production, biters can't see it, circuits can't see it, basically it's an all output system reporting data from the sim. If you're performing any s...

I would add a separate antenna for wireless transmission. Would it add any new features that a wireless radar can't already do? Or rather, is a wireless antenna needed because the radar gets in the way of some vital function? I could see there maybe being a need for a local vs. global network. For ...