I'm actually digging the new night time look. It needs to be compared with some light sources in the picture, of course. Obvious sources of light include lamps for that cool glow and furnaces for that warm glow, but could there be a bit more in the way of sparky bits? For example if you've ever play...

Some of the starcraft pathing tricks can be seen when you set a unit to "stop" in the middle of a group. The surrounding units don't consider it an obstacle at all, but they also have some agency to push other units around. They ignore each other as pathing obstacles and attempt to move in...

Had this problem once, it was that at some locations there were too large gaps between roboports. So logistic bots were enroute with the goods, ran out of fuel, closest roboport was the one in the direction they came from, go back there to charge, rinse and repeat. Just gonna repeat this one here. ...

"Making things more convenient isn't always making things better". This is a very critical lesson that is difficult to get right. If every goal was a clear shot from the start, there wouldn't be any puzzle to enjoy. If all progression was simple, you may as well play cookie clicker. It's ...

Night vision goggles require 120 seconds of storage to barely last through the night. At 10kJ power drain it demands 1.2MJ of energy storage, or 6% of a basic battery. I don't think it's unreasonable for NV to be a fully contained system. The modular armor's first energy source is pocket solar panel...

- Signal to tell the path-algorithm to avoid this part

Doesn't the normal rail stop do a soft version of this, something like +1000 to pathing length? That may have been patched.

I don't think anyone's saying that an overflowing rocket silo can't be solved. It's just weird because it doesn't fit with the design principle of "safe failure" seen in the rest of the game. When a machine overflows, it stalls. When an arm can't deposit, it waits. When a train can't pass,...

A lot of the ideas presented in the FFF completely change the game. They may seem simple up front, but simple ideas have a way of avalanching down the iterative pipeline. There are even more crazy and fun ideas to explore, but I think there needs to be a new platform to see how they end up playing o...

Make the fusion reactor perform a thermonucular explosion with atomic bomb radius and strength on player death. Creating a nuclear blast is pretty hard, even in the middle of a nuclear reactor. It's not even a matter of the reactors being made that way, you really have to go out of your way to crea...

In early versions, water was gradually heated by passing through a series of 1x1 boilers. The boilers were replaced with the current 2x3 boilers, which gave a fixed 165C output. Nuclear power came, and the 165C boiler water could still be mixed with the 500C nuclear water to create some medium hot w...

Don't let pollution reach nests! If you can, kill the nest. Extra land space is always good. If not, tone the factory down a bit. Bullet weapons are simply awful and should not be depended upon. The cost of pollution in producing ammo is higher than the biter penalty if that pollution ever reaches a...

Don't forget to check out the FFFs. The devs have talked about many of the obstacles they have overcome in game development. You may find some things on keeping random number generation not so random. I don't know enough about factorio under the hood to say how they did it, but I imagine the answer ...

The PLD definitely gets incredibly powerful towards the end game. I'd much rather see that kind of power growth happen with combat robots. With combat drones it's much easier to tweak balance in terms of cost:value, and drones fit in better with the strong "automation" themes of the game. ...

I think you'll have more success in the Gameplay Help forum. All the existing tools in the game make detecting daylight possible, if not necessarily easy.

Kudos to the devs for trying to fix some oddball cases, but sometimes the problem is between the chair and keyboard.
That junction breaks the golden rule of signaling; every rail crossing needs a signal. The north/south crossing doesn't have signals when it should.

But nuclear IS viable for the late game and beyond. You're probably not using it properly. One of the most important traits of nuclear reactors (which probably isn't explained very well) is that adjacent reactors boost each other. So a 2x2 block of reactors will produce 480MW of power, while a solo ...

Should the rules for filling chests be different from the rules for emptying them? When it comes to filling chests, there is an expectation that items get moved around in some kind of priority. When it comes to emptying chests, bots should probably grab from the most convenient spot. But different r...

Machine modules only boost one machine. Beacon modules boost 8-12 machines. It's a good way of getting more mileage out of the very expensive T3 modules.

There's no need to use beacons for T1 speed modules. A pile of machines will work fine.

Adding randomization is a divisive decision. Some people will like it, some won't. I think (but I might be wrong) that the majority of the player base prefers predictability over unpredictability. If I'm right, adding some way to make the solar panels inadequate would be a bad move from a design st...

map coordinates are defined in milimeters and microtiles and unit health pools are 330000/330000. Well. A computer's internal value and a game's display output are by no means required to be the same value. 330000 internal can just as easily be 330 with a hidden decimal on the output. A float's goi...