Increase spoilage timer

[J-H]

The +50% on biochambers is nice, but they have to be fed nutrients, which are produced 50% spoiled, in order to function. Forcing biochambers for viability just increases the need to rely on robots instead of traditional production/belts, given how far apart the biomes are - at least on my map. Just moving things close to somewhere central with belts is resulting in product arriving over half spoiled already.

This is pretty unforgiving and really not very fun.

[mmmPI]

there is an ingame setting during map generation to increase the spoilage time

[coppercoil]

there is an ingame setting during map generation to increase the spoilage time

"Balancing" is about the changes that may work better for all players with the default setting. Extreme players can reduce this setting for themselves.

[mmmPI]

there is an ingame setting during map generation to increase the spoilage time

"Balancing" is about the changes that may work better for all players with the default setting. Extreme players can reduce this setting for themselves.

This is a succession of generic argument or what ? here is previous copy paste of the original post : viewtopic.php?p=633894#p633894

For the particular topic where this was copy pasted, "spoilage time" there exist possibility to make the default easier or harder. It means if you think it's hard you can try the settings, since there was no mention of it in the original post and this settings seem to adress this question in particular it appeared to me noteworthy to mention it because i think it would work better for "all player" if they started to use the settings made for them but they can't if they are unaware of their existence.

[coppercoil]

While you are correct in saying that people may be unaware of the setting, posting a topic in "Balancing" doesn't mean "too hard for me", it means "may be too hard for most players." This implies correcting the default setting, not just the ability to set individual settings.

[mmmPI]

While you are correct in saying that people may be unaware of the setting, posting a topic in "Balancing" doesn't mean "too hard for me", it means "may be too hard for most players." This implies correcting the default setting, not just the ability to set individual settings.

It would be a shame that only the people who think it's too hard express their voice, as the balance of the game would be shifted toward only a single direction, especially if it is caused by the lack of knowledge about the options already available to mitigate the thing they may find hard.

[Nemoricus]

Generically increasing spoil time doesn’t make sense, since there are several situations where you need something to spoil before you can use it. Particularly bacteria.

It would be more useful to talk about which timers are too short, if any, and see if they warrant adjustments.

[coppercoil]

Of course, we expect some discussion here.
Or, this topic may be just N+1 voice saying "Gleba is too hard". There already are many discussions about that. I'd just like to ask more one question: are most players as skilled as those who say "Actually Gleba is good"?

[ALDK]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/spoilage-solution
My vision of problem of spoil.
Canning and freezing.

[valneq]

[…] nutrients, which are produced 50% spoiled, in order to function. […]

This is only true if you limit yourself to making nutrients from spoilage.
Once you have bioflux, you can make nutrients at the same freshness as the bioflux …

[J-H]

That takes a lot more in terms of inputs.

[mouzy]

That takes a lot more in terms of inputs.

It's a bit more complicated, but in terms of resources it's much more efficient - you get 12 nutrients per bioflux using that recipe (accounting for the +50% prod of biochambers), and it's fresh.

It takes 120 spoilage to make that much and it will be halfway spoiled. That takes waaaay more fruit to make than 1 bioflux does.

[Krizs]

What me and my friend at 300+ hours into Space Age, currently working on our megabase 250+ hours in, producing ~48K regular sciences and working on the specific planetary ones find most annoying about the spoilage timer isn't for the production chains, but the fact that the science packs spoil as well.

The issues we found with rotting Gleba packs.
1) It's not shown in-game that spoilage timer affects the amount of science in the pack, the green bar isn't decreasing in the UI to represent that the pack is "getting used up" by spoiling.

2) If we aren't using Gleba packs they start to go bad and it takes 10-30 minutes of using Gleba packs again to clear out the bad batch.
We are doing Nauvis - Gleba round trips going 450-490km/s 132K pack a trip, however at this rate sending up somewhat rotten packs also gets tedious due to the shuttle's contents as well as the silo's contents rotting requiring more and more rockets as it's waiting for the currently flying rockets to land causing even more spoilage. This means the shuttle takes even longer to load causing even more loss of the packs' contents.

3) This related to 2) but we have the rocket silos pre-loaded with the packs ready to go (automatic requests turned off, packs are loaded via inserters), however when a ship arrives requesting 132K packs it takes roughly 60 seconds for the silos to START sending the packs as the rockets on the way tick up roughly 1-2 / second even with our 132 silos loaded up. Why don't they start all at the same time if they are loaded and ready to go by the time the ship arrives? (This feels more like a bug than a design / balancing issue.)

[valneq]

1) It's not shown in-game that spoilage timer affects the amount of science in the pack, the green bar isn't decreasing in the UI to represent that the pack is "getting used up" by spoiling.

While there is actually a tipps&tricks entry about that … let me link one of my suggestions here
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=121500

[Theragus]

3) This related to 2) but we have the rocket silos pre-loaded with the packs ready to go (automatic requests turned off, packs are loaded via inserters), however when a ship arrives requesting 132K packs it takes roughly 60 seconds for the silos to START sending the packs as the rockets on the way tick up roughly 1-2 / second even with our 132 silos loaded up. Why don't they start all at the same time if they are loaded and ready to go by the time the ship arrives? (This feels more like a bug than a design / balancing issue.)

As a curious question, how much cargo bays do you have on the platform? As far as I know throughput from ground to space is also affected by the amounts of cargo bays you have on your platform.

[Theragus]

After 300 hours in my SA save, and playing around with the spoilage rate in the map gen settings a bit, I personally would say that increasing (or slightly decreasing) the spoilage timer doesn't change the game at all in the long run.

The spoilage mechanic forces you to make a production line that uses "Just-in-time" delivery of resources and prevents stock-piling and "hand-feeding", or at least make it so that none of your outputs or inputs can be clogged by spoilage.
the timer on this spoilage is, therefore, at least if you don't massive decrease it, completely irrelevant since you need to make a factory that handles this earlier or later anyway.
For me, the spoilage rate setting is basically just a slider for "How long do you want to keep hand-feeding?".

An increased spoilage timer would therefore contradict the general idea behind spoilage, which is reducing the time it takes to get from one resource to the next as much as possible.
Increasing this value would just lead players longer down the roads to find solutions that are not is not intended, like stockpiling or hand feeding.