[1.1+] [WIP] Sosciencity

[tiriscef]

Co-Authors: Johanna Spieker, _traum

Discord: https://discord.gg/yg7yytYQRq

Description

You are an architect. The architect of a new civilization.

You crashlanded on this planet, lost most of your resources, found out it's inhabited by vicious aliens and - yeah - nearly died. But that is merely a small setback on the mission to found your own city.

Society

The society you're living in originated from a caste system and is still divided into several groups with vastly differing worldviews.

• The Clockwork Caste: Undemanding, simple and living in boxes. The Clockwork Caste consists mostly of mechanics that keep factories and thus civilisations up and running.
• The Orchid Caste: Masters of the flora. The Caste of the farmers, gardeners, botanists. They are also really good cooks.
• The Gunfire Caste: The Caste of the military. They do not talk much, but they will make your defenses even deadlier.
• The Ember Caste: Historically the Ember Caste was a small group of people that stayed at the campfire and kept the fires alife. In modern times they became the caste of all the people without a caste-forming profession (or due to growing automation: without any profession at all). They are the core of culture, art and social engagement. Everyone likes to have them around.
• The Foundry Caste: If you combine the Clockwork and the Gleam Caste, you essentially get the Foundry Caste. They take scientific findings, some nights and lots of caffeine - and create a machine that solves exactly your problem.
• The Gleam Caste: Curious and in pursuit of a better understanding of the world - like a spark in the dark. The Gleam People dedicate their lives to expanding their knowledge and sciences. Intellectuals, professors and livelong students that will greatly improve your research.
• The Aurora People: A small group of really famous people. Actors, Artists, Autors, Mod Makers... - people that inspire other people. While they are technically members of the Ember Caste, they are often seen as their own group.
• The Plasma Caste: Medical professionals

Science

While the base game requires you to produce the equipment and fundings to research, Sosciencity will add another ingredient: Ideas.

Each tier of science packs requires you to attract another caste into your city.

• Automation Science - Clockwork Caste
• Logistic Science - Orchid Caste
• Military Science - Gunfire Caste
• Chemical Science - Ember Caste
• Production Science - Foundry Caste
• Utility Science - Gleam Caste
• Space Science - Aurora People (not implemented yet)

City

As the architect of the city you need to fulfill several responsibilities in order to keep the citizens satisfied.

• Food
• Clean Water
• Power
• Healthcare
• Safety from Biters
• Garbage Collection

Implementation Plan

I like to develop in a continuous process and get feedback as I go. So far it is possible to complete a run with this mod, but you will notice that it's not entirely fleshed out at around Production to Utility Science.
I would really appreciate feedback, because a lot of stuff in this mod is hard to balance without playtesting.

While I will try to avoid it, I cannot guarantee the backwards compatibility of each release - especially because I haven't planned every feature out yet. It might happen that you need to refactor your factory or create a new map after a major release.

Compatibility

Sosciencity is designed to work together with bigger overhaul mods. The mod creates it's own conceptual space and interacts little with the typical production chains.
So far I made my mod at least load with a number of other modpacks. I haven't actually come around to playtest any combinations or tweak my recipes to better work with the concepts these mods introduce.

Compatibility Status

• Bob's mods: Loads together with Sosciencity.
• Angel's mods: Loads together with Sosciencity.
• Pyanodon's mods: Loads together with Sosciencity. There is a problem with Ethanol, which is way more expensive in pyanodons. I suggest a pretty high Startup Clockwork Points setting.
• Space Exploration: Loads together with Sosciencity, but there seem to be technology deadlocks. I haven't come around to look into the compatibility options that mod provides. So at the moment you can place e.g. Groundwater Pumps in space which makes no sense.
• Krastorio: Loads together with Sosciencity.
• Omnimatter: Loads together with Sosciencity.
• Industrial Revolution: Loads together with Sosciencity. You might need to start a map at a technology stage where you already have energy, iron and copper or else I suppose the start will be very painful.
• Brevven's mods / Very BZ: Loads together with Sosciencity.

Bugs

Please have a look at the Known Problems list before reporting.
The population part of Sosciencity relies heavily on control scripting, which is prone to have bugs that end with desyncs and crashes. Please report any of those to me, either in the mod portal, discord, via email, PN, or in this thread.
If the game gives you an error message, then send that to me. If not or if you think the circumstance of the crash could be hard to replicate, then please send me your savefile.

Known Problems

• If you don't know how to get Mold: Compost Blue Grapes or Weird Berries in the Composting Silo. The mold then appears inside the silo (if there is an empty slot).
• If you don't know how to get Necrofall: There will be flowers around the Composting Silo after it composts for a while.
• Entities like houses or the upbringing station show up on the "Production" side of the power statistics, despite not actually producing power. I simulate their energy usage with hidden EEI entities and Factorio's engine does that. I made a feature request for that.
• You can break Sosciencity's entities by teleporting them (e.g. with Picker Dollies). For example the neighborhood connections or the speed/productivity manipulation of them will bug out. Because there is no teleporting of entities in the base game, I didn't implement any teleport detection to save on everyones UPS.
• If you have another mod installed which adds true speed/productivity modules (meaning modules that provide a bonus without a consumption or pollution malus), you can place them in beacons and have them affect the manufactory type entities and farms that Sosciencity adds. That's not intended, but there's nothing I can do about it. Internal my mod is placing invisible beacons under those entities as a hacky way to control these stats during control stage, so disallowing these effects isn't an option.
• You can insert Saplings into Mining Drills (and then they'll do nothing).
• The mod doesn't work with multiple player forces. I don't know what will happen, I never played PvP. But not caring about Forces saved a myself lot of headaches.

Credits

Thanks to all the nice, helpful people in the Factorio discord's mod making channel.
Huge thanks to justarandomgeek, their Factorio Debugger saved me an ocean of headaches.

[tiriscef]

The Automated Greenhouse that will be used to grow food.

It's not animated yet, because I don't feel proficient enough in blender. ^^"

[slippycheeze]

It's not animated yet, because I don't feel proficient enough in blender. ^^"

I die of jealous at your graphical abilities, if this is "not proficient enough" for you. Your standards must be pretty much hitting the top of possible.
Seriously, though, this sounds like an interesting effort, and good luck!

[PTTG]

I like your ideas, and your CGI stuff looks amazing too!

Is it at all possible to have citizens act like bots to some degree? Ferrying resources and building buildings? Or perhaps to limit the number of functional assemblers based on the number of people you have to work in them? This would make the game involve a close balance between the population and the factory.

[tiriscef]

I die of jealous at your graphical abilities, if this is "not proficient enough" for you. Your standards must be pretty much hitting the top of possible.

Graphical abilities and knowing how blender works are two separate skills. My graphics card is still a bit mad at me because I accidentally ended up with over 10 million triangles when I made those plants in the right greenhouse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I like your ideas, and your CGI stuff looks amazing too!

Is it at all possible to have citizens act like bots to some degree? Ferrying resources and building buildings? Or perhaps to limit the number of functional assemblers based on the number of people you have to work in them? This would make the game involve a close balance between the population and the factory.

I could place invisible roboports with x robots (where x is the number of inhabitants) to the housings to make a caste also behave like construction/logistic robots. Hm. But I cannot control to which roboport/house they return. And that makes removing them when the people move out or when a house gets destroyed very messy. And it's weird when there are people in the normal roboports. ._.
I also thought about limiting the number of working machines by the number of clockwork people, but I don't know a good way to stop them from working without killing performance.
But I could let them start at -80% speed and add +(number of clockwork people ÷ number of machines)% speed.

[PTTG]

Possible, possible. The important thing is it's the number of people in proportion to the number of machines.

[tiriscef]

Hey,
the last weeks weren't very productive, as I was busy trying out IR, being depressed and having stuff to do in the real world.

But I fleshed out the system I want to implement for feeding your population.
My design goal is to provide the player with a variety of different options, so that they could optimize their factory/city for different things. So I needed a system that distinguishes the food items.

So every item has physiological values:

• Nutrients: Fat, Carbohydrates and Proteins. The sum of these is the calorific value of the food that specifies how long your people can live of it.
• Intrinsic Healthiness: How healthy this food itself is. Some are poisonous or can cause cancer and some contain a lot of vitamins, minerals and essential amino acids/fatty acids.

..and psychological values:

• Taste category: e.g. sweet, sour, salty, spicy, neutral, bitter, umami
• Taste quality: How good this food tastes^^
• Luxority: How expensive the people think this food is. Just like in real life some people might value potatoes less than avocados.

Now you can choose an array of different foods that you want to provide*. The people will consume some of each food. The game will then generate some values out of the diet:

• Dietary Healthiness: An optimal diet consists of 20% proteins, 30% fat and 50% carbohydrates. The dietary healthiness is determined by how far the diet is off from the optimal value and by the sum of each food's intrinsic healthiness. A
  Dietary Mental Healthiness: Determined by some pitfalls, like only providing one type of food, only neutral tasting food or only food whose taste the caste dislikes.
  Satisfaction: How happy the people are with the food provided. Depends on taste quality, luxority and if the taste matches what the caste likes.

The satisfaction/happiness is a central value of the mod. It makes the people stay in your city, generate ideas and affects their secondary bonuses (like the machine speedup from the clockwork caste).
This should allow you to either optimize for healthiness (to reduce the mortality rate and the number of hospitals you need), for happiness, for a minimum amount of different food factories needed or for space efficiency (if you play with a lot of biters).
*: provide means that the food is either in their house or in a market-building near the house.

I'm quite unsure about how the farming will look like. From other factorio and minecraft mods I've seen 4 approaches so far:

• You need saplings/seeds that you get from the environment.
• You need saplings/seeds that you need to produce out of crops.
• You need to supply various educts like soil, humus, water, fertilizer and so on.
• You need nothing but time.

I don't really like the first option, because searching for the right seeds often ends up being an annoying one-time task. And it is inherently random. Sometimes you don't really need to search because you're lucky. Sometimes you get frustrated after searching for way too long while biter chase you. On the other hand it might result in different experiences from map to map, something like replay value.

The second option is my least favorite. It often felt like annoying pseudo-realism or a very artificial kind of difficulty.

I like the third option. Pyanodon does it for example. The problem is just that I don't plan on creating an overhaul mod, but rather a... pasta mod. A mod that you can eat to almost every sauce, cheese, vegetable, etc. and it will always taste like it totally belongs to the dish. So I don't want to integrate into production chains that may or may not exist and that could result in weird balancing problems.

The fourth option would be okay if I lay more of a focus on processed food. Otherwise I would feel like it's too boring. Also I planed to make a joke here about plants whose DNA the engineer knows from memory and then link to Bonaparte - Technologiya. But I don't know how I should word it.

The more I write about it the more I think the solution lies in a combination of all of those approaches. After all what I want is options and different tiers of food. And to make this interesting different approaches can be useful.

Some other ideas about farming I had:
- Grow fruit trees: Orangery-like buildings which grow fruit trees. They start out rather inefficient, but gain productivity over time. (I will have every assembly machine registered either way. So I might as well add some hidden speed/productivity modules over time.)
- Lighting: Reduce the speed of the farm-buildings at night when no lamps are around. No light, no photosynthesis.

[BHakluyt]

This is awesome stuff! I've been building this mod in my head for 2 to 3 years now. I'd like to contribute something to the mod if I may?

I'm in construction and in 2011 this building came to me in a dream, so I taught myself blender just so I can make it. The 3km high multipurpose mega skyscraper (for endgame mass colonisation of Nauvis.)

MegaTopia1

2019-09-23_08.11.57.jpg (2.18 MiB) Viewed 8071 times

I hope I still have the blender files somewhere. Will check when I get home in a few weeks.

Next up: Elevated maglev trains...

Let me know what you think...

[darkfrei]

I hope I still have the blender files somewhere. Will check when I get home in a few weeks.

It's a main reason to make all 3D models public, you and another people can use them some years later.

[BHakluyt]

I didn't want to make my design public because I wanted to build it for real one day but my country is useless and another 1000 years of evolution would not elevate these people to the level of western man. So fuckit might as well have it live on in Factorio. I think I have the blender file on my crashed PC so will remove the HDD and place it into an external reader and get the file that way...

[tiriscef]

This is awesome stuff! I've been building this mod in my head for 2 to 3 years now. I'd like to contribute something to the mod if I may?

I'm in construction and in 2011 this building came to me in a dream, so I taught myself blender just so I can make it. The 3km high multipurpose mega skyscraper (for endgame mass colonisation of Nauvis.)

MegaTopia1

2019-09-23_08.11.57.jpg

I hope I still have the blender files somewhere. Will check when I get home in a few weeks.

Next up: Elevated maglev trains...

Let me know what you think...

Looks good.

Well, I plan to create an interface that other mods can use to add buildings/food/whatever to my system. So we can have add-on mods with buildings of different architecture styles.

[tiriscef]

Hey,

I figured I should post updates sometimes to motivate myself. And because I got inspired by the fff posts. :)

Because I might always feel the urge to say it I will communicate it just once: the development of the mod is going slowly, but steady.
It takes quite long because the scope of the mod got out of hand big and because I'm not too confident about my graphics work. I guess it will take some time until I'm up to speed with designing entities - I'm more a programmer than a designer.

Anyway. I reordered the castes. The progression now is:
Red Science: Clockwork (bonus: machine speed)
Green Science: Orchid (agriculture productivity)
Black Science: Gunfire (turret damage)
Blue Science: Ember (happiness)
Purple Science: Foundry (mining productivity)
Yellow Science: Gleam (lab productivity)
White Science: Aurora (rocket silo productivity)

And there is a new caste at the same level as Ember: The Plasma Caste - medical professionals who will treat sick people and provide a general health bonus for all inhabitants.
I created icons for all the castes, which will for example be displayed in alt-mode to make it easy to see what caste lives in a house.

(I'm not too satisfied with some of them. Especially the Aurora icon, because I kind of gave up with designing a convincing aurora borealis o.o. So for now they have 'northern lights themed embers' because lore.. (aurora people are just popstars from the ember caste))

Left is the custom gui that tries to tell the player what's going on with the people. They have 3 key values: happiness, health and sanity. Happiness is the most important value, because the people will move out when it gets too low and the strength of the caste bonus depends on it. It's also influenced by the other two values.

So far I implemented some mechanics:
- People will immigrate if the caste got researched* and if there are free houses.
- People will emigrate if they are too unhappy.
- People consume food which is in the house itself or in a nearby market entity.
- People consume water provided by a nearby water tower.
- People create garbage and get unhappy if there is a lot of it in their home.
- Garbage will be put into a nearby dumpster entity, if there is one. Otherwise it will be put into the house. And if that isn't possible, then it gets spilled, hopefully onto a nearby belt you filth monster!
- People create 'idea' items that are needed for science packs.
- People will get scared if civil buildings or houses get destroyed.

*: yeah, researching them is a bit illogical, but that's just... in the spirit of factorio.

Also I thought I add some 'speakers' which will tell you important stuff that's going on. And also useless comments every 7 minutes. Did I say that the Tropico games inspire me? I like the different characters in those games.

[Earendel]

Unfortunately I don't have time to try this mod but it looks interesting. You're welcome to take any ideas from "The Colony" concept from years ago. viewtopic.php?f=33&t=39180

Having civilian building spread or pop up randomly could be an interesting building and logistics challenge (self-placing slums or evolving housing), if it's really in the way you could demolish it for a temporary happiness penalty and put replacement housing where you want.

[addict for uranium]

he mod Sosciencity (0.1.0) caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event sosciencity::on_nth_tick(10)
__sosciencity__/classes/communication.lua:528: attempt to compare number with nil
stack traceback:
__sosciencity__/classes/communication.lua:528: in function '?'
__sosciencity__/classes/communication.lua:546: in function 'look_for_report'
__sosciencity__/classes/communication.lua:748: in function 'update_communication'
__sosciencity__/control.lua:163: in function <__sosciencity__/control.lua:150>

I just wanted to tell you while I was playing with your mod this came up and exited out of my world. I love your mod and its my favorite only second to space exploration so I wanted to show you this so you can further improve on it. Don't stop the great work! Seriously don't stop this mod is the only thing stopping me from having to automate rocket science

[tiriscef]

he mod Sosciencity (0.1.0) caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event sosciencity::on_nth_tick(10)
__sosciencity__/classes/communication.lua:528: attempt to compare number with nil
stack traceback:
__sosciencity__/classes/communication.lua:528: in function '?'
__sosciencity__/classes/communication.lua:546: in function 'look_for_report'
__sosciencity__/classes/communication.lua:748: in function 'update_communication'
__sosciencity__/control.lua:163: in function <__sosciencity__/control.lua:150>

I just wanted to tell you while I was playing with your mod this came up and exited out of my world. I love your mod and its my favorite only second to space exploration so I wanted to show you this so you can further improve on it. Don't stop the great work! Seriously don't stop this mod is the only thing stopping me from having to automate rocket science

Thanks for the report. This is fixed in the 0.1.1 release.

[tiriscef]

Unfortunately I don't have time to try this mod but it looks interesting. You're welcome to take any ideas from "The Colony" concept from years ago. viewtopic.php?f=33&t=39180

Having civilian building spread or pop up randomly could be an interesting building and logistics challenge (self-placing slums or evolving housing), if it's really in the way you could demolish it for a temporary happiness penalty and put replacement housing where you want.

Sosciencity has a similar mechanic, where inhabitants built their own huts when there aren't enough homes. But in this case the player can avoid that with proper planning. A temporary malus after forcing them to move is a good idea.

I experimented with some ways to let the citizens have their own head and do stuff the player doesn't necessarily wants. But it feels more like factorio when the player has some form of control. So it's a fine line between proposing challenges and just annoying the player.