[0.17.2] Tutorial experience report

[RickJS]

There was a request from the Factorio team to try to break the tutorial and report. I’m kind of a noob (I’ve won the game only 3 times and never made a megabase), so maybe I can bring beginner’s mind to this.

Upon clicking on the shipwreck, the screen went dark and there was no response to clicking on anything. It took me a while to see the text in the upper left corner. It could use a bright arrow pointing up there. It brings up my first general observation: the text is so tiny throughout that it is hard to read, especially flying text notices and Compilatron’s speech when it is moving.

It gets worse when the frame rate drops, which it did surprisingly early. My screen resolution is 1680 X 1050. The computer is 8-core 3 GHz, 64-bit, 16 GB RAM. FPS was down to 13.2 with 2 assemblers, 1 lab, some belt, and 6 burner-inserters on the screen. Curiously it increased to 17.2 on zooming out. Zoomed-in, the FPS dropped to 4.5 when I replaced some burner-inserters with inserters. Huh??

It would be a good idea to say early that hovering on an item will show colored brackets, and red brackets mean you can’t act on that item, and blue means the tutorial is urging you to act there.

The tutorial seems to go to sleep occasionally, leaving me wondering why nothing is responding to my clicks.
When you send the player to find coal, that might be a good time to introduce the map and finding resources there.

Feeder is a term which does not appear in the field of play. Use loader. I’m not sure what is the point of those loaders. Are they a new feature of the game?

You say Control-left-click will grab everything in a structure, but not off a belt, so this might be a good time to explain that distinction.

I was instructed to feed copper plates into the feeder. I erroneously fed copper ore into the loader, and it did not stack up, as would happen in the game. It just left me puzzling over why the assembler wasn’t working, what else I had to do to fix it.

The tutorial leaves the beginner with the impression that you can fix a damaged assembler by supplying its inputs.

I created a belt jam at the science pack assembler, trying to put two items on a belt (I flubbed my 2-sided belt mojo), and a beginner might not anticipate the log jam where one ingredient prevents another from getting in. This would be a good time to tell them they can use multiple inserters to feed multiple flows to an assembler.

On the technology screen, hovering over a tech shows the products in a mini-window. It would be nice if the mini-window was stable so I could hover over products and read their names.

Shadows still show after unchecking “show shadows” in Graphics settings.

On the first encounter with the biters, I was able to walk right up to them and they ignored me. I guess they were waiting for their drummer. This might be a good time to explain alien behavior a bit.

In the tech window, when a tech is brought up as a candidate, there is an illegible symbol and a barely-legible number next to it. It’s another symptom of things being too small. There should be a graphics setting for that.

It took me quite a while to figure out how to get a duplicate link off the new toolbelt. Explain that.
And then we get to the race to keep the turrets supplied with ammo, which I cannot survive. I don’t have kid reflexes. I even loaded _autosave-survive to see if building more assemblers of firearms magazines would fix it. Nope. I certainly hope you have told the player everything you want to tell them before you show off that you can stomp them into fudge any time you want to. I don’t play games to be frustrated, and I might not be the only one. You can put beginners off your game right here. What were you thinking? Did your ego get the better of you? Please review the purpose for having a tutorial. Broken.

[TheRaph]

Some Answers ...

It gets worse when the frame rate drops, which it did surprisingly early. My screen resolution is 1680 X 1050. The computer is 8-core 3 GHz, 64-bit, 16 GB RAM. FPS was down to 13.2 with 2 assemblers, 1 lab, some belt, and 6 burner-inserters on the screen. Curiously it increased to 17.2 on zooming out. Zoomed-in, the FPS dropped to 4.5 when I replaced some burner-inserters with inserters. Huh??

I play on 7 year old hardware an on resolution 1920 x 1200 and all works fine. I think in your case may be a special foult. You should consider to post this in technical help, an if this doesn't help post it again in bug-reports. - Also
! But if you play on laptop with dedicated graphic card you may run in a knife I was run, times ago. Sometimes the NVIDIA - Card doesn't detect that it's needed and the game will run with energy-saving cpu-integrated intel-gpu!
So if you have got an Laptop with two graphic cards check your sys-tray for an icon that shows up how much programs use heavy graphic - if it counts "0", there is your problem.
To solve it you may right-click your factorio-icon and chose "run with graphic processor" ... look here for more information: http://aps2.toshiba-tro.de/kb0/TSB5603RN0000R01.htm

Feeder is a term which does not appear in the field of play. Use loader. I’m not sure what is the point of those loaders. Are they a new feature of the game?

No they aren't. They are there from the beginnings of the game, but are a concept the devs did not really like. So they make no good graphics for loaders, but let them in code for modders to use (you also can select them in editor-mode). Now the devs found a purpose for loaders and use them in campaign. I think they will give them a nice graphic in future.

But you're right, it should named same in text and object. I think it may possible that they will rename loaders to "repair-module" this would also fix an other problem you stated:

The tutorial leaves the beginner with the impression that you can fix a damaged assembler by supplying its inputs.

It brings up my first general observation: the text is so tiny throughout that it is hard to read, especially flying text notices and Compilatron’s speech when it is moving.

In the tech window, when a tech is brought up as a candidate, there is an illegible symbol and a barely-legible number next to it. It’s another symptom of things being too small. There should be a graphics setting for that.

There are already everything you may need. Hit ESC to open Menu, click on Settings, click on Interface, under UI-Scale set radio-button on "Custom", and adjust the slider next to radio-button.
How it looks like: see attached pics.

And then we get to the race to keep the turrets supplied with ammo, which I cannot survive. I don’t have kid reflexes. I even loaded _autosave-survive to see if building more assemblers of firearms magazines would fix it. Nope. I certainly hope you have told the player everything you want to tell them before you show off that you can stomp them into fudge any time you want to. I don’t play games to be frustrated, and I might not be the only one. You can put beginners off your game right here. What were you thinking? Did your ego get the better of you? Please review the purpose for having a tutorial. Broken.

You surely don't need kid reflexes. You can just put 200pc of ammo in to that turrets.
To survive as newbie you need only 4 assemblers for firearms (or less if you do it like a pro). The big thing to deal with is the support of metal plates for that assemblers. But that is, what the game is - manage logistics and fabrication.

[RickJS]

Thanks!

[zOldBulldog]

TBH the worst problem is that it tries to be both a tutorial AND a campaign at the same time. Those two things are incompatible, so it becomes an exercise in frustration.

If I had tried it as the first thing after downloading the demo, I would have quit with the impression that this was just another idiotic and poorly designed combat game and never bought the game. I would have never discovered the richness of features and factory design sandbox.

What I would do to fix it is to completely separate the tutorial from the Campaign. Failing that I would at least:

- Make it very clear that in the early stages you can take your time trying things out to help you learn.

- Make it clear up to what point in the tutorial you can freely disassemble and redesign in order to learn and fix earlier mistakes. And warn - in advance - of the action that will trigger the first attack.

- Make it an explicit goal to layout the base that auto-feeds the turrets, giving unlimited time to tear down and redo until figured out. This is especially important due to the lack of splitters and undergrounds. As a matter of fact, you should teach how to split (using inserters) and cross belts (using long inserters) when you don't have proper splitters and undergrounds.

Or better yet, give up on the tutorial/campaign and instead give the tools to players, let them design tutorials and campaign missions, and then let players vote/like those player-designed tutorials and campaigns so that future players can choose the best.

[RickJS]

I agree. Thanks!