Factorio Forums

Hi there,

I'm having trouble gettign through the tutorial because of a bug (reported) but this is just a quick note about the approach to the milestones you need to hit to complete the tutorial.

USer convention/expectation would be

• subtask 1

• subtask 2

• MILESTONE COMPLETION

but what you have is

• MILESTONE COMPLETION

• subtask 2

• subtask 1

which is a little confusing because it's unintuitive. Perhaps consider re-ordering the format?

I agree. The task list is not very intuitive. I can see it's supposed to be a tree and you need to fill all the branches but in-game it can be confusing.

There are also no reference from the bot or other help text that you're supposed to look out for a list of tasks you need to complete. If you're focused on what's in the main game window it's easy to miss and can lead to frustration because at one point in the tutorial it's assumed that people know it's there in order to continue.

During focus testing we discovered that having the lists "upside down" caused the testers to read much more thoroughly.
Having the tasks in the order they need to be completed led to participants NOT reading, but instead just completing one after another. Seeing as we are trying to teach the player which concepts are related to each other you can see why we reversed them.

It is well know that this approach is actually worse for experts, who are looking for specific information. Presenting that information to experts is a different use case, and not one that the tutorial should prioritize over learning outcomes.

Thank you for your explanation, this is interesting. I should see if I could get someone new to the game to try out the tutorial.

However I still think you need to draw attention to the steps in the upper left corner in the first place when they're needed as it can take a while to realise it's there. Maybe a small animation with an arrow from the center of the screen moving up to the steps?