Version 0.17.60

[Koub]

this feel likes flooding off topic.

[Koub] Indeed, I was going to say that

[SomeLazyBastard]

As you can see, the FFF305 changes are the solution we have found to be the best. Please give it a try, and give it some time to see what the impacts will be.

Welp, time to pack it in, folks. Show's over, there's nothing left here anymore.

https://youtu.be/XvuM3DjvYf0?t=69

[ssilk]

... some years ago Kovarex changed the stack sizes: some stacks where 2^n based (64, 128...) some 10^n, like now.

Nobody will discuss it anymore. Most might even know about it.

But at that time it was a hard discussion and what keeps in my mind was, that many players haven't understood, that the sense of Factorio was not that they need to split the things apart "by hand" (like in Minecraft), but that they need to automate that job, where the stack size splitting doesn't matter so much.

This diskussion reminds me strongly to that of this long time ago...

Arguments agains change will never change.

[5thHorseman]

I finally got to set up blue science from scratch using the new basic oil processing in a new game.

I loved it.

[crambaza]

I had to set up Blue Science by hand because I had no construction bots, because some new player somewhere who doesn't have the game yet would have had trouble with oil.

I hated it.

[Light]

... some years ago Kovarex changed the stack sizes: some stacks where 2^n based (64, 128...) some 10^n, like now.

Nobody will discuss it anymore. Most might even know about it.

Was the community for Factorio even in the six digits then?

I'd imagine that was before oil was even added and the overall direction of the game wasn't nailed down yet. As the game evolved so did the bigger picture we see today, alongside the size of the community who have embraced that very design and thus more vocal disapproval. We're closer to release today than many years ago as well, which makes these changes more official and less experimental to some.

Given many registrations aren't before 2016, it's little wonder that people would be bothered about things more recent than something long before their time. Hence the phrase: "This will blow over and people will forget" since the older community fades as newer members arrive.

That still doesn't negate their feedback though.

[xnmo]

Arguments agains change will never change.

The problem is this change is logically nonsensical and is on a different scale of magnitude in terms of significance compared to other changes Wube has made which some have voiced opinions against in the past.

Having stack sizes 2^n vs a multiple of 10 is ultimately a matter of subjective preference: do you prefer the look of 32/64/128/256 or do you prefer 10/50/100/200? People will always find a way to come up with arguments for their preferred position (e.g. 100 is smaller than 128 so it's a nerf which = bad, grrr...) but it really comes down to aesthetics, and both positions are valid aesthetic choices. I like seeing round decimal numbers so I liked that change, but it's no biggie either way.
The pick removal is similar - do you like seeing this little icon in the bottom right and clicking on the craft button for this doodad ~half a dozen times in your 100+hour game? Or would you rather not having to bother to wasting even that amount of mental energy in the first place? For vanilla, this difference is inconsequential.

But simplifying oil recipes? There are indeed aesthetic considerations involved - to which I don't think NewBOP stacks up favourably against OldOil. E.g., the derpy-looking refinery output, the disgustingly simplified simulacrum of how actual processing of crude works, and the inscrutable consequence that the "basic" starter recipe gives you only the sweet stuff that up to now has been what you're starved for (petrol gas) while the advanced, hi-tech recipe version is what burdens you with a bunch of intermediary-of-intermediary byproducts that you will generally just mostly crack down to petrol in the end anyway.

But the gameplay effects involved here is the real issue; and there are certainly issues here! The one true "improvement" NewBOP gives is that it indeed smooths out the Green-->Blue science transition hump. But in doing so it cheapens the game experience and locks access to a core characteristic feature of the game behind another wall - among various other objections that have been raised to the change. Setting up a handful of pipes and storage tanks is not the issue, and while removing that requirement obviously lets you get to other things quicker, as many have pointed out over and over and over, this is not the only solution that exists which could smooth-out/improve the early-mid game experience.

Adding GUI improvements and an oil tutorial, moving sulfur production to heavy oil/making blue science cost 1 more SF and 1 less red circuit to make it easier to balance consumption of your oil byproducts, and/or making cracking a separate green-science tech are all things which seem infinitely preferable to just yeeting light/heavy oil from existence until the engineer finally figures out the "advanced" process of how to stop accidentally burning it all off at the refinery for no gain . Yet certain figures at Wube seem to like their own pet solution put forward from the beginning - which for all the reasons discussed is worse than just about any other suggested fix across the last 2 weeks of forum posts, including doing abso-fucking-lutely nothing at all about it, marking 0.17.59 as stable, and finishing up the campaign and GUI revamp so they can slap that shiney v1.0 on Factorio once and for all.

It's all so tiresome.

[Koub]

... some years ago Kovarex changed the stack sizes: some stacks where 2^n based (64, 128...) some 10^n, like now.

Nobody will discuss it anymore. Most might even know about it.

Was the community for Factorio even in the six digits then?

I'd imagine that was before oil was even added and the overall direction of the game wasn't nailed down yet.

It was around 5 years ago iirc, when 0.10 came out. I quite remember, it was the first major update I witnessed. I agree the community was far smaller (although as passionate as today's).
Also oil was definitely implemented, with Basic and Advanced processing, cracking and stuff. I started playing somewhere in the 0.9.X, and the whole oil processing stuff was already there.

[Moolicious]

after 700+ hrs on steam in factorio this is the one change that has made me log onto the forums to post that i think this is one of the worst changes in factorio history that not does it not solve the intended problem, it creates a mess of new ones. turning off auto updates until this is reverted.

[henke37]

I think that this is an attempt to solve a real problem. But it ended up exposing some deeper problems while not really solving the target problem.

There are two problems here: the other oil products being at best limited use and the big bump in production chain complexity.

Oil can be complicated. This is no secret. But it also coincides with another big spike in difficulty in that recipes are now longer chains with more inputs.

I've been in a fair number of online games that have petered out because of an inability to act. People have trouble actually setting up the long chains. Not "finding a setup that works", but the more fundamental blank canvas issue. The more "big blocks" players are asked to set up before they get a result, the less people do so.

Then there is the issue of the imbalance in oil consumption. This recent patch attempted to resolve it, but it ended up exposing the real issue: light and heavy oil is superfluous since they just aren't used anywhere. It might've been in jest, but people pointing out that we are this close to just eliminating them entirely is a sign that it is a real issue.

Petroleum gas is used in a lot of mid to late game recipes. Plastic leads to red circuits, which are the third level basic bulk filler item in recipes. Plastic is also used in light weight structures, the high end filler item for recipes. And then we have sulfur and acid. All the explosives are here. And so are the batteries, the mid game middle level filler item for recipes, and nuclear ore mining supply.

Meanwhile light oil is only good for solid fuel. Which isn't used in anything.

And heavy oil is only good for lubricant, which is only used for the highest end of logistics items. That could be an interesting niche, but not as its only use. At least not with lube and heavy oil being two separate fluids. Eliminating lube would help show the point of heavy oil.

In conclusion, oil is imbalanced. Not because of lacking cracking, but because the recipes in the game are imbalanced.

For a proper solution, one need only look at my description of petroleum gas. All the filler items are on this branch of oil. That is the real imbalance in oil.

Of course, this only addresses the oil issue. The other issue of longer chains and action paralysis is deeper and harder to solve.

[zenos14]

So had some time to play around with the new changes last night and today and I still strongly dislike it, it pushes bots further back than I'd like and still has the issue of teaching new players bad design/habits and pushing the "wall" of oil back to the point where it'll punish those bad habits even more. I might be overestimating how big of a problem the latter is like the devs seem to think, but my past experiences and (admittedly somewhat limited) experience in designing UIs to teach the user how to use a piece of software is still screaming at me that this is not the optimal design change to solve this problem.

Bots, as I said before I could possibly learn to live it if they get put back to red/green, or at least con bots, possibly by making them not need electric engines somehow? I don't know, just really don't like the delay with them

But one thing I hadn't considered with it, seeing big number 100 become small number 45 upsets my stupid lizard brain for some reason, it's possibly due to me being used to how much liquid crude "should" produce, and even if it isn't, it's such a stupid issue I'm not sure I should consider it a problem, but seeing 100 units become 45 units in total irrationally bothers me for some reason. I know it's about the same as 2 units becoming 1, but it makes lizard brain angry to see big number become small, and though I'm still going to play .17.60 a bit more to see if lizard brain warms up to it, I hate to say it but this change is probably going to push me to playing mod heavy playthroughs/playing other games till it's reverted and/or goes through a bit more balancing

There are mods for a quicker start giving you some bots from the get-go... I use one of these now, as I am going for higher science pack per minute bases on fresh maps, and indeed want to avoid the duplication tedium.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FasterStart

I would rather not have to resort to mods to see a problem with the game "fixed" and it's not all the tedious while I'm still in red/green, or rather, focusing on what I need to get bots, most of the stuff there is simple to build and doesn't take up too much room/time to build/rebuild, it's only once I start to scale up does things get annoying, and I usually start scaling up at or shortly before blue science

Of course it is. There's no question that bots have been harder to make than blue science since at least 0.16...

Also, remember that early bots are slow, bot frames take a long time to craft, and personal roboports required blue science since at least 0.16.

Don't know what to say, I usually have ~100 con bots built before I even start on automating blue science production, and this change really disrupts the flow of my preferred play style, most are made with minimal assembler usage/a quick and dirty setup I tear down once they're made, but they've always been in my head as easier to make then blue if only cause I focus on them first
And the speed of them has never bothered me unless I'm building something truly massive, and by the time I get to that it's usually quite a bit after I've got both bot and Blue (and further) science automated

But just for the shits and giggles of a heated discussion this may cause... just imagine if we take the above achievement progression as the standard... and now the devs come to the conclusion "man, a lot of people quit due to the difficulty rail setups impose... let's do something about rails" and then end up axing part of the rail experience, leaving it in a rather questionable state. The outcries from all the hardcore rail guys would probably be even more extreme as they are about the oil industry.

I actually find rail road construction one of the most tedious and boring parts of the game and that's with blueprints and an evergrowing swarm of con bots. But I love it when it's set up and yeah, I'd probably be up in arms if the devs made any big changes to it that I wasn't convinced would help things
...Actually if I had to rate the top 5 things that I find/found most tedious and unlikable in the game I'd put "Building a railnetwork" at the top, with "First time you have to figure out cracking without circuits", "First time you have to figure out circuits", "First time you realize your iron smelting is far, far too small" and "First time you have to figure out basic oil processing" as 2, 3, 4, and 5

A way I've made supplying large amounts of metals was to make them at the mining site, so my trains are delivering 4k iron plate instead of 2k iron ore. Of course this sort of thing was too complex for me for oil outposts because there are too many materials involved, but no longer! why ship crude when you can ship petroleum:

This may sound odd, but I've never really focused on oil for plastic production, when I first saw oil (and realized oil wells don't dry up completely) the thing that really grabbed me about BOP was solid fuel and I saw oil as a coal patch that didn't really dry up so I immediately started churning that out, only making plastic and lubricant on the side. Of course once I realized how useful bots were, lubricant and batteries took precedent, but even now I tend to see plastic as something I make when not using oil for anything else (Though that's also sorta due to usually having enough crude oil coming in to not be starved for plastic even when I'm not focusing on producing it) so this change isn't that appealing to me given I no longer have Heavy or Light oil at BOP to make into fuel/lubricant


Edit:

... some years ago Kovarex changed the stack sizes: some stacks where 2^n based (64, 128...) some 10^n, like now.

This seems like a far smaller change in my opinion, not quite sure it's equivalent
Though it does remind me that there are a few current stack sizes I feel should be smaller....

[MeduSalem]

... some years ago Kovarex changed the stack sizes: some stacks where 2^n based (64, 128...) some 10^n, like now.

Nobody will discuss it anymore. Most might even know about it.

[...]

Arguments agains change will never change.

Ah come on ssilk, like this is even a proper comparison... a none-gameplay-affecting-change to one that actually effects several recipe- and research-progression and even goes so far as to raise questions to the entire purpose of even having heavy/light oil when there is like only 1 use left for each after the change.


Also I am one of those who would still like to see 2^n instead of 10^n, but I accepted that one because it's rather a matter of taste and not crucial to gameplay.

Also pretty sure that not every change that people complained about in the past and which people don't complain about anymore is now an universally "loved" change.

And while I agree that there probably are a good deal of people who eventually changed their mind about a change a lot of people also accepted that they are talking against a wall and took the change with a grain of salt or resorted to mods to revert changes or remained on older versions or quit playing the game altogether when they felt like that from their point of view the development direction started heading the wrong way.

The sad part for me is, that this time I am part of those who will part with Vanilla in favor of mods, because really... I don't agree with the oil change in the slightest. They are willingly sacrificing recipe logic and reverse research progression and make heavy oil and light oil almost completely superfluous. Heavy Oil was never much used to begin with and now there's only Lubricant or cracking and Light oil just on artificial lifesupport now with that forced addition to Rocket Fuel because of how otherwise people might end up not using it at all. Also they postpone robots even further even though people complained for years already that they were too far into the research tree already as well as several other arbitrary and questionable changes [Moderated by Koub : this is starting to get personal again].

[FuryoftheStars]

For a proper solution, one need only look at my description of petroleum gas. All the filler items are on this branch of oil. That is the real imbalance in oil.

Yeah, some of us have been saying that and suggesting moving sulfur (while in reality it seems like it comes out during the actual refining process and even then the crude may not actually be that saturated with it depending, it would make more sense gameplay wise to come out of heavy oil), but apparently the thinking of the devs is “that’s dangerous”.

Sulfur not being from PG is dangerous, because it can easily happen that the player does not have enough PG sink (for example when starting to mine uranium and producing a lot of sulfuric acid, when producing accumulators and solar panels, maybe in combination with explosives). That way it is possible to get into a situation with "getting stuck" problems even if you already have proper Advanced oil processing set up including proper circuit-controlled cracking. The only way how this could happen otherwise is with Lubricant - typically only when you mass switch to express belts ... assuming you have enough iron plate/iron gear wheel production to show the lubricant being a bottleneck.

And rebuttals have gone unanswered.

And having as much as you did on PG is what was causing the stuck issues in the first place. Incidentally, there was already a solution: solid fuel. But trying to do that much solid fuel from both HO & LO previously to keep up with the PG demands was too much. With sulfur on HO, you only really need to convert LO into SF to relieve the blockage (less PG needs to be converted due to it being used in plastics which has a much higher demand). You also could have allowed sulfur production from all 3 (same as SF), just with the better ratio on HO.

[BorisTheBastard]

Personally, I don't really mind the oil and Blue science changes much.
I'm really upset about the construction bots being pushed further down the tech tree! Sure, off the bat, bots are slow. But my early-game strategy is to plop down a roboport and a storage chest with components and build my factory a section at a time.
This game is already a click-fest, I even made an AHK script that rebinds CapsLock to LeftClick because I started getting carpal-tunnel syndrome. Now we have to click and grind, click and grind even more.

[Eiermann]

I had to set up Blue Science by hand because I had no construction bots, because some new player somewhere who doesn't have the game yet would have had trouble with oil.

I hated it.

You had too place something by hand? What a shame!

[irbork]

If you aren't against mods: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Pre0-17-60Oil

I'm not against mods in general, I'm against mods that fix bad design decisions.

That is pretty good then. You will have to play the game as it is designed. After a playthrough you will see that professional game designers know a tad more about game design then game consumers.

"professional game designers". Define that. What makes a "professional game designer"? AFAIK, none of the devs are either experienced games designers or went to some game design school. They. Are. Winging. It.

[Moderated by Koub]

Such a great game is not made by winging it. They may be talented supplemented by lots of self teaching.

[RocketManChronicles]

I prefer to avoid logibots too, as I don't really like how they change logistics to be about recharging (etc.) rather than layout...
Heck, I'd rather use logicarts instead !

Logisitic Carts are a lot of fun! I use them a lot before even Bob's logistics come online. And still, I use these things to transport goods on the ground between areas, where demand for what they carry is not always throughput driven. For example, where I build most military turrets (Bob's/Natural Evolution/Modular/etc); where the Logistic Carts bring in the intermediate goods these items desire like bearings, gears, electronics, etc. Plus, having these guys running around doing their work is quite satisfying.

Watch out for the Will O' the Wisps mod! The purple drifting wisps will destroy your stickers!

[Oktokolo]

Now that i updated, the oil and recipe changes where actually straight forward.
Instead of otherwise useless solid fuel i now have to import otherwise useless sulphur to my science cluster. Both ingredients feel equally wrong to have on a main base bus (same with coal, stone and iron ore for concrete).
I was at advanced oil processing already so nothing changed there. I also have a blueprint i made in creative mode some years ago and always use for my refineries - and that seems to still work fine for BOP and AOP.
I am fine with having to make my early solid fuel for my power plant and smelters from petrol first. At that stage, oil supply from the first outpost is plenty. So wasting some of it by using the inferior recipe is not a problem.
All in all, it certainly feels wrong to have a refinery recipe not outputting multiple fractions as that is the very definition of oil refining.
But at the end i am fine with the update and will not use the famous 0.17.60-revert mod.

I am still mad about "fixing" away the rail bridges though...

[meganothing]

... ( assuming there is one in the first place). ...

+ Are you sure steam sales boost factorio sells ? what about the % that is bought on website ?on Gog ? those little % don't count i guess right ? 80% of 80% of 80% is only +/- 50% .

As I clearly said, I'm not sure. I would need to be Wube employee to know.

If Wube had to guess the number of games sold on Gog, then yes, that would be a problem. But guess what, they also get the number of keys sold on gog. They can adjust for gog player numbers. BUT do they really need to? Gog has no achievements yet as far as I know, so those buyers don't even register on the achievements count. A non-problem

Even if they did, the number of gog sales and gog achievements would just be more statistical data. And even in the absolut devastatingly worst case, if the achievements of steam AND gog buyers would all be reported as one number, you can just add the sales. There is no problem here.

Same idea you have no way to know such impact unless you ask specifically the users to know if they were watching a youtuber and detect that no other thing that this can make a spike such as the one observed if there is such a spike , you don't need to hypothesize something like that, you need to have a way to know what can impact and how it impact the achievement for that 10%-50% of player ? this is way too imprecise to be reliable.

1) You can see the impact of an influential youtuber in that there is a spike without a sale happening before or a much bigger achievement spike after a sales spike than on other sales spikes. THEN you look for a reason. You google to see if there was something happening in typical social channels like youtube, twitter, facebook. If you find a likely source (like that youtuber), you now have some information how a youtube promotion influences your achievements. Find a few more events like these and you can make good guesses how that influences your achievements.

2) BUT you don't even need to know that if you observe a lot of sales spikes. Lets assume that 2 of the 15 sales spikes of the last 3 years were tainted by influential youtubers presenting Factorio to their clientele. You simply see that those spikes are different than the 13 other spikes and likely have special circumstances. Without knowing what the reason is you just drop them, you still have 13 useful spikes

3) Why even drop youtube spikes? For the calculation how long players need to reach rocket that is valuable data (if it is separate from other spikes). If that is the way a large part of your audience plays the game it even makes sense to include it in your evaluation of the oil change.

Do you remember that Wube in one of the FFFs posted a picture of crashes per day. They also could tell you for every spike what caused it (with high confidence). Most (or all, I don't remember exactly) were caused by internal events like new versions and that is a lot easier to attribute than external events. But still, there is google, there is youtube search, those are powerful instruments to find causal links

Yeah maybe it's 7 month that will be impractical to use, also the lengh of an average game could evolve with the update, so if you test 2 differents updates in 2 month time, and you want to measure if the average for a new player to get the rocket is higher or lower than 7 month as it was before then it's completly unusable.

Yes, if the average time for new users to start a rocket is 7 months then you won't get anything out of the statistical data. Do you really think 7 months is anywhere near a realistic number? If someone buys the game he either puts it on his pile of shame, tries it out for a few minutes or he gets hooked. But most players who get hooked will play the game continually for the next days and weeks until they are fed up for good or got to the end. The average time for a new player to reach rocket (if he ever does) is likely below a month, surely not more than 2 months. Because only players that are really hooked will ever reach rocket.

The biggest problem of my theory is that steam sale spikes simply might not exist because many steam sale buyers just put new games on their "pile of shame" and don't even try it out until years after or never. But lets assume that amongst the steam buyers on a steam sale 20-40% are really trying out the game shortly after the sale, that couid very well be enough for a noticable spike.

But do we need to rely on sales numbers alone? We have more data: You not only have the rocket achievement, you have smaller achievements before oil. Instead of only using sales spikes you could be using those smaller achievements to indicate new users and compare them with rocket achievements. This shows hooked new users much better than any other number. Combine that with sales numbers and youtuber spikes and you have a much better understanding of your current new users.

Statistic works because if in 2017 lets say 30% of new users were teenagers then in 2018 probably again around 30% of new users were teenagers,plus minus 1 to 5%(?).

No, this is an example of common mistake. If a very popular youtuber amongst the youger audience massively attract teenager this particular year ?

=> oh but we detect this ???? => REALLY without knowing their age and who's their favourite youtuber and without asking them why they got to the rocket ? this is not statistic this is magic !

Options:
1) Ignore the spike and/or those 2-3 months. You think a youtuber will influence a whole year? Wube surely would like that, I can't imagine that to be true. People following youtubers would act immediately after a new video comes out if they have some energy left, the rest is content to just watch passively anyway
2) Use the spike: You think Wube doesn't know which youtubers are showing Factorio? A simple google search or a question in the steam forum could tell them that. Youtubers that have enough influence and viewers also have a high general visibilty. The spike is attributable to the youtuber, the age of his audience is known (if it even were important, which it isn't). And it tells you how many of that age group reaches rocket. If you have before/after events with the same age group you struck gold, if not, it still can tell you something with a high error margin though.

I think it's time to agree to disagree.

I do not say it's impossible to use statistics, just saying that some of the stuff you say is not correct, i think you undersestimate the difficulty of what you say, even if some of what you argue make sense, like it answers the point, but it doesn't do it while being true.

The best metaphora i can come up with is this one : If i put ice cube in my drink, i can study a sample of the composition, and with math sort out the % of water in the whole drink then say how much ice was added. But i can't tell you if there was 1 or 2 or 3 ice cube, this information is lost. I could tell you that if the ice cube were from different color but same concentration of color in the ice. The information would be preserved from a sample of the drink you could say there this % of red and this % of blue and this % of yellow, hence there were at least 3 ice cube. ( maybe there was a bigger red ice cube maybe there was 2 red ice cube ) . Some of the information you cannot recover from aggregated data, no matter how hard you try. ( Maybe there was 100000 small red ice cube if you only have the drink no matter what you theorize on the average ice cube it's irrelevant.

So i think i understand how you start your reasoning, but i think you are mistaken and not seeing it ,hence i disagree for the last time after that PM me if you want to because this feel likes flooding off topic. The only link is that for me it stresses the importance of human beings expressing themselves with words for feedback:)

You know the reflex to have the last word? I succumbed, feel free to try to get the last word in too EDIT: Ah, maybe better not, I see Koub is showing signs of off-topic-fever (I noticed only after posting this. Sorry)

To talk in your metaphor, knowing the number of ice cubes might make your statistic much more reliable, but if you have the choice between knowing nothing and just calculating with the % of water and getting a result that is at least better than not knowing, then that result IS better.

Also your metaphor is problematic for your case because you know how much ice cubes you yourself put into that drink

But say it was someone else creating the drink who does that on youtube, you then still have a chance to get a lower or upper bound of ice cubes if you notice what ice cube size he uses.

Even if not, you could observe many drinks made by him and notice that the water % is always a multiple of 10%. Voila, you can predict with high confidence that he uses ice cubes the size of 10% of your drink. My impression is you seem to underestimate the power of statistics because you always think of only one event (your metaphor and your youtuber, you always talk about single isolated events). Statistics is about analyzing MANY events.

[slippycheeze]

I prefer to avoid logibots too, as I don't really like how they change logistics to be about recharging (etc.) rather than layout...
Heck, I'd rather use logicarts instead !

Logisitic Carts are a lot of fun! I use them a lot before even Bob's logistics come online. And still, I use these things to transport goods on the ground between areas, where demand for what they carry is not always throughput driven. For example, where I build most military turrets (Bob's/Natural Evolution/Modular/etc); where the Logistic Carts bring in the intermediate goods these items desire like bearings, gears, electronics, etc. Plus, having these guys running around doing their work is quite satisfying.

Watch out for the Will O' the Wisps mod! The purple drifting wisps will destroy your stickers!

Wouldn't be super-hard to make them immune, but you should probably be protecting your critical infrastructure with weapons and/or wisp lights. Both work, but only wisp (UV) lights work against the purple things, and everything degenerates to a drifting purple doom every time. OTOH, like the "machines need maintenance" mod, it mostly just adds a bit of repair work.

The only challenge I found with the carts, which are fun, was that they have frustrating fill/empty behaviour from the automated points. I should check and see if I can build a circuit network / inserter based fill and empty for them, since I definitely wanted the train-ish "depart after filled, or after N seconds", and smarter emptying when multiple stops existed.

Trying to use them when I first got them, they got stuck at a miner group that was filling a box with coal ... from 4 electric drills. Just fast enough to trigger the "being filled, stick around" timer reset every time one coal trickled in, so it would just sit there until 200 coal were mined...