[IDEA/WIP] Touch of Realism(TOR)

[Strategic Sage]

I've started working on a mod over the past few days, and I've done enough to convince myself that I want to proceed with it. I also thought it would be useful to get ideas/feedback from the community.

Complete realism, in a game like Factorio, is both impossible and IMO not desirable. Nobody would want to spend the actual amount of time it would take to build the scale of facilities involved here(lifetimes), for example: time compression is a essential part of making things feasible. There are still thinks that stick out though where more realism would make things better in my opinion. The goal here is not realism for realism's sake though -- I'm looking for things to improve both gameplay and realism at the same time.

This will not be for everyone. It won't be for most players, in fact. The majority of requests I see here head in the opposite direction.

Implemented

** Starting Equipment. Where exactly did you get a burner drill and a stone furnace from? Don't tell me that was on your spaceship. Those are gone, and the number of magazines for the pistol reduced from 10 to 2.

** Survival Needs. Hunger, Thirst, and Sleep. Failure to attend to these will lower the player's health and eventually kill them. Basic food and water(with reused stock icons for now) have been added to the starting equipment as well.

** Inventory & Storage. Carrying around enough supplies with you sufficient to build a decent-sized city is an absurdity on it's face. An understandable one for ease of getting things done, but having to choose where you keep things and having a more realistic amount of space adds to the pressure on factory planning & logisitical concerns. Player inventory reduced to one slot, with the quickbar as well which can't be changed.

** Available Recipes. I've disabled everything while I figure out what to do here(see Crafting below).

To-do List

** Survival Needs Resolution. Not sure what I'm going to do with Sleep yet, pretty much all options are on the table there. Might be that Hunger and Thirst are enough. I need to add in the ability to eat/drink etc., probably just automatic consumption of the supplies with the player effort being on the side of always having enough on hand. Exactly how to handle food(gathering? farming? etc.) is something I'm still thinking about.

** Crafting. This is almost a 'magic wand' in the vanilla game. The solution of most of the 'no-crafting mods' I've seen is to allow a burner assembler that can make the starting items. I don't aim to make everything impossible to craft, but most should be and those you can craft should take a LOT longer than a decent machine would to accomplish. Also, I want to take out the whole concept of crafting while simultaneously running around placing buildings, gathering resources, and doing whatever else you feel like. If nothing else, a straight health damage to the player if they move while crafting here. It'd be better if I could just prevent the player from moving while there was ongoing crafting, or stop new jobs from getting queued until they stopped, and so on. I don't know if those things are doable.

** Sensible Storage Limits. I know the Hard Storage mod already did quite a bit of this, though I plan to go further. Stack sizes need to be reduced on many things, and chests should hold only a fraction of what they do, etc. Planning out where to put your products, and how to get them there, can be more of a challenge in this way.

Wish List

** Maintenance. All machines, no matter how well-designed, break down. Implementation would defend on the performance hit, but probably just very slow damage over time that would have to eventually be repaired. This would provide another challenge for keeping a factory going as it grows.

** Transport Belt Backlogs. The idea of a bunch of items just sitting backed up on a belt(which keeps moving, but the items don't) allows typical designs that shouldn't work. Possibilities for this are damage to/destroying sections of belt that can't move their items anymore, damaging the items themselves(very possibly can't be done), throwing the items about or on the ground at the end of the belt, etc. Needs to be some kind of sensible penalty for doing this though. A well-designed production line must account for everything during the process.

** New Ways of Doing Research. Building a massive production line for this is one of those features that I totally understand, it adds to the game in terms of challenge, but it's just silly at the same time. I like some of what Dytech did with this. Unlocking new recipes by working with the items involved is one possibility. A chance of a new, improved version of something once you've built a certain amount of them, etc. I want to do it in a way that isn't overly 'make-work' or performance-taxing, so something to think about quite a bit more.

** Flow of Tech Development. Some things seem to come somewhat out of order. For example, inserters, again for obvious reasons, come too early in the process. Having transport belts available before any form on power production also seems out of place. Etc.

That's where I'm at right now. I intend to work on this bit by bit and hopefully I'll eventually reach something worth trying out. Thanks in advance for any contributions.

[Adil]

Well, most of that stuff have been done around here: the hunger, inventory, belts needing electricity, belts, that spill items out of their ends... there was even that mod which made you start with stone axe and bow and arrows. Most of those didn't make it to the mod portal, but you can find them here in modding sections.

Everything described here is possible to implement, but to turn factorio in don't starve it will take much work, most of the stuff is trivial to the point of not being called programming, but will take lots of script lines nevertheless.

This one is definitely not my cup of fun, but hey, I myself do mods mostly because I think those would be fun.

[thelordodin]

If speaking about realism:
Inserters - how do they guess where the item is?
how do they differ items when inserting into a factory?

How are chests organized the way they are?
I mean: a belt with different kinds of items a plain inseter and a chest. And what you get in chest? Perfectly sorted stacks.
In reality if you put two different ores in one chest you'd have hard time separating it back into two types.

Proposials1:
You can introduce rivers, this will allow you to build a mill quite easily from wood.
Which will allow to make first electricity in more realistic way in fact make copper wire, turn it around sticks and have a little magnet to start - this is really possible to do.

With this you can actually make an electrified belt (wooden, probably)

You won't have inserters for a very long time, and filtered ones specifically.
But you can make in loaders, which just throw items into a chest - imagine you just put an open chest and all the items just drop into it.

This chest however should be for single type of items.


More over: you have intelligent turrents which auto-focus enemies, and even flying robots, rockets etc....
BUT look at this, a SINGLE combinator takes 1 kilowatt AND it takes only one operation to do, and it's BIG, and you do all this mess with wires. But hey, you develop it with integral microchips and build it from green sockets. One socket can perform a lot of operations just by itself.

I think inventing a computer (or, by the way - getting one from ship - which is done in campaigin - and i think should be used here) in reality should give you a way to do basic programs inside game quite easily. This should be done at least by a constructor which allows up to 10 (16 or 32) operations to be done in one combinator.

Also finding a computer should give you all the nice features of GUI (see mod for Advanced Logistic mod - this gives you all the stats).
Blueprints should also be available with a computer, but should be placed automatically only if you stay still for a while, and this should be a bit slow.


Even more realism - Crew

You can introduce a crew. Say there is not only one survivor but a team. And you are leader of them.
You'll never be able to add a new member which is obviosly impossible, but say you have 50 survived capsules with your crew frozen.
You can wake them up easily one by one.

The crew consist of different types of humans, and maybe you even have 5 walking human-like robots survived this crash.

First ones are just 5 robots
if you wake them up you have to feed them with electricity, else they turn off.
These are just worker robots, not terminators.
They are future made and obviosly have all the stuff needed to do inserter work and can do maintanance.


They are also your inserters for the first time.
Each take quite much power. And you have only 5 of them survived. You can't make more till end play.

So if you use them as inserters, this just won't be enough to have only 5 robots.
If a robot is destroed by a biter - you can restore it by reparing.

Than you can wake up scientists (humans).
This guys will do research for you. They can't be inserters (too weak and slow for this).

And then you can have some women and even childrens.
Why you them?

They are just there. And the resource of ship is limited - you just can't keep them frozen forever - so at some point the game forces you to support them too.
All this people can give you just a bit of help.

They can do maintanance for you, BUT only if you have enough technology to do it without physical force (this humans can't be used as inserters).
Also they increase speed of research.
Also they can watch and change states of your machines or even control some of your factory parts.

They all for sure have to eat, so you'll have to make a dinner point for them and produce food somehow.

-----------
I Really liked your idea)

[Strategic Sage]

Everything described here is possible to implement, but to turn factorio in don't starve it will take much work, most of the stuff is trivial to the point of not being called programming, but will take lots of script lines nevertheless.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Anything involving coding is programming, whether it be simple or complex. I have seen some things done that are on the list, but of course they are generally all in different mods that don't always work well together or sometimes with the rest of the game. For example, the 'no hand crafting' mods I've seen, which go a little further than I want to, give you a burner assembler that can build more complex items than those you research later on, and cause issues with the flow of tech ...

I may have miscommunicated quite dramatically. I have no intention of turning factorio into don't starve. Personally I think that would be quite a bad idea. Having the player deal with some more realistic concepts in the process of building their factories would leave things a lot closer to this game than that one.

[Strategic Sage]

I think inventing a computer (or, by the way - getting one from ship - which is done in campaigin - and i think should be used here) in reality should give you a way to do basic programs inside game quite easily. This should be done at least by a constructor which allows up to 10 (16 or 32) operations to be done in one combinator.

I like a lot of the things you said. Dealing with the problem of auto-loading and unloading of chests, organization, etc. is a good point that I hadn't thought of. On the above here, I've been toying with the idea of having the player start with a PVI(Personal Virtual Intelligence) -- a basic computer that could serve as a repository of knowledge that your advanced civilization possesses for emergencies such as this. Definitely think you would probably have some kind of basic electronics salvageable from the crash. How much, and what purpose they would serve early on is very much up in the air. I also like the idea of improving your computing and developing more information in the gui as a result.

I'm definitely leaning against the idea of other humans/crew at this point. I think the default factorio situation of being stuck on a planet alone with virtually no hope of outside assistance or rescue is worth keeping.

[thelordodin]

Alone - ok

I just got a thought - wind turbine is much easier to implement than rivers. In terms of realism its much easier than steam engine.

Also speaking about beauty....
You have to warm yourself during the night if you sleep. Imagine campfire on early stages (done really easily, but how beautiful it'll look like!).

- This fire can attract a few biters.
- You should stay near fire at night (here is your sleep idea implementation way).
- Later you can build a home

Food:
The main problem here, as I see, that with no more humans you'll have no need to expand your farming part.
For one man you don't really need more then one quite small farm.

This would be hard at the beginning, but later on - no need to expand.

Maybe this is ok, i don't know, just pointing this out.

[Strategic Sage]

You are quite right in that food will need less and less attention as time goes on(perhaps, eventually, the bots will basically do all of it for you, and you'll literally just need to get the finished, harvested product from somewhere). That's the direction I'm aiming for here: as you advance, you can work on your factory more and more, and be interrupted by other concerns less and less.

[Strategic Sage]

I've completed the first phase. My plans for this discussion are to continue updating here until I've gotten to the point where the player can reach steam power/basic electricity. At that point I'll start a new thread in WIP/Pre-Alpha sub-forum, and release what's done at that point for people to look at and evaluate. Here's what I've got in so far. I'm spending a lot of time screwing up lua syntax, looking for code samples to correct it, etc. but am gradually getting better at putting stuff in.

** Survival Needs -- Hunger, Thirst, and Sleep are all implemented. These are automatically consumed from what a player has on them -- the only thing you have to do is make sure you have enough. Water is acquired automatically standing on the shore of a water source(pond/lake). Gathering herbs(most basic form of getting food) and sleeping are handled by crafting. A completely made-up item that I've termed 'personal time'(clock icon) is consumed to produce sleep(zzzz icon) or herbs. Mining somewhat increases the requirements of hunger/thirst/sleep as you tire.

** Crafting & Motion -- The best solution I've found so far is to eliminate the first spot in the crafting queue if the player is moving. You can't craft and move around at the same time, so you have to choose what to do instead of unrealistically multi-tasking. Obviously this will push you towards building machines even more than in the vanilla setup. Realized just now I also need to eliminate items from the queue if the player is mining, for the same reason.

** Mining -- Changed quite a few things with the values here. Stone is twice as plentiful now: it defaults to being rarer than iron/copper/coal. Trees are not as hard as before, stone is harder, coal a bit softer. Initial mining times have been considerably increased. I'm not changing the daily time scale here -- a day in the game is still just under 7 minutes of real time. You do NOT want to mine iron/copper by hand now without getting improved tools(i.e., axes). Hardness basically means 'better axes required to efficiently mine', so as that better equipment is developed and produced, cutting down trees will get faster, but the harder mining of iron/copper will speed up a lot more -- though it'll still be the slowest. Tweaks/balancing will be necessary here of course but I think it's in the right general range.

TECHNOLOGY

This is the next big thing to handle -- how to improve from the starting situation. This is a matter of practical expertise at this point. You have access to the knowledge of your advanced civilization, but spaceship pilots tend to not spend a whole lot of time with woodworking or designing basic tools to do things that they are used to having mass-produced for them. After considering this, I think I want progress to come by way of a process of experimentation. Getting some basic stone tools, including a stone axe, will be important for almost everything as a readily apparent first step. Rather than have a 'lab' building hammer out specifications, you'll have an item to craft that represents your first attempts to make a stone axe(or whatever). At first you will fail, and the ingredients used will become useless. All you'll have is a bunch of junk for your trouble. With a little work you'll be more successful, however, and the new recipe will be unlocked. Then the process will be repeated as you attempt to craft an improved version of this tool, or something entirely new that you need.

Dividing your time wisely between personal survival needs, painstakingly gathering needed resources, and working on these improvements -- which are not so much technology really as they are your basic skills in various areas.

[thelordodin]

Blocking player from doing crafting on run...

It's a bit of challange.

I have an idea, but i don't know if this can be implemented or not:
1. Player have 2 speeds - exoskeleton increases walking speed, also there is a mod which slows you down if you have full inventory.
Axe - acellerates mining time and, maybe building time, also there is a mod with research which speeds handcrafting on a research.

Maybe it's possible to make an item which reduces walking speed to 0 but gives you mining speed, and then set mining speed to relatively low value, or vice-versa.
By the way the same applies to shooting - you can't craft.

[Strategic Sage]

That's a possibility I hadn't thought of. Right now I think it's better for the player to just deal with losing their crafting queue if they moved, versus having to switch equipment if they want to change tasks.

I haven't done a lot else in terms of actual coding, but I've done a bit of planning the last couple days. A couple things worth mentioning:

** Minor, but tree health has been quadrupled. They were far too easy to 'kill' with shotguns, etc. Go out in your backyard and take a sawed-off to that 30-foot oak and see how soon it comes down . Hope you have lots of ammo ...
** In keeping with trying to keep things as simple as possible, axes will serve as an 'all-purpose tool'. Specifically, better axes will improve crafting time; they represent more than just an axe. There will be a few more versions of them as well, but getting the best one as soon as you can will very much be worth your while. You'll start with a very, very basic one right off the bat, made from the wreckage of your ship. Or at least the ability to make one, without mining anything.
** Eliminating production-line research takes away a big part of what vanilla factories do. In the place of that, most if not all production lines will be a little more complicated and have more steps. Take wood for instance. Right now you cut down a tree, get wood from it, and make that wood into whatever. Trees now yield three products: wood logs, bark, and kindling. When you cut down a tree, the 'raw wood' needs to be processed into these three items. Then the logs need to be sawed into beams which can then be made into whatever, bark is needed for the 'string' used to bind tools such as your initial axes, and kindling is used to start fires. In general, this is the pattern I intend: more complex production chains for the essentials, instead of the science pack direction.

[Artorius]

This is awesome. Makes the game more of a survival game. Add it to a hunger mod and you have a much more in depth survival element.
This would greatly extend the play time of the game and make the coal stage and stuff seem like super high tech.

I also love the river idea. Using either wind mills (like the Netherlands) and/or water-wheels to make mechanical energy at first then eventually making electricity would be awesome.

Would mechanical energy be possible? Some sort of chain/belt/shaft power delivery system? It could be overhead shafts like the old machine shops and mines had.
Add a shovel to dig a diverting trench and build a water wheel. More water wheels = more shaft power.
Windmills can be the same thing, making shaft power to supply things around it or to feed power to the main shaft supply.

I love the idea of starting with a few things and working your way up.

[Adil]

Would mechanical energy be possible? Some sort of chain/belt/shaft power delivery system? It could be overhead shafts like the old machine shops and mines had.

Yuokitani mods implement mechanical power, however it lacks documentation how to use it.

[Strategic Sage]

Using either wind mills (like the Netherlands) and/or water-wheels to make mechanical energy at first then eventually making electricity would be awesome.

Would mechanical energy be possible? Some sort of chain/belt/shaft power delivery system? It could be overhead shafts like the old machine shops and mines had.
Add a shovel to dig a diverting trench and build a water wheel. More water wheels = more shaft power.
Windmills can be the same thing, making shaft power to supply things around it or to feed power to the main shaft supply.

Thanks for the support -- it's always good to know others in the community are interested in what you are doing. Right now I'm not planning on going the rivers route, but a windmill is tentatively planned. I'm going to be getting into figuring out just how difficult it will be to add buildings and I'm trying not to post a bunch of stuff in here that I'm not sure I can do. I would like to have some sort of mechanical power along the lines you describe, and before that even I'd like to put in a windmill for producing a generic grain product from wheat. I don't plan on having a large number of food products, but a few different ones so that the effectiveness of the food-gathering and preparing process can 'scale up' is sensible I think.

Thanks for reference to existing mechanical implementations Adil, I'll have to look that up when the time comes.

[thelordodin]

Hi.

Just got some more ideas for your mod.
Some hardcore))

1 - Pollution masks
Certan levels of pollution should deal damage if you stay inside it.
Damage is also increased over time.
There can be some delay before you start taking damage (take a deeeep breath ).
The higher pollution - the higher damage.
Or you shoud wear some kind of equippment (respirator, gas mask) to avoid damage.
Equippment should have many Mk's

Each Mk allows you to stay in higher pollution levels.
First lvls will requre coal.
Futher ones - some more complex premade filters.

Also an item with oxygen should be available - this allows you to stay in any pollution level, does not depend on pollution level, can be made on low tech, but is much more limited in live time.
You should have this one with you in case you cant enter your factory.
Then if too much pollution you wear it on and run to stop your factory.

2 - Trees die from high pollution
Trees should become trunk on certan pollution levels - this don't absorb pollution anymore but have same amount of wood in it (see last mission of campaign - i think they show exactly this - what happens when you pollute too much - no more trees).
Also trees may grow if pollution is low (there is a mod implementing grows i suggest taking code from there)


3 - Health and hunger speed
When player have less hp he should walk slower
When player is very hungry he should walk slower
Hand craft speed should be reduced in this states
Building might be forbidden on certan levels
All this states should give an announcment on start/finish

-----

Many of your ideas above have been implemented in some mods. Example: belts overloading - there is a mod which just drops all the items stuck - to the ground. This makes SUCH a mess - fully enough to stop you from doing this.
Most mods hold only something one. Most mods have liberal licenses.
I suggest looking through some of them and take some well tested code into yours.

If you need help in finding out which mods you should look at I (and others) can name some here.

[latrous98]

Hi there !
i can't express how happy i was when i was reading the post
i've been waiting for someone to add some "realism" to the game
but i'm dying for one thing , don't know if i have the right to suggest
but the idea is adding like a failure percentage related to the machine state
for exemple a new machine will have 1% chance to "stop working" as the opposite of a machine working from day 1 (which will have like 99% to fail )
it may be hard to deal with it but with robots flying around and repairing i don't think it's a problem
but i really wish for that to happen :p
plus the idea of "messed up " products can alsoo be related to the reliability of the machine which is how it works in real life ^^"
and all other factors like temperature production frequence etc cann be added too (it's just a matter of perspective )
I hope that u will look into that with consideration mr BryanSw and i 'm here to help with all i can if it's possible :p
thanks again for finally exploring this idea

[Strategic Sage]

A couple of comments:

On pollution masks, health affecting movement speed, etc. -- such things may be possible eventually but they are far off in the future. I'm focusing on stuff that affects the core gameplay first. I.e., changes to crafting while moving, survival needs, the belts issue you mentioned, changing how tech works, etc. If I get to a point where this project is working with those things in then I'll re-evaluate, but right now I'll put that stuff in the potentially useful but right now beyond the current scope category.

but i'm dying for one thing , don't know if i have the right to suggest

Glad you are interested, you don't need any 'right' to suggest, the more ideas the merrier.

Regarding machines failing ... that could be done by basically just lowering their 'health', i.e. what happens when aliens attack something and damage it beyond the point of repair. I'm on the fence whether to put this in yet, but it's something I've been thinking about. Messed-up products could be done the same way, but the more things like that which are put in, the more of a performance hit will result. I don't want to take away the ability of people to run a reasonably expansive 'gigafactory' without the game crawling. Because of that issue, I'm going to 'major on the majors' here and see where the current changes end up when I've got things done all the way up through the 'tech' progression to rocket-launching. That'll be quite enough to keep me busy for some time, and while I'm going to stick with the vanilla capabilities and items as much as possible, some things about the belts are going to have to change, there will no 'magic turrets' that fire without power like the first one does, etc. Some new items have already been added, and more will need to be as almost everything is going to have a longer production chain.

A couple bits of info. First, while I've been spending some time playing vanilla factorio lately both for inspiration and to try some things out, I'm pretty much set on where the axes are going to end up. Vanilla of course has iron and steel.

No Axe -- Starting out. If you don't an axe equipped you won't be able to craft much of anything. You don't want that to happen.
Stone Axe -- Three versions of this, and at least two of the higher tiers. Allows many other basic tasks. The better stone axes increase speed a little, but are much more durable(better skill in making them replaces the recipe with better ones).
Copper -- This will be 'native copper' and doesn't need to be smelted. Useful for making other fairly basic items for cooking, etc. as it doesn't have to be smelted and can be reshaped much easier than stone.
Bronze -- First smelted metal, much more durable in all applications.
Iron -- This basically opens the door to various types of machining. Once the skill for it is developed, a gradual progression to more and more precise and complex machines starts here.
Steel -- Allows for 'modern' industrial applications, more durable, etc.
Corundum/Diamond(??) -- Not sure exactly what I'll do here, it's a long way off, but I'd like to have a harder-than-steel but fairly difficult-to-obtain material at the top of the chain.

Something I'm currently considering is how to deal with 'assembler magic'. By this I mean the fact that any assembler can presently be used for any number of different items with an instantaneous 'retooling' of a structure that takes up nine square meters. I'm more inclined to have an approach requiring a specific machine for different tasks, but there's only a limited number of ways to present the different machines graphically and it could get messy.