Future idea - Pre Industrial Realism.

[Evgeni]

Factorio is amazing game. The vanilla experience offers a good balance of complexity and a reasonably steep learning curve.

But after few games we just seek more. More realistic, complex industry.
Currently, bobs pack offers great realism for the modern PCB and alloy industry. Angle buffs the petrochemical industry (and few others) to a sadistically realistic complexity.

Nevertheless, there in still one major component missing. I am talking about the early stage of technology.
One doesn't just throw some iron ore and wood into an oven shaped pile of stone to get metallic iron! Come on! 1540 °C is ridiculously hot. It took the humankind 2000+ years of copper and bronze smelting to bring the technology to get any (barely usable) iron yield. Even with modern knowledge, iron smelting is extremely hard (look at primitive technology on YT as reference).

The 2nd aspect of early stage of technology is too easy automation. Take the basic inserter as a test case. IRL building a robotic arm that can grab objects would take at least a basic microcontroller, as well as few sensors and electric motors. It would be realistically available after you get electric motor and integrated electronics.

The only reason things stay this way is to keep the game playable. Well, I think we can fix realism while keeping it playable and fun.
Those are the key features:

1. new "power grid": food. I suggest treating it the same way the game treats power: village (substation equivalent), farm(solar panel equivalent), and granary (capacitor equivalent) are the 3 components of the food power grid.
2. new resource: people. Those squishy meatballs managed to bring us technology once, and they will do it once again. They are slowly generated in the village from excessive food, and are one extra limiting factor to the rate your "factory" can grow.
3. 2 levels before full automation: man powered (many people needed to craft, slow, high food consumption) and man controlled (low food consumption, in addition to fuel/ electricity)
4. primitive tire structures: man-powered wooden crane ("inserter"), dedicated workshops for metalworking, woodworking, ropes & textile (assembler equivalent), wagons on store roads ("trains")(archery weapons & arrows, towers("torrents") and maybe warriors (fighting bot equivalent). We can consider even human carriers & engineers ("construction bots")
5. early tech is focused on yield improvement. Early labor intensive chunks of metal allow making tools for the workshops for major quality and speed improvements. Those in turn allow higher yield smithing. The process gradually improves until you get massive iron & steel
   output.
6. Industrial revolution tech used huge amount of metals to make steam powered devices. Basically similar to vanilla factorio, but with extra steam pipes feeding into the assemblers and inserters. Those allow you mass produce electric motors(not the compact one for drones) and accurate gears to gradually switch to electric power. Men are still needed (only late game tech replaces them with a processing unit), but in much smaller quantities than before. Luckily you can "recycle" old structures to get back the people.

In my opinion early game realism it the biggest unpatched hole from the vanilla simplification.
All this primitive early game will look very different from the factorio industrial theme, but we can keep the essence of gameplay around factory planning.

Implementation: All the elements can rely on existing game code. The food works same as the electric grid, including all its elements. People are just another resource you can slowly craft from food. Wagons works same as trains. Just lots of coding (and graphics) but nothing extremely hard.


What do you think?

Evgeni

[Pi-C]

The problem is: Where do all the people come from? It kind of makes sense that a single engineer can escape a crash with his space ship, odds are against you, but there would be a chance. However, lots of people that work the fields to grow food, set up an early-tech economy and make up an army to fight the biters?

Of course, there may have been a bunch of survivors, of both sexes. Humans can reproduce, so one could imagine that people go forth to fornicate and multiply. In a dystopian world, one could also imagine breeding of humans in factory-like institutions. There's one problem however: time. While the time needed for the actual breeding (intercourse to giving birth) is negligible, you can't use the new humans immediately -- years pass before they can work in the factories or die fighting the native population.

Meanwhile, your character (well past the prime of his life given that he had to spend time on Earth to learn Science and Technology before he could venture out on his journey) will be too old to have any hope to ever get home again; more likely, he will have died long before a workforce of suitable size is in place. These new generations, however, won't have an incentive to build a rocket because they've spent all their life on Nauvis; it's their home, so why should they leave just because of old legends of an obscure planet named Earth they can't relate to?

While I appreciate your attempt to make early game more worthwhile, I'm afraid it wouldn't work storywise.

[bobingabout]

Firstly, This isn't the sort of direction I want to take Bob's mods.
For huge mod ideas like this, you're better off posting in the general mod requests subforum, not in a specific modder's subforum. I can move it if you want me to. (I have moderator rights only in my subforum, but it does mean I can move topics out of my area if I need to)

But, to point a few holes in some of these game mechanics... There is only 1 power grid, you can't have a second type of power grid.
There way be other ways to do it, but like I said, not a direction bob's mods will go.

As for the iron ore, I am actually painfully aware that it isn't exactly the best candidate for a main metal to start the game with, personally I'd probably replace it with something else like Tin, and then bronze would be your first alloy instead of steel, but since iron is a base game material, I'd rather leave it alone, for now (as other mods would expect it to be there). It is something you may see one day though.
The inserters are something else I'm not going to change, due to game mechanics.

I do have plans however to add a few extra steps to the low end, mostly in the form of more burner powered entities, and steam powered entities, but I have a lot of other things I need to work through first, such as fixing the ore spawning stuff.

[Evgeni]

The problem is: Where do all the people come from? It kind of makes sense that a single engineer can escape a crash with his space ship, odds are against you, but there would be a chance. However, lots of people that work the fields to grow food, set up an early-tech economy and make up an army to fight the biters?

Of course, there may have been a bunch of survivors, of both sexes. Humans can reproduce, so one could imagine that people go forth to fornicate and multiply. In a dystopian world, one could also imagine breeding of humans in factory-like institutions. There's one problem however: time. While the time needed for the actual breeding (intercourse to giving birth) is negligible, you can't use the new humans immediately -- years pass before they can work in the factories or die fighting the native population.

Meanwhile, your character (well past the prime of his life given that he had to spend time on Earth to learn Science and Technology before he could venture out on his journey) will be too old to have any hope to ever get home again; more likely, he will have died long before a workforce of suitable size is in place. These new generations, however, won't have an incentive to build a rocket because they've spent all their life on Nauvis; it's their home, so why should they leave just because of old legends of an obscure planet named Earth they can't relate to?

While I appreciate your attempt to make early game more worthwhile, I'm afraid it wouldn't work storywise.

Originally i though about a few hundred of survivors you start with. If you look at plane crashes the 2 most common results are many survivors or no survivors at all. "Just one" is extremely uncommon unless you are on board alone in the first place.

About the time problem: The time is obviously accelerated. The time related units are consistent, but everything else clearly isn't. Crafting giant machines with your hands takes months, not 0.5 second. So if you insist on realistic times, your lifespan should be enough to handcraft 100~1000 assemblers. 1~8 game minutes! Also, for any planet with enough gravity to have atmosphere, day-night cycle lasting few minutes will create centrifugal force that would tear the planet apart. Any biologic organism evolution, takes may generations. At least few thousand years for biter-sized creature. [/b]

To be honest, i feel the "crash survivor" is part of the campaign, not the entire game. It suits the campaign perfectly, but later on you start new game and there is no crashed ship around, or even start a PvP scenario with 2 pre-made rival bases. So personally, I am not concerned with taking a small step away the "crash survivor" storyline.

[Evgeni]

Firstly, This isn't the sort of direction I want to take Bob's mods.

For huge mod ideas like this, you're better off posting in the general mod requests subforum, not in a specific modder's subforum. I can move it if you want me to. (I have moderator rights only in my subforum, but it does mean I can move topics out of my area if I need to)
(...)

Thank you for your answer. Sounds like you have tons of work with updating and maintaining your already huge mod pack. I'm looking forward to your future releases .

I guess I started writing without realizing it's a huge chunk of development. Sorry for the wrong subforum ... Please move it to the right one.

[eradicator]

Xander Mod has an extended pre-electricity stage (10 hours+). (And you actually do copper+tin before iron, but not on the scale you describe.)

There was (is?) also "Stone Age" beta. viewtopic.php?f=190&t=62509

I think "SomethingSomething Colonial-Something"-Mod had something where you needed to care about "people", though they were still transported on belts as items.

If you don't want to reinvent belts+inserters i guess you could make graphics for them that *look* like people, though probably not very good given the engine's constraints. Implementing a completely new way of item transport is a huge amount of work (though from the description of https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones it *might* be "not impossible" compared to 0.16.x, to have actual ppl walk around.).

In conclusion your idea sounds like adding a whole second game that one has to beat before one can progress to the main game. (Like medival "ANNO" Series or "Factory Town".)

And then there's the question: Who's your target group? Do people who like steam-punk factorio also want medival people management aspects?

[Evgeni]

And then there's the question: Who's your target group? Do people who like steam-punk factorio also want medival people management aspects?

Strange as it sounds, i actually want factorio to be more steam-punk. Vanilla factorio leaves the steampunk age about 10 minutes into the game (except the small coal power plant). I want to play into the steam revolution rather than starting at it's last breath.
Early industrial era is amazing! But in order to appreciate inventions such as the Blast furnace or Bessemer converter you need to first try making iron and steel without them. The Pre Industrial Era is essentiallys there so you can praise the steam tech instead of treating it as a low tier junk... (Seriously, how can you praise a pile of 5 stones?)

Who's my target group? I don't know... people who want more Steam tech in factorio? People who look for extra challenge and complexity, preferably in a more realistic way?
This is a somewhat raw idea, aiming to patch the under-representation of the early industrial revolution. I would like to know what you think about it. Do you feel the over simplicity of the iron industry should be patched? What is the best way to patch it?

Xander Mod has an extended pre-electricity stage (10 hours+). (And you actually do copper+tin before iron, but not on the scale you describe.)

There was (is?) also "Stone Age" beta. viewtopic.php?f=190&t=62509

I think "SomethingSomething Colonial-Something"-Mod had something where you needed to care about "people", though they were still transported on belts as items.

Thanks, I will try Xander and Stone age.
"SomethingSomething Colonial-Something" - I think you mean Colonial Charter viewtopic.php?f=190&t=63531&hilit=colonial
I will try this one as well.

About the implementation:

• Cranes use inserter code, just change the resource it uses. the graphics can have a static base + moving wooden arm. like here or here
• workers are essentially modified Construction Drones
• the workshops are just assemblers with different restrictions and graphics.

[Deadlock989]

AAI Industry is a criminally overlooked mod which extends the early phase of the game, but not by all that much. It adds a small amount of mechanical complexity to mid-game recipes as well. There's also AmatorPhasma's steam power mod but I've never played it so can't recommend it.

For myself, I experimented with an early game phase mod which included stone gears, wooden contraptions, lots of handcrafting and coal everywhere. It was boring as hell so I abandoned it. I'm keeping the bronze steambots though for my next attempt which does also delay iron smelting. I've got no interest in food mechanics - it's one step from there to installing functioning toilets.

The API doesn't let you do a great deal with unit AI very easily, which is why there are so few mods around that have attempted it. So a Settlers-style workforce is probably off the table. Construction bots are also quite limited in the extent they can be modded - you could in theory give them a human skin but then you'd see them flying around a few inches off the ground and popping themselves into barns like Pokemon, and there is nothing you can do about that from the Lua side. Take a look at the discussion forum for Construction Drones to see just how flaky that approach can be.

Modders also have almost zero control over how inserters are drawn.

[eradicator]

Early industrial era is amazing! But in order to appreciate inventions such as the Blast furnace or Bessemer converter you need to first try making iron and steel without them.

Xander has Bessemer+Blast Furnace. Though, as far as i remember - from my last 30%-play-though a year ago - they don't invoke a feeling of "praise". It's just another building/another recipe, which you probably aren't going to use for a while even after researching it, because by the time you get there you already have a fully automated and working iron+steel industry with the "inefficent old" recipes. And rebuilding stuff is annoying/takes time (especially without robots, which are much more advanced). And this is probably true for any similar "upgrade". Even in base you don't demolish all your furnace arrays the second the electric furnace reserach finishes. Basically everything that isn't a straight "drop-in" replacement will cause "oh shit, i have to build yet another array of something", and anything that *is* straight drop-in won't be much appreciated because the player didn't spend much time thinking about it at all.

Do you feel the over simplicity of the iron industry should be patched? What is the best way to patch it?

I don't feel anything about that actually. It all depends on what kind of game/content one wants. Minecraft has a much larger variety of pre-steam/steam/high-tech mods than factorio has (not sure how relevant that is :p). I feel that factorio is generally "too short" as a game, which i guess means i'd like more content. But then again, because of how factorio works, adding "more content" also quadratically increases the difficulty. In an FPS you can just run though 10 more levels and have fun, in factorio with 10 more intermediates your main bus starts getting to unmanagable widths. Also contrary to minecraft where most mods have their own tech-tree and are thus "side-grades" to each other, in factorio usually any mod added puts itself "into the way" and makes reaching the rocket a bit slower. I.e. in factorio you always have to "master" all mods at once.

Btw, of those mentioned mods i only know Xander, and that only 30% ish because it's so riduculously complex that you probably have to play at least 300h to build a rocket. The guy who made it is a professional chemist as far as i remember so it is much more "realistic" than base factorio, but in being that it replaces almost the entire base game :).

About the implementation:

• Cranes use inserter code, just change the resource it uses. the graphics can have a static base + moving wooden arm. like here or here
• workers are essentially modified Construction Drones
• the workshops are just assemblers with different restrictions and graphics.

Inserters can only do inserter-ish movement. That means some sort of two-segment-one-ball-joint thing with a claw at the end. Sure, you can give it a wooden texture, and maybe make the claw half-side invisible?
Workshops are easy code-wise, but i see much fewer talented graphics artists around than hobby-coders. At least that is my conclusion to the question why almost all mods use re-colored base-game assets.


-------------

AAI Industry is a criminally overlooked mod

80k+ downloads. Totally overlooked *cough*.

[pleegwat]

Rather than adding a workforce, I'd suggest using steam as a power transfer mechanism. This would mean the boiler is available, but the steam engine is not, and instead steam inserters and steam assemblers have a fluid fuel input which takes steam.

I expect this will be more steampunky and less horrendous to design a base with than burner gear, particularly for the inserters.

[eradicator]

Rather than adding a workforce, I'd suggest using steam as a power transfer mechanism. This would mean the boiler is available, but the steam engine is not, and instead steam inserters and steam assemblers have a fluid fuel input which takes steam.

I expect this will be more steampunky and less horrendous to design a base with than burner gear, particularly for the inserters.

Xander uses burner inserters and machines in the early stages, which can conveniently take their fuel off the existing belts. Adding *another* delivery system that's a full tile wide and needs to go *everywhere* ... you Sir, must be insane.

xanderiron.jpg (374.32 KiB) Viewed 5420 times

[pleegwat]

I'd imagine the steam-powered inserters to include a passthrough steam connection, so the steam pipe occupies the same tile space as the inserters themselves. This removes the need to carry a coal lane on the belt, as well as the need to insert coal into output burner inserters.

[Evgeni]

The key is to balance early game gameplay and early game realism.


Pre electric mods clearly add realism but they make the gameplay to "manual and boring". Inserters and assemblers and bots are way too far ahead in the tech tree. The trivial gameplay improvement would be to start right off with construction bots, but again, those don't go well with the "building from scratch" theme.

So I am looking for a way to fix the gameplay issues with reasonable realism. Maybe this will do?

• You start off with some survivors. You can peel off the food dependency for the same reason your character does not consume food, or try making a granary-farm dependence as modifies (Substation+capacitor)/solar panel. In and case there will be no workers running around.
• People can be placed to become 1x1 "mines" that "mine" work for free (generating a little pollution in the process). "Work" is a new resource that replaces coal in all early building you can build for free. Work has Extremely inefficient storage to force you place the workers right where the work is needed.
• "Work" is the earliest fuel and automation you have. Very simple wood inserters "burn" work as fuel. Early wood made miners burn work at a much higher rate. Workbenches need work to craft stuff (either as fuel or ingredient). Even furnaces use work now as an ingredient in smelting (not replacing the need of actual fuel) - a step towards realism.
• So far the 1st step. Early Automation right from the 1st minute of play. Much earlier then vanilla as you only need a little wood. And this method is easy to balance by the amount of people you start with, the time and effort of making habitats and increasing your population, and the amount of pollution generated during work mining
• Now back to steampunk. I want the player praise the industrial revolution. Blast furnace is not another 2x2 building with faster craft speed. Instead, its a 6x6 building that needs 1000s of raw materials to build, but once its made it transforms some 100 iron ore (as well as some coke and limestone) into Pig iron/cast iron in several seconds. How can you not praise a monument capable of processing a full iron belt or even more?
• From now on things become larger. The many Reverberatory furnaces (2x2 "normal" furnaces) you used to process pig iron into iron are replaced with a 5*5 Bessemer converter (after a research you can use it to make steel). The Blast furnace gets a same-size Pre heater next to it to increase speed and fuel efficiency. Several smaller (just 3*3) foundries are now casting metal pipes and huge metal tanks, ready to start the steam revolution. The very first steam devices are probably going to be *large* steam miners and *huge* steam powered forges (with x10 speed compared to the man-powered variant).
  As you can see, the general theme is replacing vanilla's 100s of miners and smelter and the 10s of intermediate product assemblers with mach smaller amount of large remarkable buildings.
• After the early crude processing machines shrink back to regular size. As pleegwat suggested, assemblers and inserters use passthrough steam connection.
  You basically start vanilla/bobs mod now, but your basic inserters and assemblers run on steam directly, requiting somewhat more complex planning. Mining and smelting, on the other hand, id made with just few large buildings instead of annoying boring arrays. Oh, and anything electric is using electric motors now (iron plates+ copper wire)
• Some thoughts about metal processing... Iron processing Should probably be a multi stage process. Probably something like Deadlock's WIP.
  The inductrial way to make copper wire it rod->thick wire>thinner wire -> even thinner wire.
  Some recipes should be made of several materials, for example "huge gear" that is needed in the large buildings can be cast of 30 cast iron or just 20 brass / iron Or just 15 steel.
  Blast furnace can process most ores, not just iron.
  
• Some thoughts about people... I think the "work" needed in a recipe should be directly derived from the factory class, gradually going down and disappearing completely only for highest level assemblers. Even if you ignore pollution issues the manpower bottleneck should keep pushing you forward. Torrents should definitely require a worker and early archery towers should use few of those. Biters should see workers as "military" and prioritize them. and if a worker or a structure containing one is destroyed, is should spawn a wounded worker resource that can be very slowly revived.

Bottom line:
Adding survivors allows early automation right from the 1st minute of play. Much earlier then vanilla as "manpower" tire structures require mostly wood. It improves realism and allow interesting early game gameplay.
I want the early industrial revolution with a theme HUGE buildings capable to mass produce basic intermediate products. Those replace the boring vanilla's furnace arrays and make you praise humanity changing inventions.

[mexmer]

have you put though on on one simple thing? why the hell should person from civilization, that is capable of interstellar flight should start wirh preindustrial tech?

if you consider game canon, even steam engines are little off ... but somewhat tolerable, but anything bellow? we are not playing civilization or age of empires, where you have evolution and research timeline.

while factorio has research, to unlock further technologies, main constraint of research is materials, not missing knowledge.

[Evgeni]

have you put though on on one simple thing? why the hell should person from civilization, that is capable of interstellar flight should start wirh preindustrial tech?

if you consider game canon, even steam engines are little off ... but somewhat tolerable, but anything bellow? we are not playing civilization or age of empires, where you have evolution and research timeline.

while factorio has research, to unlock further technologies, main constraint of research is materials, not missing knowledge.

Well... to build stuff you need both knowledge and tools. They are some people with modern knowledge that try doing exactly that. Take primitive technology - this extreamly skilled man uses all modern knowladge but no modern tools. His most advanced achievements so far are automated mechanic wooden hummer and making few ~3mm bids of cast iron. Realisticly thinking, if he keeps eating and sleeping in his modern home but dedicate all his time to his YT hobby, he is just few years away from making reasonably efficient metal smelting to craft his first iron plate. Knowledge alone does not help.

[Deadlock989]

Well... to build stuff you need both knowledge and tools. They are some people with modern knowledge that try doing exactly that. Take primitive technology - this extreamly skilled man uses all modern knowladge but no modern tools. His most advanced achievements so far are automated mechanic wooden hummer and making few ~3mm bids of cast iron. Realisticly thinking, if he keeps eating and sleeping in his modern home but dedicate all his time to his YT hobby, he is just few years away from making reasonably efficient metal smelting to craft his first iron plate. Knowledge alone does not help.

Maybe. But does any of that make a fun game?

[Evgeni]

Maybe. But does any of that make a fun game?

Many players (including me) want to add complexity and realism after the vanilla. Just look how much players use Bob's and Angle's mod packs.
So extra complexity can be fun.

The not fun thing is doing things manually. Basically the game becomes more enjoyable after you get robots.
I think my suggestion make the game more enjoyable by cutting out the manual parts...

[eradicator]

Btw, i'm not really convinced the "labor" bit can be implemented in a non-immersion breaking way. Even if it might conceptually be fun to require labor, labor is esentially "fuel". But factorio only supports one fuel input per machine. And if you "fake" it by using labor as ingredient like described, then it doesn't behave like fuel anymore. I.e. Productivity modules would reduce required labor, efficiency modules would not. Just imagine you'd have to put coal into the ingredient slot when crafting inserters. Also as factorio is all about scaling up you'd need a good way to produce infinite labor (laborers?) which would feel wrong again, and if you don't have a way to do that you're artifically limiting the player.
(I'm thinking of the indie game "Factory Town" where every building requires workers, and you get workers by building houses, but the amount of houses is artificially limited by a "housing limit" instead of by the material cost of building houses.)

As for the steam-pass-through inserters... do inserters even support fluid fuel? And running assemblers on steam i would imagine is a planning nightmare, due to input being limited to one tile per side (unless you allow steam input everywhere). Also 90% chance assemblers can't do the "steam pass through" thing, i tried that in 0.15 or 0.16 and it had the "slight" quirk that it only works while an assembler is working, so as soon as one in the row has a full output belt it'll starve all the ones behind it.

Also i think it's time i say the evil thing because nobody has said it yet:
If you want that mod you'll need to make it yourself. Nobody is going to make it for you. If you get really lucky the best you can hope is constant help here in the forum. That's reality. "Request a mod" only works for trivial things that take less than a day to make, not for huge projects that need several thousand hours of dev time, because people with that amount of time and coding-skill prefer to make their own mods.

[Evgeni]

Thanks. Especially for the "evil" thing.

The "labor" does have issues. I'm not sure what i feel about putting labor in smelting ingredient (this issue exists only in furnaces). Maybe the coal should be an ingredient? after all, most early smelters have it mixed with the ore, and work only for a specific type of fuel. Smelting is usually done in reasonably large batches so you don't come to the "many cycles per fuel unit" operation mode anyway.

The modules/labor conflict does not bother me simply because early tech does not have module slots. modules are for advanced electric things where no worker is needed. But here is an idea: maybe you can make early workshops with crafting speed=0, and make worker a "module" that adds +X crafting speed (instead of the *(1+X%) )?

About growing exponentially:
1. Factorio allows infinite exponential growth only at late game, but they are many limiting factors during early game. Biters limit you to your spawn zone until you researth advanced weapons, building manually limits you before you have drones. In "Deathworld" you need tight pollution management, usually restricted to the absorbtion rate of biter-free tiles around you.
2. Workers can grow exponentially - you need to place a habitat(/village?/house?) and build few farms that feed it. I think setting worker's reproduction rate somewhat slower then the pace you need them would create interesting gameplay that pushes you up the tech tree, but i may be wrong.

I wasn't aware to the assembling machine steam feed problem and I have no idea how to solve it.


P.S.
What is the general attitude towards using content from other mods? What i need to do if i want to use parts from other mods?

[Deadlock989]

What is the general attitude towards using content from other mods? What i need to do if i want to use parts from other mods?

Read the licenses. Carefully.