Friday Facts #211 - The little things

[eradicator]

The problem with nuclear power at the moment is just that the rules of its complex behaviour (the 200 seconds run, the 500 and 1000 degree limits...) is not described in game but has to be read from the wiki, but that will be surely corrected in time.

Without wanting to sound patronizing...do you really consider that so difficult to understand that you feel that reading the wiki is the only way to get to this info? When nuclear was first introduced i just built one and had my fun figuiring out how it works by looking at it. The temperatures and adjacency bonusses are clearly shown in the tooltips, and you don't really need to know the numerical value for the burn time per cell, just that it always burns even if the energy ist lost, which can be - again - figured out by observation, and isn't actually required to run the reactor, just to save (a lot of) fuel.
Admittedly i read almost every FFF and have spent my fair share of time playing the game, so my judegement here is certainly not unbiased. But i'm still having a hard time to believe that the nuclear mechanic is too difficult to figure out on your own.
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Could we have a key combination that make it so, when placing a blueprint, everything in our construction range which is in our inventory is placed ?

The ability to meaningfully interact with blueprints before you have bots is indeed something long overdue. Even you had to manually click onto each of the buildings manually to build them. Currently the only thing you can do is destroy the ghosts :/

[Demongornot]

Could we have a key combination that make it so, when placing a blueprint, everything in our construction range which is in our inventory is placed ?

Well, that would just make construction bots and the personal roboport nearly superfluous.

Well actually, if I suggested that, this is because manual construction lack a really important aspect, which is the settings.
Basically, if you place a ghost blueprint on the ground, if you manually build it, you still have to put modules, recipes and more importantly, the wires and the conditions...
Now imagine this is a complex early game setup that use a lot of wires to control something, well, because manually building it will basically remove the ghost and replace it by your object, you loose all of those setups which are sometime more important than the object themselves.
Also this is really easy to place your object one tile where you expected to, but now you may have just destroyed several entity on your ghost blueprint...
But I admit that self constructing blueprint would be a little too much, but :

Could we have a key combination that make it so, when placing a blueprint, everything in our construction range which is in our inventory is placed ?

The ability to meaningfully interact with blueprints before you have bots is indeed something long overdue. Even you had to manually click onto each of the buildings manually to build them. Currently the only thing you can do is destroy the ghosts :

Yes, clicking on them, like shift plus left click with empty hand for example to build them if we have them in our inventory would be perfect !

[JohnyDL]

There's a mod called ghost copier that copies everything except cables I think, you have to pick and place and have recipes unlocked but if you move the eyedropper tool from Q to middle mouse click it's really easy. Would definitely like to see it become vanilla

And I think Nexela's picker extended if you hover over a ghost and put the item away you place it. So spamming Q while moving your hand over a blueprint works with that too (though I believe it doesn't copy information like recipes and such)

Your mileage may vary but I use both and prefer ghost copier cause you should be used to placing items in the right place.

[5thHorseman]

Could we have a key combination that make it so, when placing a blueprint, everything in our construction range which is in our inventory is placed ?

Well, that would just make construction bots and the personal roboport nearly superfluous.

Untrue. In my current world I have Bluebuild installed and not only do I love it, I'm looking forward to turning it off and having construction bots do it for me.

Why? Deconstruction.

[meganothing]

The problem with nuclear power at the moment is just that the rules of its complex behaviour (the 200 seconds run, the 500 and 1000 degree limits...) is not described in game but has to be read from the wiki, but that will be surely corrected in time.

Without wanting to sound patronizing...do you really consider that so difficult to understand that you feel that reading the wiki is the only way to get to this info?

I'm aware of trail and error. "has to be read" should be read as "can only be read in the wiki if you want to read about the rules instead of trial and error". When I built my first nuclear reactor I actually didn't have the patience, so I read the wiki.

[Demongornot]

There's a mod called ghost copier that copies everything except cables I think

Well, I would like to try this mod, but without cables...

I mean, just look at this

2017-10-15 09_27_41-Greenshot.png (3.34 MiB) Viewed 5126 times

Imagine putting all those by hand...
But anyway, except Creative Mode for developing setups and experimenting and few visual and audio non game changing mods, I like to play vanilla...

But it depend, I think auto placing entity nearby is not a good idea, the start of the game is volunteer involving a lot of manual work, the goal is to work toward automation after all...
But being able to place down those we mouse over and click a certain key combo, even if we can just move the mouse like a crazy to build everything, will, in my opinion be better...

The best will be to have this feature, and a little latter but before the robots, having something else, like an experimental robot, ground only, slow, but can still do all the things construction bot can do for example !

The problem with nuclear power at the moment is just that the rules of its complex behaviour (the 200 seconds run, the 500 and 1000 degree limits...) is not described in game but has to be read from the wiki, but that will be surely corrected in time.

Nuclear isn't that complex in the game, also it is optional, because if we have enough accumulator and solar panels output, which we need in endgame anyway, we can use them to build solar farm...
And since they require no maintenance and don't output any pollution, nuclear is honestly just a fun thing to build (which I even build in my Lazy Bastard test even if I output ) rather than a true endgame item because of it's cost, maintenance and pollution, you need a lot to build it, to start the Korvax process also require a lot to start, you need outpost that themselves require sulphuric acid...
Even in this 100% vanilla Lazy Bastard game, before I even launch a rocket, I had enough solar power to make a second factory :

I mean, just judge by yourself

2017-10-15 09_49_00-Greenshot.png (741.09 KiB) Viewed 5126 times

And yes, the huge square on the top is my solar farm which is almost as big as my factory itself (and probably take more area than it) and output way more than needed, but I had fun placing all those blueprint and watching my construction bot going crazy
Totally overkill but totally worth it

So Nuclear is basically fun like that, and it can make for beautiful designs because of this complexity !

[meganothing]

The best will be to have this feature, and a little latter but before the robots, having something else, like an experimental robot, ground only, slow, but can still do all the things construction bot can do for example !

Nice idea. It just doesn't matter how slow that bot will be, because of mass production it will always be fast enough. So I think the idea to copy settings too when you put an actual item on its ghost seems to me the better way.

The problem with nuclear power at the moment is just that the rules of its complex behaviour (the 200 seconds run, the 500 and 1000 degree limits...) is not described in game but has to be read from the wiki, but that will be surely corrected in time.

Nuclear isn't that complex in the game, also it is optional, because if we have enough accumulator and solar panels output, which we need in endgame anyway, we can use them to build solar farm...

80% of the game is optional, does that matter in any way?

Did you see that above sentence is part of a dissent to someone who wanted to make the whole nuclear power setup easier? Nobody seemed to disagree with him, but that in-game documentation could be better seems strangely much more problematic to you and eradicator !?

But I can see your point, sure. For example the difference between Drain and energy consumtion: Is it a feature or a bug that you have to find it out by yourself at the moment? Maybe all that missing documentation should be put in tutorials and the first tutorial should explain to a new player that you can discover all this by yourself and that that is part of the game and you should watch the tutorials only if you are stuck.

[Demongornot]

I was just saying that actually those rules are not that hard, the hardest part might be to make a setup for the Kovarex process, it goes in your sense, there is no need to make nuclear easier as it not really that hard.
And yes a lot is optional technically, but nuclear is even more, most other object are used at least once or provide help for better output except maybe for the military, but nuclear is totally different, it have it's own resources and you play the entire game without doing anything related to it except if you want to, and it isn't even really more practical, cheaper or better than solar, so it is completely optional because of that.
I would personally like the idea of meltdown to comeback if we don't handle properly our setup !

[meganothing]

I would personally like the idea of meltdown to comeback if we don't handle properly our setup !

Second that.

[eradicator]

Did you see that above sentence is part of a dissent to someone who wanted to make the whole nuclear power setup easier? Nobody seemed to disagree with him, but that in-game documentation could be better seems strangely much more problematic to you and eradicator !?

But I can see your point, sure. For example the difference between Drain and energy consumtion: Is it a feature or a bug that you have to find it out by yourself at the moment? Maybe all that missing documentation should be put in tutorials and the first tutorial should explain to a new player that you can discover all this by yourself and that that is part of the game and you should watch the tutorials only if you are stuck.

Well. It certainly sounded to me that you wanted nuclear to be easier mechanically as opposed to simply requesting better documentation. And you misunderstood me if you thought i was against more ingame documentation. I actually voted for the inclusion of some sort of engineers handbook (like many Minecraft mods have, and is also common in 4X games). The only thing i was ever against is adding more clutter to the tooltips for the sake of "documentation", because i think that needs to be seperate. I merely added to that the thought that - personally - i do not feel the documentation is lacking as much as you seem to. For example i find the wording of "drain" and "consumption" intuitively obvious (though other locales may be less well worded).