Friday Facts #304 - Small bugs; Big changes

[bhaktivedanta]

The concepts are "oil pumpjacks, oil refineries, outputs blocking recipes, chemical plants".

I think I get what you mean, but I don't think that you ahve given an entirely correct description of "concepts": Buildings and their placement do not represent concepts on their own in my opinion (also the buildings are all still present after the change), the lerning is rather about the new implications that those new buildings have:
- The player has already learned to use coal-powered steam-engines for electricity, so using water and pipelines should be nothing new.
- Building pumpjacks is straightforward, like a waterpump just on an oil spot.
- Refineries: Here is where the trouble starts: 2 liquid inputs required to be connected to the right input slot. Also several liquid outputs with their respective slots. This should still be doable at a single learning step, but this is my personal assessment only.
- Outputs blocking recipes: Big trouble! I believe that this is the core problem. Failing to realize that a "full" output capacity is the reason the entire production is stalled may even get players confused about the right way to connect their pipelines: Many will probably re-check every step they made building their oil-setup without realizing the actual cause of the problem.
- Chem plants should again be easy to run as the liquid-input - liquid-output scenario has already been practised with the refinery before.

If I had to make a design decision, I would probably have a gas-only recipe but with an animation that shows the discarded outputs being burned and with extra pollution added. I am not sure, however if such a visual clue could be easily added to the existing graphics. Also there should be a tutorial message pop-up to hint about blocking outputs.
I would also have tow distict triple-output recipes like it is now, as two such recipes in different relations make the process of output-balancing more flexible.
We now have the conversions from heavy to light and from light to gas via chem plant. However, if one needs more heavy in the first place, there is no inverse conversion (and cannt be for logical reasons) from light to heavy. So the option to switch between two triple-output refinery-recipes is actually very useful in shifting the distribution of the 3 oil assets more in the direction of heavy.
Also, as I posted before the challenge of automizing such a switching-process by activation refineries with one kind of recipe and deactivation the others is a nice and welcome challenge.

[VFaalcatnodriiro]

And food for though: Assuming basic oil outputs only heavy, I was able to whip up a setup that outputs all 3 oils in under 60s without needing to know ratios, without having to worry about bottle necks, etc:

I really like this for a new "basic oil processing" recipe, since it's not really "basic" to have the refinery do all the work for you and turn everything to petrol. No that sounds very very advanced. Your proposed "basic oil processing" feels like a factorissimo-version of an oil-setup, where all the cracking, the caring of ratios and everything is implemented.

[FerMod]

(...) a new feature so that a recipe can specify a specific fluidbox to use.

Nice, now we can prepare the water input before having Advanced oil processing. Like before the liquid mix prevention update.

At first I wasn't very convinced of the oil changes, but after thinking a little about the changes, I think they are nice.
I will have to play, to know how much affect the changes.

The lasers are beautiful, killing bitters is getting prettier and prettier. :b

[mmmPI]

What about BOP only yielding HO and LO in addition with basic (waterless) cracking repices.

I suggested that too ( but it is now page 5/15 so i'm bumping it again ) as compromise vs only Heavy oil
( that steal the use of the coal liquefaction for mega-baser, still delay the lesson of "multiple-output-can-clog ", makes water desirable near first initial oil)

The change described in the FFF reduces the amount of new concepts you learn at once by removing (delaying) one, outputs blocking recipes. So now you only have 3 instead of 4.

You can avoid delaying it, by having the basic oil processing yielding 2 differents ouputs, teaching the player that if one of the two is full the other will be clogged, starting with 2 different product early, getting to 3 later with similar logic.

If you get the basic waterless cracking at the same time, it's easy for you to compare 20 HO for solid fuel or 10 LO for solid fuel, so you know what to do with the HO, crack it, you don't need water , you do it right away. You crack your LO to Petroleum gas too, because that's what you want for the plastic.It does makes sense from a gameplay perspective to get the rawest product first, as you intuitively wants to refined them. And if you don't crack all the HO, the byproduct, then the refinery will stop. An you only have a very simple setup, easy to analyse, 1 input, 2 output.

If LO is full it's fine, since HO has no use at this time in the game. If HO is full, then you learn the lesson.

I'm not a fan of flare stack because in vanilla you definitely don't need them atm , but when i started to play, i saw on a speedrun from Anti-Elitz that you could use a steam engine to get rid of unwanted liquid ( which has been changed) so maybe i have a biaised impression of the difficulty spike when you don't have an easy way to delay the problem.

In this case, the flare stack would allow a "complex" receipe right of the bat, and you'd learn the lesson as ; this is a temporary fix for a complicated problem that you tackle when you feel ready , and not like a blocking wall but really when you are a beginner you wont build such an efficient setup that you would need flare stacks, you will produce slowly and adding tanks should be fine, flare stacks are more a lazy solution for experienced players to my eyes.

[Yandersen]

I like the oil change.

Oil processing in Factorio is a wall for new players because you have to learn many new concepts at once. In my opinion, the problem is that amount of concepts, not their difficulty. The concepts are "oil pumpjacks, oil refineries, outputs blocking recipes, chemical plants". These concepts aren't hard separately. They are hard together because have to do all of them at once, you can't naturally split them up. An example for a process that you split up would be iron - first you do mining directly into furnaces and use those plates for handcrafting. Then you build a smelter and automate plate use. It's split up. Trying to do it at once would be a wall just like oil.

The change described in the FFF reduces the amount of new concepts you learn at once by removing (delaying) one, outputs blocking recipes. So now you only have 3 instead of 4. The process can also be split up further by using crude oil for flamethrower ammo so that you already learn one new concept, the oil pumpjacks, before you even get to chemical science. It can also be split up by making the player build flamethrower turrets directly from the refinery output, so they don't need to learn chemical plants, however this needs some kind of incentive which we don't have in the vanilla game.

With the above changes, the process in no longer 4 steps. It makes sense to do it one by one, and at most the player is forced to learn three new concepts at once (if they ignore military) instead of the previous four. This removes the wall from the game that stopped many people from progressing.

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion. I was not involved in the changes described in this post.

While I do agree with you (remembering my first oil setup experience), I still see better options to alleviate the spike of learning new fluid handling concepts for the beginners. What I may suggest is to give pumpjacks two outputs - petroleum gas and crude oil. Both are produced independently, so if the crude oil goes full, the gas production doesn't get blocked. This will make learning curve smoother - to get the petroleum gas there will be no need for the refinery as PG can be gathered directly from pumpjacks. So a refinery is a second step.

The techs can be separated then - starting with "petroleum gas extraction" which adds pumpjacks producing gas only (crude oil output stays at 0) and the recipes based on PG, then we go with "basic oil processing" unlocking the refineries that process crude oil. Together with refineries outputting HO,LO,PG (outputs need to be rebalanced then to produce less PG in this case, or maybe even no PG at all!) the boilers need to get the third fluid input for fluid and start accepting crude oil,HO,LO,PG as a fuel. Same should go with locomotives, so a pump can fuel them too. I personally never used flamethrower, but I would be happy to burn unwanted petroproducts in boilers, or fuel locomotives with it.

[conn11]

What about BOP only yielding HO and LO in addition with basic (waterless) cracking repices.

I suggested that too ( but it is now page 5/15 so i'm bumping it again ) as compromise vs only Heavy oil
( that steal the use of the coal liquefaction for mega-baser, still delay the lesson of "multiple-output-can-clog ", makes water desirable near first initial oil)

Ups that I've missed. A steam temperature bonus (either inherent process speed or productivity) could be added to coal liqufidation, so that pairing it with high steam output from nuclear would make it much more efficent than the new BOP with cracking. Definitly a late game thing, wich dose not effect default coal liquifidation and would be an nice de facto optional feature.

[huancz]

Just one more +1 for the "I think oil was fine" side. It WAS huge difficulty spike. My first refinery WAS an unholy mess (how naive I was when I thought I could get by with one refinery and 2-3 chemical factories doing whatever needs doing at the moment, and not reserving more space). In the end I dealt with the waste by turning it to solid fuel and feeding it to boilers - because it needs access to water I had it connected to the same water pipe as boilers (for "efficiency" and "not wasting space", the most common resource the game has...), so it was near, and my coal source was very lacking. I still managed to launch the rocket in that game and learned a lot in the process. And loved it.

Now I'm trying to attack the 8h achievement and refinery is complete nonissue - I get about 7k stored "waste" products before I get to activate cracking part of the factory, long before the pump limit of 23k. It took me quite a few hours in sandbox to prepare this blueprint, but that's what the game is about - understanding the mechanics and dealing with them.

You managed to create awesome game so I'm more than willing to believe that you know what you are doing and it will work fine in the end... Still, maybe an option to world generation "old style oil refining", similar to how we get option to select expensive recipes?

PS: there's now way I'm updating before I get that damned 8h achievement. Best time 10:40 so far, I still have some improving to do without dealing with changes like this.

[Silfir]

But, you seem to have missed the point in my post. The quantity of new concepts is the problem, not the quality. Changing how easy it is to learn the concept changes only quality, not quantity - so it doesn't solve the problem.

Well, see, that is my problem, too. I'm worried about the new concepts you've added to the learning process.

Specifically, using petroleum gas for solid fuel. That's what you teach players now. Then, on researching advanced oil processing, they have to figure out that that's actually wrong and you should use light fuel to do it. You teach players a wrong concept, and have them unlearn it later. Isn't that absurd? I really don't understand how that helps. The stance of the developers on this issue seems incredibly short-sighted to me.

There is nothing in the Friday Facts blog that addresses this discrepancy, either. It just says "it makes oil processing a bit less of a difficulty spike". By my count, it makes it two difficulty spikes where there used to be one - instead of a basic oil processing spike, you now have a basic oil processing spike and a substantial advanced oil processing spike. From where I stand that seems remarkably short-sighted.



By the way: Pumpjacks are not a difficult concept. They're oil mines. Neither are pipes and liquids; players know them from setting up steam power.

It really is an UI problem. Whatever indicators you had that were supposed to communicate the issue were just bad indicators. I never noticed any of them (except for the refinery no longer working, which only does the work of telling you that something is wrong, not what it is); the way I could tell I was being blocked up was in the refinery window, when one outputted chemical wasn't disappearing instantly. Put something in clear writing in the refinery window and you can catch some more players who are having issues.

Or make a good tutorial.

I'm not part of the "burn excess fuel" faction, by the by. I want to do oil processing right, without waste. Crucially, I want to do it right the first time, not be forced to do it wrong and later correct it.



In the end, I always loop back to this: Please, please don't make me turn petroleum gas into solid fuel. I die a little inside just thinking of it. You taught me to use light oil for solid fuel. Don't take away my light oil and make me do it wrong.

[mmmPI]

What about BOP only yielding HO and LO in addition with basic (waterless) cracking repices.

I suggested that too ( but it is now page 5/15 so i'm bumping it again ) as compromise vs only Heavy oil
( that steal the use of the coal liquefaction for mega-baser, still delay the lesson of "multiple-output-can-clog ", makes water desirable near first initial oil)

Ups that I've missed. A steam temperature bonus (either inherent process speed or productivity) could be added to coal liqufidation, so that pairing it with high steam output from nuclear would make it much more efficent than the new BOP with cracking. Definitly a late game thing, wich dose not effect default coal liquifidation and would be an nice de facto optional feature.

At your discharge not many people seems to read everything and it's the first FFF that i'm aware launched such controversies

I'd like additionnal interactions with temperature and steam, i'd welcome other possibilites for late game, i am afraid a BOP that output only heavy oil, would be the go-to for mass lubricant ( robots/blue belts) even for late game, that's what i called "stealing the use of coal liquefaction for mega-baser".

[conn11]

What about BOP only yielding HO and LO in addition with basic (waterless) cracking repices.

I suggested that too ( but it is now page 5/15 so i'm bumping it again ) as compromise vs only Heavy oil
( that steal the use of the coal liquefaction for mega-baser, still delay the lesson of "multiple-output-can-clog ", makes water desirable near first initial oil)

Ups that I've missed. A steam temperature bonus (either inherent process speed or productivity) could be added to coal liqufidation, so that pairing it with high steam output from nuclear would make it much more efficent than the new BOP with cracking. Definitly a late game thing, wich dose not effect default coal liquifidation and would be an nice de facto optional feature.

At your discharge not many people seems to read everything and it's the first FFF that i'm aware launched such controversies

I'd like additionnal interactions with temperature and steam, i'd welcome other possibilites for late game, i am afraid a BOP that output only heavy oil, would be the go-to for mass lubricant ( robots/blue belts) even for late game, that's what i called "stealing the use of coal liquefaction for mega-baser".

IMHO it's rather better to have a relativ dumb concept with BOP (it would make a nice mix between BOP and AOP ) for the low tech lubricant, with the option to use coal liquifidation (maybe with some changes/ advantages) than a no brainer BOP wich requires only the occasionally AOP setup.
Well we had belts vs. bots now it's seems like the oil war

[BlueTemplar]

While I do agree with [Bilka] (remembering my first oil setup experience), I still see better options to alleviate the spike of learning new fluid handling concepts for the beginners. What I may suggest is to give pumpjacks two outputs - petroleum gas and crude oil. Both are produced independently, so if the crude oil goes full, the gas production doesn't get blocked. This will make learning curve smoother - to get the petroleum gas there will be no need for the refinery as PG can be gathered directly from pumpjacks. So a refinery is a second step.

The techs can be separated then - starting with "petroleum gas extraction" which adds pumpjacks producing gas only (crude oil output stays at 0) and the recipes based on PG, then we go with "basic oil processing" unlocking the refineries that process crude oil. Together with refineries outputting HO,LO,PG (outputs need to be rebalanced then to produce less PG in this case, or maybe even no PG at all!) the boilers need to get the third fluid input for fluid and start accepting crude oil,HO,LO,PG as a fuel. Same should go with locomotives, so a pump can fuel them too. I personally never used flamethrower, but I would be happy to burn unwanted petroproducts in boilers, or fuel locomotives with it.

No, this would be dumbing down oil !
Basic Oil processing is only supposed to be a temporary, inefficient solution until you get to Advanced Oil Processing !
(Well, excepting the situations, currently, when you need a massive amount of lubricant, stat! for blue belts...)

Also, having two resources come from the same spot is going to pose its own set of problems, AFAIK, nothing like that is implemented in the engine even for mods right now...

At your discharge not many people seems to read everything and it's the first FFF that i'm aware launched such controversies

Lol, where were you when the pickaxe removal (et al.) was talked about ?
Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of mechanics
The Problem With Pickaxes - Digging Out Factorio's Core

[jodokus31]

Just a small idea, which I hesitated to post, but here we go:

What if basic oil processing also outputs an residual solid item. Should be easy enough to setup a chest to collect and postpone the headache?
This item could be processed very inefficiently (f.e with steam) to heavy oil or lubricant or something like that.

This would achieve the following:
- BOP is still somewhat easy but wouldn't feel so trivial
- AOP is more desirable
- BOP is not so feasible for large scale

Problem is, that it teaches other concepts, which are not helpful on the way to AOP

[mmmPI]

(Well, excepting the situations, currently, when you need a massive amount of lubricant, stat! for blue belts...)

Yeah and robots , that's why you have coal liquefaction !!

Also, having two resources come from the same spot is going to pose its own set of problems, AFAIK, nothing like that is implemented in the engine even for mods right now...

It is in some sort i think https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/DeepMine not arguing if it's a good idea for vanilla though.

At your discharge not many people seems to read everything and it's the first FFF that i'm aware launched such controversies

Lol, where were you when the pickaxe removal (et al.) was talked about ?

That could be top secret !!, but really it's just the first time i see so many comments on one topic so fast, i wonder how the devs will be able to tell a general feeling that would not be biaised towards the most vocal players.

[BlueTemplar]

That one is different though - as you cannot decide what you're going to get, it's picked randomly.
(A bit like the difference between a furnace and an assembler... not sure how easy it would be to port the assembler logic to miners?)

[conn11]

Or rather than tossing a fine working, well implemented mechanic out the window have the option for a beginner (or starter) mode, in wich you have simplified BOP, early laser turrets and maybe future simplifications and strongly recommand to use this mode by e.g. checkbox for the very first freeplay.

[V453000]

I am quite surprised how many times I have read "the problem of multiple output refining is just delayed" in a bad meaning.

The fact that it's split (delayed) is a huge benefit - first time around you learn how basic pumpjack/fluid transport/refinery/chemplant works, and second time around you can actually do a puzzle as you already know the basic mechanics. Doing a puzzle AND learning the mechanics at the same time is the problem, and it's really not necessary to do both.

One of the less complicated but still contributing factors is that suddenly there is 5 different fluids that you need to do something with, and they go into plastic/sulfur/explosives on top of that. It's not complicated, it's just one recipe after another if you take it slow. But it's a many step process with many unfamiliar items compared to almost any other unlock in the game. I'm not saying all researches should only unlock one extra processing step, but oil has been too much for years and we have been trying to soften it since then.

I don't really understand the argument of "it's making the game simpler" and I feel like many people take it in the "git gud" way - "we understand it, make newcomers suffer too" (I don't assume all of people who posted this argument think along those lines, but I'm getting that feeling from many posts). Advanced oil processing is still completely mandatory to go through, it's just a bit later. The thing that changes is that you can access anything unlocked by Chemical science pack, but you can only get robots after you get Advanced oil processing going. You could say the puzzle and the reward is exactly the same as it was then - except cracking provides a solution to the oil puzzle other than adding storage tanks to fix the problem temporarily.

I've read many times the difference between getting solid fuel from petroleum gas and light oil. I think you massively overestimate how much a new player cares about efficiency, and how much should he. As long as the process runs, it's fine. New players also don't get 4 rows of full-belt smelting from the start, yet they still have fun and do progress in the game. However for now I did reduce the Petroleum gas price for solid fuel from 20 to 15.

Adding cracking with basic oil processing and having basic oil processing only output heavy or light I don't find to be a good solution. It would mean it just extends the refining process by one (in case of light oil) or two (in case of heavy oil) rather basic steps - when we already have a lot of basic steps.

Allowing the player to select individual recipes (heavy or light or petroleum gas only) would allow to completely avoid using Advanced oil processing. That's surely dumbing it down significantly. Adding flare stacks has the same effect of making Advanced oil processing completely optional additional complexity for more resource efficiency.

I believe Advanced oil processing should be mandatory to go through in order to finish the game, but it does not have to be when the player is completely new to the whole concept of oil. You didn't learn quadratic functions before learning to count on fingers either.

Getting robots a bit later is quite tough to justify as being a good thing on the first sight (my own reaction to hearing this idea from kovarex was WTF, but then quickly calmed down when thinking about it a bit), but there's a lot of factors that soften this. The extra additional delay really isn't that much. You only need to set up some chemical science and do a few cheap researches with it (currently you need total 275 chemical science packs total for construction robots). Also consider that setting up the refinery is less tedious as you don't need to pipe light and heavy oil, so chemical science pack is set up a bit quicker, and with perfect reliability that doesn't clog if you added too few storage tanks.

I think robots fit into the tier of Chemical science very well actually - along with Electric furnaces, Power armor, Nuclear power, Tank and now Laser turrets for example.

I wonder how many first time players actually use robots, too. I certainly didn't use them first time around, I didn't even know they exist and I had no idea that I need the storage chest for them. These things are better nowadays, but still. They are a powerful tool but completely optional.

Extreme case side note: It's quite likely UPS optimized megabases will use Basic oil processing as much as they can to avoid using cracking as much as possible - using Advanced oil processing only for the necessary lubricant and I guess the rest of light oil would go to solid fuel, possibly eliminating cracking almost completely. I don't think this is a big problem, it's just another solution that is heavily relying on single-purpose (SPM) ratio math.

[dood]

What happened to your idea to make early construction bots?
All you did now is push them back even further.

[_Attila_]

Well, it appears that all these pages of opinions were pointless and any more will be too. The decision seems to have been made and that will be that.

[V453000]

Well, it appears that all these pages of opinions were pointless and any more will be too. The decision seems to have been made and that will be that.

I'm sorry that I dare to post counter arguments or my general impressions, but please convince me otherwise about those points if you believe I missed or overlooked something.

[conn11]

The biggest concern I could think of, is that with the new BOP, new players will skip AOP, as for reasons stated quite good in the last 16 pages (e.g. reserving not enough spacing). Sometimes they will need lube, so minimal AOP has to been set up. Probably cracking all LO to PG , as stated new players likely don't care much for ratios. Even worse with coal liquifidation there is a good posibility to de facto skip AOP by coal liquidation. Sure it's purple science, but red belts are working just fine and following your argument will new players even use bots? It's much more easy to spam refineries and pumps and a +25% bloated PG output than get into oil chain, esspecially if you remove the need to work with balancing completly from BOP. Futhermore it's more like the real advanced, because easy process is the new BOP. And of course you are forcing any expiriencd player to deliberatly create inefficent setups.
Edit: Cracking dosen't requires mandatory balancing, at worse you will be overflown by PG