Friday Facts #309 - Controversial opinions

[ggrnd0]

> and how many people would use a shortcut for toggling manual driving in trains.

i need it!

[Stinosko]

Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature

I disagree that importing/exporting blueprints should be removed to vanilla game.

1) blueprints makes it easier for new players to understand game mechanics: People have different ways of learning by reading, visual and doing it yourself. For reading you have forum/wiki ect. to help, visual you have YouTube, ... and third are the blueprints so you can build it yourself easily watch it work and tweak things to the build.
You can argue that you learn more by building it yourself of a picture/video but a simple blueprint does the same. Difference is in blueprints you can't make mistakes, are faster and if you accidentally broke (before you saved it locally) the build you just paste it again.

2) It allows to easily migrate blueprints from one pc to the other. i have no idea if blueprint are now synced by steam but i remember before i had to manually transfer them...

3) It enhance the community instead of the individual player. Factorio is the first game where i really felt there is a big community instead "a big playerbase". I think import/export blueprints contribute to that feeling. I see a lot of exchange of blueprints to help new community members: New players send their setup blueprints and experience talk what they did good or what could be improved... It also give a satisfaction if you can share a blueprint that others havn't thought about...

4) I disagree on this argument:

it eliminates the satisfaction you feel after finishing your creation you spent hours tinkering and planning

As not all users like this and some get frustrated why and start ranting why the Koverax is impossible to build. It's a risk to make the community (a bit) toxic in my opinion...

So my proposition is that this tool should only be modded in.

By removing (or never implementing in future games) you limited the people that enjoys the game, by including the feature in vanilla you give the player a choose to use it or not. Make it a mod is a bad idea, that means as developer you don't care about the benefits and give the same negative impact as other mod (no achievements anymore).

5) A workaround is very easy: start a new save import all blueprints, save them and go to unmodded save. So by removing or not implementing you make the progress harder to import/share the blueprint while having not mcuh of a negative impact is the tool is just vanilla.

6) Not all blueprints is about being the most efficient or the smallest. I'm thinking about giving a nice concrete logo blueprint to your favorite YouTube, streamer...

7) Once you go modded you're fast running out of online blueprints but being able to share them to review your build among friends is still a very nice feature...

[Kiu]

For some of the things you posted, I have to say I really like the mods which do some of the things, like the exploration (Abandoned Ruins, Rampart).
Starting a new freeplay, searching for some stuff and finding a basic elements of a power plant or some walls and some ammo for basic defense is a nice reason to explore a little bit and killing the time until your initial setup has produced enough stuff to begin with the master plan.
And with rampart, you should have walls on alot of places - it is not a skynet-will-destroy-you-level AI, but at least some basic retread and search another near attack area thing that makes sense for organic creatures with some basic intelligence (Starship troopers - BRAINBUG? )
But because you made one of the most important things (who needs the base game ) right - a great modding support (just check how long Quake 2 or Warcraft 3 are alive just because of that), we can have those small but nice improvements if we want.

With the inserters and such things, I have to say I would love some more minor imperfections, like the random gems you get with Bobs (diamond blocking your boilers because you forgot to filter?). But only some small organic things (even a hard drive guesses if it is a 0 or a 1, and sometimes fails ).

[Muche]

How is more unbound hotkeys a bad thing? (Except for how it can make the list more cluttered.)

[Flouid]

I honestly love the suggested changes to the pipe mechanics. It would make it so much easier and simpler to understand and I have a relatively simple (if probably flawed) way of still having flow restrictions. Maybe if there was a total throughput limitation on each grid such that it could only do something like 1200 units/sec split across all things inputting into it and split across all things outputting from it. Just tossing ideas out there. Love the game and keep up the great work!

[huancz]

I usually use the import/export BP feature only to mirror my designs if I need them on the opposite side of the bus. There are online tools that can do the mirroring fine (despite the argument that it's impossible to do it 100% correctly and 95% is not good enough to bother) and don't void achievements like a mod would.

If I use other peoples' designs, I just use screenshot and build it by hand, to get a feeling what it does and why does it work. So, I don't care for the most part, but it has some uses.

[Zaflis]

Items should have volume and mass

Just pointing out this bit with... "No, just no!" They're already adding it to Empyrion which was a terrible idea.

[Spieker]

[...]I imagine things like an abandoned railyard that would give one early access to a few prebuilt engines and rails, totally changing the way an early factory is designed.

I quite like this idea - maybe this could be toggled on or off, sort of like the "Bonus Chest" in Minecraft. However, I do see the issue that such a structure would always need to be there in the world, and unlike the guaranteed ores in the starter area, this structure should need some exploring, but at the same time shouldn't be too hidden.

And speaking of line-of-sight-blocking terrain features, we also need mountains. Not just rows of cliffs, but large and impassible mountain ranges that compliment the impassible (but non-sight-blocking and land-fillable) bodies of water.

I very much agree to this one, flat landscapes are boring. I like the idea of trains winding up over a mountain pass, or with more advanced technology, going through some very long Tunnel.

Items should have volume and mass

I'm not so sure about this, and maybe this could be an option that is deactivated by default, but big entities like the rocket silo or huge amounts of chemical plants or refineries should at least have a slowing effect on the characters walking speed.
In addition, acceleration and deceleration of trains should change depending on the mass of the transported items. Together with mountains, this would be very interesting...


I agree on the other ideas not being implemented, though.
Keep up the great work guys!

[glee8e]

> Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature
If you can provide blue print library sync-ing via steam cloud - or factorio cloud (or something) for people who purchased outside steam, I think this is not a thing too bad.

> Weapons shouldn't lock on
Horrible. No. Please don't. This is not Minecraft. Besides, how do you fight in your own factory then? Killing one tiny bug now means destory an assembler?

> Clearing bases should not leave you safe
This looks like an idea coming from 0.16. We can already adjust how aggressive biters expand right?

> Miners shouldn't output directly to belts
> Boilers shouldn't have a water output
No. Uninteresting change without adding any depth to the game.

> Pipes should work like electricity
No. It breaks immersion. We have an unreleased update to fluid mechanism already, right?

> Robots should take up space and time
Good call, yet, check for colliding robot sounds like a UPS killer. I also have a similiar idea: robot stack size should greatly reduce (say a roboport can only hold up to 100 robot).

> Items should have volume and mass
> Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses
Sounds like a good mod idea. Not for vanilla though. FYI, a particualr mod in Modded Minecraft does add volume/mass, and it is called a hardcore mod for experienced players only.

[FutureSpec]

Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature:
Agree, but I've never used blueprint import after 192 hours of play, so this likely varies by personality

Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses:
Agree! I know some people turn off biters, but I love building defenses and biters restricting my expansion choices so the game's not too easy

Clearing bases should not leave you safe:
Agree completely; naively I had thought they would re-expand with enough pollution; TIL

Adventure mode:
Agree totally that there should be fog of war; why have all these combat robots and such if you barely have to leave the base to explore?

Robots should take up space and time:
Agree -- robots, like solar, are overpowered once researched and built

Items should have volume and mass:
Agree -- carrying a train on your back is one of the most immersion-breaking aspects of the game. For that matter, water sources that never run dry...

[Mylon]

Re Robots taking up space: Roboports have limited inventory but I think this design space is largely unexplored. Their inventory is far too large. I've made this comment before, but I like how Bobs Logistics breaks up the omni-roboports into multiple structures. Antennas for coverage, charging stations for charging, and chests for robot storage.

[wheybags]

wheybags sounds like my bearded mirror universe evil twin.

<3

"Miners shouldn't output directly to belts". No. The total opposite. All machines should output directly to belts. Inserters are massively passé and were always boring to manage. They should be removed from the game.

This is actually something that is really great about factorio IMO. I can specifically compare this to the mechanic in satisfactory, where they have belts run directly into machines. I remember a point where I had a recipe that required a massive amount of screws. So many, in fact, that I realised one full belt of screws wasn't enough. In factorio, I could have run a second belt of screws to the assembler, and placed another input inserter. But because inputs were direct belt connections, and the machines had a limited number of input belts, there was just no way fro me to run that assembler at 100% speed, I just could not load it fast enough at my current tech level. Factorio's system gives you a lot more flexibility in situations like that.

Why don't you create a survey and allow people to vote for each idea.

Someone on reddit has done this: https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... s/exthg9x/

> There would also be no way to visualize the flow

No, u really can do it.
Visualization is pretty suitable when wave start flow after pipe connected.
In other times you can just visualize random waves in preview based on calculated pipe utilization.

And you can limit throughput too.

I know you can, but the performance impactb is massive. I actually implemented a prototype, where the code would pathfind across the pipe network between consumers and producers, then "lay down" utilisation on the pipes, in order to show flow and limit throughput. Even with some optimisations, and consider possible future optimisations that could be added, it was just dog slow.

[riking]

On blueprints.

We trust that you have received the usual lecture from your local Factorio community. It usually boils down to these three things:

1) Build it yourself first.
2) Don't be afraid to tweak the designs.
3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Paste blueprint string here:

[LotA]

These topics are controversial because they touch the core mechanisms of the game.

It's true that inserters mess up your calculations yet the feel of randomness they add is I believe irreplaceable. If you can stabilize their throughput while keeping their charm it's ok otherwise, i'd rather keep them as they are currently. I value their graphical benefit much much more than the gameplay annoyance.

I absolutely agree on the blueprint library, It's a great tool but badly used by players. Every multiplayer game looks the same. Same bus, same mall and so on... And no matter what, someone will abuse the function.
Maybe simply have a server parameter to disable bp library so you could start a server without and decide let say after 50 hours to turn it on.

Bitters feel unpolished to me. Of course they're not the main aspect of the game yet I believe they could use some changes. I'm not sure the ia needs to be that "smarter", on megafactories the bitter pathfinding/logic can already eat up a lot of processing time. I want them to be fast and fluid like "starship troopers", instead they seems clunky to me. Maybe something about their collisions (between each other)? How about bouncing/soft collisions? I'm ok with them being stupid but i'd like to have the feeling of getting overwhelm (by the number). The waves feels too little when you defend. On the other hand, while cleaning their bases, there you can have great amount than spawns and I'm very pleased with that.

Pipe pressure can be a pain in the ass but in the end of the day, it's another challenge to overcome, I like it. But I understand your perspective and it's true that if it was never there in the first place, i would have not bother.

Bots are OP, yeah they are but as you unlock them lategame I don't mind. I'm fine the way they work. Anyway, a nerf I see is that it takes some time to drop an item (reduced by research to a limit idk... 1 tick or 10 tick, it's a balance thing) and that only x (maybe 1 or maybe upgradable) bots can drop at the same time in the same container, much like when they need to recharge and they wait for their turn. That would be a very strong nerf don't you think? I haven't thought about processing time tough would that be cpu-intensive?

Factorio is a sandbox game and has been thought and design as a sandbox game, satisfactory is more of an adventure/exploration game in which the farming aspect can be automated (and should be). It's really different philosophy so It's no surprise it doesn't touch the same audience.
Line-of-sight exploration would help a lot to emphasize the player with its environment, but that means radar needs to be moved farther away in the tech tree, i guess a observatory tower could replace a low-end radar, high view distance but line-of-sight.
That also means that biomes must have unicity, a gameplay impact and not just a cosmetic effect. Some biomes are full of lakes, others of cliffs, some biome are more copper/iron-friendly, etc...
A lot of work but it sounds like a good idea to me.

[Philip017]

My 2¢
- Inserters should not chase items
Would be ideal, so long as they only pickup the item needed, sushi belts should still be viable, if this is not the case, then it will make belts alot more complex, we will need extra long inserters (3 wide), or adjustable ones.

- Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature
when the mod for this feature became available it was soft modded into the servers i joined, and definitely should not be removed, it is up to the player to decide if they want to share something with the community or friends, and using a string is the best way to do so, even if we had some players crash the server by inputting a bad string, most of those poor soles were banned as a result.

- Weapons shouldn't lock on
even though the idea is interesting, when you have a hoard of biters nibbling at your feet, having the ability to choose to fire on the nearest ones or the hive you really want gone is great, but if you change the mechanic of the smg to this format, they need to be piercing tracer, punching through biters and you know exactly where they are heading, if you want big and behemoth biters to stop the rounds the tracer should stop indicating that they aren't punching through. not opposed to this, but it's a bit far into development to implement.

- Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses
there are mods that do just this, for those that really want a challenge, for those of us that want them to be of no annoyance at all, they can completely disable them, or you can adjust them to the level of frequency by changing the adjustments in the map generator. for me i prefer to play with few and small with at least 40 mins between expansions. they keep me on my toes for a change in scenery to go clean them out of my pollution zone, but other wise i would play with out them. having the biters destroy my rails, signals and power poles is like having a player that comes into your game and dig them all up, and we ban those people.

- Clearing bases should not leave you safe
if this was the case then what is the point, global pollution you say? might as well play wave defense. which is totally something in the game! if you play with out biters might as well disable pollution as well as at that point pollution only serves to eat ups.

- Miners shouldn't output directly to belts
yeah this is controversial, but if they didn't they would need to mine a larger area, because not having to take it out and put it on the belt, means that the space an inserter needs along with the space the belt uses would mean extremely creative belt weaving or a larger mining area (by one block). but i totally understand this, i have watched several friends take the coal out of the drill miner with an inserter, thinking they are taking the ore out. now i watched a friend play for several hours and played through the tutorial in v12 (demo) before i bought the game, and got a good amount of incite on how to play long before i started playing, so i didn't experience this.

- Boilers shouldn't have a water output
this is something left over from older versions of the game, where we stringed along a number of boilers to get the desired temperature to use in the engines, this was something that was more complex, but the new method is only used for simplicity and space saving. pipes no longer cause the temperature of the fluid to be lost and we can store the "hot" fluid in a storage tank like an accumulator, less realistic, but a simpler mechanic and less ups intensive. if the boiler input from the bottom and output steam from the top this would be perfectly fine, it would necessitate additional pipes, but i don't see why it cant be. oh and yes i have seen my friends do exactly that, put the engine on the water side instead of the steam side, it helps if they turn on alt mode, but most don't know about it well enough yet and it isn't on by default.

- Pipes should work like electricity
ideally that would be great, but then at that point pipes are less immersive, you can teleport whatever from one end of the map to the other with out worrying about pressure and also through put would be unlimited and make the game perhaps much more ups friendly, but so literally unrealistic that you might as well make all fluids run on a wire.... pros and cons both ways, if it was mod-able then maybe we would see how many people like the idea, but i have seen more mods that make more use out of pipes than i have seen the opposite. besides if you want your fluids on a belt or flown, just barrel them and all is good.

- Adventure mode
there is a few mods out there that scatter loot boxes, meteors, through out the world randomly that can get your significant other to come to the game and play with you, but i recon it's the glorious graphics that satisfactory has that brings them to the table first and foremost. not everyone is good with top down games. some mods have made changes in the game like redmew group that gave us diggy but another mod would be factorisimo to give you that change of surface feeling. imo anyone that wants a more adventurous mode, there are mods that can accommodate you. for that matter there are mods for factorio that can serve up just about any experience, just check the mods page.

- Robots should take up space and time
haha i remember a version of the game that nerfed the bots to that point, but really now does it really matter that robots become the next best thing to teleportation, you have to do alot of research to get them that fast, and in the beginning you need large buffers to accommodate the slow robots if they are moving the items a long distance. for me robots are a convenience until i have space science going and can buff them for the megabase stage. at which point thousands to hundreds of thousands of robots fly around, not only are they more ups friendly than belts at this level but for those that want to reach more than 1rpm it's the better way to do it imo.

- Items should have volume and mass
the Rocket Silo Construction mod is exactly what i was thinking when i first started to read this, perhaps more mods can introduce stages like this like you have done in the v17 introduction where you need to repaid damaged buildings. this would certainly change the pace of the game, but i feel things like this should be left to the mod space. perhaps someone is interested in creating a mod to do just this? also i read the next one wrong with Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients, to which i thought: if you build the structure on site (assembly machine and larger structures), you wouldn't need to have any of them prebuilt, and returning the items used to make the building then seems reasonable. if you use the rule above in conjunction with this one it would definitely make for a different game.

- Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe
well this would be nice, but it is already working on it, what you started working on isn't finished yet, so let it finish if you value the single item it is working on, the really high tech stuff you probably want to wait on, like mk3 modules, or the u235 you mentioned, and heaven forbid you need need to move the silo while it's working on a rocket. but for the most part all other items if they go poof, it's not really a big deal. *BUT* if you cant use productivity modules on the specific item, might i recommend that the items be returned... canceling that kavorex process when it can't even use productivity modules seems a little harsh. a simple check could be performed, is there productivity module in the machine, or is this recipe capable of being used with productivity modules, if the answer is yes, the items are deleted, if the answer is no the the items are refunded.

- Power-user hotkeys
i change alot of my key binds and i don't use some of them and unbind the ones i don't, but for players that leave all theirs at the defaults and for new players that ask "what key is that" it certainly comes in handy to have a preassigned keybinding that can be shared. just dont ask me what key it is for me, because my key is probably going to be different than yours.

alrighty hope that you enjoyed my 2 cents and have fun in the game!

[TheBloke]

Regarding theoretical removal of Blueprint Import/Export:

Speaking purely selfishly, having the feature only as a mod would of course not prevent me using it. It would reduce the total number of available blueprints, but likely not to a huge significance for me personally, on the basis that the players most likely to create high quality and interesting blueprints are also the most likely to already be using, or willing to use, mods. Plus I have in fact not imported blueprints at all during my 'normal' playthroughs, only in later design testing phases. (EDIT: actually I did import belt balancers, the one set of BPs I allowed myself to import. If I'd lacked the ability to import, I would have re-created them tile-by-tile from screenshots.)

But I feel strongly that the feature should stay, because:

• A key attribute of Factorio, in my view, is its depth. Part of that depth is the ability to approach problems in a multitude of different ways. Another part of it is the fact that the game can be so many things to so many people, and different things to the same person at different times. It starts out as a 'game', but later can become a design simulation, a testing ground, an electronic playground. And frequently one player will move freely between those different 'modes', even within the same save.
• Therefore, I am fully in favour of any feature that enhances this depth and encourages different ways to play. And I feel BP import/export fits into that category. It enables players to try different designs more easily. It encourages them to work on improving their own designs so they can share them for others to try. This can and is done with screenshots and videos, but a direct import/export is a useful time saver which, I believe, further facilitates the sharing process.
• Having it a base game feature, not a mod, indicates that this philosophy is part of the core experience: this can be more than a game, it can become a hobby. There's a whole world of possibilities after the base objective of launching a rocket, and that this is part of the standard package, not only available via mods, which are by definition unofficial and unsupported.
• I believe that on the whole, more people are encouraged to try new things and to push their own creative efforts, than other people are discouraged from doing the same because they can just import a blueprint.
• I also think that the community as a whole is very good at recognising when importing a BP would rob them of fun and challenge. It's a common across Factorio communities to see people say "I don't import blueprints, I make my own." And those who do import them, usually have a good understanding of the impact that is having on how they experience the game.
• Moreover, there are some players for whom the enjoyment of the game is centred on the ability to leverage the work of others. I am reminded of a guy on Reddit a few months ago, who commented that he almost exclusively used imported blueprints. He did this because being a married father with a full time job, he had very little time to invest in gaming. He therefore felt that he got more fun out of the game by stitching together the BPs of others than he would if he had to start from scratch. This is not going to be a common experience, but it is an example of this feature improving the game experience in perhaps unexpected ways. To remove that feature would in effect tell him "you've been playing it wrong." And I don't think he was; he found a way to enjoy the game with his very limited time availability, and it was working great for him.
  • I could liken this to my own experiments with electronics. I briefly got interested in it, and did some tinkering. But I never had the time or inclination to learn enough to make advanced circuits on my own. Instead, I enjoyed replicating the work of others, and following guides that enabled me to make simple fixes and modifications on my own.
• Things might be different if the vanilla game was actively encouraging BP import/export. But in my view it really is not. It's a feature one usually has to find out about externally, and that alone tells a player that this is not a requirement for their early experiences. And it's pretty obvious to every player that in a game about building advanced automation designs, wholesale use of the work of other people is going to risk reducing the challenge and therefore the experience. I don't think the game needs to be prescriptive about this; it's self evident that this is a feature that the player needs to use judiciously during their earlier game hours. And I believe the community at large are self-policing themselves very well.

TLDR: I feel that the ability for every player to easily share their creations is a core part of the Factorio experience, and representative of it. The ability to share designs encourages more creativity in making them, more than it promotes simply copying the work of others. It indicates that the Factorio product can be much more than a game, it can become a hobby: one that encourages and celebrates endless creativity, and provides the tools with which to nurture and share the results.

All that said, I would not personally object to a 'tightening' of the system. For example, as already mentioned, the disabling of achievements when Import BP String is used (or switching them to the modded track). I think that would preserve the philosophy of the feature while providing a stronger indication that importing BPs is not the intended way to launch one's first rocket. Even then I still don't think such a limitation is necessary. But, were a compromise needed, I think that could be a workable one.

[rhynex]

EDIT: just saw these shall not be in game. Still I shall not change my post below. Take it as comments to your ideas in case you want to make them into game.

* Inserters should not chase items : hated the idea, makes game too predictable. no more fun to solve complex throughput problems.

* Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature: (if this is an idea for factorio 1) finish your blueprint redesign thing first and then bring this again. I do not use blueprints from another user but it cuts resources of a huge player set. you just made a change to gain new players because game was too difficult for some and now you cut another resource a new player might use as help? seriously?

* Miners shouldn't output directly to belts: more I think of it, more I hate it. go on please:)

* Pipes should work like electricity: it should be other way around, electricity should act like fluid mechanics

* Adventure mode: there are similar mods anyway, you can create a scenario easily. I will never play this though.

Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories.

this is first line of factorio.com, just wanted to remind you. make it in factorio 2 if you want.

-- rant starting now --

* Items should have volume and mass : makes sense, kills playability though. realism does not fit factorio much. just to nerf bots are you going to kill a huge system? how are we supposed to build a train network because we cannot carry enough rail on our inventory or cargo wagon now?
I dunno man, it looks super annoying. creating a train network takes hours anyway and it shall take days now due to carrying those rails etc.
what does "item stack" mean? did you forget this?
I feel that your hidden idea is to prevent robots to carry items. see last comment.

* Robots should take up space and time: robots taking space just kills bots because they shall have super limited throughput. logistic bots shall be trash.
I support build time thing though.

-- huge rant below --

* Robots should take up space and time
* Items should have volume and mass

overpowerdness-of-bots problem

main idea is to make bots not able to carry heavy things right? just remove the bots, dude. enough of this discussion over and over. just remove it so that we can mod game to bring back. why so hate on bots? does your new players rush to bots now?

there is another part of bots which everyone skip. bots require energy and more space (roboports). energy is free by solar. simple right? no brain needed even. you dont need perfect ratios even.
make bots require huge energy so bots shall be nerfed automatically, are you aware of that? make one bot require 1mj/m instead of 5kj/m and you nerfed the bots, yay!!
even after this change some players want robots? then respect those guys having TW level power production with their "overpowered bots".
by adding space and mass complexities you are forcing people to avoid bots entirely (which you want) but players want opposite. bots shall be useless like barrels right now. give me 7-to-11 or 11-to-8 belt balancers then because that is why I use bots.

-- rant ended --

almost all of the things above, make it mods or in "factorio 2". just release the game instead of unnecessarily changing it.

[ggrnd0]

I know you can, but the performance impactb is massive. I actually implemented a prototype, where the code would pathfind across the pipe network between consumers and producers, then "lay down" utilisation on the pipes, in order to show flow and limit throughput. Even with some optimisations, and consider possible future optimisations that could be added, it was just dog slow.

performance impact is massive only if you do accurate calculations.
you need calculate maximal ratios on network changes and use them as limits.
that will works fine on large and small networks.
The only one thing is do it in separate thread...

[Amarula]

Another awesome FFF! I love that you are throwing out ideas to generate discussion.

Inserters: I would like to see more progression in inserters (and belts and assembly machines...), such that the earliest versions are less predictable. So yes your burner inserters sometimes turn the wrong way and fail to pick up items, yellow belts sometimes jam and items fall off, AM1 have the occasional hiccup and drop or destroy a single input. As you move to better inserters, better belts, more advance factories, they get more reliable performance, not just faster.

Bots are OP: there should be some time required to construct/deconstruct items, maybe faster than a player could do it, but not instantaneous.

Hotkeys: I would agree with leaving more of the unusual functions unbound (like connecting/disconnecting rolling stock). On the other hand, it was really hilarious when I accidentally launched my pocket atom bomb and destroyed a chunk of my base

Item mass/volume: it is wrong to be able to carry dozens of locomotives, but I don't see any good way to fix it, and it is kind of fun feeling like Popeye the Sailor Man *flexes muscles* *downs another can of spinach*

[ggrnd0]

give me 7-to-11 or 11-to-8 belt balancers then because that is why I use bots.

no, give us Angel WhereHouses, CompactLoaders and MiniLoaders...