Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[Molay]

AWESOME! Oh my god, this really has me excited! I love the idea of "playing tall". One of the reasons I love krastorio so much, it adds those ridiculously fast machines. This is such a great feature! Instead of just going wide and getting more, I can see myself dedicating a big chunk of production on just stockpiling high quality mats instead.

Some things I like in particular is the radar range (I always use mods that make them wider currently) and grid slots. I wonder if quality also applies to trains (acceleration perhaps?) and cargo wagons (amount of cargo?)? Maybe could even apply to processed fuels (better acceleration?). I want my trains to go choo choo HARD.

[ledow]

Well, here's me hoping that whole quality thing is a late April Fools.

[Radjack]

Actually, I have another question as well. With Productivity being capped to 300%, does that mean Mining Productivity is capped as well? Or is there a little bit of nuance that hasn't been discussed yet that means we still can get bigger productivity numbers on things that aren't making intermediaries?

[Elocutiona]

Overall, I love this! But I also hate the names! I expect you will make them moddable though, right? I'd name them something like Crude/Low (and you only realize the quality wasn't even good before you unlock quality modules and see it), Normal/Nominal, High/Great, Exceptional/Superior and Pristine/Perfect.

Yea the names don't feel Factorio. Some less silly gamy names would be appreciated.

Totally agree your names suites better

They sound... simply incorrect to me as they are. A gear can be crude or pristine, but epic or legendary?
On top of being highly generic adjectives, aren't they just nonsense when not applied to unique items like one-of-a-kind swords or whatever?

[DeadMG]

Overall I'm really looking forward to it, but there's a couple things that need improving. The first is the quality names. What is this, an RPG? They should be given industrial names, like "basic", "refined", etc. The second one is that quality for inserters improves swing speed. It should be improving stack size so that the player doesn't pay a larger UPS cost for higher quality inserters for the same items/sec throughput.

[vedrit]

I wonder... is it possible to apply the quality filter to tiers? For example, my mod has 5 tiers of walls. If I could remove all the higher tiers and instead reference them in a similar way as quality, it would clean up the logic UI a fair bit. More so for larger mods that are chalk FULL of tiered entities.

[PaqpuK]

I actually don't like this.

The RPG-like quality names look stupid enough, but even if you rename them, you have just created a tiering system on top of another two tiering systems: the natural game progression (assmebly machine 1 -> 2 -> 3) and modules.

While this can create a late game mechanic, that allows you to scale some of your preestablished builds vertically, the way this mechanic works sound extremelty boring. All you need to do, is copy and paste the same structure that is just going to recycle lower quality items to get higher quality ones, rinse and repeat for every assembly machine/furnace/train?/roboport? etc.

Recycling to me would fit naturally into machine lifecycle, like if an assembly machine/furnace would have limited operating cycles, but handling that also sounds boring.

It creates more repetetive tasks instead of complexity and challenge (what I want from the DLC).

[Mooncat]

Overall, I love this! But I also hate the names! I expect you will make them moddable though, right? I'd name them something like Crude/Low (and you only realize the quality wasn't even good before you unlock quality modules and see it), Normal/Nominal, High/Great, Exceptional/Superior and Pristine/Perfect.

Yea the names don't feel Factorio. Some less silly gamy names would be appreciated.

Totally agree your names suites better

They sound... simply incorrect to me as they are. A gear can be crude or pristine, but epic or legendary?
On top of being highly generic, aren't they just nonsense when not applied to unique items like one-of-a-kind swords or whatever?

Yes, the names!
I know the intention of adding quality to the game and I believe it will make the game more fun to play. But the names make it more feel like a RPG rather than a factory game. You don't call raw materials that will eventually be mass produced "Legendary".

"Look at my legendary iron plates."
"What?"

On the other hand, "Perfect icon plates" sound more scientific and suits Factorio more.
Or simply use numeric representation like Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, Q5.

Also I don't like the quality icons.

Edit: or we can also call it Grading, i.e. Grade E, Grade D, Grade C, Grade B, Grade A.

[drewmate]

How will these qualities handle stacking? Especially wrt inserter hands. Will an inserter be slower, on average, if the quality levels are mixed?

In a similar vein, will this interfere with all the optimizations around saturated belts? It sounds like 10% (or more) of end-game outputs could be higher quality, which could effectively break up otherwise homogenous belts.

[Deadlock989]

This is a joke, right?

Right?

[Criperum]

I'm really confused now with quality and tiered machines. Now we have just 3 tiers of them then we'll have like 12 (T1.Q1->T1.Q2->...->T3.Q4)?
The overall quality idea is great but the implementation...
I'd say devs should change how recipes work to let use not an item but set of items so that better quality ingredients produce better quality result.
I've never seen an assembly line that suddenly makes better quality stuff but lots of them making worse by mistake or other reason.

[Fish-Face]

Yeah, the names are awful. Factorio is not Fortnite! (or WoW, which I guess popularised this tiering? I heard of it first from Fortnite, having never played MMOs)

The gameplay I guess can't be judged without trying it but on the face of it I am quite skeptical. 5 tiers of quality presumably means 5 tiers of design, which is a huge expansion of complexity. But it's worse than that because the complexity multiplies: maybe your design could be significantly improved by using higher tier power poles, but obviously the assemblers, inserters, modules can all also be swapped out. Existing designs already converge around a few optima: early game yellow belts/low tier assemblers and furnaces/no modules, late game blue belts/high tier assemblers/beaconed max tier three modules for example, and not loads of other ones. This already allows for a large variety of design choices.

It looks like this will force you to deal with two kinds of complexity: randomness (which otherwise was just limited to nuclear processing, which many many people seem to aim to bypass by immediately researching enrichment!) and this huge proliferation of different tiers of building, compounding exponentially into different designs. I think a new way to deal with randomness adds an interesting relatively self-contained puzzle. But *guess* (and it can only be a guess) is that a lot of the new design complexity will not actually add much, because it's simply too much to deal with. People will likely opt out of a bunch of it and just go for the lowest or highest tier in one key item. The obsessives will find a way to make everything in max quality. A few people will presumably not design with it at all and just chuck in a few quality modules and upgrade bits without planning stuff beforehand, but I don't feel this will add much because design is the interesting part.

[leion247]

This is an uncomfortable addition. However, 100% these tier names need to change. They don't fit even 1% with the games aesthetic.

[doktorstick]

The recycler creating better outputs than inputs feels wrong gameplaywise. To me, it seems like it should have a chance of producing the same tier (or lower) as the input, and that quality beacons would increase the chance to recapture the good inputs.

[dlloyd117]

Love everything in this Friday Fact and love the recycler. I love how it looks not and that fact 2x3/4 its brillant. Please dont change a thing

[Areckahn]

This is an uncomfortable addition. However, 100% these tier names need to change. They don't fit even 1% with the games aesthetic.

Both these things.
The system as a whole ... I'm very dubious about.

But the names, those desperately need to change to make it not seem like a joke.

[Suslik]

Honestly? Not a fan. Even with existing machine tiers I frequently don't even bother using anything past tier 1, and managing quality on top of that feels like a level of micromanagement that I don't need. Besides, having an assembly line where 2 assemblers are randomly 50% faster than everything else is just OCD-inducing.

[tuhe]

I am really warming up to the idea... I have long hoped to see more "recycling loops" in factorio, ala science cards in SE!

If the factory spends a good fraction of the resources assembling/disassembling, this would also have some implications in terms of bus-based designs since resources would need to be looped around.

For UPS purposes, this also seems like a step in the right direction: With a constant cost (assembly/disassembly loops, etc. for generating the high-quality buildings), the entire factory can be upgraded by a huge factor, therefore saving UPS by requiring less "stuff".

My concern remains how "scaleable" assembly/disassembly and sorting is for buildings that require many different materials (mods), and whether there can be annoying implications for blueprints (i.e. having a lot of low-quality power-poles that cannot satisfy a blueprint).

[fly]

Well, here's me hoping that whole quality thing is a late April Fools.

Same here, please tell this is a joke.

Ever since the expansion was first announced a year ago, I had made up my mind to purchase it, regardless of its content. However, my enthusiasm has waned today, and I'm now seriously reconsidering my intention. It almost feels like they might announce loot boxes with a chance of obtaining a legendary nuclear reactor next

[matjojo]

How will these qualities handle stacking? Especially wrt inserter hands. Will an inserter be slower, on average, if the quality levels are mixed?

In a similar vein, will this interfere with all the optimizations around saturated belts? It sounds like 10% (or more) of end-game outputs could be higher quality, which could effectively break up otherwise homogenous belts.

As far as I know the saturation of belts (as a UPS optimization) is not broken here, since dissimilar items can already saturate a belt.