Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[spiral_power]

I'm half-excited and half-anxious about the new feature.
It seems to me that UPS costs would go up with more types of items, but I am sure the developers have thought about that properly.
And this is a challenging feature that will increase play time.
Please raise the current game.tick constraint, 20,000 hour limit, more.
Even at this point I am having trouble with it.

[toman]

What about a less-rng option where you trade production speed for quality instead?
Since "Haste makes Waste", it'd be sensible that you can just slow your machines down -no module needed- and they generate higher-quality items

[Hares]

I have a really important question. Will there be EPIC Biters and LEGENDARY Behemoth Worms? Will them get ranks as they deal damage / kill entities?

[jaredjeya]

I actually really like this change. It introduces a new level of challenge at every stage of the game, and strategic complexity - and as is made explicit by the FFF, it is entirely optional. If you don't like it, never make a quality module, and you'll never see an enhanced quality item.

However...I fully agree about the names. Should be more industrial -- like "Crude/Normal/Refined/Pristine". I hope the devs read this and consider making a name change. If not, I'm sure we can mod them to be different anyway! It's just localisation basically.

[jamezhall]

I'm just a voice on the internet so who cares what I think... But I don't like this update. It takes away this simplicity in a way that I can only describe it being like when they went from Assassin's Creed early years to Assassin's Creed RPG mode.

I don't like the Idea of fortnite / rpg mode in factorio. The randomness of it all.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint did this with their weapon systems. Eventually they created an entire new game mode to please everyone by removing the coloured level of items and made it make sense again.

Like I said who cares what I think. Please at least consider different names... The chap earlier in the thread had good ideas with pristine etc..

Sorry but this feels like a miss to me.

[valneq]

At first I was wondering if that was a joke.

Now I'm merely sceptical. Not sure if five tiers of quality is a good idea. Guess we will have to see.

But for the Love of Nauvis, please change the names to something that works with the industrial theme of Factorio. There have already been some good suggestions in this forum thread.

[Lubricus]

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.

Was also thinking about it at first. But I don't think it will be that of a big deal because quality should only be relevant for the mall and not the science production. An megabase where UPS optimization is relevant have tiny mals compared to science production.

[AirForce1]

Absolutely stupid idea. Now you dowgraded into stupid MMORPG games where you enchant items with some low probability RNG and you waste your time and resources in HUGE scale!
Also why dont you just do it like a real facotries? Just make some switch in factories what kind of quality would you like to produce that change speed of production or maybe number of input materials. Do you think that real facotories produce product quality at random scale? Absolutely stupid!
Also some product in real production can be "upgraded" into better quality even after it was made (not all and not always of course) so why dont you do this?

Overall I really dont like the idea of quality like this and I hope you make something different or better scratch this entirely!
Sorry but this is absolutely no from me!

Where can I vote for NO for this idea?

[Elocutiona]

The idea of adding something like quality sounds like a good one. But, I have concerns about the whole random chance. Then again, have yet to play with the mechanic, but pure RNG isn't fun.

-Pure RNG is annoying. It's basically a wait mechanic that you can't math around. Will you get the right one? Well, you certainly have a chance. But, if you're unlucky, then there's nothing you can do but increase that chance. But there's no guarantee.
- It's hard to plan around RNG. It's too extreme on maybe giving you 3 legendary items in a row or none for hours. You can have 2 wildly different returns over a set period of time across 5 quality levels of different chances.
- It's not fun. I've already called it an arbitrary way mechanic, and someone else already noted how people immediately skip the RNG nuclear level. Because waiting for a chance of a thing isn't fun, unless you're invested in a gambling like scenario. Which isn't healthy.

Again, haven't experienced the mechanic firsthand, and while it sounds like a good solution for a need I do not agree with pure RNG. My vote would be go with samples of 100 or 1000. Every 1000 plates from a machine you will get 100 legendary quality (10%, if you met the requirements). When you get them in that 1000 plates, RNG. But, now at least you can have an expectation and math things out.

I don't think making it deterministic would work. If you knew that every thousandth craft would be a jackpot, surely you could run 999 generic items through it, and then a rare as your thousandth. By the time you seriously ramp up production of these things, the law of large numbers will make the math work out just fine.
You never actually "skip" the RNG nuclear level, it's not like it stops having a random component. You simply size things up and recycle the bad outcomes with kovarex. You can do the exact same with rarity. The reason early nuclear is annoying is not because of randomness, but because of the surplus of 238 you can't do anything with. It'd be just as annoying if the rates were fixed.

[AntiElitz]

This sounds really interesting. My worries that the expansion would only extent existing content has vanished. This sound like a new mechanic that will offer us a lot of room for optimasation and complexity. Really appreaciate the courage to introduce new mechanics that really make the extension play a lot differently rather than walking the easy and safe path here of adding more of the same!

I see that a lot of people are worried about RNG here, but I am confident that this can be solved if the game offers us the right tools to control this easily.

[Tekky]

I really like the concept of introducing quality to the game.

However, I don't like it that the recycler only outputs 25% of the resources.

I understand that reducing it to this amount is necessary in order to prevent allowing you to create a production loop that gives you more resources than you invested. However, I think it would be best to simply abolish production modules and to increase the recycler output to 50% or maybe 75%.

Currently, it is necessary to disallow production modules for many recipes, in order to prevent allowing you to create production loops that give you more resources than you invested. For example, the "Space Exploration" mod disallows production modules in space completely. Due to these (necessary) restrictions on using production modules, I never had the impression that the concept of production modules fitted well into Factorio. The ban on using production modules for certain recipes always felt to me like a workaround for a fundamentally broken concept.

Making the recycler only output 25% of the resources feels to me like yet another another workaround to this fundamentally broken concept.

[sniperczar]

Along with everybody else I have my own "Factorio flair" name suggestions:

1. Crude
2. Calibrated
3. Optimized
4. Precision
5. Fully integrated

[morsk]

I will take any mechanic that isn't just more 12-beaconing. We've already played Factorio: Beacon Age and I don't need any more of it in my forward light cone. So many beautiful and interesting belt mechanics and layouts get clobbered by the space restrictions of mass beacons.

People are going to figure out which parts are best 12-beaconed vs. quality-enhancing, but at least there'll be some places we get to see belts. And we probably won't beacon a mall, which I always hated. Malls will be free to use a great variety of layouts.

[thedoh]

If I put on my casual player hat, this sounds really cool in principle. I worry that the tedium of dealing with the various quality levels will be too much: Filter splitter after filter splitter to catch the various kinds? For every intermediate and product? Ugh! So very inelegant.

With my speedrunner hat I am screaming internally at how the changes are going to lead to potentially miserable gameplay for 100% category, especially with the new achievement (!!!! NEW ACHIEVEMENTS! HYPE).

I also add my voice to the chorus that take issue with the names of the various levels. I got strong Magic: the Gathering vibes from it (common, uncommon, rare, mythic) and that's not the crossover I'm looking for (tho universes beyond Factorio cards? ).

In any event, this was a quality FFF.

[aka13]

I have mixed feelings, rather bad ones.
This is what I have feared with the dlc being developed behind closed doors. I think that such a radical change in mechanics would have benefitted from community input.

On megabase-scale, it just feels like a tedious resource-sink with already mechanically limited thoughput. Balancers larger than 8x8 are unreasonable, ore mining is slow and tedious, ressources scale poorly with distance.

I wonder if large-scale logistics get a buff as well, if we the "sink" side got immensely amplified.
The 12-beacon-everything-era is then also getting changes?

It does not really fit to all the other "calculable" recipes, but I guess it was expectable after SE and initially Uranium with %-chances.

[AirForce1]

This is part of the DLC only or it will be integrated in the whole game? I hope you could turn this stupid RNG off. If this is activated by DLC I really starting to considered to not buy it righ now Because it is so HUGE game changing thing that you would have to change absolutely whole facotry from scratch in order to nosence RNG.
I was so exited about the DLC but now im not at all and really worried!

[Terry]

When I started reading I disliked this, mostly thanks to the naming scheme. But I think I will actually enjoy this mechanic a lot.

More importantly, am I the only one who noticed that those recycle stations are neatly Mirrored? Since I played Nullius, the ability to mirror input/output fluids has been my top desired feature so this animation gets me excited.

[Balint23]

I really dont like the idea of adding this amount of RNG to the game. With these names and mechanics (to me) it mosty feels like a F2P mobile game crafting system, and I dont think it will be much fun to automate either.
I think it will make blueprints a mess too, because if the maker of the blueprint makes use of these upgraded machines, then i cant easily swap them over to "normal" ones since the ratios will be wrong.
I think adding new module tiers to existing ones, adding rescearch that upgrades these machines or adding new tiers to them would be a better option. (Altough I know that it would mean lots of extra work creating new sprites and balancing the new machines.)
Also I think this adds too much complexity jump to the game, a new player could feasibly get to these quality modules with relativly basic building technices (aka spagetti) and not knowing that they can be simply ignored, interpret them as "mandatory" for endgame and get overwhelmed by the relativly complex belt systems that are needed fot these.

I am happy to hear that I can ignore this system, and hope that everybody who likes this system will enjoy it, but from what I read today it didnt win me over, and I dont think that this is a good addition to Factorio

[toman]

This is part of the DLC only or it will be integrated in the whole game? I hope you could turn this stupid RNG off. If this is activated by DLC I really starting to considered to not buy it righ now Because it is so HUGE game changing thing that you would have to change absolutely whole facotry from scratch in order to nosence RNG.
I was so exited about the DLC but now im not at all and really worried!

Base game will have everything be set to normal quality. So none of this applies without expansion. (Except maybe the recycler?)

[Elocutiona]

This is part of the DLC only or it will be integrated in the whole game? I hope you could turn this stupid RNG off. If this is activated by DLC I really starting to considered to not buy it righ now Because it is so HUGE game changing thing that you would have to change absolutely whole facotry from scratch in order to nosence RNG.
I was so exited about the DLC but now im not at all and really worried!

The way I understand it, lv 2+ only drops from machines with quality modules in them. You can simply not make any.