Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[albino]

I have many questions, and a few comments.
Does the recycler return items of the same quality inputted?
how does the 25% return work on items with less than 4 ingredients? would a gear return a plate only 1/2 the time?
depending on how it works i could see recycling being used to create better ingredients from trivial ingredients. need a legendary plate? just recycle gears to no end. and preform similar actions until you only supply your mall with legendary ingredients. if so, neet.

it looks like assemblers can be set to create parts of a given rarity, presumably requiring components of that rarity. if by chance a recipe is fulfilled with uncommon ingredients in a machine crafting common products, what is the output of the product? or will the machine accept items of other rarities?

Spidertrons have a bigger inventory
Turrets and guns have more range.

do vehicle weapons, or weapons in general get more range?
Do tanks and cars get more gun range, or speed?
Legendary spitters/worms?

Nuclear reactors, boilers and steam engines have increased production.

does the boiler get more "productivity" or is it more efficient with its fuel?
the former would screw with the 1:2 boiler steam engine ratio? it would seam weird to me to go back to the older way of many boilers and steam engines piped together to get proper ratios after so long of that being streamlined.

As others have said, please change the naming, though i guess mods can fix that.
I also find the labels unintuitive, unless the base model gets one "pip" (which i would prefer not) the tier two should have one pip, with the tier 5 having four pips, making pips "levels of improvement". Something tells me factorio players won't complain on counting from zero...

[Tertius]

Randomized loot in factorio is sacrilegious.

This is not randomized loot. It's input for a sorting and filtering and feedback facility. You filter out the items you want and feed back the trash into the production.
This is just a loop for refining stuff like the uranium feedback loop in the Kovarex enrichment process.
If you don't want that quality game, ignore it.

If you want quality gear, inspect the animated next to last image from the fff. This is an example how you create items with the occasional quality item, filter out and store the desired quality, and feed back the trash into production.

The challenge is to build a black box that includes proper feedback loops that do refining stuff. Input of that black box is "normal" gear, output is "legendary" gear. Now design that black box. That becomes a factory production line we never saw before in Factorio, so it's a genuine new challenge. Something really worth doing for an expansion.

[tamanous]

Actually I stopped playing factorio only because I ran into too high UPS drops.
If quality worsens the situation, I hope it can be deactivated.
If quality has no impact on UPS, I'll take a look.
If quality speeds up my factories, I'll use it.

[TheBuzzSaw]

All I ask is that they can be disabled at the map level. I don't wanna send out reminders to other players or rely on mods. Just lemme turn them off. Problem solved. Everyone wins.

[FuryoftheStars]

Person who works in real factory here (solar panels). Quality/performance is absolutely variable part-to-part and we heavily lean on statistics to understand the distribution of performance for the parts we make each day. It is impossible to make every single part the exact same with the same performance/quality due to random variables outside of our control.

Yes and no.

Absolutely correct, each one will not perform exactly like the rest. But they will all fall within a tolerance range. You're not going to have some that perform 2-3x better than others, or even 50% better, unless you're dealing with a very low quality product. Higher quailty products (which come about both from higher quality parts and manufacturing processes) can perform better than lower quality products, and will typically have tighter variances in their performance from one to another.

[RTC]

Actually I stopped playing factorio only because I ran into too high UPS drops.
If quality worsens the situation, I hope it can be deactivated.
If quality has no impact on UPS, I'll take a look.
If quality speeds up my factories, I'll use it.

the initial work of setting up a big enough factory that can mass produce high quality modules will be very expensive, but once that is solved you are getting a huge speed and productivity multiplier on everything you build, which means your final megabase will be much more UPS efficient than it would be without quality.

[IronCartographer]

Still, please consider multiplayer interaction in light of the polarizing nature of this system. Making quality not just optional per-map but actually per-player (allowing each player to choose when to engage with it individually and also leave it behind as desired) in terms of UI would help a lot.

This is literally not possible to achieve without having the quality disabled player missing crucial information and wondering why there are three stacks of iron that just won't stack, or why this splitter only ejects to one side. It can only work with being on/off per map. And no amount of mental gymnastics solutions will change that. Just disable it completely via a mod and/or have everyone agree beforehand to not do quality.

I explained more thoroughly in an earlier comment. Items would always retain quality indicators, and looking at a UI that currently had a quality setting would still show that there was a quality setting.

The quality on entities would be a separate layer than current Alt Mode though.

[MrDayne]

This is a mechanic that has me jumping in my chair. Imagine now all that equipment you have in mods, unlocking everything legendary. It's going to be like an RPG within Factorio, plus the added bonus of having a 100% legendary base, it's gonna be insane.

[Subway]

That Quality system... ummm... I cannot say that I'm a huge fan, but I'm also not against it. We will see how it fits in the game when we can test it.

The recycler is a cool piece of machinery! I'm waiting for something like that since I started to play. How about to use it to "recycle" all the dead biters and put them to biomass? This could be used as fuel or alternative chemical recipes. Collecting the corpses could be done by the logistic robots.

Great work (as always) and I'm looking forward to the expansion!

[ilikegoodfood]

I have some concerns over the currently suggested implementation of quality, but any suggestions I could make have already been made in much better thought out, researched, and detailed responses than I could produce.

There is, in fact, only one thing that is causing me genuine "Mayby this expansion will actually be bad" levels of concern, and it is this line posted by a moderator on the reddit thread for this FFF:

It'll be part of the expansion, not vanilla.

If I hadn't seen this one line, I wouldn't be bothered enough to post anything here at all, but I need someone to please confirm that this sentiment is not held by the development team.

The expansion absolutely is "vanilla". It is not a mod, or a custom game mode, but the big content update and overhaul that we have been expecting for years. If the sentiment behind devlopment is that it's not vanilla, then that is a monumental red-flag for me personally.

That's all I wanted to say.
You have more than enough feedback here to sort out the other issues (I at least skimmed over almost every comment on this thread, and some on reddit), if you're willing to do so, and don't succumb to the sunk-cost fallicy.
Regardless of how the expansion works out, thank you for an excellent game, excellent post-launch support, and generally good communication.

[KuuLightwing]

I thought I was registered here a long time ago, but apparently not. Anyway, I guess add me to the list of those who are not very excited about this. The reasons are numerous, I'll try to sum it up together as I've been posting that on reddit in different threads, but there's plenty of thoughts to be had.

1. I don't like is that it's essentially another tier system on top of other tier systems. I think it's not elegant from the perspective of the overall game structure, as different tier systems serve essentially the same purpose - make better versions of existing machines. This also creates unnecessary granularity to the tiers of the same machine or module. I don't think that factorio supports such granularity particularly well.

2. I don't like the visual design aspect - they are the same model with an icon attached to them. A more "honest" tier system would probably at least include new models and new animations, allowing visually differentiate different tiers of machines. Perhaps it is a necessity because of the way it is designed, but it doesn't make it any better as a result.

3. I frankly don't find the idea of just adding more tiers all that interesting to begin with. It is something that many mods do, and it's fine, but I personally hoped for more unique solutions for vertical scaling rather than just providing the same pieces with bigger numbers. Beacons and modules is an attempt of just that in vanilla, though I suppose it's a system with its own pain points. But in the end a "legendary" assembler Mk.III is no different than some modded assembler Mk. V with 150% more speed. So I do not see it as an improvement over just adding more tiers to existing tier systems.

4. The process itself - it's not necessarily the RNG that concerns me, what I don't like is that it's just one process applied to everything. In the end your only solution is to shove quality modules into machines and filter out the desired quality, recycling the rest. There will be questions as to whether it should be used in intermediates or final products, but it will be resolved rather quickly and optimal solution will be found. Frankly I just find it rather dull to have the same process used for everything. I wouldn't mind this process to be present in the game as a part of a production chain, but not universally applied to everything.

5. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it before recycler is unlocked, as I don't see the benefit of having random and unpredictable quantities of machines that are slightly better than the rest, I'd either plan around specific quality that I can mass produce, or not use it at all until I can have some predictable amount of machines.

6. I don't see what is the reason to have five tiers instead of, say, three, as process of acquiring better tiers doesn't seem notably different from previous steps. That seems like padding to me.

Probably something else I've forgotten, but these are my concerns and dislikes about the system.

[IronCartographer]

The expansion absolutely is "vanilla". It is not a mod, or a custom game mode, but the big content update and overhaul that we have been expecting for years. If the sentiment behind devlopment is that it's not vanilla, then that is a monumental red-flag for me personally.

As kovarex posted elsewhere, the expansion is three mods. It's all mods; the base game is a mod, the expansion is three mods. The real question is not really about vanilla vs. expansion so much as "official" mod vs. those available on the mod portal.

Don't worry about whether people call the expansion vanilla or not--it's another official mod design like everything in the base game before it.

[ilikegoodfood]

The expansion absolutely is "vanilla". It is not a mod, or a custom game mode, but the big content update and overhaul that we have been expecting for years. If the sentiment behind devlopment is that it's not vanilla, then that is a monumental red-flag for me personally.

As kovarex posted elsewhere, the expansion is three mods. It's all mods; the base game is a mod, the expansion is three mods. The real question is not really about vanilla vs. expansion so much as "official" mod vs. those available on the mod portal.

Don't worry about whether people call the expansion vanilla or not--it's another official mod design like everything in the base game before it.

It being technically programmed in the same way as a mod, accompanied by engine changes to support the more ambitous features, or as a direct core feature, isn't of concern to me. I know that many games are developed either in part or in whole in that way.

My concern is that it is not designed and thought of as a core vanilla set of features, but designed and thought of as a mod, or mods.
While many development teams could learn a lot from their modding communities, and could often improve on design and gameplay aspects by anticipating the likely desires of said modding community, there are different design incentives and goals involved in core developement and modding.

[Tricorius]

The expansion absolutely is "vanilla". It is not a mod, or a custom game mode, but the big content update and overhaul that we have been expecting for years. If the sentiment behind devlopment is that it's not vanilla, then that is a monumental red-flag for me personally.

I believe when they say “vanilla” they mean Factorio with only the Base “mod” loaded. So, Factorio 1.x, or 2.x without the expansion content loaded. As soon as you check the mod that contains the expansion, you get expansion which isn’t “vanilla” anymore.

Once 2.x is released, the nonclemature will be a bit more tricky. But yeah, I wouldn’t disagree 2.x with official expansions could be considered “vanilla”. Once you’ve enabled non-official mods it’s no longer vanilla.

I think that is just a “now” delineation as opposed to an official stance. I wouldn’t read too much into it.

My concern is that it is not designed and thought of as a core vanilla set of features, but designed and thought of as a mod, or mods.

WUBE are traditionally amazing when it comes to mod API support. I expect nothing less this time around.

Does the recycler return items of the same quality inputted?
how does the 25% return work on items with less than 4 ingredients? would a gear return a plate only 1/2 the time?
depending on how it works i could see recycling being used to create better ingredients from trivial ingredients. need a legendary plate? just recycle gears to no end. and preform similar actions until you only supply your mall with legendary ingredients. if so, neet.

I read it as the recycler will have a base 25% return that is then modified by its own quality and inserted modules.

You can see some with legendary quality modules in it and it’s returning varying levels of intermediates. They are even looping back “less acceptable” green circuits back into it and storing acceptable ones. Those, presumably, have a better chance of giving back higher quality intermediates (similar to how better intermediates can help guarantee higher quality outputs).

So, I’d assume you can pick between productivity modules to further boost quantity of return, or quality modules to boost quality of return.

Build your own puzzle.

Another interesting point in the below build, it’s bringing in basic quality greens from the top, also sending basic quality components back up (likely to the standard assembler which has no quality modules). So this is a way to keep your main bus “clean” and try looping quality up. You could then use those greens to help guarantee something of better quality, like maybe a personal bot or whatever. You have a stack or few of them reserved.

I neglected to circle these, but the lowest assembler is guaranteed to produce legendaries since it is consuming only legendaries. Those are tossed into their own chest. The second to bottom is producing mostly epic quality, but also occasionally a legendary. Thus the mixed chest.

Also, something Nilaus pointed out that had completely escaped me, that recycler is using a loader to push stuff straight onto the belt.

[FuryoftheStars]

There is, in fact, only one thing that is causing me genuine "Mayby this expansion will actually be bad" levels of concern, and it is this line posted by a moderator on the reddit thread for this FFF:

It'll be part of the expansion, not vanilla.

If I hadn't seen this one line, I wouldn't be bothered enough to post anything here at all, but I need someone to please confirm that this sentiment is not held by the development team.

The expansion absolutely is "vanilla". It is not a mod, or a custom game mode, but the big content update and overhaul that we have been expecting for years. If the sentiment behind devlopment is that it's not vanilla, then that is a monumental red-flag for me personally.

All they are saying with this statement is that the Quality stuff will not be released for free as a part of the 1.2 update and will require purchasing the expansion to get.

[rhynex]

sorry if someone already mentioned same things, there are just too many comments above. sorry for long text

it seems devs focused on "progression" than "outcome". in fact the change about tech in SE-- is also about progression changes. outcome of game is same but not progression, the path to achieve those achievements (tech, new entities etc). we do not know much yet so just a guess and observation from what we saw in previous FFFs

what I mean. imagine there is a mod which gives legendary items already. there are tens, maybe hundreds of mods like that actually, "there is a mod for that". the progression to achieve them is different though, just expensive recipes, different items in process etc. now in this design items are same with vanilla (no new objects) but different quality types of them. from point of inventory handling, sorting, it is not that different from completely separate items other mods offer. if I remember correctly in reddit one of the devs said the different quality items would not stack, so every item and their different qualities could be considered different item with different stats. if you put a different icon and attach a recipe to it, then congrats, you made a mod, just like others. the change is just the progress for achieving them. outcome is same with mods.

consider this: every item you generate is legendary (top quality). then where is the challenge of game? is the challenge of automation changed? no, it is exact same challenge, just numbers are different. check your favorite site or tool/mod to get new numbers and continue design from there.

so it comes to the first thing I said. progression of achieving those MK2/MK3... versions are different. that is the new challenge. take it, or not, up to player, optional.

from comments I see people dislike the idea of that "random progression" to achieve those, but that is my observation only. if it was a fixed/consistent way of achieving those then it would not raise those concerns. but then how different would it be from another mod?

my personal opinion and expectations about this FFF stuff: endgame "new" content is nonexistent to be honest, because "there is a mod for that". if you want to limit yourself with subpar items then sure (use vanilla, base quality), but there is always a higher quality item you can get (legendary stuff). what happens when you achieved them? done, nothing more to do. your factory most probably will work in the same way as before, just different numbers. so you did not invent something new actually. for endgame now every player has to design two factories probably, one with default quality (starter) and one with legendary quality (later). of course everyone would go for top high quality one if they could, because why not? "progress" is the new content, or automation of winning over RNG is new content. sorry, not exciting or funny at all. if I need 5 legendary item and within 10 seconds I created 5 then challenge is over. it is RNG after all, unlikely but potential, also 10 hours with no good result too, just depends on RNG, not your super fancy design.

not sure if devs count responses in a category but I am on the negative side if it matters, unfortunately. I understand what devs tried but I just do not like the implementation, because outcome is not different than mods and progression is not good I would say, does not fit Factorio style challenges. putting quality items in game, even tied with a checkbox does not make it optional in my mind. pollution and biters are optional too but you take them as game's challenge always and game has to balance around these too. just disabling one or two might affect gameplay a lot (biters especially, or expansion of biters for example, peaceful mode). this new quality feature would not affect much for sure but then for endgame it would force player to build multiple factories. anyone who dislikes that new "random progression" challenge will hate it.

---

to be honest if someone asked me how to solve that problem what devs tried to achieve, at first I would probably do the same thing actually (use RNG). introducing a new item/resource is too lazy and devs tried to avoid it for obvious reasons (because there is a mod for that). but also I feel this is lazy

I would go with the "outcome" path perhaps. just a fluffy idea. I would instead implement a new beacon which accepts some limited number of modules (maybe one). then invent a new kind of wire which can connect from that special beacon to every entity within range, not like a power wire. lets say the module you put into beacon is legendary module, so it shall make every entity within range legendary quality but only if connected with that wire (even though item built is base, regular inserter or assembler or other stuff). then that special unseen wiring from beacon to entities would be needed to set manually (or blueprint). of course beacon has to have limited connections accepted to make it more challenging. so for example if beacon supports four connection, then within area it should be able to support total of only 4 items (2 inserter plus 2 assembler = 4 , or 3 inserter plus 1 assembler). of course it is a beacon so you cannot fill it within our beacon rules, limited range and space etc. in that case the designs would need to change a lot, and quality modules you put would allow countless options, and you can upgrade them when you unlock new modules, then connect to different entities perhaps. it would also push people to use beacons more (because most people hates them). also items are always same, their stats would be different depending on that special wire so no inventory hell. I do not think it would be a super good idea but probably I would go into this kind of "design" related challenge instead. making new and complex factory designs is better and more fun than RNG progression I would say. the solution I provided is absolute and consistent, not RNG based. probably it is hitting the same roof perhaps but it is just an idea anyway. the progression is not the challenge though, outcome is different because of new design and it can vary a lot depending on how the structures are set by player, which entity takes quality bonus and priorities, effects etc. in the devs' solution when you access the highest tier then there is almost no potential upgrade. in this solution it is similar but progression is more factorio progression like, you build more, make factory efficient and upgrade more to open more options, at least predictable and consistent.

this kind of solution could also be applied to our current beacons, so we could avoid the boxed 4x4 like beacon structures. definitely changing a lot but could help about boring same repeated designs. beacons within spagetti factory would really look nice.

why such a solution? lets be clear, most people shall ignore legendary radar, or pole, or maybe turrets even. what does a legendary gear do? do we really need that? actually no, we need legendary entities, not intermediate stuff. it does not affect production, then it is not so fancy and does not have that "I must have this" feeling. anything that affects production is good, rest is meh.

[mmmPI]

It is also an incentive to avoid manual crafting, as i guess you can't actually place the white modules on the players.

The things you need in big quantities could gain little to no (average) quality from handcrafting, but small amounts of complex products would gain (significative) quality from manual assembly over automated systems, at a cost of time and maybe some ingredients lost. Of course, it would make sense to require the use of high quality components only. For example, I would manually assemble the Rocket Silo, or the Nuclear Reactors.

I meant manual crafting as in the crafting queue, those can't get quality upgrade, since player has no modules slots, although, you can still handcraft something of high quality if you have material of high quality.

Placing down a temporary assembly with quality modules for Silo or Nuclear Reactor, even the portable one, or the armor, makes total sense i think and is an incentive away from handcrafting in the crafting queue since if you do that, you can't hope too get a quality RNG boost.

[kirkbauer]

Person who works in real factory here (solar panels). Quality/performance is absolutely variable part-to-part and we heavily lean on statistics to understand the distribution of performance for the parts we make each day. It is impossible to make every single part the exact same with the same performance/quality due to random variables outside of our control.

Yes and no.

Absolutely correct, each one will not perform exactly like the rest. But they will all fall within a tolerance range. You're not going to have some that perform 2-3x better than others, or even 50% better, unless you're dealing with a very low quality product. Higher quailty products (which come about both from higher quality parts and manufacturing processes) can perform better than lower quality products, and will typically have tighter variances in their performance from one to another.

But the new quality system does match how CPUs work in the real world. A 3.2, 3.4, and 3.7Ghz CPU of the same family is the same thing made on the same equipment. But when they stress test, some can run faster than others. So they sell those at a higher price point. So the 3.7Ghz CPU is like a Legendary circuit.

[Pirate_Rance]

Since the MAJORITY FOR SOME REASON CANNOT READ let me post this

UNTIL THE RESEARCH IS COMPLETE NOTHING HAS QUALITY

[Demonsmith]

This is single handedly the worst addition idea I have seen in any games I play this is a nightmare for any big factory especially if you are one to set up building optimization quickly because you cant limit storage easily as they probably cant stack not to mention your optimization will be thrown off as you will have to accommodate the extra resources if you want more vertical growth add more levels to the miner production research and add higher tier assembly or add a "assembler speed" research to do it. This is just a nightmare and I will personally learn how to mod just to make a mod to remove this feature if you add it.