Friday Facts #399 - Trash to Treasure

[aka13]

I absolutely agree with everything that you say. The problem is, that "my spagetti is this way" vs "my spagetti is that way" is not real variation. What this causes, as you say, that this is a playstyle thing, which simply makes one playstyle significantly worse than another one. I have been playing for a while, and I do not have a blueprint book for a main bus system, I design it a little bit differently each time I play. Often I end up with localized spaghetty scenarios, which can then be readapted into a grid-like rail base.

The problem is, that now instead of "I target a main bus system", there is an enforcement of "you can not have a main bus system, because you have to jump through some hoops first".
This is a design decision to lengthen the gameplay without adding additional content.

I feel this way with the artillery lockout, which was announced, and I am pretty sure that a bot lockout is coming as well.

This just enforces, that you have to play a specific way, or not play at all. Currently, I can resonably rush cliff explosives, and that makes a playstyle possible, where I can be as main-bussy as I want with reasonable ressource investments.
WIth the current shown friday facts, I will have to do so 3 (three) times at least, each time having to replay "you can't craft anything - spaghetti - megabase". A reasonable counterargument is "we will have to see, if it really is that way", and I also agree on that.

But what worries me a lot, is as I mentioned before, that SE is having exactly the same problem gameplay-wise. All planets and all technologies rotate around "Big enrichment building-useless byproducts which you can not void-recycler"-loops. If on top of that I have to do that in enforced spaghetti at least 3 times for a playthrough, this is as unfun as it gets for me.

I wonder how you deal with it on Nauvis with biters. You have to build defense... everywhere. There you don't complain or do you play without biters?

The last five years I played only deathworld marathon. I find biters an interesting, constant enviromental threat, but yes, indeed, I do think that vanilla is lacking automation for proper engagement far enough into the lategame. It's really tiresome to expand walls, I usually do it with artillery trains and blueprints, which work in many iterations.
I do indeed find the placement of mining outposts the weakest gameplay part of vanilla factorio. It is so boring and unfun having to set up the same stupid miner rows, which deplete too fast, and ressources scale too little with distance, plus the trains, which lack automation. I am really really looking forward to the new miners and trains, they will make that part way more fun.

I also have a small tiny sliver of hope that artillery will start charting chunks, so that expansion can be automated further, seeing as how remote view is also a thing in 2.0.

Well, there seems to be oil for forever and 3 days. Just make Solid fuel. Don't know what you are complaining about there. You basically contradict yourself a few lines further down when you mention that the planet has oil.

You can't crack heavy oil without water, which means you are going to be importing water, or doing the recycler loop and voiding stuff.

There will be a landfill, just later down the line. They even wrote it in one of the paragraphs.

I know, but it's as in previous FFF stated, that that landfill is "lategame" tech, so it is the third iteration of having to rush the landfill.

Also you don't have to build spaghetti. Do it with bots if you don't want weird belt path, or do you have an expensive "I feel too good to use bots"-subscription you can't cancel? xD

I like bots myself, but don't conveyors also have a place in your heart as well? The whole "limit the build area" thing affect more or less belts only, tbh. It would be even more tiresome just plopping down assembler-2logichest malls, than having to run spaghetti. I mean, I don't even have a real complaint about the whole buildable ground thing, but having the same "mechanic" of not being able to build where you desire THREE times in a playthrough in a building game just sounds uninspiring.

Don't be ridiculous. The items the scrap gives are easily broken down into first-tier intermediate items like plates and plastic. You don't even need a 3rd cascade of recyclers to get to it.
It just replaces your usual setup of first tier assemblers like furnaces/oil refineries.
Also there is good use for a lot of the items the scrap gives so you don't have to craft them. So you probably don't even need to recycle everything all the time. I know I won't and I will only start recycling something when I can't get the resource I want otherwise or chests start overflowing from the excess.

I also won't, but I just don't find the storage overflow mechanics fun. I also did not like the old oil, where you had to sit on a huge surplus of liquid, until you reach the needed technology. And at that time, in my opinion, the decision to streamline oil was the right one, which made the blue science jump way more bearable.

[MeduSalem]

All of this looks good.

If we can have 5 module slots (not to mention 50% native productivity bonus), does it means that an infinite production loop is possible with recyclers?

Not that it would be necessarily a bad thing (or would it?)

I was wondering the same. I think we will likely see how it will turn out when the expansion is out.

I know they wrote that there will be a 300% productivity cap on machines and that it is supposed to break the possibility to get net-positive from the 25% you get back from the recycler. So it can likely never be net-positive by just going 1 tier down.


That said I will still be cranking up my spreadsheets and see if there is somewhere an exploit in the crafting chain with all the new buildings, recipes, modules, quality and the recycling loop.

From theory I expect there could be net-positive in certain conditions; if the chain is deep enough AND the end-product is using a low-tier ingredient while one of the earlier steps in the chain also used the same low-tier ingredient. Then because of the productivity multiplication in between the cascade you might get more of that particular low-tier ingredient out by recycling the end-product than you had to input into the first step of the cascade.

But the numbers of ingredient inputs for that to be possible are very delicate.

Also I doubt it will overall be worth it because while it may be net-positive for that one ingredient, you would still have to waste a lot of other resources that are not profitable, so it would overall still not be worth it.


Also quality might actually be something you could farm over recycling. There totally might be items worth crafting just to break them back down and get better quality ingredients back which you then use for something else. And despite the loss of material through recycling, the process could still be more resource-efficient than if you would craft the stuff normally. I think it might be possibe because of how the probabillity stacks up. ^^

[FuryoftheStars]

This all looks pretty cool to me. Love the island hoping concept.

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there are already 3 tires of modules, and pretty quickly in the game everyone ignores tire 1 and tier 2 (or at least i do) , or people like me directly aims at tier 3 directly.
Tier 1 and 2 modules are pretty much only there to reach tier 3.

now there are 5 quality levels ... ?? .. do we really need 5.. ???. I think people will soon ignore lower quality levels .. and it is only a mean to reach to the highest quality level.
i would rather wait and make the best , rather than figuring to make use of lower tier modules and lower quality levels .. to me this becomes like work rather than a game ..
soon there will be more icons / items that we do not even care about in the list ..

I suppose 3 quality levels are enough .. each with notable benefits and worth using in builds ..
or
only one tier module which gets better with quality .. or something ..
request to re consider ..

I kind of agree with this. With the different module tiers and now quality tiers, I see (and can see) many people just skipping the early tiers until they get the last one. If upgrading modules and quality level of entities could be fully automated (vs having to manually setup and drag out an upgrade planner), I can see more use for the intermediate tiers.

But I suppose the devs went the direction of quality tiers to give us more "vertical" progression that wasn't just another MK # entity to stamp down replacing others (although, in those cases, at least they had trade-offs). Although, in some ways, this can be seen as still being exactly that, except it's like going MK 1, MK 1.1, MK 1.2 etc, then MK 2, MK 2.1, etc, etc.

Really not sure on the best solution.

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Also, capturing the lighting to produce electricity? Come on, most of your player base are engineers, they know better.

While I didn't follow it fully, from the previous FFF, there was a lot of discussion leading to (what seemed to me) conclusions that not only is it possible, but feasible, with the right tech and conditions.

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How long do things take to sink into the sands? Is it instant or non-buildable terrain, or could we run a temporary steering of power poles for example to kickstart a new island?

Most likely the oil-sands are just different texture water (albeit shallow to allow the player to transverse), so would behave in the same fashion - just straight up prevent you from building. The whole concept of "slowly sinking in" is lore to explain why you can't build on there.

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Do trains survive lightning strikes? Rails have been explicitely mentined as immune, if trains are vulnerable to lightnings, that would be quite upsetting. Unless there would be some mechanic to prevent trains from departing at nights

I believe it was mentioned in the FFF where interrupts were first introduced that there was a condition for these that would be useful for a specific planet....

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It also doesn't help that both of those planets are completely lifeless and devoid of risk.

Wasn't there something mentioned in the Vulcanis FFF hinting at disturbing a sleeping enemy?

[Dmytrozern]

Wow! And I mean it. This FFF is actually in the top 3, if not the biggest excitement I got from v2.0 teases.
Environment hazards? — Awesome. Cool new mood enhancer that gives character to the surroundings.
Tar rivers and small islands? — Hell yeah! Let there be train spaghetti! I was skeptical about using elevated rails since I usually have longer trains that do not need that much throughput, but with many small islands, I'll probably be forced to use shorter or even shuttle trains. Nice change of style.

But the biggest awe for me was the resource sourcing system. This one is BIG. New and fresh, calls for solutions to new problems. Will I decide to create several unloads for different components or go with mixed trains and sorters? Maybe even circuit-controlled unloads to save space! So many interesting options. Not to mention the actual need to diversify production. That's exactly what I was hoping for in 2.0. My hat is off to you. gyus.

To address the point about devs "forcing" and "constraining" us to do something — I'm embracing it! After 2000 hours, I'm bored with bus and cityblock designs. I try to find new challenges and embrace limitations like putting those cliffs to the max and prohibiting cliff explosives. Starting a run with a 25% cost for bug attacks (four times the frequency) to force myself to adapt. And considering there are a lot of soft-modded servers that do the same — a lot of people enjoy it. I still remember a no-flamer map that went south after one guy bumped the evo so much that we were overrun, but instead of giving up, 20 people went for the landfilled islands to stay alive and built a factory from there! That limitation alone created a whole new playstyle for harsh environments for runs to come. I still remember that excitement years later! After all, if you don't want limitations — there is a sandbox mode that you can build without any restrictions, right?


PS. With the electromagnetic plant graphic that goooood, I wonder if inserters gonna get a little update-love.

[Dmytrozern]

If there is a possibility of time of day triggers like weather effects only at night....just imagine what is possible on those new planets. Or what modders could do with dynamic weather. Think about the world from "Pitch Black" movie where aliens would attack only at night! 5h of daytime, then 15 min of night, rain, and bugs attack non-stop. And it's up to you if you want to defend it all or retreat to a safe spot and rebuild after. Pretty niche, but it could be an interesting mod concept.

[ywlf]

You can walk across them, but the only things you can build on the sinking sands are elevated rail supports and offshore pumps.


Does it mean all rails will be on one level.... again?

[vernir]

Lightning look super-cool (really), but you should think about sensitive people and those who struggle from epilepsy. Looking at lightning in a your trailers is pleasant and amusing but to be disturbed by randomized strong light (and sound) effects while making engineering for a long time sound like a psychological and physiological challenge. I’m referencing to the last animation with 3 electromagnetic plants, which features lightnings in real time I guess.

I love Factorio for it’s calmness as well (if I want stress I turn on Rampant or go playing RTS).

Maybe to introduce some settings hiding the most of the lightning effects when it hits in the attractor. Have no simple solution. Just highlighting possible issue.

[XT-248]

Doesn't Space Age have ways to throw away items? Just have a priority splitter and if the belt gets backed up, the items go into the garbage.

On Fulgora? With recycling removing up to 75% of material? That would work for non-basic products (steel, copper wires, etc).

The last time I checked, you can not recycle solid fuel (liquid) or stone (already in its rawest form and can not be processed further).

Then, one can not help but return to the fundamental issue of non-deterministic recipes occasionally giving players excess of particular resources without a reliable way to sink/get rid of them directly without extra steps.

You need power poles all around your factory already, it's not that different. Though these also work like night solar panels as well, so you basically have to put your power plant mixed in with the production.

The problem is about something other than the number of power poles players have to build.

The question is where and how to maintain the power poles against lightning strikes on the low plain where buildable surfaces are at a premium.

Yes, the power poles need protection but the wire does not. You don't build power poles on oily lowland, it's impossible, it's like water except you can walk on it. But if you landfill to place poles you can just protect the poles with the lightning rod just like everywhere else.

Fulgora landfill is not immediately readily available. Meanwhile, scrap processing has a 5% chance (the third-highest odd next to 7% solid fuel and 12% iron gear) to give you stones.

Unless there is a non-trivial sink cost to stone early in the Fulgora unique production chain, the odds are good that players will need dozens of buffer storage chests. The typical scenario in mods with recipes like those is to use a colossal warehouse to solve the buffering issue.

The non-determinism is a red herring, it has no effect on gameplay. You will get everything in proportion and you don't have to consider luck or bad luck.

Excess byproducts can be handled in many ways. There is never a need to manually clear out things you don't have a use for, you can just void them automatically. Fulgora is the planet that gives you the void machine.

Is the recycle outlet blocked by the exit belt being full and cannot accept more items, a red herring mechanic?

Void stone, how? Launch them to Vulcanis to be eventually tossed in lava? While players initially land and process their first scrap on Fulgora?

I am confident that people are underestimating dealing with non-deterministic recipes, especially those with different products that can block other useful products from coming out of scrap processing. IE: All non-scrap belts are full of stone in this looping video.



None of the visible belts in this footage have a stone outlet through inserters or splitters for the main loop. The secondary row of the recycler on the right area doesn't count, as none of them grabbed or consumed stone. The bottom splitter does not have an outlet and is used to merge incoming items into the main loop.

It is your right, what i meant by fix income is that unlike mining drill that allow to have an income of iron or copper and increase one or the other, the income of material on Fulgora will have "fixed income ratio", meaning you will always have the same amount of iron per copper for income, even if you do not consume the same ratio over the course of the game. This is what you describe as a problem. But to me this is like oil refining, where you can't have more "petroleum gas" if you don't deal with the "heavy oil" or "light oil" that could clog the system.

The difference is that RNG doesn't play any part in Oil processing but does for scrap processing.

I maintain my position and disagree that 'fixed income' is the best way to describe scrap processing.

Not processing at least one of the three oil derivates byproducts is a perfect example of the issue in the previous section with stone and the main loop, which can prevent the other oil derivates byproducts from being produced.

I think there will be several ways to handle the excess ressources that are not needed and may risk clogging the system, in space you can throw them out of platform, in Vulcanus you can throw them in lava, and in Fulgora i suppose the spotlight is made onto the recycling, so i suppose there will be ways to get rid of excess stone like there is a way to refine heavy oil and light oil. If you consistently have an excess of one ressource, it makes it a good candidate for exporting over space, or making high quality, this is part of the strategy to me, figuring out the "most efficent" use of such ressources, in that particular game, at that time. Weighting in if it's worth it to build a recycling facility or a sorting one, or a zone for assembly, or an export area ,this is part of what i like as a challenge in space exploration, localizing production based on the environment and available ressources is made more exciting when there are very different environment & ressources that have significant impact on the strategy.

Launching a rocket to deal with stone byproducts or processing stones into other products only to recycle them seems counter-intuitive when a more straightforward solution exists—ground deposits.

Fulgora may have had a civilization in the past, and I doubt that they would have exhausted all of Fulgora's stone deposits entirely.

I said i think it could be difficult on a remote planet where you may have to travel accross half the galaxy to fix it, so i'm not totally unaware of the thing i share some of your concern, but i'm confident it will be fun to solve when released

The community should compliment people having an awareness and appreciation of oil processing in Factorio.

Try some mods with RNG, aka non-deterministic, recipes to broaden your experience and leave your comfort zone.

[MeduSalem]

there are already 3 tires of modules, and pretty quickly in the game everyone ignores tire 1 and tier 2 (or at least i do) , or people like me directly aims at tier 3 directly.
Tier 1 and 2 modules are pretty much only there to reach tier 3.

now there are 5 quality levels ... ?? .. do we really need 5.. ???. I think people will soon ignore lower quality levels .. and it is only a mean to reach to the highest quality level.
i would rather wait and make the best , rather than figuring to make use of lower tier modules and lower quality levels .. to me this becomes like work rather than a game ..
soon there will be more icons / items that we do not even care about in the list ..

I suppose 3 quality levels are enough .. each with notable benefits and worth using in builds ..
or
only one tier module which gets better with quality .. or something ..
request to re consider ..

I kind of agree with this. With the different module tiers and now quality tiers, I see (and can see) many people just skipping the early tiers until they get the last one. If upgrading modules and quality level of entities could be fully automated (vs having to manually setup and drag out an upgrade planner), I can see more use for the intermediate tiers.

But I suppose the devs went the direction of quality tiers to give us more "vertical" progression that wasn't just another MK # entity to stamp down replacing others (although, in those cases, at least they had trade-offs). Although, in some ways, this can be seen as still being exactly that, except it's like going MK 1, MK 1.1, MK 1.2 etc, then MK 2, MK 2.1, etc, etc.

Really not sure on the best solution.

Well, the way quality works in many cases you will not be able to skip quality levels.

Every quality level has 10 times less chance to happen. So you would have to grind 10 times longer for each level.

In practice... you will not wait thaaat long for some legendary item to happen.

Sure, with quality modules (which themselves have also quality) the chances are much higher, but you will still not wait around for that to happen. I mean you will likely still try to get legendary quality modules first, then apply them down the crafting cascade to make the chances higher and higher so you can get more legendary quality modules faster, but...

... that is more something you can work towards in the endgame if you are basically like "done everything, now I want to go nuts and make everything legendary", but not something that you will try to aim for at the start of the game.


I also read that quality of items will be hidden from the start of the game for as long as you haven't researched quality modules yet... and we don't know when you will get that tech, if you can get it on Nauvis or later on one of the other planets. ^^
So you will totally craft away a lot of good quality items before you know what quality they were.

[husnikadam]

now there are 5 quality levels ... ?? .. do we really need 5.. ???. I think people will soon ignore lower quality levels .. and it is only a mean to reach to the highest quality level.
i would rather wait and make the best , rather than figuring to make use of lower tier modules and lower quality levels .. to me this becomes like work rather than a game ..

The thing is that at the beginning of the game, obtaining even rare quality items will be incredibly expensive and extremely uneconomical, as you have unlocked low tier quality modules of low or no quality. Every tier adds a huge boost to the stats, 30% per level and 60% for the final level. That is way bigger boost than f.e. +10% productivity of tier 3 prod module. I guess we will have to try it out ourselves once the expanion comes out

[mmmPI]

Also, capturing the lighting to produce electricity? Come on, most of your player base are engineers, they know better.

While I didn't follow it fully, from the previous FFF, there was a lot of discussion leading to (what seemed to me) conclusions that not only is it possible, but feasible, with the right tech and conditions.

I think the discussion actually went toward the other way about feasability of such things. Yes there is a lot of energy in a lightning bolt or in a the storm, but only part of it ever reaches the surfaces, and that part is divided between heat and "electricity", both being very difficult to capture due to the very short time in which it occurs, most material can't wisthand the heat and store it fast enough without being damaged or the plasma that forms and dissipate some energy, and same for the electricity. The magnitude of the strongest lightning bolts compared to the average being way stronger than the magnitude of tornados compared to regular winds some log vs normal distribution, and wind turbines are not adapted to tornados. It would require some gigantic infra structure to handle the two week of worst weather compared to the rest of the year, but it would also be the time where 75% of the energy of lightning is occuring. I'm making up number, btw, just to try and report what i understood from my reading. Why it's not being done IRL already is because it's difficult Charging some batteries would require some "alien" tech or something not on the surface, like the experience of Benjamin Franklin with a kite. There are some experiments, and it was mentionned sandstorms , if you think in a planet covered of metallic sand, the causes of lightning strike that occurs in sandstorm are not well understood by scientist, so anyone can pretend it works like that on an (science)-fictionnal planet. To be prooven wrong would require someone to bring in new scientific knowledge. Same as explaining how to harvest energy from lightning. ^^

[husnikadam]

So, the alien civilization mined the planet dry and left? Seems far-fetched, to be honest. Aliens had to get the resources to build all their stuff from somewhere, and now, somehow, these resources are nowhere to be found? And also, aliens use the very same intermediate products as you do? Aren't aliens supposed to be, you know, aliens? Imagine we find the remains of the ancient alien civilization on mars, start digging, and find out that they used MOS6502's in their computers. This is what this alien recycling looks like.

Also, capturing the lighting to produce electricity? Come on, most of your player base are engineers, they know better.

I would say that they didn't leave, they went extinct, otherwise they would take everything important with them away (wouldn't leave advanced tech, which would become scrap over time)

If you want to be super realistic, than yes, it is a bit weird that allies would have simillar technologies. But if you deal with completely new and unrelated items, that would make the game way more complicated. I am fine with the tradeoff of similar technology and reasonably simple automation

Who know how much energy can we actually harvest from the lightning. Maybe it gets very expensive as you may need sh*t ton of acumulators. As water supply is limited (water is essentially mined), alternative energy sources may be inefficient. Having electricity as a limited resource is a new, interesting concept

[MeduSalem]

Void stone, how? Launch them to Vulcanis to be eventually tossed in lava? While players initially land and process their first scrap on Fulgora?

As written by others. Throw the stuff you don't want into the recycler.

If it is already in its most basic form (stone can't be broken down further), it will return itself, but only with a 25% chance.

So you can throw in stone, and there is only a 25% chance that it will be returned. Loop the stuff around until it gets deleted.



That said, I am not sure when you will get the recycler from research (but I think it will be necessary to even do anything on Fulgora so it can't be thaaat hard to get) and if the generic item-recycling recipe needs extra research ontop of being able to recycle scrap.
BUT even if you don't readily have it, you could stockpile the excess stuff in chests until you have it, and then start throwing it into the recycler loop until it gets deleted and slowly decrease your stockpile in the background, not like you need to babysit it. ^^

[NotRexButCaesar]

Quality is something that feasibly can be turned off.

One screenshot here lists scrap recycling under "quality". So it doesn't look like it can be turned off :/

Even if quality could not be turned off, quality items are not produced unless you put quality modules in your machines. If you never want quality items, just ignore quality modules.

[husnikadam]

One inherited problem involving non-deterministic recipes like those is that one of the outlets can become bottlenecked if consumption is not balanced. For example, solid fuel is the second most common material on average. Lightning rods absorb energy during the night into accumulators, Ice + offshore pump-Heavy-Oil-to-solid-fuel boilers to generate energy during the day, rocket launches, and maybe rocket fuel for train logistics.

Then I look at the bottomless pool of heavy oil on Fulgora. I can crank as much solid fuel as I want or need. Why do I need solid fuel from recycling? Or even concrete or stone? Can I unlock the Fulgora landfill early enough to prevent a complete gridlock because all logistics are full of stones blocking/backing-up to the recyclers?

You can dump items non-directly using self feeding recyclers, as they yield only 25% of input resources, or directly into lava (if there is a way to bring lava to Fulgora)

You can crack as much oil as you want as long as you have enough water from scrap. Fulgora landfill is a very lategame tech, so no landfilling anytime soon. Dump excess items via methods above

[mmmPI]

It is your right, what i meant by fix income is that unlike mining drill that allow to have an income of iron or copper and increase one or the other, the income of material on Fulgora will have "fixed income ratio", meaning you will always have the same amount of iron per copper for income, even if you do not consume the same ratio over the course of the game. This is what you describe as a problem. But to me this is like oil refining, where you can't have more "petroleum gas" if you don't deal with the "heavy oil" or "light oil" that could clog the system.

The difference is that RNG doesn't play any part in Oil processing but does for scrap processing.

I maintain my position and disagree that 'fixed income' is the best way to describe scrap processing.

Not processing at least one of the three oil derivates byproducts is a perfect example of the issue in the previous section with stone and the main loop, which can prevent the other oil derivates byproducts from being produced.

We are talking about the same thing we are giving it different name, you have the same amount of light oil , heavy oil and petroleum gas from the receipe, but you don't always needs them in those proportions, so you refine them, i see the same for the product on Fulgora, you alwways get the same amount of copper relative to iron that's a proportion thing. Yes it's 12% but really it doesn't matter to me, it could be 12 it wouldn't change much.

Launching a rocket to deal with stone byproducts or processing stones into other products only to recycle them seems counter-intuitive when a more straightforward solution exists—ground deposits.

Fulgora may have had a civilization in the past, and I doubt that they would have exhausted all of Fulgora's stone deposits entirely.

processing stones into other products only to recycle them is what many many mods do, call it stone, gravel, scrap , whatever, it's a byproduct in a production chain that need be routed in another one under some specific conditions.

Launching a rocket is your idea, we only saw 1 single receipe ! What would be the point of making science if not for unlocking receipes ?:D

Edit : About stone depletion it may sound silly at first, but then you can research about the sand shortage on Earth despite deserts being full of it, because humans don't know how to make good concrete with desert sand, only with some beach sand. And concrete is the material the most used in quantity per human on average on earth.
Maybe the Fulgorans(?) depleted all the volcanic stone they could find because that was the only one they could use for a certain purpose and their planet had not volcanism active long enough to provide plenty of it, like obsidian is a rare volcanic stone. Also there is no stone*granite quarry near the great Pyramids,(some) stone is thought to have come from boat from hundreds of km away from the site, there was a real market at the time for good stone, it made cities develop around the quarries and leave when the surface rock were depleted. Maybe Fulgora was just a mining outpost from the aliens that are not Fulgorans, and they depleted all the holmium and left, the rest being sand and gravel.

The community should compliment people having an awareness and appreciation of oil processing in Factorio.

Try some mods with RNG, aka non-deterministic, recipes to broaden your experience and leave your comfort zone.

I've played plenty ! RNG is nothing problematic at all, the real deal is when you have 1:1 income of iron and copper and no good way to handle it, but at this point to me it's obvious the devs play their game, and they know this, im just curious to see what are the tools we'll be given to handle that.

[frostig]

the electromagnetic plant reminds me of theme hospital. in a good way

[FuryoftheStars]

Well, the way quality works in many cases you will not be able to skip quality levels.

Every quality level has 10 times less chance to happen. So you would have to grind 10 times longer for each level.

In practice... you will not wait thaaat long for some legendary item to happen.

Sure, with quality modules (which themselves have also quality) the chances are much higher, but you will still not wait around for that to happen. I mean you will likely still try to get legendary quality modules first, then apply them down the crafting cascade to make the chances higher and higher so you can get more legendary quality modules faster, but...

... that is more something you can work towards in the endgame if you are basically like "done everything, now I want to go nuts and make everything legendary", but not something that you will try to aim for at the start of the game.

Once I'm at the point of the game where I care anything about quality, I'm not going to start using Q2 or 3 (I don't remember what these tiers are called) items in my factory at large. I'm going to be explicitly targeting Q5/Legendary. Only use for the lower tiers I'd have is to upgrade the loop that is producing the higher quality stuff.

I also read that quality of items will be hidden from the start of the game for as long as you haven't researched quality modules yet... and we don't know when you will get that tech, if you can get it on Nauvis or later on one of the other planets. ^^
So you will totally craft away a lot of good quality items before you know what quality they were.

This is semi-incorrect. Quality is hidden, yes, but you also can't craft anything of a higher tier quality until you unlock the first research, create, and use quality modules. Quality modules are what allow you to create the higher tier quality item (and their use in recyclers is what gives them a chance to output higher quality while recycling).

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If there is a possibility of time of day triggers like weather effects only at night....just imagine what is possible on those new planets. Or what modders could do with dynamic weather. Think about the world from "Pitch Black" movie where aliens would attack only at night! 5h of daytime, then 15 min of night, rain, and bugs attack non-stop. And it's up to you if you want to defend it all or retreat to a safe spot and rebuild after. Pretty niche, but it could be an interesting mod concept.

This is already a thing now (re: alien attacks at night). There's a "Pitch Black" mod, and Rampant has an optional setting for heavier attacks at night. The time of day is already accessible to modders.

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You can walk across them, but the only things you can build on the sinking sands are elevated rail supports and offshore pumps.


Does it mean all rails will be on one level.... again?

No? You can't load and unload from elevated rails.

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The last time I checked, you can not recycle solid fuel (liquid) or stone (already in its rawest form and can not be processed further).

[...]

None of the visible belts in this footage have a stone outlet through inserters or splitters for the main loop. The secondary row of the recycler on the right area doesn't count, as none of them grabbed or consumed stone. The bottom splitter does not have an outlet and is used to merge incoming items into the main loop.

So, actually, you can, and it is visible in that video. Watch the third inserter from the bottom, middle row. It grabs and inserts some stone ore at one point.

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Also, capturing the lighting to produce electricity? Come on, most of your player base are engineers, they know better.

While I didn't follow it fully, from the previous FFF, there was a lot of discussion leading to (what seemed to me) conclusions that not only is it possible, but feasible, with the right tech and conditions.

I think the discussion actually went toward the other way about feasability of such things. Yes there is a lot of energy in a lightning bolt or in a the storm, but only part of it ever reaches the surfaces, and that part is divided between heat and "electricity", both being very difficult to capture due to the very short time in which it occurs, most material can't wisthand the heat and store it fast enough without being damaged or the plasma that forms and dissipate some energy, and same for the electricity. The magnitude of the strongest lightning bolts compared to the average being way stronger than the magnitude of tornados compared to regular winds some log vs normal distribution, and wind turbines are not adapted to tornados. It would require some gigantic infra structure to handle the two week of worst weather compared to the rest of the year, but it would also be the time where 75% of the energy of lightning is occuring. I'm making up number, btw, just to try and report what i understood from my reading. Why it's not being done IRL already is because it's difficult Charging some batteries would require some "alien" tech or something not on the surface, like the experience of Benjamin Franklin with a kite. There are some experiments, and it was mentionned sandstorms , if you think in a planet covered of metallic sand, the causes of lightning strike that occurs in sandstorm are not well understood by scientist, so anyone can pretend it works like that on an (science)-fictionnal planet. To be prooven wrong would require someone to bring in new scientific knowledge. Same as explaining how to harvest energy from lightning. ^^

Ok, I didn't follow it closely, but I do remember the discussion talking about if there was a shorter distance for the lightning to travel and the FFF hinting at these lightning bolts are generated from within dust storms... which are lower to the ground.

[Dmytrozern]

The last time I checked, you can not recycle solid fuel (liquid) or stone (already in its rawest form and can not be processed further).
...
None of the visible belts in this footage have a stone outlet through inserters or splitters for the main loop. The secondary row of the recycler on the right area doesn't count, as none of them grabbed or consumed stone. The bottom splitter does not have an outlet and is used to merge incoming items into the main loop.

According to the gif you posted, stone can be trashed in that recycler. Look closer at the second row, third inserter from the bottom. I didn't see solid fuel being trashed, but I did see ice being thrown to that recycler, so solid fuel can be, too, I suppose.

[DeadMG]

Um, does this mean that UPS usage from distinct electric networks will be fixed? Because this sounds like it would destroy perfomance in 1.1.

I am also interested in hearing if this issue will be resolved.

It has been fixed in 2.0

Out of curiosity, was this mentioned by Wube anywhere?

Yes

Where? I've been reading the FFFs as they come out and seen no discussion of UPS performance. Presumably they have made improvements but no specifics.