Friday Facts #409 - Diminishing beacons

[mwls]

A couple of thoughts after reading the FFF, both inspired by imagined "real world" mechanics — sounds like you already have a solution you're satisfied with for the expansion, but maybe mod support could be added/improved for these:

• I wonder if having beacons have a circular area of effect instead of a square one would lead to more creative layouts (especially when using transmission areas larger than 9x9). Or allowing mods to define other different transmission patterns/shapes.
• The title "diminishing beacons" made me think that the effect percentage would diminish with distance from the beacon, which could also lead to some different layouts. This could maybe be faked by mods with multiple invisible overlapping beacons, but would give misleading information for "effect sources" when inspecting entities.

I'm curious if you experimented with these options and if you found downsides to them!

[mwls]

So far, the changes you've been making have been fundamentally additive to the base game. This one makes breaking changes to existing game mechanics. You're smart people, so I'm sure you realized this, but I'd be really curious to hear a bit more about why you still felt it was worth boiling this ocean.

They've already accepted some level of breakages for this major version bump, with the new rail layouts and removal of rocket control units (for example), and have stated that even without the expansion, players will get the best experience by starting new games instead of continuing old ones.

Personally I see freshening of the base game experience as a positive, there's no fundamental benefit to the old "optimal" solutions remaining optimal forever. But people can make individual decisions on whether it's more important to them to be able to continue to use their old blueprints and stay on the old version of Factorio, versus getting the new features and QoL benefits at the "cost" of doing some new blueprint design (which in my opinion is part of the fundamental Factorio experience, so basically getting additional gameplay for free!).

This is going to cause a ton of confusion for people finding long-abandoned blueprints on the web and then not understanding why some don't work right in the game.

To be honest this is already kind of the case with sites like Factorio Prints, where many of the top-favorited prints are from pre-1.0 versions of Factorio.

[Bloodred217]

Hello!

I think the overall changes to beacons do sound like an improvement over what we've got in 1.1, but I have to admit I'm also a bit disappointed that all this amounts to is effectively a tweak on numbers rather than some more fundamental change to make beacons more interactive or in-depth somehow. Beacons go from passive power consumers with an AoE bonus to passive power consumers with an AoE bonus but different numbers on the bonus. I appreciate that the change in numbers will very likely result in a change in how we're going to build, but I would've liked the beacons themselves to become more interesting.

I know that sounds pointlessly vague, so just as a basic example, how about beacons require something in order to function beyond just power? Routing something to the beacons themselves would shake up the layouts and usage patterns for sure. Going further with this idea, this something could for instance be cooling, maybe even with a heat pipe connection (since heat pipes are so underutilized now). You need to remove heat from the beacon via heat pipes and the benefit of doing so could improve beacon performance. You could either have beacon temperature impact effectiveness continuously or perhaps just in a few performance tiers. Quality scaling can be included by having cooling and quality impact different beacon stats, for instance cooling could improve transmission while quality might improve beacon power draw, are of effect or even just the amount of cooling required (higher quality beacons need less cooling since they use less power).

Having beacons require cooling would also open up end-game scaling for other support production chains too, the heat extracted from the beacons has to go somewhere after all. There could be different cooling systems at different tech levels like simple passive radiators or regular forced-air cooling, large evaporative coolers which need plentiful access to water, refrigeration loops which can bring beacons to sub-ambient temperatures but need to be filled with some special refrigeration agent and so on. Since we're going to visit different planets, the different environments would even influence which cooling solutions are more efficient and in turn each planet could impact how effective or viable big beaconed builds are, after all if cooling is more difficult then perhaps you don't want to have them on certain planets, so you might change your logistics decisions on what to process locally too.

I just think the end-game scaling could really benefit from a bit more depth than just figuring out how to place the expensive AoE bonus buildings. I don't mean to imply that it's all bad or anything, train builds and direct insertion builds in general can get pretty tricky to design for beacons already (it's not all 8 or 12 beacon builds with belts or logi chests), but I think it would be very interesting if building big had a bit more of a design space to play in.

[Chumfactor]

Kind-a related, kind-a a tangent -- tied-in because beacon builds consider belt pathways...

What if there was a module that said, basically, "this assembly plant has a roboport for deliveries in & out"? No belts needed to that assembler; no loaders; robots can carry stuff in & out. The assembler is, basically, a combination requester/provider chest, too.

What neat is, you can make "request only", "provide only" or "both" modules and "price" them accordingly.

Liquid plants would still need barrels or some such to move liquid in & dispose of empty barrels.

Variation:
* "Loading dock" module -- adds "loading dock" capability to plant (in & out) -- just run belt (or underground) to attach-point, similar to where liquid piping is attached.

This would make for some interesting build variations, IMO.

[CyberCider]

Kind-a related, kind-a a tangent -- tied-in because beacon builds consider belt pathways...

What if there was a module that said, basically, "this assembly plant has a roboport for deliveries in & out"? No belts needed to that assembler; no loaders; robots can carry stuff in & out. The assembler is, basically, a combination requester/provider chest, too.

What neat is, you can make "request only", "provide only" or "both" modules and "price" them accordingly.

Liquid plants would still need barrels or some such to move liquid in & dispose of empty barrels.

Variation:
* "Loading dock" module -- adds "loading dock" capability to plant (in & out) -- just run belt (or underground) to attach-point, similar to where liquid piping is attached.

This would make for some interesting build variations, IMO.

What variations? This would do the opposite, it would make things simpler and more straightforward than ever. More than they ever should be.

[CyberCider]

I really do not like beacons. Conceptually, they are weird and nonsensical. They emit an aura buff to machines around them, which is just way too out there for me.

Beacons also ruin module build diversity. All beacon setups have blue speed modules in beacons and red productivity modules in machines. It's the best setup every time. Without the beacons, I use all the different modules in various configurations depending on parameters, optimizing production. It's much more interesting and engaging than any beacon setup.

I do play without beacons, but beacons are too powerful, and causes my factories to be way too big without them to reach the same production rates. And there are no beacon removal mods, but there are mods to change recipes, which I have used to compensate for not using beacons.

Obviously beacons cannot be removed from the game, but I wish the developers will address this problem. I would rather have modules be expanded more, to modify the machines in more clever ways, and offer options to opt out of beacon use in later stages of the game.

Also, I'm not hating because I have played the game for many, many hours, and love it. It's like crack in a good way, but it does have some sour bits to it. And I wanted to voice my experience with this mechanic, in hopes to improve the experience more in Factorio.


PS. Not sure if those new assembly machines in the last clip on the post were shown before or not, but they make me a little nauseous looking at them spin. It might be a motion sickness for me (similar feeling when reading in a moving car) and hope there is an option to disable the spinning.

The thing is, modules are much less nuanced than beacons. That’s the reason beacons exist, to make modules interact with the real factory layout and building process instead of just abstract values and UI slots. It’s much more engaging to make tangible changes to your factory and design new blueprints, instead of clicking and dragging items in an interface.

Also, wireless signals are “out there” to you? Really? You think the engineer can make nuclear reactors, but not wi-fi?

[Saphira123456]

Everything I see is great and all but I still don't see the reason they could have just kept everything on Nauvis and in Nauvis orbit instead of building whole new planets.

That way, just like launching a rocket ends the vanilla game in 1.1, once you press the "warp drive" button you win.

[Rebmes]

Yes, fantastic post and great changes, I didn't use beacons much but now I definitely will.

[Chaoseed]

People use beacons?

[CyberCider]

Everything I see is great and all but I still don't see the reason they could have just kept everything on Nauvis and in Nauvis orbit instead of building whole new planets.

That way, just like launching a rocket ends the vanilla game in 1.1, once you press the "warp drive" button you win.

Because the logistical separation between planets leads to much more unique gameplay. Planets can have unique sets of resources, and that can’t be circumvented by just a very long railway. Same with power generation, good luck running large power poles through space.

[MrGrim]

This is good. To the naysayers, you're never going to force "meta" players to stop optimizing the fun out of games. Any attempt to do so will eventually converge into a new meta with all the same complaints. This instead gives more options to players that want to target goals for their builds outside maximum efficiency. As someone who has always tried to make interesting patterns out of beaconed builds where I don't really care if I get a perfect 12 or 8 these changes ease up on the restrictions quite a bit.

[Syriusz]

Interesting. Two ideas:
-Make it so the scaling is per module type. So with mixing modules (maybe even mixing levels?) you get more effect in the end. How would mixing modules calculate otherwise anyway?
-If you want to make bigger impact on the builds, maybe make some assembler/ beacon combo? Assembler that transmits his own modules 1-2 tiles beyond their size, so packing more assemblers closer make them stronger. Apes alone weak, together strong, or something.
Both would require rebalance, but it could be interesting. The second one could be a mod, but I don't think I saw any like that.

[Saphira123456]

Everything I see is great and all but I still don't see the reason they could have just kept everything on Nauvis and in Nauvis orbit instead of building whole new planets.

That way, just like launching a rocket ends the vanilla game in 1.1, once you press the "warp drive" button you win.

Because the logistical separation between planets leads to much more unique gameplay. Planets can have unique sets of resources, and that can’t be circumvented by just a very long railway. Same with power generation, good luck running large power poles through space.

The logistical separation would be there for railways, just make every map giant-sized. As in actual planetary scale, as opposed to the relatively narrow ribbons we currently get for things like Rail world maps. Good luck running power poles OR rails across an entire ocean! Just make sure you code it so that there's a certain depth of water, a certain distance offshore, that even elevated rails can't traverse.


And no, as it stands now the current gameplay will be almost completely identical between planets.

Sure, there's a couple new sources for materials, and a couple new machines, but that's barely a difference. And there's ways to actually void things now, but that's nothing that mods haven't already added. There's nothing new here, that couldn't be added to Nauvis without trouble.

The only difference will be during the start, deciding which planet you want to start on. After that, the gameplay loops are all perfectly identical with a few mostly cosmetic changes between them.

Turn the space platform into a giant geostationary solar power station, transmitting power wirelessly back to Nauvis. Add a shipyard to build your eventual FTL ship.
THAT is unique gameplay, right there. And you never need to go beyond Nauvis. Hell, it's already a thing in Space Exploration!

You could do literally everything that 2.0 already does, without the need for any other planets. Different biomes, new machines, different enemy spawns, huge oceans full of oil, volcanoes and lava rivers, large piles of scrap just dumped everywhere, everything.
While the expansion looks and sounds great, there was literally no need for a vast majority of what it's bringing.

"Unique gameplay" my dragon's foot. Almost everything said in all of these FFFs are cosmetic changes only. Including the new planets.

[planetfall]

The problem is that, as I understand it, the solution to all quality production is to just do the exact same recycle loop over and over, for every item in the mall.

What makes you think this is how it will work? You think a recycling loop for a beacon, and a recycling loop for an assembly machine 3 will be the same? That’s like saying green circuits and engine units are both made by the exact same blueprint. Different items have different crafting times and amounts of unique inputs, which will require the blueprint to be adapted. And telescopic recipes like inserters are much more complicated to recycle this way, too.

Not really. You can make a setup for any recipe with N ingredients, which will only differ between recipes by the filters on the splitters on the return lines, and it will work for all recipes with fewer ingredients. I think you may even be able to auto-set the filters using parameterized blueprints - for all I know this is one of the use cases that led them to implement that feature.

Telescopic recipes won't really save it because different quality items don't mix and reuse nicely with base-quality items. If you recycle unsatisfactory stack inserters, you're going to end up with a mix of various-quality stack inserter components in ratios that only make sense to recombine into more stack inserters that hopefully roll better. The only real alternative on the table is you can try making quality intermediates to begin with but then you give up on using productivity modules, which is a massive tradeoff.

You can say, "well, that's factorio isn't it, you take 3 things off the bus, you combine them, you put the product back on the bus, every 3-ingredient recipe will look the same" and you'd be right, it's a real problem with how the incentives of the game run. There aren't enough processes with "fluffy" steps like copper wire that make it advantageous to build self-contained multi-step designs that demand more fun spatial spaghetti than "put machines in a line with belts on each side." I've long felt the green circuit trapezoid that everyone knows feels like an end-of-tutorial test of knowledge that is then never followed up by actual non-tutorial puzzles. Maybe the massive productivity boosts available in the expansion with the specialty buildings and the high quality modules will fix this, but the productivity researches laugh in the face of clean ratios which are a big part of what makes "perfect" builds so satisfying.

Quality and recycling offer to shake this up exactly once and then you apply that solution everywhere, except they've already shown off the solution in a previous FFF so there's not even the fun of figuring it out.

[TheoMarque]

I would say one thing. Game NEED Built-in MaxRateCalculator or other useful QoL mod to calculate REAL output of items without over-complicated excel math on side screen - this kill immersion when switch windows and recalculating output od for example foundry to not overproduce items that cannot be transferred or not sufficient input. From first few weeks when start play modded factorio - 0.16 - used mods for rate calc, due maths beaconed with productivity modules refinery makes me sick and can't create efficient layout for machines in reasonable time.

And, beacons save tons of UPS. Beacons are crucial for large factories postponing 1 UPS much later than without.
Anyway, I used in my last run Modules 4 - them sits near epic speed 3 modules. Clear way, reasonable boost. I know, is not good solution but is possible for me and I feel honestly to Factorio game design.

[wizcreations]

I never found the late game Beacon design to be all that exciting. I'm not sure this will make it more exciting. But this does make it different.

[CyberCider]

The problem is that, as I understand it, the solution to all quality production is to just do the exact same recycle loop over and over, for every item in the mall.

What makes you think this is how it will work? You think a recycling loop for a beacon, and a recycling loop for an assembly machine 3 will be the same? That’s like saying green circuits and engine units are both made by the exact same blueprint. Different items have different crafting times and amounts of unique inputs, which will require the blueprint to be adapted. And telescopic recipes like inserters are much more complicated to recycle this way, too.

Not really. You can make a setup for any recipe with N ingredients, which will only differ between recipes by the filters on the splitters on the return lines, and it will work for all recipes with fewer ingredients. I think you may even be able to auto-set the filters using parameterized blueprints - for all I know this is one of the use cases that led them to implement that feature.

This logic can also be applied to literally any other recipe in the game, I hope you understand that. You could make a setup of assemblers that accepts up to 4 ingredients and a fluid, and paste it all over your factory to produce anything and everything. It can be done. But do people do it? Of course they don’t. And so they will continue not doing it, because it’s wasteful and weird and unfun.

[Chrisdasdasd]

Ok, you are either treating us like we are stupid or hiding real reason for this change.

What you did won't change designs. More beacons is still better...
If you truly wished for cutting their number, you would code hard limits on assemblers and other devices.
Just like it is with efficiency but for productivity, speed etc.

It could be even interesting. For example, productivity would be limited by item quantity and not proportion.
Items that are overall produced faster would require less beacons, while slower ones would need more of them to get closer to that peek production limit.


This change was made only for space platforms and their constrained space.
Nothing more. Could have been at least honest about it. There is no shame in that...

[Saphira123456]

The problem is that, as I understand it, the solution to all quality production is to just do the exact same recycle loop over and over, for every item in the mall.

What makes you think this is how it will work? You think a recycling loop for a beacon, and a recycling loop for an assembly machine 3 will be the same? That’s like saying green circuits and engine units are both made by the exact same blueprint. Different items have different crafting times and amounts of unique inputs, which will require the blueprint to be adapted. And telescopic recipes like inserters are much more complicated to recycle this way, too.

Not really. You can make a setup for any recipe with N ingredients, which will only differ between recipes by the filters on the splitters on the return lines, and it will work for all recipes with fewer ingredients. I think you may even be able to auto-set the filters using parameterized blueprints - for all I know this is one of the use cases that led them to implement that feature.

This logic can also be applied to literally any other recipe in the game, I hope you understand that. You could make a setup of assemblers that accepts up to 4 ingredients and a fluid, and paste it all over your factory to produce anything and everything. It can be done. But do people do it? Of course they don’t. And so they will continue not doing it, because it’s wasteful and weird and unfun.

Except that this is exactly how the entire game works. Once you have the materials sourced, it's just a matter of stamping out nearly identical assembly lines for everything.

The lines may be shorter or longer, might have a few upgrades (that look identical except for color and work identically except for a minor speed boost) in the mix. But generally speaking, once you have the raw materials sourced that's it, you've finished the fun part of the game and started the grind.

You're right about one thing though: It's weird, wasteful, and unfun.

[CyberCider]

Except that this is exactly how the game works. Once you have the materials sourced, it's just a matter of stamping out nearly identical assembly lines for everything.

Well, this is getting a little off track from the original statement. If you think this is a deeper, more fundamental problem with the game and not just a flawed implementation of the quality system within said fundamentals, then I can respect that. I don’t feel any need to disagree with this specific sentiment, especially seeing that your reasoning is at the very least consistent. So, in short: You do you, I guess.

Edit: Just now noticed that you’re a different user than the guy who originally complained about quality recycling. Awkward, I guess…