Friday Facts #414 - Spoils of Agriculture

[mcmase]

I think people are forgetting that spoilage is a thing because its coming from a natural resource... that is to say RENEWABLE. So who cares if you're continually pumping out the organic science packs and spoiling them? You aren't draining a patch of ore or burning oil reserves, its all coming from your fully automated orchard with constant, unchanging production of organics.

Yes, it changes the rules by adding spoilage, but also changes the rules of the resources accordingly. So I actually really like this mechanic (and all the new mechanics in the expansion).

Wonder if quality will apply? Make items spoil slower? Or even could be faster haha....

Also, reading where is says minutes to hours... I can't imagine the science packs being on the low end there, so unless you're gaming for a full day--which does happen, so I get it--but most of the time at least for me these things won't just be spoiling left and right while I'm playing.

Top notch stuff here.

[gGeorg]

Also, why harvesting the fruits removes the whole tree? This is not how the fruit trees usually work.

Hop plant
Potato
Cucumber
Tomato
...

Textbook examples of the fruit trees indeed (BTW, you don't destroy the plants when you harvest cucumbers or tomato).

I admit, I didnt reach master degree in xenobiology. These plants mentioned are examples of earth flora. One year earth period is enough to produce consumable where the plant is destroyed in the harvest process.

Terminology of fruit or veggies are a bit fuzzy. Especially check tomato classification.
I could imagine a fast growing alien plant ( which is made of tough material similar to wood), where plant is destroyed in the harvest process.

[BEEFE]

I was surprised that mashing fruits only yields solid products, rather than any liquid juice. I figure fluids don't play well with the new spoilage system, but everything about Gleba screams to be covered in a mass of labyrinthine pipes! The biochambers especially seem kin to the chemical plants.

Plant processing facilities love to be full of tubes. Here's a winery:


That said, plumbing for a single fluid isn't very complicated or interesting, so idk. I want pipes, I understand why I'm not seeing them, but that doesn't make the craving go away.

[K4L1R]

Esta muy fuerte toda la actualización, ni idea de cuantas horas de más le van a meter pero esta genial y mucho.

[Svip]

I find the complaints that spoilage will change how one plays Factorio to be particularly strange. Isn't that sort of the whole point? What do you want from a Factorio expansion? Just more of the same? The developers are adding new interesting ways to think about your factory design rather than just adding a new lick of paint. Besides, no one is forcing you to play Space Age. You can get it and only enable elevated rails, if that's your thing.

[ChefOfRamen]

Perishable items is something I always wondered if we could have in a factory game, however…

This process is inevitable and can't be delayed

Does this mean we won't get refrigerated cargo wagons?

[kulg]

Spoilage sounds cool! Refrigeration sounds cooler!

(I phrased it like this for the pun. I know you all work really hard and it really shows. I love this game. I like the idea of spoilage, but it's scary to me that there's nothing I can research to adapt to it.)

[X3KJ]

I was surprised that mashing fruits only yields solid products, rather than any liquid juice. I figure fluids don't play well with the new spoilage system, but everything about Gleba screams to be covered in a mass of labyrinthine pipes! The biochambers especially seem kin to the chemical plants.

That said, plumbing for a single fluid isn't very complicated or interesting, so idk. I want pipes, I understand why I'm not seeing them, but that doesn't make the craving go away.

Oh now that you say it, i feel it too, definitely...
Pumping some horrible icky alien plant ooze through a network of pipes, after the "fruits" with strong hard shells have been torn from their plant bodies and where violently crushed open... There is something very industrial about this, that i like I would love a crusher that smashes the fruit to turm them into biomaterial, instead of an assembler Not for a practical reason... purely aesthetics xD

[Edriel]

Stardew Factorio! I'm all in for this.

P.S. Next DLC "Factorio: Terraformers". Hype train here I come!

[SIGSTKFLT]

these science packs are going to be a nightmare to get the ratios right

It's going to be a nightmare to code the solver for Factory Planner and such XD

[FuryoftheStars]

Halting is different from Slowing though. If you have to put each product (multiples/ a stack) in belt-able container (like barrels), which slow the decay but not stop it. Allows for extension of transport ranges. But not for stockpiling of thousands of fruit/plant matter (which is questionable proposition anyway)

Hmm, to me, having belt-able refrigerated boxes may be going too far (how are they powered?). Refrigerated chests might be, too, unless you make them bigger than normal (say 2x2?) and greatly reduce their capacity (only a few slots at the most).

Alternatively, the refrigerators could be specialized rail cars, only.

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I was surprised that mashing fruits only yields solid products, rather than any liquid juice. I figure fluids don't play well with the new spoilage system, but everything about Gleba screams to be covered in a mass of labyrinthine pipes! The biochambers especially seem kin to the chemical plants.

Plant processing facilities love to be full of tubes. Here's a winery:


That said, plumbing for a single fluid isn't very complicated or interesting, so idk. I want pipes, I understand why I'm not seeing them, but that doesn't make the craving go away.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that when I was done going through the FFF and started reading comments. Yeah, I too was half expecting pipes. But I guess it's whatever.

[thermomug]

Boy, I cannot wait to play around with all the new mechanics!
Also their interactions, like the implications with space platforms that you described, makes me look forward to all the new challenges that will emerge naturally from this complexity.

My first thoughts after hearing about spoilage were about how you would implement this efficiently. My guess is, that every spoilable item needs to remember the time it was created? Also, spoilage only needs to be evaluated whenever the item is "touched" or looked at, meaning when it interacts with other entities or is visible by some player. This would not work if items just disappeared, because that would create a tiny gap in the belt and create computational load and every item would need to be checked every tick OR you would need some sort of schedule to efficiently keep track of spoilage times.
Any way, this new mechanic seems to be way more memory and compute intense than a compressed belt of the same material.
Can we stack spoilable items only when their spoilage level is identical, or are the individual creation times/spoilages stored for each stack? If the ladder, what happens if one item in the stacks spoils? I don't think item stacks are capable of holding different kinds of items, are they?

Have a great weekend, y'all, and remember to grow your factory !

[revanar]

For all the people posting about refrigeration mechanics, I feel like I should point out:
a) given that the whole point of this is to make you need to design a subset of factories that don't rely on buffers as a new and interesting design challenge, refrigeration would just serve to undermine the new mechanic
b) there's plenty of produce on Earth that doesn't do well with refrigeration/freezing---bananas are a good example, but there's lots of local fruits and vegetables that aren't widely sold because there's no good way to prolong their shelf life!

[Dfq]

Three things:
1. Will pollution act as a catalyst for spoilage?
2. Will Steel Barrels be an inefficient way to pickle /store organic matter indefinitely without it spoiling?
2.1. Maybe with ice?

[FuryoftheStars]

My first thoughts after hearing about spoilage were about how you would implement this efficiently. My guess is, that every spoilable item needs to remember the time it was created? Also, spoilage only needs to be evaluated whenever the item is "touched" or looked at, meaning when it interacts with other entities or is visible by some player. This would not work if items just disappeared, because that would create a tiny gap in the belt and create computational load and every item would need to be checked every tick OR you would need some sort of schedule to efficiently keep track of spoilage times.
Any way, this new mechanic seems to be way more memory and compute intense than a compressed belt of the same material.
Can we stack spoilable items only when their spoilage level is identical, or are the individual creation times/spoilages stored for each stack? If the ladder, what happens if one item in the stacks spoils? I don't think item stacks are capable of holding different kinds of items, are they?

I wonder if they found a way to use the same mechanic for tool/recipe % for spoilage.

And as I think about it, considering that an item that spoils turns into something different, I wonder if the stack sizes on these would need to be 1, as otherwise you could end up in a situation where something spoils, thus needs to be split to a different stack, but there's no available room. Unless they're tracking that, too, in the item stack.

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For all the people posting about refrigeration mechanics, I feel like I should point out:
a) given that the whole point of this is to make you need to design a subset of factories that don't rely on buffers as a new and interesting design challenge, refrigeration would just serve to undermine the new mechanic
b) there's plenty of produce on Earth that doesn't do well with refrigeration/freezing---bananas are a good example, but there's lots of local fruits and vegetables that aren't widely sold because there's no good way to prolong their shelf life!

For point (a), you could make the refrigerated container be very bad for storage space vs tiles used. For a chest, you could make it take up a larger footprint, (2x2 or 2x1), but then only hold as much as (or less than) a wooden chest. For railcars, they could simply have a lot less slots.

But I think that also depends in part on how stacks for these items work. As I noted in the reply above, unless they have some separate tracking mechanism they've introduced into the stack itself, any spoiled items would need to be split out to a separate stack, and if there are no slots available, that could cause issues, so their stack sizes may just be 1 to begin with.

[Dmytrozern]

Love new mechanics! Harvesting trees reminded me of how I discovered that wood-fuelled base in the tutorial/demo. Loved that moment of discovering cut down trees, infrastructure to cut down energy usage, remnants of bugs and buildings that were telling the story of that place... I'm definitely doing a couple of wood-bowered outposts just for the sake of it.

I wonder if we gonna be able to cultivate and use fungi - it's quite a material.
Pipes? Makes sense. I'm down for more plumbing!
And I do like how everything looks alien here. Weird, slimy, but nice.

[Hares]

So, now modeers could make a truly radioactive isotopes with relatively short half-lifes? That's awesome!

[Stalinlover22]

Awesome!! I want to play this farm mechanic, but what about pollution? Didn´t disturb this planet?

[kitt159]

How is this concept functional together with quality? I'm not sure if it is a good idea to have items with different quality and changing durability at the same time. In my opinion it is overcomplicated.

[Akontio]

If we look at the images provided it seems they can stack just fine together. I imagine the system works by averaging the total spoilage of a stack, likely keeping count of the highest spoilage value of each stack as to avoid players refreshing the spoilage with new product.