Friday Facts #414 - Spoils of Agriculture

[Gemma]

You probably don't need me to tell you this, but gardening (in real life) involves a lot of intentionally getting things to "spoil" (compost) because it greatly enhances the fertility/viability/nutrition of plant life. Of course, this is Factorio, not real life, but I think it makes sense to take inspiration from that and have spoilage interact in some similar way, at least under certain conditions, rather than just creating inferior products.

[Knuth]

Hi,

Not a big fan of the idea of spoilage paired with the whole "send it back home" idea, but then again my guess is that provided a reccurent enough supply of rockets, it will eventually stop being an actual problem so long as you clear any bottlenecks and keep short production lines. It is at least interesting to think about factory designs that would fit the bill when time is of the essence.

I'm happy to read each FFF to see interesting news. But today, i'm disappointed
I think spoilage is really a bad idea (I hate this in the games).

I read some posts speak about freezer.. Hum, may be, but with at least 1000x up of duration
Better to disable this. I don't even want to try.

You could create the mod that just removes the spoil time, if you don't like it.

It's obvious that the spoil time is a balance choice. If you introduce the way to halt it, it makes the whole feature pointless. You just replace the chests with freezers and that's it.

I agree with this kind of mod.

Oh yes, mod to removes the spoil time, hope it come quickly.
It isn't balance choice, juste bad idea to be disable. If afterwards it is unbalanced, for me, it will just make the idea even worse.

I created an account on the forums just to write this. Sorry in advance if it may sound less constructive and too emotional. Hope such feedback is valid too.

The point is that spoilage mechanic is the most disappointing part of the expansion after quality, for me personally. Honestly, I hoped that Gleba experience would be about growth, not decay.

[...]

This is just frustrating and tedious. Not fun.

I agree with MistAway, and it's also my first post, I would have preferred write for other thing.

Oh no. I can already see a mod that makes everything spoilable.

[BEEFE]

You probably don't need me to tell you this, but gardening (in real life) involves a lot of intentionally getting things to "spoil" (compost) because it greatly enhances the fertility/viability/nutrition of plant life. Of course, this is Factorio, not real life, but I think it makes sense to take inspiration from that and have spoilage interact in some similar way, at least under certain conditions, rather than just creating inferior products.

I'm not 100% on this but I think the "pile of white powder" item is a fertilizer made from organic sources, and converting Spoilage into that stuff is one of the Spoilage disposal loops mentioned at the end of the post. Not terribly like real gardening but close enough for Factorio purposes.

That's why spoilage exists, and we have multiple methods to get rid of it - you can burn it, waste it in a recycler, or create nutrients that are already half-spoilt.

I could see a factory that uses that as its main source of nutrients.

[iestynne]

Fantastic concept. This is a fundamentally different mechanic, requiring us to balance latency against throughout. This should really shake up factory designs. Awesome!

[jerjamby]

If the entire tree is cut down for harvest, the farming arms must provide wood as a by-product, and these must be processed into plastic or another resource so that it does not accumulate as much in Gleba as in Nauvis.
It seems perfectly logical to me that certain raw organic resources such as fruits or vegetables deteriorate, but products already processed from these should deteriorate more slowly, and as they are processed, the deterioration should disappear.
What I find unpleasant is that it is implemented by percentages, it would be more intuitive for me if it were by phases of deterioration as happens with the Nauvis trees in contamination, this would help to suppress the deterioration bars and replace them with slightly different sprites to identify each state of deterioration, this should also happen with the quality levels, thus the deterioration of organic resources would be a parallel to the quality levels of inorganic resources, this would make the quality symbols in the lower corner of each resource unnecessary, but All sprites would have to be redesigned, both resources and buildings.
Since we are talking about organic resources, it seems necessary to me that some resource such as bones, meat or grease be extracted from the corpses of the biters, the levels of deterioration would fit perfectly if that mechanic is implemented.

[Commandervander]

Tiny feedback: the icon for the planet in the friday facts is missing the science pack, unlike the friday facts on the Vulcanus and Fulgora mechanics.

images

, ,

Science pack spoiled : (

[Blaster]

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.

Still waiting for the pipe physics rework. I would like my reactors to actually not tank UPS for a change

[Blaster]

I'm so hyped with this update !! I already see myself angrily alt+f4 the game because I couldn't figure the correct ratios to avoid spoils then get back at the game 5 minutes after because i'm already addicted

Oh no. I can already see a mod that makes everything spoilable.

Introducing Factorio Nightmare Mod

Which will also include the mod that removes grid snapping when placing machines.

[Roxor128]

I think the harvesting needs a bit of work.

Removing the whole tree and only getting fruit out of it is a bit weird. Two possible ways to make this a bit less strange:

1. If you want to keep fruit only as the resource, have the harvesting based around shaking the fruit out of it then collecting it off the ground. This is done in real life when farming things like almonds. If bruising is a concern, add a net around the tree to catch the fruit.

2. If you want to keep removing the whole tree, have it produce a large quantity of wood as well as the fruit. Then give us a bunch of recipes to make use of the wood.

Also, it'd be nice to have trees regrowing on Nauvis, even if they can't be manually replanted. Probably wouldn't be too hard to implement either. Whenever a live tree gets destroyed, whether by a player harvesting it or just simply destroyed by being damaged, spawn a few invisible seed sprites around it. If the player builds anything on top of them, the sprites get removed. If not, then after a random amount of time on the order of an in-game month, the seeds spawn a seedling that'll grow into a new tree over the course of a few hundred to a few thousand in-game days, provided the surroundings aren't too polluted, in which case, they simply won't sprout until they're sufficiently clean. Kill a forest will pollution from your coal power plant, then have it sprout back once you clean up your act and go nuclear.

[TROPtastic]

The spoilage mechanic sounds interesting, although extending it to science packs might make it optimal to put all your science labs on Gleba to maximize research rather than risking science losses from shipping. Perhaps spoiled science packs can be recycled in some way on Nauvis or wherever the main science hub ends up being for the player.

I agree with the other commenters that cutting down a plant just to get fruit and some seeds seems strange even by Factorio's "exploit the environment" standards. Perhaps there can be some wood-like product produced as well that can be used in various recipes. I quite like the look of the plant harvester though! I hope the animation framerate of the internal "mixer" is increased to something significantly smoother, perhaps whatever the framerate of the foundry is.

[Mathematician]

So... memory-cell-based sushi belts are out of the window?
Does the "whole belt reader" have an option to read a contents of neighbouring splitters? Do we have ANY option to read contents of splitters?

[bnrom]

I don't understand some of the negative takes. To me, these takes come across as highly pessimistic... un-grounded, and unhelpful.

I don't like the new mechanic because all the products, including science packs themself, spoil and inherit spoilage, and that affecting final science level.

1. They literally say in the FF that not all products spoil... To quote directly: "To avoid this mechanic being over the top and to allow meaningful decisions to be made, there are some items where their freshness doesn't contribute to the final product as the final product is something that isn't spoilable."

Also, spoilage of packs will be inconsistent if any slack and invariants are present in the production chain, basically all this means that total science value of packs is going to be hardly calculatable, denoting the idea of "SPM" for any research requiring this.

2. Why would the final science level be hard to calculate? The impact of spoilage might be hard to spreadsheet, but it seems like it will be easy to empirically measure and test. There are several reasons I expect throughput to be consistent. First, spoilage is deterministic and non-random, and second bio-resource acquisition is likely super easy to scale as, going by the FFs, it seems you can farm any location using the craftable soil. The whole point of spoilage and renewable resources is that you don't buffer it, but instead just constantly produce (and dispose of any spoilage or excess).
2.1. If you are worried then just overbuild bio science until it is not a limiting factor. Your final science is then just your normal science (as calculated by spreadsheet!)

This mechanic is also very UPS-unfriendly, and if that pack is used along other science packs, that inconsistency will be inherited by other non-spoilable science too, through the labs, meaning you can't perfectly predict required size for ANY of your production chains on ANY planet. This is not terrible for gameplay itself, but the cumulative effect on UPS will be significant.

I'm currently not sure anymore that Space Age will be able to provide fold-times more SPM than the base 1.1. Considering all the new surfaces, space platforms, UPS-unfriendly stuff like recycling and spoilage, I guess developers added new inserter/belt/machine buffs mainly to compensate for much higher computational cost of planet-specific science. I bet last planet science will get even more crazy, because that planet is not visitable before the first 3.

3. Why do you think it would harm USP? First, if the factory is well designed then there shouldn't be any inconsistent slack, or variability. And second, according to the devs on reddit, the direct impact UPS impact of the spoilage calculation is actually negligible.
3.1 They've also consistently throughout the other FFs revealed multiple UPS optimizations.

Last thing I'd like to note is that Space Age seems to be delayed looking at the rate of content reveals and amount of "this is subject to change" sentences. I don't expect they are 3 month away from release, I'd bet for more like november-december. Which is also frustrating for many players waiting for this over the last 3-4 years, but whatever, what has to be done, has to be done.

4. The devs literally owe us nothing. They're creating a product we are all excited about, and that's great! But it's not like they've taken anyone's money for it. We would all just like to buy it! And speaking personally, I would far rather have the polished Factorio they want to make than something rushed. To harp about your frustration at a possible delay to a timeline they have only implied and never even made firm comes across, to me, as quite bizarre and entitled.

[AHDog]

However, what I do wonder is, what will Gleba bring to the table. By that I mean, asside from progress towards finishing the expansion, what does it bring for the rest of the game once you're done with it?

The FFF mentioned there's going to be carbon fiber, maybe that will be useful for something.

[Junorus]

Some questions/ideas:
-Does Nauvis fish and wood spoil?
-What is influence of spoilage on UPS? I hope there is some good optimisation there... Otherwise tracking and updating all spoilable items will take a lot. How can we stack items of different spoilage %? Or is it like damage?
-Maybe instead of the wite bar the organic items would start as legendary, then with time got random chance of decreasing in quality? Then common quality get into spoilage? That is, unless we have some special purpose of legendary spoilage or fruits... This would also allow to reduce spoilage by using quality modules.

I don't think anything was covered on how decay mechanics will interact with quality mechanics. Quality boosting loops will necessarily cost time, which is at odds with product time limits. Eh, that can wait for the next FFF.

-Where is wood from harvesting fruit tree? It might be a pain to have a lot of it, but since we cut it anyway...

[...]3. However, with the whole tree being harvested, only obtaining the fruit feels quite strange... why not add some type of important wood product as a secondary output? E.g. it seems like carbon fiber should be made from the wood (e.g., alien-plant trunk material) and not the fruits. I'd expect the fruits to be a very low component of the biomass, and mainly used for making biologically active components, e.g., the research packs, and not something structural like carbon fiber.[...]

So not only me thinking that
-Will we have options to turn off some part of the expansion? We can turn off bitters and pollution, then maybe spoilage as well?
-Can we have an option to mix new terrain into one planet in freeplay?
-Would not it make sense to put fruits into recycler to get the seeds and pulp instead of the assembler? At the start spoiling fruit could give spoilage and seed. That would make spoiling useful in some cases. Or being able to plant fruit, not just seed.
-Pollution vs growing fruits. Will factory pollution make the harvest smaller?

Overall limiting the factory size from raw material seems interesting. Also it should be easy to implement mod that let's you take spoiling item machine it into frozen/transport packed item that needs to be unpacked before using. Overall I would prefer to use the quality and spoilage mechanics being merged.

[Losash]

I don't understand some of the negative takes. To me, these takes come across as highly pessimistic... un-grounded, and unhelpful.

1. They literally say in the FF that not all products spoil... To quote directly: "To avoid this mechanic being over the top and to allow meaningful decisions to be made, there are some items where their freshness doesn't contribute to the final product as the final product is something that isn't spoilable."

2. Why would the final science level be hard to calculate? The impact of spoilage might be hard to spreadsheet, but it seems like it will be easy to empirically measure and test. There are several reasons I expect throughput to be consistent. First, spoilage is deterministic and non-random, and second bio-resource acquisition is likely super easy to scale as, going by the FFs, it seems you can farm any location using the craftable soil. The whole point of spoilage and renewable resources is that you don't buffer it, but instead just constantly produce (and dispose of any spoilage or excess).
2.1. If you are worried then just overbuild bio science until it is not a limiting factor. Your final science is then just your normal science (as calculated by spreadsheet!)

3. Why do you think it would harm USP? First, if the factory is well designed then there shouldn't be any inconsistent slack, or variability. And second, according to the devs on reddit, the direct impact UPS impact of the spoilage calculation is actually negligible.
3.1 They've also consistently throughout the other FFs revealed multiple UPS optimizations.

4. The devs literally owe us nothing. They're creating a product we are all excited about, and that's great! But it's not like they've taken anyone's money for it. We would all just like to buy it! And speaking personally, I would far rather have the polished Factorio they want to make than something rushed. To harp about your frustration at a possible delay to a timeline they have only implied and never even made firm comes across, to me, as quite bizarre and entitled.

1,2 Gleba science packs are affected by this spoil mechanic, this is confirmed in the post. Science pack is a final product for infinite researches. If your main base is (most likely) going to be on the other planet, you are going to transport it via multiple transport types, all the route having tons of time variables. Space platforms are quite complex on their own. Trains wait on signals. Belts can become stuck or empty at spots, resulting in deviating wait times. It's all neglected at large time scales, but their size grows with game complexity:

if the factory is well designed then there shouldn't be any inconsistent slack, or variability.

You are wrong in the general case, the more complex your delevery route is, the more inconsistent it is on shorter timescales, the larger timescale you need to call it "consistent". There is a reason why 1.1 megabases are tested to average SPM over 10 hour time interval, especially train-based megabases. Good luck measuring your base for more than that every time you want to find something out "empirically", for example your total SPM.

3. Because it will? In (2.1) you suggest "overbuilding" as one of your solutions, right? I didn't mean white bar calculations will cause UPS problems. I meant your base becoming a lot more complex because of this mechanic will fo the trick.

4. I just wrote my observations. You overestimate my frustration just because you like to rant over anything? Your frustration over my post is larger than my frustration about entire Gleba thing. Calm.

[steinio]

'Spoilage'? Haven't these people heard of fridges and freezers?

I am not happy about this new mechanic at all.

Spoiling materials/resources create a need to be prompt with using them. Seeing spoilage times being even minutes, as stated in the FF, creates in my a sense of urgency, racing. Factorio has never been about racing to a goal, it's always been "take my time to design something". That seems to contradict this. It doesn't seem like I can store some resources in waiting for my design to work, and then wait to see if this is good enough, or stop a production block that is not working as well as I'd like, and then take some time to redesign it. Now I'm being penalized against that because the resources are spoiling.

I am not looking forward to this experience, I would not like to be subjected to that. If this makes it to the expansion, I might not pick this up.

100% what you said.

Devs, please don't let Earendel's weird sense of 'balancing' ruin the game.

Already to late.
Space Age is just Space Exploration for money.

[malecord]

1,2 Gleba science packs are affected by this spoil mechanic, this is confirmed in the post. Science pack is a final product for infinite researches. If your main base is (most likely) going to be on the other planet, you are going to transport it via multiple transport types, all the route having tons of time variables. Space platforms are quite complex on their own. Trains wait on signals. Belts can become stuck or empty at spots, resulting in deviating wait times. It's all neglected at large time scales, but their size grows with game complexity:

if the factory is well designed then there shouldn't be any inconsistent slack, or variability.

But the whole point of spoiling is that you can't use giga design for gleba. You can't load a 12 wagon train and bring stuff half planet away to be processed in a giga refinery.
You need instead huge arrays of all in production lines, from trees and agricultural crane to science pack assembler. With little belts or better just direct insertion. And ofc your rocket silo must also be very near. And your delivery platforms needs also to be small in capacity but fast. So a swarm of small factories instead of a gigaone.

Generally speaking in computer engineering (in the 1% of jobs where it truly matters) when you push to max efficiency there is a well known tradeoff between throughput and latency. On Gleba we will design for speed, even though we could use the same amount of land for higher throughout.

I like this twist. And people preoccupied that this doesn't fit "their playstile" is overconcerned. Ofc it doesn't. We all always optimized by throughput. Once on Gleba optimize by latency will come natural and not be an issue at all.

[PaszaVonPomiot]

The devs are on point with agricultural aspect of the game. There were already many attempts by modders to introduce this layer to the game. Current implementation is really interesting with spoilage mechanics and biochamber. I have mixed feelings regarding this gigantic tower that picks up whole trees instead of just fruits. I think I would separate planting from harversing and from cutting down the tree. That would also be a modders paradise where they can implement beloved Stardew Valley in Factorio. Apart from that the graphics are stunning - well done!
Looking forward I would see another planet focused on fauna where you can use agricultural products to feed the animals for example.

Ultimately it would be interesting to see final planet that you can terraform and create environment instead of destroying it - like creating second Earth from resources, flora, fauna and technology you got from all previous planets.

[princediver]

my prophecy, on 4 planet we will play with pokemon !

and what about 500M spoiled items and UPS/FPS ?!

[CyberCider]

Already to late.
Space Age is just Space Exploration for money.

If you're saying this, you have NEVER played Space Exploration.

The only similarity is that you go to space, and at that point you can say Star Wars and Star Trek are the same thing.

- Rockets have a different role, and the weight system vs. SE's slot based system makes their logistics a very different problem
- Spaceships have different design rules, a different role, they make their own fuel instead of needing to be refuelled from your base, and they come way earlier in the game
- There is no "norbit space base" at all, which is a massively important part of SE
- Besides space science, none of the sciences are made in space, they are all made on their respective planets and need to be shipped around already finished instead of shipping all their ingredients to a central location
- The datacard/catalogue/insight system, a defining feature of SE's science, is totally absent, science packs have regular recipes and only one tier
- There is a limited amount of planets that are infinite in size, instead of an infinite amount of planets that are limited in size
- As a result, each planet is custom-designed instead of randomly generated
- Every planet has every resource available, they are just obtained and processed in new ways, instead of SE's planets requiring imports due lacking certain resources
- It's extremely impractical to send rockets full of rocket parts to other planets, each planet will have to make the rockets locally out of its own resources
- This all means you have to make a full base on every planet instead of just mining and compressing one resource for shipment
- Core mining doesn't exist at all, again another crucial element of SE's gameplay
- Orbital asteroid collecting is close I guess, but it can be scaled much more, and you don't have to balance excess because you can put filters on asteroid collectors or void unwanted items into space
- Expensive higher tiers of modules are replaced by quality, which is a different and more interesting kind of expensive that also affects more areas of the game
- Obviously, the difficulty is on a completely different level, in Space Age there aren't nearly as many recipes with byproducts, there are significantly less intermediate items, and it's a much shorter and more streamlined experience

And I could KEEP GOING with these differences.
I am so tired of people saying this when they have no idea what they're talking about.