Friday Facts #417 - Space Age development

[Tungro]

Heya you great devs, is pre-order being discussed at all? Outstanding job you are all doing by the way, keep it up!!!

[necrogami]

What's the current record for SPM, on one of those big umpteen-person cluster events? Anywhere near a million? Certainly nowhere near that for an individual playthrough. So yeah, numbers get big.

Enternity Cluster (Factorio Clustorio Mod) Got upto 2.1 Million SPM w/ 51 Hosts spanning 305 Factorio Servers, 822 cores and 3.45 TB of memory to do it.

[Mycroft4114]

Hi, I have a doubt, I realy don't remember if it was said or not on some FFF.

I know on some FFF said the SE will be more like a mod and you can play the base game or the SE, but the QOL and other things will be on the 2.0 base game to improve the game quality.

My doubt is: For the 2.0 base game, the recipities and sciences packs will be untouched or will follow the new rules on the SE? The quality itens will be part of the base game?

Id like to have a FFF explaing the main differences between 1.x base game X 2.0 base game X 2.0 SE

Thanks!

You can get a detailed rundown here: https://wiki.factorio.com/Upcoming_features

The short version is:
The QoL stuff and changes to how certain systems work (Trains, combinators, fluids) will be coming to all players in 2.0. Most recipes will be unchanged, with a few exceptions: circuit wire and remotes will be abstracted to a button. RCUs will be removed and replaced with Blue circuits. Filter and stack filter inserters are going away, now all inserters will be able to filter. Vanilla 2.0 should remain pretty mostly the same, just better QoL in a lot of places.

The new content stuff: Space Age (space platforms, other planets, new science packs) will be enabled like a mod. It will include a dependency on the other systems, which can be enabled individually as mods if you want. So far, we known that this will include the quality system and elevated rails. (IE, these systems will not be in vanilla 2.0, but if you have bought the expansion you will have them and can for example, play a vanilla game that also has elevated rails but none of the other stuff. Same with the quality system.)

[Hopscotch1337]

finally that FFF I am waiting for 3 years now

[Kyralessa]

kovarex, thank you for posting this. I always enjoy peeking behind the curtains to see how a game or expansion goes from a vague idea to a finished product.

I'm very much looking forward to playing it. Already got my credit card in hand.

[Ohz]

You rock, guys, thank you so much for your hard work.

[steinio]

Coffee Stain will drop a release date for Satisfactory soon.
I bet they wait for the Factorio release date next week to consider it.

[mmmPI]

I wonder why the devs didn't choose to do another FFF on the fluid mechanic, maybe it is too powerfull of a topic for the amount of widsom contained in your average factorio player.

Looking at the timeline, it makes me appreciate the different stages from "developer graphics" to those for players , i find interesting to read the evolution as it gives clues on what to expect "following the trend", and what was considered the different challenges. It's not often that you read devs saying "we tried hard for month to make our game SHORTER" . I think it goes to really show the potential for long game, if that amount of time is made for a polished experience with mods and so on. The game will be "dense" to me, not artifically made "longer" with grind for players.

I think there are some hints at another reason for the fluid rework, the UPS, as it was quite surprising for me to read that gamespeed needed to be adjusted for test. This and the picture of the silo's field at the end make me think the scale at which we are expected to build will be much larger than in the original game. And probably that the spec for the game will increase to match today's specs rather than stay aligned with original game's.

I think it is interesting to read about how games are made, who makes them and how, maybe it creates some vocations

Also regarding the picture of Gleba, i don't think it is an ennemy, i think it is a tree, or a mushroom, maybe some sort of algae, on of the 12 plants mentionned, because we weren't shown any ennemies so far, and it has to be on purpose, to either keep some mystery at release or exciting reveals until the release date which i'm very excited to have a confirmation, because i tried to run that 1 hour Czech interview in whisper and DeepL as mentionned in the comments to try and understand but the technology's not yet ready for good pochopení.

[morse]

Are you guys in cahoots with satisfactory devs or something? Just 3 hours ago they released a video where they also promised to give us the release date "real soon". If it turns out that your release dates coincide it'll make many people really unhappy, just saying.

[blahfasel2000]

Though I'm really not a fan of the concept of transporting molten metals being more efficient. For me it falls into the same "utter nonsense" category as steam batteries.

Why? Molten metals are being transported from the smelter to the foundry with trains in the real world all the time, sometimes over distances of several hundred kilometers because it's more energy efficient to keep the metal hot rather than remelt it at the foundry. Modern torpedo or bottle wagons (named after their shape) can keep their contents hot for 30 hours or more, a train can cover quite some distance in that time. Some lower melting metals (eg. aluminium) are even transported on public roads in molten form.

[Inscius]

Why? Molten metals are being transported from the smelter to the foundry with trains in the real world all the time, sometimes over distances of several hundred kilometers because it's more energy efficient to keep the metal hot rather than remelt it at the foundry. Modern torpedo or bottle wagons (named after their shape) can keep their contents hot for 30 hours or more, a train can cover quite some distance in that time. Some lower melting metals (eg. aluminium) are even transported on public roads in molten form.

In part that molten metals can be kept in that state indefinitely, but it's mostly the notion that melting the metal down somehow makes a train able to carry more of it that I find nonsensical.

[mcmase]

AWESOME!

I love that you've given new planets completely new gameplay, rather than a "standard" start where you do all the same stuff over again. I was originally worried about repetition but it seems that question has been answered!

"The Gleba Enemy" - Why haven't we heard anything about COMBAT? The missing component of the game in the expansion FFFs as far as I'm aware, but the most interesting to me, as I really want combat to have received the same amount of an upgrade as the rest of the game! To me this basically confirms that each planet should have its own alien species, but also I hope the aliens offer new challenges and the players get new weapons to deal with the advanced threat against the ever growing factory!

Those screenshots look awesome and this was the most complete look at actually playing the expansion so far and I must say I did not think the hype could have grown further but my expectations have been exceeded yet again! This looks so fun!

[Terrahertz]

Why? Molten metals are being transported from the smelter to the foundry with trains in the real world all the time, sometimes over distances of several hundred kilometers because it's more energy efficient to keep the metal hot rather than remelt it at the foundry. Modern torpedo or bottle wagons (named after their shape) can keep their contents hot for 30 hours or more, a train can cover quite some distance in that time. Some lower melting metals (eg. aluminium) are even transported on public roads in molten form.

In part that molten metals can be kept in that state indefinitely, but it's mostly the notion that melting the metal down somehow makes a train able to carry more of it that I find nonsensical.

While the idea if doing this in regular Fluid-Wagons instead of dedicated torpedo-wagons makes me a bit uneven, the notion of this being more space efficient makes sense to me. After all the molten metal can fill the entire volume, while the plates have air in between them, maybe even some cargo-wagon structure to make extraction by inserters easier.

[Juanjo]

I was wondering when will translators be able to work on the localization of Space Age, now that maybe next week there will be an estimated release date for it.
I don't know if this has been asked and answered before, but I would be glad if I could start translating it into Catalan before the release during this summer.
So, will translators have some way for translating before the release or we will have to wait?

[GregoriusT]

Why? Molten metals are being transported from the smelter to the foundry with trains in the real world all the time, sometimes over distances of several hundred kilometers because it's more energy efficient to keep the metal hot rather than remelt it at the foundry. Modern torpedo or bottle wagons (named after their shape) can keep their contents hot for 30 hours or more, a train can cover quite some distance in that time. Some lower melting metals (eg. aluminium) are even transported on public roads in molten form.

In part that molten metals can be kept in that state indefinitely, but it's mostly the notion that melting the metal down somehow makes a train able to carry more of it that I find nonsensical.

While the idea if doing this in regular Fluid-Wagons instead of dedicated torpedo-wagons makes me a bit uneven, the notion of this being more space efficient makes sense to me. After all the molten metal can fill the entire volume, while the plates have air in between them, maybe even some cargo-wagon structure to make extraction by inserters easier.

wait dont solid materials expand when they get turned into liquid? pretty sure that is the case for everything that doesn't crystallize a certain way (like water/ice does)

[Maddhawk]

The first gameplay draft was made in less than 2 weeks and was a vertical slice for the entire expansion. It was sort of a blue-sky concepting stage where I could try a lot of different things to see what sticks.

To make things more difficult though, there was a lot of initial reluctance to have alternate recipes for things (because recyclers had already been added to reprocess items for quality). This meant that the first version couldn’t have many shortcut recipes and that resulted in the need for a lot of the basic resources to still be on most planets (even if the source is a little different), but then you’d still need most of the same processing chain as Nauvis in addition to the planet-specific ones. Fortunately that stance has been relaxed for a lot of things.

Also, some of the things that were cut from the first version made it back in eventually, like resources from lava.

And just think, everything else that got cut and didn't make it back in is something you can add back in later with more mods! Personally, I'm really hyped for all the new things to come. Especially fluids 2.0. Been waiting on that one for what seems like forever now.

[Terrahertz]

Why? Molten metals are being transported from the smelter to the foundry with trains in the real world all the time, sometimes over distances of several hundred kilometers because it's more energy efficient to keep the metal hot rather than remelt it at the foundry. Modern torpedo or bottle wagons (named after their shape) can keep their contents hot for 30 hours or more, a train can cover quite some distance in that time. Some lower melting metals (eg. aluminium) are even transported on public roads in molten form.

In part that molten metals can be kept in that state indefinitely, but it's mostly the notion that melting the metal down somehow makes a train able to carry more of it that I find nonsensical.

While the idea if doing this in regular Fluid-Wagons instead of dedicated torpedo-wagons makes me a bit uneven, the notion of this being more space efficient makes sense to me. After all the molten metal can fill the entire volume, while the plates have air in between them, maybe even some cargo-wagon structure to make extraction by inserters easier.

wait dont solid materials expand when they get turned into liquid? pretty sure that is the case for everything that doesn't crystallize a certain way (like water/ice does)

For Iron the thermal expansion coefficient is 11.8 * 10^-6 per Kelvin. Now I'm no expert in material science, but this sounds pretty low, even if you multiply it with the temperaturedifference of 2000K between room temperature and molten Iron. At least it sounds low enough that it does not counter the effect of removing all the air gaps from the solid plates.

[maggot28]

Please, release space age sooner
I must try it before russians occupy my city

[FasterJump]

• Cool to have this 'vertical slice'. I'm hyped by most content and QoL. I trust that devs will do their magic and make simple yet powerful UIs for trains, planets, etc.
• 1m spm? I hope making a megabase isn't mandatory to finish space age. At the same time, I welcome complexity and playtime.
• Still sad about the removal of the fluid "flow" mechanics, I'm sure there is a better solution...

[unflushablepoop]

man this is going to feel like the longest week ever waiting for the release date to drop