Friday Facts #376 - Research and Technology

[zb140]

I also miss the opportunity to buff belts with quality. IMO it would be enough, if you don't have different speeds at each stage, but at least at some stages.
And blue belt only, would also be enough. I would imagine something like:
- normal 45 items per sec.
- uncommon 60 (double red belt)
- rare 90 (double blue belt)

When I first heard about quality, I hated it because of the randomness. I'm still highly skeptical but I'm reserving judgment until all the details are available.

Having said that, I now really, really want underground belts whose available length increases with quality. Like, I want it so badly that it would be enough all by itself to convince me to deal with quality even if I end up hating it for everything else.

Edit because I should say something about today's news:
I like the idea of research triggers. Because so much stuff is unlocked by just red and green science, I've often found myself in a position where there are "plateaus" of no-more-research-to-do because it takes me longer to finish building the one factory I'm working on that to unlock the things I need for the next 5 (or whatever). Because I've played the game a lot and am generally familiar with the progression, that's not really a big issue for me, but for a new player it can contribute to feeling like they don't know what to do next, and I think gating (for instance) oil behind actually having gone and found oil can help with that.

[Terry]

I liked the use of Trigger technologies in the Nullius mod. I don't think I need them in the base game anymore but they sound great for newer players.

I'm not set on any names, but would imagine something like

• Normal
• Refined (Might be weird if there's an item name like "Refined Steel" already)
• Prestine (I like this one)
• Superior (I like this one)
• Masterwork (I also like this one)

Nice names, but pristine is a bit ambiguous. Since it could be seen as better then Superior or even Masterwork. You could add a 'Perfect' or 'Perfected' tier as tier 5 instead.

[BicycleEater]

Oooh, I hope they really play with the trigger researches, I had a lot of fun with True Nukes making alternative research systems, and having a system to do that nicely would be amazing.
Particularly if some of the requirements were eccentric, like having an infinite research based on the number of items you've produced. That way you could have e.g. "Iron Gear Wheel Productivity" be based on the number of gears produced (with exponential research, and a small bonus like 1%), and do that for a whole bunch of intermediates, that way the factory would always be progressing. It would be like you got more experience making the items, so the productivity got higher naturally.
Just thinking that would be awesome.

[adam_bise]

How about just "Quality Level X" QL0,QL1, etc..

Would allow for less searching of names in the case where modders try to make many more quality levels, and avoid trying to find a scheme that works in all languages.

Plus, imagine coming up with a word that means "the best possible ever" then later trying to make a higher one

[rldml]

Are the changes to technology (and I assume the engine additions too) enabled in the 2.0 update or the DLC?

I'm not sure about the processing techs being unlocked just by mining a resource. It's weird that mining a piece of uranium tells you the secrets of centrifuges. I think it could be better if it were like in Captain of Industry, where you need to do X before you're allowed to start researching a tech, but then you still need to select the tech to research and supply the labs.

As far as i understand, mining uranium is only unlocking the possibility to research this stuff

[fgfgfg445ZA]

Hi, read the part about the Research list being on with startup.
and yes most play with it but Mod: Ultimate research queue and it's co-like mods aren't compatible with it.
and even go so far as to disable the normal queue on triggering the mod.

[FuzzyOne]

Given the videos, it seems the recycler can output items of a higher quality than the input. If so, I'm not a huge fan of this idea. Conceptually, it'd make much more sense if a quality-enhanced recycler could improve the chance of extracting high-quality modules from high-quality items, without generating them out of thin air.

Perhaps it might be reasonable to see that such a recycler other than just dismantling items and sorting the parts also needs to refurbish those parts which have most likely taken some wear and tear. This refurbishing of the parts could be responsible for the increase in quality in some circumstances. In this case, perhaps a better name for the 'Recycler' would be 'Reclaimator', 'Refabricator' or 'Recoverator'. If this is the case then also it would make sense to have a few versions of the 'Reclaimator' that become unlocked which can reclaim parts from items that require more advanced science packs to manufacture and work in slightly different ways. This would then give some progress to the recycling idea and vary the recycling loops to provide some variety to this loopy mechanic. (Or various 'Reclaimators' based upon other properties of the items being processed, not just the science packs). I would just like to see some progression and variety available for the recycling mechanic.

[Tertius]

Given the videos, it seems the recycler can output items of a higher quality than the input.

The recycler is just a special assembling machine that processes a recipe in reverse, but otherwise it seems it's working exactly as an assembling machine: input some item, output some other item. Since it is equipped with quality modules in the video, it's output will contain quality-enhanced items. That's quite according to the basic game mechanics.

[juliejayne]

I must say that the concept of quality items sounds great to me, but you did mention that some people (that includes me) don't use Beacons. Then later you mentioned the acceptable weirdness threshold, and might I suggest that Beacons breach that, as they magically transmit speed to entities around them.

Having pointed that out my question is then, will it be possible or practical to build the New Factorio Factories without them?

[jodokus31]

I also miss the opportunity to buff belts with quality. IMO it would be enough, if you don't have different speeds at each stage, but at least at some stages.
And blue belt only, would also be enough. I would imagine something like:
- normal 45 items per sec.
- uncommon 60 (double red belt)
- rare 90 (double blue belt)

When I first heard about quality, I hated it because of the randomness. I'm still highly skeptical but I'm reserving judgment until all the details are available.

Having said that, I now really, really want underground belts whose available length increases with quality. Like, I want it so badly that it would be enough all by itself to convince me to deal with quality even if I end up hating it for everything else.

I wonder, if they add buffed belts or something similar in a different way than quality. Because, quality is expensive af for mass producing things like belts.
But honestly, there should be better way to counter logistic bots, esp. when everything else gets faster except belts.

[Chrisdasdasd]

There's more coming from this - when you crash land on the very first planet! Why does the player immediately know how to craft steam engines, inserters, transport belts?

Because he is not amoeba and did receive some education before crashing
I still like the idea though.

[WarrantyVoid]

In regards to this part related to Quality and randomness

The reason is, that you rarely depend on the random result, because you (hopefully) produce at a large scale and the law of large numbers will just transform probabilities into ratios. The more you produce the more it evens out.

That means Quality can only be approached in a sane way with very large scale setups if one wants anything close to being reliable.

A better approach would be to handle Quality upgrades in a similar same way to how productivity works with the major difference that the output is of higher Quality instead of additional output. It would work based on a bar per Quality tier that was possible that fills up during processing and when a bar is full the next output will be of that Quality with 100% progress removed from that Quality bar.
This means that for a setup that has 5% chance to get +1 Quality on output it would instead be that every 20 (due to 1 / 0.05) output would be +1 Quality with no randomness.
(One thing to consider is if having over 100% for Quality upgrade should be possible and if possible what that would mean. )

For example:
In this image (that I clobbered together) this assembly machine has made 1 Iron gear wheel. It had 4 x T3 Quality modules of regular Quality, according to the example from FFF-375 this would give the machine a 10% change to produce a Fine Quality Iron gear wheel, meaning with what I suggested it now has 10% filled in the progress bar to get a Fine Quality Iron gear wheel.

Assembly machine quality bar.png (135.14 KiB) Viewed 2896 times

(Image contains only 1 bar for the Fine Quality but in reality there would be a need for 1 bar per Quality tier that could be outputted)
(Also not shown is how those bars would work with Productivity modules being present)

Doing so will solve pain points around how Quality works with small scale setups and remove the slot machine gambling like behavior, it would also help prevent potential issues related to multiplayer syncing & determinism as there won't be that randomness anymore to sync. As a bonus from doing so speed-runners won't have to worry about randomness and can instead use Quality as part of a larger plan since it will be deterministic.

However, this puts the Recycler in an akwarwd spot of how it should work. One option is that it works as before with its randomness another option is that any quality upgrade progress gained would be per input type.

[nazarie]

I can imagine the tech tree using trigger technologies as secondary conditions to research related things. What I mean is, finding oil unlocks a tech that maybe doesn't provide any specific benefit beyond unlocking all of the oil related technologies. This would help with some of the scenarios people are talking about with sequencing and round-tripping.

[StansTheMan]

THis is great and here is an idea for a technology trigger.

Put items into lab like research packs, blindly do research with them (using them up), and unlock new branches of the technology tree. Especially with new resources this could be great. Eg. 50 uranium ore inside the research lab, research with the ore, unlock the uranium research tree.

[DudebroPyro]

Optimized has to be the last quality tear. Optimized is an absolute maximum value and cannot be increased

Optimization is a process. You can optimize something a bit, take a break, then optimize it some more later. It's like saying "being improved is an absolute maximum value".

[KuuLightwing]

Thanks for addressing the comments regarding quality. Though looking at the gif you provided I sadly have reaffirmed my dislike of the visual design with the overlay on top of existing machine. Especially when it uses the same icon to denote the quality of the modules, the quality of machine itself and the quality of the recipe. Sure all of them are in the different parts of the machine, but I can see this being a mess to read at a glance when the same icon is plastered all over the machine.

Now for recipe triggers, I don't think it's a bad idea, but I do not like the example used with oil. I think it's not necessarily a huge deal, but this forces to build oil outpost before oil processing which may or may not be my preferred order of things.

Also how does that interact with flamethrower turrets? They are useful to defend oil outposts, but if it's unlocked after you turn the outpost on, then you'll have to go back, research it, go back in and set up turrets instead of just building the outpost from the start. That makes it rather tedious, and I think doesn't add much to the game experience. If it's still unlocked normally, that breaks the logic used in the article - cause it's strange to have access to a turret that uses oil without having access to oil.

[Dixi]

Endless research for other things, in addition to mining productivity 100+ is very attractive idea!

[dzaima]

1. Research pumpjacks
2. Go place pumpjacks
3. Go back to the base while laying down a line of pipes (and underground), and branch it to storage (note that those are already researched)
4. Make chem plants / refineries
5. Use oil

I mean, what psychopath refine oil at the outpost instead of at the base ?

My bases are pretty much always split into the main item-producing section, and the oil/fluid outpost (which can work nearly independently from the main base - just needs coal (can be a separate patch due to the high consumption), and a tiny bit of iron & copper (both on a single yellow belt is enough for a while)). The upside is that the halves get to have independent amounts of spaghetti, and the oil stuff can be upgraded/replaced independent of the main base. Additionally, piping fluids a long way gets quite annoying as you have to add pumps Every Now And Then™ to keep the throughput up (and a beginner would have no clue if they'd need 0, 1, or 20 pumps across a 500-tile-long pipe for their refinery size), whereas long belts trivially function the same as short ones.

If refineries/chemplants/plastics were restricted behind having "visited" oil, my play style would necessarily just have some round-tripping to oil (I could imagine literally just unlocking pumpjacks as early as possible, placing exactly one down, and then doing everything else after having researched plastic).

But in general, I would think a decent amount of people would desire to build oil to, well, like, get something for their efforts (plastic for red circuits), for which I think it would make sense to have some way to do all of oil from pumpjack to plastic chemplants in one go.

[valneq]

Reading about technologies being unlocked by triggers felt very "Seablock" to me. Have not touched any other mods that do this, but it's nice to see that we will have it in vanilla (and available to all the mods!).

Not sure about the running back and forth for oil yet, as other people have emphasized. But I guess we will need a more complete picture of the new systems and features before we pass judgement.

[morsk]

If we are putting names here, I will repeat my method from another post. 1) Try a thesaurus on "quality", "excellent", etc. 2) Remember WoW has 2 "rarity" names + 2 "thematic" names about being a hero. I like Optimized for the top name to fit a theme of "good engineering". But I start out with a plain quality word like "Superior".

I don't have a full list. My best is (Quality, Superior, High-Grade Premium, Optimized) but I cheated to use Quality as a level. I don't mind the Warcraft names, also I think the popular "Masterwork" is blacksmithing not engineering, and is even more off-brand than Legendary. I am conquering multiple planets. Surely I am legendary.