Friday Facts #399 - Trash to Treasure

[POPISowyNumer]

I really hope there will be change to the names of quality levels.

[Dial-up]

I hope the ice icon is a placeholder, it doesn’t look very professional and stands out from the overall picture. at least it seems so to me, but it really is too white and clean

[aka13]

For those wondering how to eliminate excess ressources, just use a non-quality recycler loop, because without quality modules, recyclers give only 25% of the ressource back. Craft it, recycle again, and you only have 6.25% left.

Even better, we can introduce as another "fun" and "engaging" mechanic the recycler from satisfactory, which you feed anything and get le ebin loot from le ebin tickets, that's even more fun!

[Gouada]

This Friday facts was awesome. Thank you devs!

[kirkbauer]

This looks incredible. To the one person so far that doesn't like it... Space Age is not for megabases. If that's all you like (and it's ok if it is) then I wouldn't enable the Space Age mod. But most of the other quality of life improvements, plus the elevated rails and quality mods, should still be exciting for you. And easily worth the cost of the expansion even if you never use Space Age (given how many hours you must necessarily spend on megabases).

[quaatal]

I really hope there will be change to the names of quality levels.

Cast your vote here, like I did: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=108777

And I wonder what's this new blue wire is

As someone who's currently playing Space Exploration, the name Holmium is familiar to me. I believe that to be Holmium cable.

Anyway. Love the new planet design but gotta ask one thing: This seems cool and all but... I remember when you first introduced the elevated rails you said they're toggle-able. This planet makes it seem like they're a mandatory part of the game (at least when playing Space Age), unless you're gonna give us landfill, which seems tedious. Quality is something that feasibly can be turned off. However I don't see that being possible with elevated rails here. Not that I care, this planet is going to be my first stop because oh boy am I a train nerd.

It is also being repeatedly implied that space platforms are balanced around high quality structures, which are togglable, too. I do wonder how toggling Space Age off will affect the win condition in the base game, now that the rocket is unlocked with blue science. Is Wube going to maintain two different versions of the game?

While all of this does look brilliant, I can't say that I am looking forward to it, it's just not fun for me.
It's all the mechanics that make SE not fun cramped into one, obviously mandatory, location.

- You have to build defensive coverage everywhere you build - check, although this time it seem you don't get a planet-wide solution, but HAVE to do it on every point. Can't wait to have additional entiities on mining outposts which have to be delivered and stamped down in a grid.
- You need to ship in a resource which is usually abundant and is needed in huge amounts - check. "But you don't have to" - yeah, trains will be burning what then?
- No "landfill" - you now HAVE to build spaghetti for the third time now, because that's obviously such a fun mechanic somehow, being cramped. First the cliffs, then the lava fields, now the oil fields. I don't know, maybe it's me, but the novelty of cliffs wears off 30 minutes after starting a vanilla game in 1.0. Yeah, you can wall of biters every now and then for free, but otherwise they are literally undermine what made factorio great for me in the first place, when it all began - that you can quickly scale to ludicrous amounts, without being artificially limited by performance. Is this also a performance thing, like in other games, finally catching up? We should not build wide anymore?
- Recycling - I somewhat warmed up to quality, whatever, I could deal with that. But now it's the most unfun mechanic from SE shoehorned in again. Was quality not enough with recycling, is the space platform not enough?
It is not fun to have 98237546 byproducts, and have to have a convoluted way to delete them from the world is just not fun, and not interesting gameplay. This is the same as robots needing maintenance, assemblers needing lubrication, and other tedium-inducing mods.

I very much appreciate the hard work that went into the design and playtesting it, and am really sorry for being so harsh, but this is just tedium for the sake of tedium.

I agree with everything you said. I wish Wube would stop trying to force spaghetti on us.

[plepper1]

- You need to ship in a resource which is usually abundant and is needed in huge amounts - check. "But you don't have to" - yeah, trains will be burning what then?

As far as I got, you can get heavy oil, which you can use to fuel trains?

Aside from iron gears, the most frequent item from scrap is solid fuel.

fuel.png (3.82 KiB) Viewed 3593 times

[aka13]

- You need to ship in a resource which is usually abundant and is needed in huge amounts - check. "But you don't have to" - yeah, trains will be burning what then?

As far as I got, you can get heavy oil, which you can use to fuel trains?

Aside from iron gears, the most frequent item from scrap is solid fuel.
fuel.png

I take the thing with the trains back than, I thought of rocket fuel and heavy oil cracking.

[picklock]

Another outstanding FFF with lots of interesting news. Apart from the quality issue and its randomness, it all sounds very good.

So this is the planet for which we need the elevated trains. I can't wait to see how quickly the resources can be gathered to build up the train network.

I also think the concept with the lightning and how it is handled is very good. I hope there is enough space for lots of accumulators to store the energy captured.

All in all, an interesting 2nd planet and also a good extension of the game concept.

By the way, what are these blue cables and what are they used for?

[mmmPI]

I like everything in this FFF ! Apart from the lack of sound in the first video because i attempted for 10 minutes to turn it on waiting to hear some thunder but that's very minor

The result is that you'll typically be motivated to create a train network that spans over many islands using elevated rails.

I am looking forward to this !

This FFF puts many pieces together, the elevated rails make total sense in such context, and the recycling scrap of ancient ruins, those feature being integrated this way makes it more appealing to me to turn "quality" everytime. I don't know if you could still play without elevated rails on this planet, but i don't mind. I'm sure there will be some mods to adjust to such preferences and i really welcome the way that some terrain is in between passable and non-passable, like shallow water, where you could walk but not build, it has always felt underused to me, and now i hope those mechanics will be source of nice puzzle.

It doesn't sound/look that this was a desperate case x), all the contrary, it sound like many ideas kept in a room finally found their way in the game. There is/was a mod to restrict building in some small platforms already https://mods.factorio.com/mod/building-platform, it does put emphasis on logistic. The lighting theme fit nicely with the fire/volcano and "neutral" Nauvis, i'm expecting an ice planet and maybe also a jungle one ? Thore are enough different from each other to hide that repetition feeling i feel. And the idea to get some advanced good to quickstart the rebuilding on the planet instead alleviating the feeling of getting back to red science when landing on a new planet you can't use that trick in every planet and it makes a lot of sense in a planet with ruins, rather than getting advanced circuit buried in the ground in Vulcanus ...

I really like the look of the electro magnetic plant, there was a concept art that was revealed and i thought it was a power switch haha, it does convey the idea of electricity/magnetism and it look cool the way it "knit" the wire on the circuits. The lightning rod looks remind me of the beacons, maybe the technology is related, the productivity module always seemed magical to me, but maybe it's just high tech. I like the idea that the lightning is a source of energy when you can tame it and no longer a hazard ! Hopefully IRL too at some point !

I like the reflexion on the impact of civilizations on their environment, there is no more holmium deposit because the land was inhabited maybe by engineers-minded aliens that excavated everything, that's totally believable. Maybe we'll have an explanation for the presence of earth-like trees in Nauvis despite the alien looking fauna ? An attempt at terraforming that failed somehow ? Could it be related to why the spaceship crashed on Nauvis in the first place ? I think it also make a good gameplay to have to deal with some fix income ratio of material and to deal with the byproduct, it is well adapted to what we can do in factorio , many way to tackle the problem, many ways to consider one's priority and strategize for it. Maybe it is a bit difficult to have such mechanic on a (remote) planet where it can jam and you need to fly accross half the galaxy to fix it. Fulgora seems harsher than Vulcanus for a first planet to expand imo, plus the foundry comes earlier than the electromagnetic plant in the supply chain. I like that other layer of reflexion made explicit because player has to comit to either one or the other instead of doing a bit of improvement here and there. To me it will shape the state of the run in my mind, instead of early mid late, with robots, depending only on your tech there will be pre-fulgora or pre-vulcanus phase now to consider. I wonder if i will end up having a favourite order, if there will be a more logical order, or if it will be situationnal, but i'm eager to try anyway

[koliw_br]

Anyway. Love the new planet design but gotta ask one thing: This seems cool and all but... I remember when you first introduced the elevated rails you said they're toggle-able. This planet makes it seem like they're a mandatory part of the game (at least when playing Space Age), unless you're gonna give us landfill, which seems tedious. Quality is something that feasibly can be turned off. However I don't see that being possible with elevated rails here. Not that I care, this planet is going to be my first stop because oh boy am I a train nerd.

If I remember FFF correctly the option to enable/disable raised tracks, quality etc is only there if you play without space age. That is, in the base game you can turn on, for example, only quality or only raised tracks

[akxcv]

Um, does this mean that UPS usage from distinct electric networks will be fixed? Because this sounds like it would destroy perfomance in 1.1.

I am also interested in hearing if this issue will be resolved.

While I do agree that SE is not about megabases, me and my friend have encountered huge UPS issues about 500 hours into our playthrough, and we were just playing the game, not trying to build anything particularly "mega". Granted, electric networks had little to do with it, but they were one of the factors that created lag, along with train pathfinding, entities, gaps on belts, inefficient inserters, and so on.

Furthermore, it was fun for me to introduce power switches to big smelting arrays so we can save energy when we don't have anything to smelt, but it was not fun to find out that separate electric networks and unpowered entities contribute to UPS problems, and having to then remove power switches and feeling like I have to keep everything powered all the time felt bad.

I understand that these problems are fundamentally unsolvable because our CPUs are not infinitely fast, but it would be nice if there were some improvements in 2.0, if these improvements are at all possible. It would also be nice to hear Wube's thoughts about these UPS-limiting issues, especially since some of the new features of Space Age seem nudge the player away from UPS-optimal solutions.

[Serenity]

Quality is something that feasibly can be turned off.

One screenshot here lists scrap recycling under "quality". So it doesn't look like it can be turned off :/

[mmmPI]

If I remember FFF correctly the option to enable/disable raised tracks, quality etc is only there if you play without space age. That is, in the base game you can turn on, for example, only quality or only raised tracks

I'm willing to believe that and i'm fine with it, it answers my doubts.

[Svip]

Quality is something that feasibly can be turned off.

One screenshot here lists scrap recycling under "quality". So it doesn't look like it can be turned off :/

It lists scrap as modified by Quality, but the base mod is Space Age.

[Hares]

Damage and frequency boosted for demonstration purposes.

Scammed and clickbaited. Such a shame.

Modders, you know what to do.

[ThorsDragon]

SO. MUCH. HYPE!!! I am SO excited for this game's 2.0 and DLC!!!!!! And easily, Fulgora will be my first planet- I love lightning!!!

[Mycroft4114]

Looks great! I like the idea of a giant scrap pile to dig up and sort, sort, sort. The lightning storms hitting at night and being used for power is a funny reverse solar setup.

How long do things take to sink into the sands? Is it instant or non-buildable terrain, or could we run a temporary steering of power poles for example to kickstart a new island?

I see some people being confused about having elevated rails and quality required when they are togglable - those systems are packaged as separate mods so they can be added to other games. (Want to play vanilla, but with elevated rails added? You can!) But mods can list required dependencies - so if you are playing Space Age, the rails and quality will be marked as required and you can't turn them off for a Space Age game. You can choose to not make use of them, but they will be there.

[Niyu.Cuatro]

I'm still not that sould out on the whole quality system. But i really like the idea of this planet. Limited building space, focus on trains, reversed crafting tree, regional dangers to buildings and last for not least, the theme of, after reletlessly harnessing the natural resources of a plant, go to completely disregard the importance of archeological findings, using them instead as raw materials.

If anything, the only thing that is a bit weird is that the ancient alien civilisation made their machines from the same components you make. It's probably meant to represent an abstract, a different device that makes the same end result. But it's still a bit weird.

[Frantic Fanatic]

Five module slots? Oof, as much fun as that would be to play with, that means the recycler would have to be extra stingy to compensate.