Friday Facts #399 - Trash to Treasure

[musbur]

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?

If you don't like cliffs or trees, you know you are one checkbox away from not having them on start of a game? And if they start bothering you later in the game you probably can erase them all with a console command. What is your problem?

[aka13]

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?

If you don't like cliffs or trees, you know you are one checkbox away from not having them on start of a game? And if they start bothering you later in the game you probably can erase them all with a console command. What is your problem?

Man, you are the 5th poster which lacks reading comprehension or is just baiting, I don't know.
And I even reply each time - cliffs are fun, trees are fun, being limited in a game is obviously fun, otherwise there is no progression.

What is not fun, is that the cliffs-lavapit-oilpit are the same limitation. Imagine if you had to craft a new assembler type for every planet, but the only difference would be the color scheme of the assembler, and otherwise it would be mechanically the same. To me, it would not be fun.

[Svip]

What is not fun, is that the cliffs-lavapit-oilpit are the same limitation. Imagine if you had to craft a new assembler type for every planet, but the only difference would be the color scheme of the assembler, and otherwise it would be mechanically the same. To me, it would not be fun.

Reasonable minds can disagree, but I don't find the lava and oil pits to be of the same nature as the cliffs on Nauvis. Cliffs on Nauvis usually form large natural walls with huge holes in them. On either side, your building space is usually not that restrictive. And when you plan out your Starter Base Mark 2, you usually scout the land for where there are as few cliffs as possible, minimising the need for cliff explosives, which one have not unlocked yet.

The considerations on Vulcanus and Fulgora are not the same - at least in my view. There are too many cliffs on Vulcanus to simply "build around them", the "mountains", as they are described are generally areas to avoid when possible. The lava pits have different shapes as cliffs, and they are more akin to small lakes than cliffs. And unlike cliffs, lava serves a purpose. Indeed, comparing lava and oil pits to water lakes might be a more appropriate comparison.

As for Fulgora, it's clear that the map will encourage (or rather require) island hopping. This is giving me Freight Forwarding vibes, though allowing me to connect trains between the islands, but have separate power networks. That's an interesting new logistical challenge that Nauvis' cliffs does not offer.

Water/lava/oil and cliffs are all used differently on either planet, and they offer new ways to meet what is at its core the same limitations. I think you'll find - once you get to play the new maps - that the challenge is distinct from those on Nauvis.

[aka13]

Certainly, I am looking forward to it.

[datkensign]

So the recycler can't output more than 100% of its input but I can take that 100% output and use it to make something with a productivity bonus, which does give >100% outpit.

Recycle again for 100% output and I now have a loop that produces slightly more material than it consumes, granting infinite resources.

Is this deliberate? Am I missing something? Seems broken to me

[orzelek]

So the recycler can't output more than 100% of its input but I can take that 100% output and use it to make something with a productivity bonus, which does give >100% outpit.

Recycle again for 100% output and I now have a loop that produces slightly more material than it consumes, granting infinite resources.

Is this deliberate? Am I missing something? Seems broken to me

You are missing two things from FFF's and/or discussions:
1. Recycler returns 25% of recycled item inputs.
2. There is a hard cap on productivity at 300% aka 4x.
So in best case scenario you recycled your item and gotten all of it's materials back.

Actually after rereading your post you are right. You can make more items from those materials using productivity and you should be able to loop that. Getting to that level of productivity will be very costly (high lvl high quality prod modules have huge costs) but it can be done.

[meganothing]

It is very seldom that I laugh out loud when reading about new features of a game, but it happened with this FF.

[Pel00]

Recently, I keep seeing that WUBE is adding news about new features/additions to the game. I saw a new train system, space age, a volcanic planet, now recently fulgora... everything is great, but gentlemen - you are feeding us with this news and I am asking when are you going to implement these new things? I like Factorio, but when you keep adding something new just to brag that it's coming, and if it doesn't happen, do you know that you'll get a wave of hate?
Wouldn't it be better for you to finish what you're working on and inform us how many new things you're implementing into the game before the update?

[MeduSalem]

I would rather consider building most of the factory where you will be having infinite resources. Like Vulcanus for Iron/Copper based stuff. Fulgora seems to be good for Oil because of the oily sand.

There is no "infinite" resource in the sense of place miner once and it goes on forever.

Splitting lava into molten metals require calcite that has to be mined from finite deposits. Splitting oil requires water that also has to be mined from finite scrap deposits on Fulgora.

Not to mention that sending stuff in space require rockets which require all kind of materials.

Well then let me correct myself... the better term is probably "semi-infinite".

Doing all kinds of metallurgy stuff on Vulcanus as much as possible is likely still going to be the meta.
I doubt one needs ungodly amounts of calcium to do it either. At least judging from the GIF with the running Foundry back in that other FF it doesn't look like it needs a lot of calcium input. So lava-mining on Vulcanus will likely still beat bulk-mining elsewhere for ores in comparison. At least you will likely have to do less expansion (basically just for calcium instead of having to expand for 2 ores elsewhere). And you can slap that monstrous miner on a calcium deposit and probably live on a couple of them almost forever if upgraded with modules. ^^

And when it comes to Fulgora, sure, the water initially seems to be a problem on Fulgora, but they wrote that there can be found natural water wells in a similar fashion that you can find oil wells on Nauvis. So securing some of the islands that have such wells would reduce the amount of scrap mining you need to do for ice. So I assume that it will likely still be most worthwhile doing oil-based stuff there.


Anyway, I didn't write that I will always ship absolutely everything. There will always be things that will be more worthwhile doing in a "local loop". Especially if the numbers of them are not worth the trouble shipping anything.


And when it comes to the cost of shipping stuff... well if it will never be worth bulk shipping anything (even in endgame) ... then doing space stuff & platforms is basically pointless in the first place. Then it would only serve as a spring board to get to other planets but nothing more, but I refuse to believe that this will be their only use. ^^

So at least I will try to ship stuff from where I have an "semi"-infinite amount to where I have not an infinite amount.

That said my final dream would rather be to build a mobile factory space platform that periodically travels between planets just to pick up the local "goods" that I can craft there from the available "semi"-infinite resource, then assemble the end-stage of products directly on the platform, so I only rarely ever have to send things back down to a planet, and instead rather keep expanding that huge monstrous space platform. ^^

[akxcv]

Where?

Not FFF. viewtopic.php?p=594603#p594603

Thank you!

[datkensign]

So the recycler can't output more than 100% of its input but I can take that 100% output and use it to make something with a productivity bonus, which does give >100% outpit.

Recycle again for 100% output and I now have a loop that produces slightly more material than it consumes, granting infinite resources.

Is this deliberate? Am I missing something? Seems broken to me

You are missing two things from FFF's and/or discussions:
1. Recycler returns 25% of recycled item inputs.
2. There is a hard cap on productivity at 300% aka 4x.
So in best case scenario you recycled your item and gotten all of it's materials back.

Actually after rereading your post you are right. You can make more items from those materials using productivity and you should be able to loop that. Getting to that level of productivity will be very costly (high lvl high quality prod modules have huge costs) but it can be done.

This.

The recycler by itself can't conjure material out of thin air, but a recycler + production bonus in an assembler making for example LDS can just keep looping and the overspill grants a hefty supply of plastic, copper and steel/iron without the need to ever mine anything.

I mean it's "balanced" in that you'll be pretty far into the game before this is viable and of course would cost a fair few resources to get it going at a decent rate. My issue is that conjuring material out of thin air isn't exactly lore friendly.

What exactly is in place to prevent these kind of shenanigans?

Edit to add: Maybe recyclers should always need some sort of catalyst/fuel that's always consumed? This doesn't necessarily "fix" the problem but could somewhat justify where you're getting that extra material from in a lore-friendly way.

[XT-248]

As written by others. Throw the stuff you don't want into the recycler.

If it is already in its most basic form (stone can't be broken down further), it will return itself, but only with a 25% chance.

So you can throw in stone, and there is only a 25% chance that it will be returned. Loop the stuff around until it gets deleted.



That said, I am not sure when you will get the recycler from research (but I think it will be necessary to even do anything on Fulgora so it can't be thaaat hard to get) and if the generic item-recycling recipe needs extra research ontop of being able to recycle scrap.
BUT even if you don't readily have it, you could stockpile the excess stuff in chests until you have it, and then start throwing it into the recycler loop until it gets deleted and slowly decrease your stockpile in the background, not like you need to babysit it. ^^

Do you have a quotation or source for the recycler voiding 75% of stone, solid fuels, or other items that can't be broken down further? Such a cycle could sink extra solid fuels, which are always in demand for train fuel, rocket fuel, and electric power. Why void solid fuels?

Put another way, a player feeds energy to a recycler to remove some potentially usable electric or mechanical energy. How do players make up for a loss in usable energy?


Even if such a solution is reasonable, I play my way, like everybody else, and prefer not to void anything if I can avoid it.

IE: I would take an excess of the three oil derivate oil byproducts and re-process them into solid fuel instead of "flare it off" (think void chest but for fluid) since solid fuels are always in demand.

Manual intervention solutions are also a no-go (IE, place a chest full of stone overnight for the Fulgora nightly lightning storm to destroy).

[FuryoftheStars]

I am asking when are you going to implement these new things? I like Factorio, but when you keep adding something new just to brag that it's coming, and if it doesn't happen, do you know that you'll get a wave of hate?
Wouldn't it be better for you to finish what you're working on and inform us how many new things you're implementing into the game before the update?

It's not an update. It's a full on Expansion. And they already gave an estimated release date:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373

[varundevan]

Electromagnetic plant

Please have a better name and better animation for this item.
Electromagnetic plant - not that good of a name for some thing that makes advanced electrical and electronics. please have a better name ..
The animation is having an object rotating all the time - does not look great .. imagine having 100s of this rotating in random order .. hmm ..
I would suggest a better and more cool looking animation ..

A suggestion , animation with something like this would look cool ..

107034318-1647898983554-NXE3400_Simplify_seq11_20180130.jpg (864.4 KiB) Viewed 1010 times

[XT-248]

Wrong. It's possible to void stone and solid fuel with the tools available.

I don't dispute that it is possible to void anything. The difference is that I choose not to do so and am still waiting for a good reason to do voiding.

See the voiding solid fuel example in my previous post.

I already told you to forget about the randomness. It can't occasionally give you excess of a particular resource type.
Voiding things directly or extra steps doesn't matter, both are 100% reliable. You are just giving excuses to fail.

I am seeking to provide criticism which you disagree with. That is no excuse for twisting my words into something else it is not supposed to communicate.

The lightning rods takes very little space and power poles don't need maintenance.

WUBE has yet to show everything about Fugora, Vulcanis, and the other two worlds.

We don't know how Fugora will challenge the players from a combat point of view. Such combat content could result in losing power poles, tracks, lightning rods, etc.

Maintenance is replacing and keeping those connections between Fugora's islands intact. The same is also true of remote outposts on Nauvis.

You don't need landfill because you don't need power poles to connect the plateaus. I didn't tell you to landfill, I told you that if you do then you also have the tools to do it safely. And power is sent from the sky to all land, so power never has to be transported from other locations anyways so just don't if you don't want to bother.

Use your brain and come up with a solution instead of giving up many months before the expansion is released.

The size of various Fugora islands determines how much power that individual island can receive.

A sizeable centralized plateau doesn't mean remote outposts have sufficient landmass and power generation capacity to support a long daytime operation when lightning doesn't strike.


In several of the blog's screenshots, such as this one, you can observe multiple connections between islands (including but not limited to power poles).



A pair of blue/yellow dots, blue is power towers with power connections turned off, is heading northeast to the screenshot corner. If power is available everywhere as you say it is. Then why is there any power connection between Fugora islands?


I am not interested in a stranger's biased outlook on how I think and play video games.

It's easy to solve by anyone that actually tries to come up with solutions instead of ways of whining. Outlets being blocked wasn't what I was talking about as a red herring, randomness was. But I suppose that since we can easily void items it's also just a distraction to worry about that as well.

I'm not telling you how to void stone, it's so simple that I'm almost certain that you can figure it out if you spend a few months thinking about it. It's not launching it to another planet.

You are confident? Arrogant and wrong is a sad combination.

If you can actually find something that is provably non-voidable then maybe we would have an issue. But the randomness would still be completely unrelated.

Your attitude is coming across as you claim me to be. I will put that aside as it is immaterial to what I am saying here.


The point of the Recycler's outlet to an already full convey belt is precisely the point.

The Recycler will become idle at that point as there is nowhere for the products to go.

The only source of holmium ore is recycling Fugora's scrap. If recyclers are idle, it doesn't matter if the reason is 'an excessive amount of stone' as any other items can be on the output convey belt. An excess of stone is just but one possible scenario where this can happen.

Recycler being idle can block your production of anything that uses holmium ore, resulting in a cascading effect.

Your example with oil is you proving yourself wrong, randomness is not the reason for clogging up the system since it happens in deterministic oil as well. But it's completely solved with voiding, so it's not actually a concern.

You can't get 100 stone pieces in a row from a random process with 5% chance so even with just belts as buffers you should be safe from clogs. You can't even realistically get 10 stone in a row...

I see where you misunderstood me.

Balancing petroleum, light, and heavy oil consumption presents the same issues when Recycler processing scrap becomes idle.

Whenever any oil outlet is full at refineries, and there is no excess production handling, you have the same situation as the Recycler becoming idle due to unhandled excess of anything.


The randomness of the recycler processing scrap recipes plays a minor role.

However, when I devise solutions to scale up holmium ore production, I have the same question regardless of what you say. What do I do if I have an unhandled excess amount of anything at a large scale (targeting an average of 100 holmium ore per second)?

Voiding is not the answer to every problem as you claim it to be.

[mmmPI]

I don't dispute that it is possible to void anything. The difference is that I choose not to do so and am still waiting for a good reason to do voiding.

Recycler being idle can block your production of anything that uses holmium ore, resulting in a cascading effect.

However, when I devise solutions to scale up holmium ore production, I have the same question regardless of what you say. What do I do if I have an unhandled excess amount of anything at a large scale (targeting an average of 100 holmium ore per second)?

Voiding is not the answer to every problem as you claim it to be.

This is what i've been trying to explain to you all along !!! The reason to do voiding is to avoid your recycler being idle resulting in a cascading effect when you want to scale Holmium production.

If you can manage all the byproducts from recycling to keep holmium production going, good, if not, you can still void some things to make sure the holmium doesn't stall.

That's also the reason why you would want to void solid fuel, if it risk jamming the recycler which is your only soure of Holimum as far as things revealed showed

[GregoriusT]

Hrrm, devoid of "Risk", I wonder if this is a lack of the Devs telling us who the natives are or if going to the final planet causes Space Biters to appear on the other 3 Planets and Nauvis, so you suddenly have to defend all locations (better prepare your tower defense early!).

Biter Meteors are quite the fun thing in SE, so I would not be surprised if those would make it into 2.0 as well.

The Space Biters could even be the Floaters from a much earlier FFF to be unleashed at a certain point, such as 90% Evo.

Anyways, really want mobile Worms on this Planet.

[malecord]

However, when I devise solutions to scale up holmium ore production, I have the same question regardless of what you say. What do I do if I have an unhandled excess amount of anything at a large scale (targeting an average of 100 holmium ore per second)?

Voiding is not the answer to every problem as you claim it to be.

That's part of this planet puzzle I guess.

I think it will work like the vanilla Oil cracking puzzle but more complex. One will need to setup buffers (chests) to absorb the throughput variations. And then to adjust to the consumption (since you don't just build science with constant ratio but also infrastructure that's situational and so with varying ratio) I guess we will need to recycle more or reassemble back depending on specific item buffers size. Some easy circuit network applied in many places.

[XT-248]

This is what i've been trying to explain to you all along !!! The reason to do voiding is to avoid your recycler being idle resulting in a cascading effect when you want to scale Holmium production.

If you can manage all the byproducts from recycling to keep holmium production going, good, if not, you can still void some things to make sure the holmium doesn't stall.

That's also the reason why you would want to void solid fuel, if it risk jamming the recycler which is your only soure of Holimum as far as things revealed showed

I looked across your posts. You were describing a different process.

'Fixed income' implies that the recipe always yields an identical product from processing something.

Put another way, people look at raw Uranium processing; the time to gain a certain amount of Uranium-235 is non-deterministic because the Uranium processing is 'non-fixed income.' Either you get Uranium 235 or 238.

One can not adjust the Uranium recipe to produce more Uranium-235 per craft except through brutal force (more reactors). When people achieve a higher and partially constant income of Uranium-235 through more reactors, they end up with an excess of Uranium-238.


Depending on my situation, I usually deal with the excess of Uranium-238 by re-processing it through the Kovarex Enrichment process or ammo.


There is nothing equivalent to the "Kovarex Sink-this-excess recipe" for stone. The same quandary exists for Foundry on Vulcanis (Calcite -> liquid metal + excess stone).

Meanwhile, people in Factorio always need iron, copper, water, plastic bars, and intermediate products made with those.


Two products yield stone from processing scrap: concrete and stone itself, which add up to a non-trivial ~11% chance per scrap, which seems a tiny bit on the excess side for a world without biter nests or enemies (stone wall).

Are you honestly prepared to sink 11 stones to one holmium ore on average into something? Railroad track? That is a lot of rail sections, considering the scale players can reach (1000 SPM+).

[mmmPI]

I looked across your posts. You were describing a different process.

'Fixed income' implies that the recipe always yields an identical product from processing something.

No that is your (mis)understanding from my words, that i tried to dispell several time, i used the expression "fixed income RATIO" and you omitted the last word, and said i meant something else but no all along that's what i meant, that's why i compared it with the oil processing and the iron COMPARED to copper income, this is a fix ratio and so on.

I'm glad the mis understanding is now dispelled

There is nothing equivalent to the "Kovarex Sink-this-excess recipe" for stone. The same quandary exists for Foundry on Vulcanis (Calcite -> liquid metal + excess stone).

Are you honestly prepared to sink 11 stones to one holmium ore on average into something? Railroad track? That is a lot of rail sections, considering the scale players can reach (1000 SPM+).

You don't know all what exist, only 1 single receipe, maybe holmium refining need a ton of stone. Maybe you will want to make legendary wall and export them in all your planets when you need defense. And you will have to only sink some stone in the recycler when you don't need that extra stone. Purple science require electric furnace which require stone brick which require ... stone .... ! Maybe the whole process is going to yield more holmium than you need for science, but not enough stone, and you will not even need a sink for stone. As i said i'm curious to see how the dev made the expansion.

Also its not because you don't want to put chest under lightning that i'm going to restrict myself about doing it. You only have partial vision, then add arbitrary restriction and then complain it's too difficult even before trying, i can't agree with you, there's no need to try and convince me x)