Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Increase light radius and power at higher quality levels.

What ?

Darkness can be annoying. Lit bases can be nice. Dropping lights and the required electric poles for them all around your base can be annoying, especially as they just get in the way while you expand, and tend to require constant adjustment or rebuilding.

Simply having the option to build more powerful lights would help a lot: you have a much better chance of building a light somewhere where it doesn't immediately get in the way but also provides enough light to be useful. Quality provides a way to have that without introducing new recipes.

Why ?

The three options we currently have for dealing with darkness are:

1. build lights
2. build night vision goggles
3. crank up brightness in settings

Settings are available from the get-go, but resorting to that feels a bit like cheating.

Night-vision goggles aren't available until you get modular armor, personal battery, etc. Even when you can build NVGs, properly lit bases could still be the more pleasant way to deal with darkness.

The only in-game solution available in the early game is lights. I'm just finding that I neglect lights most of the time because their radius is so small that you really have to clutter the base with lights and electric poles everywhere if you want it to be well lit. But then all these random lights annoyingly get in the way as you're expanding and building more important things. So you have to keep moving them around all the time while simultaneously being irritated by the patches of darkness that open up as you shove your lights around.

Because of the annoyance, most of my bases just end up being unlit. Screw darkness, screw micromanaging lights and their poles, I'm just turning up the brightness.

It doesn't have to be that way. Quality modules are a superb addition to the game, and finding new applications like this only makes them more awesome.