Factorio Forums

Hi dear devs,
I would like to give out some suggestions. And I will definitely explain how these suggestions would help the game to be better.
OK, here we go.

1,Railway Bridge.
Recently I've tried a mod named Train tunnels. The idea was amazing and it helps alot. But it's still buggy now.
After that, I tried to make intersections which work as well as the mod. I tried T shape intersections with circuits control, but I found it impossible to make any thing equivalent to any Two-way six-lane road(Google translated, I mean a road has 2 directions,and for each direction there are 3 lanes). And it's impossible to make any equavalent to any 2way 4lanes cross intersections. Trains stop to wait the circuit to turn the lights green, and block more or less.
I think you could add a bridge for railway system, say 10x10, with rail inside it already. The whole thing blocks the whole 10x10 area. No stations,no inserters,no signal lights because of the collider. And it separates the 2 railways perfectly, easy to use, easy to learn, no circuit needed, cpu friendly, saves time.

2,Water level.
This idea is from when friends and I talked about the reverse landfill alike mods. It's too powerful to dig water, because it could be utilized to protect the base perfectly, and makes the whole game too easy. So even we play with the dig-water alike mods, we just forbid ourselves to do that.
And another thing is that, sometimes we by accidentally filled some water but we found out ,say nuke power, is not gonna work anymore without that critical water grid. And crude oil runs out but water never.
And the difference between deep and light water doesnt make sence. They are just different visually.
I think you could make a new system to calculate the deepth of water,and make water flow. And a new kind of robot to change the height of ground.
And you dont need to put the calc load in maim thread. It could be updated every 5 second, so cpu friendly. The machines, assembler machines,oil refinators,chemicals, just could not work as always when they are partly inside water. That makes people to build bases on mountains. And this system makes weather meaningful as well.
And If you let creepers swim only a little,only in some light water, that would be nice, and the mods strenthen the creepers could take control of the swimming skill level of creepers.
Finally, I think with a year playing with this feature, we would see springs, revers in game. Not only islands as it is now.

3,Some things about the car-belt system.
I inspired by the idea that put tanks on belts and use the tanks as chests, I tried car belts system and it works very well. I made a tutorial on tieba.com(a Chinese forum).But I found that cars are very cpu unfriendly when they are on belts. And cars push each other when they meet the bent belts. And I have to make quite alot tech to control the accurate position of cars to make the whole system go.
If a car cares only about the next point where it is calculated to transfered to , if it's available, it goes, if it's not, it stays without any other colliding calculation. THe whole system would save a lot cpu resources. And the car belt system will definitely become way simpler, more friendly.
And if possible, could you please make all the collider shifting the same to make car belt system even simpler?

4,Elevator and multi layer system.
The idea if from a map recently. If we had standard elevator system, we could easily transfer players, items on belts, trains between layers, which makes lives of mod and map devs easier.
And after this, I think you need to add some buttons to control the radar widgets, to let people see the other layers without going to other layers.
Btw, the space exploring mod is getting popular. I tried once on some server, 3 players were not on the init layer, I found my self helpless standing there and had no idea what to do .emmmm.

OK, these are the 4 things I wanted to say today.
Good luck and have fun,dear devs.
Yagaodirac
2019-06-17

I've read some of these suggestions multiple times over the last years of Factorio development, but here are my two cents:

1. Railway bridges
Non-intersecting railway crossings were suggested by many people. While this will add a lot of comfort to the game, it is technically quite challenging as Factorio is mostly 2D, with underground belts being some kind of exception. Train bridges and tunnels could possibly be walked on/in, but that requires some additional Z-layer and more complicated pathfinding (as biters also might want to explore the tunnels).

Bridges will overlay parts of the playfield, hiding details below. Additionally, there is the question of how players would get to a train on a bridge, e.g. if it's running out of fuel - or a player getting out of a locomotive on a bridge. Similar considerations apply for tunnels. You might not be able to see a locomotive inside a tunnel, possibly can't get to it (or get out of it). Worst situation would be a train stuck in a tunnel without fuel and a player inside the train, also having no fuel in the inventory.

On a pseudo-3D-map like OpenTTD, where no player character walks among the world, this is easy to implement. But Factorio would need some serious refactoring if the devs would add either or both of these features. So this won't happen until Factorio 2 with a complete rewrite is being released.


2. Water
I really know the pains of accidentally landfilling a bit too much of a water body. Digging for water is, as you stated, too powerful and somewhat unrealistic. I'd personally suggest two improvements which don't give the player godlike powers while still making playing the game easier.

First improvement would be to have the possibility to undo landfilling. For this to work, the filled-in tiles just need some special flag so the game remembers it was placed by the player, then you could just remove the tile with the landfill using right-click, similar to floor paving. the landfill must not necessarily be given back to the player, but the water tile should be restored. You could go a step further and make coastal tiles mineable in a 1 to 2 tile radius around a map-generated water tile, so you can enlarge or straighten coast lines a bit, but not create whole new lakes or barriers against biters.

The second improvement I'd like to suggest (and that was suggested by others before) is a water well, which you can place everywhere. This pump would not provide a smaller amount of water as the offshore pump and possibly have a penalty if you place too many wells too close together. This way, you could proide water to smaller power plants or refineries, while it's uneconomical for larger setups or nuclear power plants.


3. Car/Tank belt
This feature is more of an exploit than a legitimate game mechanic. That cars on belts aren't really optimized by the devs is a good indicator. There was a time (pre-0.16) that players used fluid train wagons instead of tanks as the train wagon occupied 2x6 tiles while three tanks used 3x9 to store the same amount (75K) of liquid. Additionally, you could separate the three tanks on the train to contain different fluids. The devs nerfed the fluid wagon to only contain 25K of liquid, so it is now less space-efficient than a tank (even more so as you need at least two pumps to get liquid in and out).

So while it's fun to be able to use cars as moveable chests on belts, it is not meant to be used regularly and I wouldn't count on the devs to implement any change to make it more player-friendly.


4.
AFAIK the layer system is a nice idea, but not really mature in any way. If the devs decide to implement the layer system into the vanilla game, we'll start seeing all kinds of additional features like your proposed elevators. While it doesn't require a complete rewrite of the game engine, there's still a lot of wor to be done for this to work properly and fit into the vanilla game without making some tasks too easy. A fun part of the game is that you are limited to the square grid and just have short, straight underground belts to cross other belts and structures. The Beltlayer mod already provides such functionality, but makes building dense factories really, really easy.

If vanilla Factorio ever supports additional building layers, this has to be designed carefully. Non-connected layers like some kind of space layer just add a separate playfield, but no new mechanics. That would be easier to fit into the current game, and has also been mentioned by the devs some time ago as an idea as a post-1.0 feature.

CodAv wrote: ↑Mon Jun 17, 2019 4:08 pm I've read some of these suggestions multiple times over the last years of Factorio development, but here are my two cents:

1. Railway bridges
Non-intersecting railway crossings were suggested by many people. While this will add a lot of comfort to the game, it is technically quite challenging as Factorio is mostly 2D, with underground belts being some kind of exception. Train bridges and tunnels could possibly be walked on/in, but that requires some additional Z-layer and more complicated pathfinding (as biters also might want to explore the tunnels).

Bridges will overlay parts of the playfield, hiding details below. Additionally, there is the question of how players would get to a train on a bridge, e.g. if it's running out of fuel - or a player getting out of a locomotive on a bridge. Similar considerations apply for tunnels. You might not be able to see a locomotive inside a tunnel, possibly can't get to it (or get out of it). Worst situation would be a train stuck in a tunnel without fuel and a player inside the train, also having no fuel in the inventory.

On a pseudo-3D-map like OpenTTD, where no player character walks among the world, this is easy to implement. But Factorio would need some serious refactoring if the devs would add either or both of these features. So this won't happen until Factorio 2 with a complete rewrite is being released.


2. Water
I really know the pains of accidentally landfilling a bit too much of a water body. Digging for water is, as you stated, too powerful and somewhat unrealistic. I'd personally suggest two improvements which don't give the player godlike powers while still making playing the game easier.

First improvement would be to have the possibility to undo landfilling. For this to work, the filled-in tiles just need some special flag so the game remembers it was placed by the player, then you could just remove the tile with the landfill using right-click, similar to floor paving. the landfill must not necessarily be given back to the player, but the water tile should be restored. You could go a step further and make coastal tiles mineable in a 1 to 2 tile radius around a map-generated water tile, so you can enlarge or straighten coast lines a bit, but not create whole new lakes or barriers against biters.

The second improvement I'd like to suggest (and that was suggested by others before) is a water well, which you can place everywhere. This pump would not provide a smaller amount of water as the offshore pump and possibly have a penalty if you place too many wells too close together. This way, you could proide water to smaller power plants or refineries, while it's uneconomical for larger setups or nuclear power plants.


3. Car/Tank belt
This feature is more of an exploit than a legitimate game mechanic. That cars on belts aren't really optimized by the devs is a good indicator. There was a time (pre-0.16) that players used fluid train wagons instead of tanks as the train wagon occupied 2x6 tiles while three tanks used 3x9 to store the same amount (75K) of liquid. Additionally, you could separate the three tanks on the train to contain different fluids. The devs nerfed the fluid wagon to only contain 25K of liquid, so it is now less space-efficient than a tank (even more so as you need at least two pumps to get liquid in and out).

So while it's fun to be able to use cars as moveable chests on belts, it is not meant to be used regularly and I wouldn't count on the devs to implement any change to make it more player-friendly.


4.
AFAIK the layer system is a nice idea, but not really mature in any way. If the devs decide to implement the layer system into the vanilla game, we'll start seeing all kinds of additional features like your proposed elevators. While it doesn't require a complete rewrite of the game engine, there's still a lot of wor to be done for this to work properly and fit into the vanilla game without making some tasks too easy. A fun part of the game is that you are limited to the square grid and just have short, straight underground belts to cross other belts and structures. The Beltlayer mod already provides such functionality, but makes building dense factories really, really easy.

If vanilla Factorio ever supports additional building layers, this has to be designed carefully. Non-connected layers like some kind of space layer just add a separate playfield, but no new mechanics. That would be easier to fit into the current game, and has also been mentioned by the devs some time ago as an idea as a post-1.0 feature.

Very glad to see someone reply to my words.
I think I need to explain some of my ideas more.
1, the railway bridge.
I think it's not very difficult to handle the interaction of players, trains and bridgs. Players dont need to ba able to stand anywhere inside the bridge. If a player tries to exit his train while the train is just in side a bridge, we could simply put him some where outside the whole block. Imagine steping out of the silo.
And to the overlaying, we could simply designate the bridge is in a specified direction and the horizontal train is on the top and the vertical one is under it, no matter how you build the bridge. And the collider could also modified only very slightly to fit this situation. As I programmed in both unity3d and ue4, I think this is not difficult thing basing on experience.

2, water.
OK, this topic is so classic. I read some of the thread in this forum, and I found this topic is more funny than meaningful. Any way ,people are interesting in the mechanism no matter what it would become.

3, car belt.
OK, just for fun.Nvm. To be honest, I myself havn't even once build anything successfully with the car belt tech.

4, elevator.
The same explaining with the 1. I think there is always some way to add some feature into this game without massive modification, and people dont really need some real elevator. The elevator is more alike a transfer point to decrece the running time for players, and a mechanism to gather them in a short distance. In order to make them interact more. And to make players interact with more kinds of environments. I dont think that belts could cross floors at any place is any thing good. And that brings only confusion.
A recent map is call Decu(its folder's name), has a very simple elevator system.

That's all for today. Very glad to see people read this and reply me.
And thank you again.
Yagaodirac
2019-06-20

It is always a pleasure to read nice argumentation about my favourite game.

The suggestions are popular, those new dimensions they would add to the games seems to be related to the factorio world in the minds of many players given the past mods that were created, aiming at implementing those aspects of the game.

1. Railway Bridges: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/rail-bridge
This new mod is just that. I have not tried the Train tunnels which seems different. It allows for building road-like interchange like clover-leaf or trumpet interchange.

There is a visual issue with it despite all technical functionnality being provided. maybe not possible to fix without complete rewrite of the drawing ? I can't tell.

I do wish it makes it way to the game one way or another, but I think we will have to rely on the genius of modders for some time. My explanation would be that the game is in a phase where it is trying to makes the details perfect for version 1. Bridges or tunnels may be considered too much of a topic to be added in the game at the last minute. I hope to be proven wrong.

Bridges and tunnels are amazing in terms of potentials and many players would be disappointed if it was not well implemented, with a wide analysis of the things that it will impact and some times to fix after first implementation.

This is also why I like to read discussion about changes that appeals to me, because the more it is talked about, the easier it is becoming for the developers to envision how it should be done, and measure players expectations for later.


2. Water level : https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GlobalWarming

I have tried this one a long time ago; It is expanding the aspect of the environment, which water is a very important element in this outdated mod. When I read "Creepers" I think about environment too, the creatures that walks in minecraft.

For this one I think in Factorio the environment is just an excuse for doing engineering; The scenario revolves on a survival aspect in an unknow environment but the game itself is not based on the relation you have with the environment and its modification; You just happen to be above it . You could play without the pollution, or the biters, or even the water with some small changes.

A system to measure the water level would make the environment more alive so as a height of ground change but I don't think it is part of the general direction the game is going, maybe this is why in more funny than meaningful for many people, it would be a nice "detail" but not game changing.

Again if you implement such a thing, some other players will expect a lot from it, you can't offer a detail to them.

Undo the landfilling can be cheaty if you make a bridge to an island with biters and ressources , and cut the bridges when they attack, but it would be nice in other situations.

For the second point I totally agree, with some concern for the balance of the game, I have used this mod https://mods.factorio.com/mods/binbinhfr/WaterWell, its use can help the dev to have an idea on how players will use the new thing. And how to balance it.

3. Car and/or Tanks on belt : This is look at it, and I congrats the persons who came up with it. My only relation with the subject.

4. Elevator and multi layer system

I love this idea; i had made a map with this outdated mod some years ago https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Erdbeerb ... ces_remake on a 100x100 map, with many many layers and escalators

yagaodirac wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2019 10:54 am The elevator is more alike a transfer point to decrece the running time for players, and a mechanism to gather them in a short distance. In order to make them interact more. And to make players interact with more kinds of environments.

It was exactly that, a tile that look like a ladder , and when you step on it , you were "teleported" in an other surface. Chests , Tanks , and accumulators were used for transfer of material and you had to place one on each layer at the same coordinate for them to connect. A lot of fun.

The not cpu-friendly part was the transfer of ressources. Which for water flowing for power was very bad.

Another concept is https://mods.factorio.com/mods/MagmaMcFry/Factorissimo2

It is great and I have played so much with it that i can't even describe it honestly.

This one is version 2 because version 1 encountered the same problem for ressources transfer with lua, which seems to be a coslty-for-the-cpu workaround to add functionnality that were not planned initially.

It is getting more and more mature in a way. There are other mods that offers that, like the space exploring mod.


I think out of the 4 suggestions it is the one that has the most chance to come to a reality first; I am thinking that for version 1, the campain and tutorial are given special attention, and the layer system could be a tool in the hands of the dev for what they want to make.


Then would be the railbridges, and I have almost no hope for the water/environment aspect of the game to increase but would be happy to be wrong.

oh, and car/belt seems like a nest for synchronisation problems in multiplayer, so I expect no development on that, it's a nice thing that it stayed like this already but i have a very uninformed opinion on that subject.

Happy to see ideas are shared.

Edit: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Noxys_Swimming, You can swim, ennemy can swim. Fun but hard with a lot of water.