Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Concrete usage of mods as the intended way to play, by allowing players to manually toggle exact mods to not interfere with global steam achievements.

Why ?

I played with QoL mods since my first factory, and because of that I missed a lot of achievements; so last few weeks I spend completing them all... And since I always played with mods, playing without wasn't a great experience for me — I felt restricted in a way that isn't interesting, doesn't add any value to achieving achievement, and simply inconvenient; which made me think about why you, devs don't allow to use mods and how it can, and why it should be changed...

It shouldn't break anything or be a vulnerability that allows players to "cheat"... since it's already pretty easy. I got my first rocket achievements on Steam, even though I was using mods, including creative, which I used to actually "cheat" and decrease evolution on my first world; and all I did is just reloaded save without mods. Without mods you can do that only with cheat-commands, which are considered as cheat, and which use is disabling achievements for this save...

For the people who play mods that extend Factorio beyond vanilla limit, and which may not want their achievements to be accidentally triggered, this should be done so that you can enable/disable achievements with each mod individually, with a warning popup.



It also will establish philosophy that there is no "intended way to play", as some people which denying the use of mods refer to. While beating the game for the achievements I've created a quite few suggestion threads on this forum and reddit, and I don't actually know what was more painful — playing purely vanilla, or getting linked to the mods in almost every of my thread... and even if they literally solve everything, but I can't use them because I'm doing achievements...
(I could reload save without them, but I hate it because my pc is bad and it takes a lot of time)



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So yes... I think this change would be really great for everyone who would do achievement runs. It will make things much better; and, as I argued — I don't see how it can be bad. It also should be the bold point in arguments of the "intended ways to play", and with that there shouldn't be any other reason to decline mods.


(P.S. and again I actually really hated being linked me to mods, loving and wanting them, but being unable to use because of achievements)

I disagree. The achievements have this in common that everybody has to achieve them in comparable circumstances for them to be of any value. Even the mildest QoL mods give a marginal edge over those who don't use them.
If you want achievements to show off, then you have to accept to earn them in the same conditions as all the others who show off with theirs.
There is a separate achievement list for when you want to play with mods, so the game doesn't totally disable achievements, it just prevents them to be uploaded to Steam.

Why would i, or anyone else, intentionally want to prevent a mod giving me free achievements again?

I'm personally quite happy with the vanilla experience, and those "QoL" actually hinder the quality of life for me.
Why should my experience be judged by your standards of an inability to play without cheaty mods?

Achievements are meant to be a display of skill, and if you feel the need to use mods to reduce the skill needed to get those achievements, then when did you actually display that skill?

I am happy with Steam achievements being locked as vanilla, I actually wouldn't mind the devs making some of them even more strict (e.g. default or harder settings. Saying can't be peaceful mode but can effectively ignore biters by adjusting other settings feels like an exploit to me).

If people want to cheat their achievements I guess they can, sandbox game and that, especially single player mode, but it kinda invalidates their achievements actually being that, and IMO for every game they play/own (since then who knows what else they cheated there way to?).


You can of course set your own goals, a lot of people do. Getting so many rockets/science per minute, belt-only, etc. and that is a big part of the game, but they are inherently different from a shared "score board".



Now allowing some select mods? Maybe, but would need to be a process to judge that. I liked the idea of having "client mods" for MP purposes for a long time now (can't directly write game state, so no need to sync). But even then for the purpose of achievements I feel some would be a tangible benefit to make the game easier (intelligent warnings about biter attacks? "wallhack" / seeing stuff without radar? Calculate ideal miner, pumpjack, etc., layout? Sure can come up with a lot more).