Remove inserters, loaders.

[yagaodirac]

I believe you designed the whole game according to stl in c++. Inserters, containers, oh... Can I say assemblers, furnaces, refineries are functors?
I'm reading a book written in 1998ish by a German guy. The book is on stl. The book is great. But inserters don't make this game any better.

I don't remember very clearly. I wrote an article in Chinese language in nov 2019. I tried to list all the design of logistics system in all the game I knew in this genre. I'm not gonna list the names here. The article is on my github. According to my experience, only 2 games contains inserters, Factorio and Automation Empire. But in Factorio, inserters behavior just the same way they behavior in stl. They literally link belts and all the nodes(functors? Should I say.) It never makes any sense. But in Automation Empire, the inserters vary a lot and way more interesting. They behavior in more ways and cost less time being built.
Generally, games attach the entrance and exit to nodes( in Factorio I mean assemblers, furnaces, etc with nodes) directly. There is no point separating them at all. When people build the standard early game smelting lane, 70% or more time is cost only by putting all the inserters. Especially for the beginners, this is even worse. What's more, sometimes people mess up with the belts and furnaces, putting them in the wrong tiles due to their poor mouse or literally being not good at holding mouse. People simply put most of their time on these kind of things, rather than design some exciting things.

Factorio indeed inspired a branch of games. I saw at least 4 games based on belt system released in 2019. But except for only one, Automation Empire as mentioned, the other 3 of them didn't share the mechanism design of inserters. Their logistics systems all work well.

Inserter is more like from the idea of "making things complex only for making things complex". It's bad design. Remove it.
And, after you remove it, I'll come back to comment more on other designs. At least I know how to remake the belt building algo to make belts easier to build and manage. Yeah, inspired by shapez.io.

Have a nice day.

[Klonan]

Inserters are an iconic part of the Factorio gameplay, they aren't going to be removed.

[posila]

I don't see how putting splitters and mergers everywhere and connecting them to machines (which now very much constrain your design due to them having fixed input and output positions) is less work than placing inserter between belt and the machine. I have played planty of Satisfactory and shapez.io (and Automation Empire also). They are fun games in their own ways ... there is no need to converge all games in the genre into the exact same thing.

Loader is already not used in the base game.

[mmmPI]

Inserter is more like from the idea of "making things complex only for making things complex". It's bad design. Remove it.

Inserters are an entity that can hold logic with circuit network: active/unactive, filters, powered/unpowered, stack capacity.

Having 2 inserters per assembly machine, one for input, one for output, makes it less complex to manage this logic than if it was all parameter of the assembly machine itself imo.

You can have 2 inserter for input, and use 1 if iron plate are low, 1 if green circuit are low. You can have 3 inserter for output, 1 output on a belt for steel, 1 output on a belt for green circuit and 1 output that is split between steel and green circuit. (AND/OR), you can even make more precise/complex setup.

Yes it's repetitive early game for furnaces but it's the cost for overall modularity later in game and it emphasize a lot the benefit of construction bot, which is a very thrilling experience to see them building in second what could take hours for a human .

[steinio]

Shitpost 101