Quality levels completely break factory

[quineotio]

But that's functioning as intended.
.....
This mechanic is supposed to be hard.

In that post I was focusing on the disconnect between perception and reality, not on the difficulty itself. It's ok if something is difficult if it's introduced correctly. The problem with quality is that the complexity is hidden and out of step with the other tech you get at the time, and with the tools you have to deal with it. And so this explains some of the complaints people have.

I can make a similar argument about Gleba, but for a different reason - the difficulty is front loaded. There are a lot of things to learn at once, but after that initial learning cliff it's fine. The difference between Gleba and quality is that with Gleba the difficulty is more obvious. But I think both could be introduced better. For Gleba, it would be easier if some of the concepts were introduced on Nauvis - such as the ag tower, and seeds.

With quality, it would be a lot easier if rare was a separate research.

I don't understand what you're trying to say about gambling, it doesn't seem relevant.

[mmmPI]

I don't understand what you're trying to say about gambling, it doesn't seem relevant.

It's not relevant and is incorrect, it look like for the sake of using the word gambling because it was mentionned earlier, even though what defines gambling as risk and an addiction is what you bet and in factorio there's no money, only free infinite ressource and your time so really the parralel is just about the randomness, which is better described when using the law of large numbers as you did in your more recent post.

But there's a valid challenge there: what if you take away the language of stats or optimization, can you get the point of view to translate into gambling because that's all we're given as a prompt?

From the perspective of "gambling", if my goal is to teach gambling. I want to teach the subject. I don't want to teach a particular game.

4) Yes. Gambling and optimization both contain a logical phenomenon called a paradox. From a gamblers perspective a paradox is that they are doing something that is exciting, but not satisfying or enjoyable. And their addictive behavior is being driven, at a certain point, by emotions that are more at home to the horror and war movies I like and not the hang out and chill minecraft experience you seem to want.
I am not worried about you as a human being if you hate gambling, I'm just wondering why you thought it would be something kind.

I think we can draw the parralel with a LLM that takes its output as input a bit too much.

[XT-248]

I am writing this post as succinctly as humanly possible. So I have to keep quotation blocks to a minimum and keep most responses limited to two paragraphs. The sole exception is the list, and it is already fairly short.

... let's give this one last good try:

What do you mean when you say:

meaningful criticism

Quoting only two words left out some nuance.

Meaningful criticism, also known as constructive criticism, is feedback that targets a specific problem or issue and offers actionable feedback. In this instance, that means the feedback is for the game's mechanics and how to improve them.

Meaning, can you succinctly bring up your issues with quality (and spoilage and maybe gleba as a whole) one last time? In a manner that is falsifiable and that incorporates some of the counter-points already brought up in this thread?
Ideally I would like to see your latest Gleba factory and maybe some other factory where you are actually using quality, too. I am genuinely interested.

I am going to break it into three distinct groups: quality, spoilage as in the mechanics itself, and some specifics to the Gleba world itself. This is not an exhaustive list, given the falsifiability condition and the goal of keeping this post as short as possible.

Quality:

• Lack of onboard experience for quality.
• Quality as a mechanic can create an individualized "success or famine" experience where some people struggle, and others don't.

Spoilage:

• There is a limited onboard experience through the tech tree, but everything is upfront all at once. No room to experiment or learn.
• Evidence of both success and failure disappears so quickly, giving designers little feedback, with a potential for no data at all.
• The best approach to craft the most "science value" from Gleba Science packs, with the least amount of fruit needed, having no competing alternative production strategy currently.
• Time delta from spoilage for most spoiling items has little to no impact on the final product's freshness. The sole exception is Gleba Science packs, which start at 100% freshness and lose science value over time. At higher quality tiers, the decrease in science value from time becomes much more noticeable.

Gleba:

• Gleba has poor visibility due to a heavy visual clutter aesthetic when it comes to finding areas to grow fruit and has minor cosmetic impact. The minimap search function partially mitigates this issue. I am seeing a lot of new people who don't even know this search function exists.

As you can see, I don't have much feedback or strong feelings about Gleba. I will come back to this point later in my response. My feedback is more about how quality and spoilage, together or separately, are experienced in the game than about the Gleba world itself.

gave you good solution to that problem.

What solution was offered? I am going to take a guess. Monitoring? The problem already happened, and it was a one-time flunk. I don't have a "before" save game to set up monitoring and to reproduce it a second time. I can only work with what I do have, which is a save game after it happened.

If I do set up monitoring, it can create a lot of noisy data and false positives and false negatives from running several hours-long sessions to recapture that specific one-time flunk.

The first time you land on the planet everything spoils essentially immediately. I don't know how else you want to be onboarded?

Once again, going back to the old basic oil processing vs. current basic oil processing example from earlier. Small exposure to one part of making a functional spoilage design, then building on prior successes and moving to the next step until the Gleba Science pack arrives at a lab. Since the oil example is not doing its job well. So I am going with a different example: starting a new freeplay game.

A player starts a new freeplay game and opens up the tech tree. They see two immediate goals: craft 50 iron plates and craft 10 copper plates. This encourages new players to build a starter smelt array. After smelting successfully, they gain access to power infrastructure and machines that run on power. Then they can start to automate instead of handcrafting. Repeat and rinse until they launch a rocket.

General quality-system issues (apply to any quality science/production, any planet):

I am seeing a couple of things I didn't mention that came from someone else, indicate would be a problem, or need a response from me.

As you seem to only have an issue with quality on Gleba by admission, I am confused why you also brought up all of these other things, that are related to how quality functions fundamentally.
I don't think you ever conceded that you don't like the quality mechanic itself, but looking at all the points you brought up it looks to me like you don't like both quality and Gleba, but maybe quality itself might be a bigger issue for you (albeit, maybe gleba evokes a stronger emotional reaction, despite quality maybe being the core problem).

I've been seeing a troubling trend lately on the internet: people deciding how others feel about things while knowing absolutely nothing about others and how they actually feel. That said, I do feel that there is room for improvement in all three subjects: spoilage, quality, and Gleba. Mixing spoilage and quality together causes unresolved issues from both mechanics to occur at the same time. I don't dislike this because that is how it works in the game right now.

Gleba is just a world and doesn't evoke any strong feelings in me. Everybody knows that I am the only person who truly knows how I feel about anything. Someone made a poor guess and was wrong; it happens.

[Hurkyl]

For reference, the Gleba tech tree triggers are, grouped by depth:

• Mine an iron rock and a copper rock
• Mine a jellynut tree and a yumako tree
• Make nutrients: 10 for the biochamber tech, 500 to unlock the soil branch
• Make a biochamber
• Craft bioflux: 1 for the bacteria tech, 25 for the rest of the basic bioflux products
• Craft 100 bioflux to unlock science

and everything else requires actual research.

[mmmPI]

Meaningful criticism, also known as constructive criticism, is feedback that targets a specific problem or issue and offers actionable feedback. In this instance, that means the feedback is for the game's mechanics and how to improve them.

You should have asked the AI to define actionnable too, because saying " i don't like gleba" isn't actionnable feedback, and it being repeated doesn't constitute as such any contructive feedback, that's like 90% of what you've been posting on that unrelated thread, unfortunatly apart from a suggestion that seem irrationnal, after claiming you got the basic rapidly, you suggested to make wood spoilable, which only seem to be made for easing the part that doesn't need to be ? the basic ... That's like adding a pre-introduction when you explained you couldn't use beacon or quality due to their complexity and cost, your suggestion appear disconnected to any of the observation you made about your experience of the game.

How making wood spoilable would help someone like you use quality on Gleba ? or understand the utility of quality beacons ?

To me it appears there is no actionnable feedback, it's noise and false positive about the actual negative feedback that exist for the game , which is less than 3% review on steam, and there's like nothing about quality or Gleba...

[worph]

This is not an exhaustive list, given the falsifiability condition and the goal of keeping this post as short as possible.

Quality:

• Lack of onboard experience for quality.
• Quality as a mechanic can create an individualized "success or famine" experience where some people struggle, and others don't.

Spoilage:

• There is a limited onboard experience through the tech tree, but everything is upfront all at once. No room to experiment or learn.
• Evidence of both success and failure disappears so quickly, giving designers little feedback, with a potential for no data at all.
• The best approach to craft the most "science value" from Gleba Science packs, with the least amount of fruit needed, having no competing alternative production strategy currently.
• Time delta from spoilage for most spoiling items has little to no impact on the final product's freshness. The sole exception is Gleba Science packs, which start at 100% freshness and lose science value over time. At higher quality tiers, the decrease in science value from time becomes much more noticeable.

Gleba:

• Gleba has poor visibility due to a heavy visual clutter aesthetic when it comes to finding areas to grow fruit and has minor cosmetic impact. The minimap search function partially mitigates this issue. I am seeing a lot of new people who don't even know this search function exists.

• Spoilage onboarding: As both Hurkyl and myself have pointed out: There is onboarding. There are trigger techs. By engaging with those, players will inevitably get to experience spoilage; immediately. And they will keep experiencing it after that.
• Quality onboarding: I can see a miniscule argument for this, but I don't think it's required at all. Many mechanics in the game, especially in space age are much more complex and you are just expected to figure it out. OP highlighted this quite well: once he put quality modules in, he immediately saw things change. That MAY be irritating at first, but it's very noticeable. And players can literally opt-in and out in a dozen different ways: Disable it entirely, only use it on endproducts, only use it on certain planets, only use it after beating the game, don't research it at all, remove all modules for a short period etc. etc. It's clearly not meant as a mechanic specifically for beginners (doesn't mean beginners are forbidden from using it). Dumbing down or restricting an end-game mechanic is not the way to go in my opinion.
• Time delta: Simply not true. Fresh bioflux is very valueable for shipping throughout the solar system. Also agricultural science are not the exception, they are THE goal here.
• Quality science: Is a different argument. Quality science being non-optimal has nothing to do with factories breaking or spoilage/quality being bad. There have been different threads about this and they are valid. But arguing that quality (and spoilage) break factories because quality science is not perfectly efficient is... interesting.
• The rest is nitpicking about graphics and ignoring feedback already presented. Can the graphics be improved and are the monitoring solutions somewhat advanced circuitry? Yes. Does it break factories in the current version? No.

I would still love to see some of your factories.

To me it appears there is no actionnable feedback, it's noise and false positive

I agree that the feedback essentially is not actionable, but I disagree with you about TX-248 being a willfully bad actor in here (as insinuated earlier). I wonder if this is less deliberate bad faith and more a pattern they struggle to recognize or control themselves.

[coffee-factorio]

But that's functioning as intended.
.....
This mechanic is supposed to be hard.

In that post I was focusing on the disconnect between perception and reality, not on the difficulty itself. It's ok if something is difficult if it's introduced correctly. The problem with quality is that the complexity is hidden and out of step with the other tech you get at the time, and with the tools you have to deal with it. And so this explains some of the complaints people have.

I can make a similar argument about Gleba, but for a different reason - the difficulty is front loaded. There are a lot of things to learn at once, but after that initial learning cliff it's fine. The difference between Gleba and quality is that with Gleba the difficulty is more obvious. But I think both could be introduced better. For Gleba, it would be easier if some of the concepts were introduced on Nauvis - such as the ag tower, and seeds.

With quality, it would be a lot easier if rare was a separate research.

I don't understand what you're trying to say about gambling, it doesn't seem relevant.

Well, the thing about rhetoric, is that I'm supposed to come to some mutual understanding where possible.

I actually really agree with your point about the disconnect between perception and reality. I think the idea with having modules only on Nauvis is that you show a variation of quality akin to roulette. And people build up skills to handle the problem of having multiple production standards, which doesn't ever really exist after you get a recycler.

This is problematic because it's as boring as watching paint dry unless you have a background in investment banking or have put some hours into Seablock. It's also not what you're going to be doing for the post win game of Space Age where people will use quality.

As for the bit about gambling... so there's two parts of that. There's a logical phenomenon called a paradox. So an example of one of those, related to how quality breaks things, is the "Ship of Theseus" problem: if I replace each plank of a ship, when is not the same ship? You face a variant of that problem "The Space Platform of Theseus" because if you replace each work station with qualitatively better parts, you can be faced with a situation where the platform itself has the same but the output and cost is measurably different.

I have not even begun to talk about the joys of more productively making garbage products.

In optimization and paradoxes you tend to see an interesting phenomenon where if you take an extreme position, you end up in a measurably bad philosophical position. If I fully built the space platform of Theseus out of legendary parts form normal then it'd be the same, but you could probably build a lighter much more performant ship for the same cost.

As for the bit about gambling specifically... so paradoxes generate contradictory statements. If I feel like I hit a nerve with one, I'm backing off. I feel like I hit a nerve because the idea of a video game which isn't bad, isn't good, and is more less just causes your brain to work could be taken for something else. As for whether or not it's healthy, engineering is a profession and paradoxes are a part of that profession. Sometimes a someone can optimize the knapsack problem, sometimes you put them on another project. You have to fool around and find out.

[mmmPI]

I agree that the feedback essentially is not actionable, but I disagree with you about TX-248 being a willfully bad actor in here (as insinuated earlier). I wonder if this is less deliberate bad faith and more a pattern they struggle to recognize or control themselves.

I didn't mention anyone in particular as a willfully bad actor, no one think of themselves of being a bad actor on purpose i think, and it would be very difficult to make the difference between someone acting up and not if they were not giving any clue, at least not with unfalsifiable proof. There's none regarding the intent of the actor ^^, it's only the acts. Some players may be so frustrated by a mechanic and unable to achieve a reasonnable discussion where they receive unanimous agreement that their misfortune was a sign that the game should be changed to suit their incoherent rambling that they genuinely believe using an AI to try and beat a dead horse is constructive feedback. It would be difficult to tell apart from a troll that would play dumb for whatever reason maybe a good one in their mind ^^

Obviously video games are for a large public and there can also be immature people playing whose behavior would be more akin to the one of a child or a teenager, they do not have necessarily bad intent when they troll, they may be doing it by lack of ability to express themselves in a different way, not finding the words, or when they find the word and express them, other people can see the flaw in the logic and they get mad, refuse to recognize it and continue complaining about different thing. I can also imagine they start trolling because they are ignored when they express themselves in their normal way, because their argument look like someone who has no clue what they are saying or pedantic but shallow. It can appear easier to post inflammatory and simplistic content to make other people react in such case, in desperate need of attention, feeling genuinely frustrated and no-one around to hear their complaint. It's more of an awkward expression of misery than an actual intent to harm when trolling i think sometimes. Although sometimes it can happen that there is an antagonistic fixation that develop when those cry for attention are not receiving the expected result it appears and i had to deal with some personnal attacks in private message ^^ This is when i realized some people are trolling also out of frustration after an argument on the internet x)

All this being said, i think this discussion illustrate well some of the positive of quality, it's easy to get in, by just using modules in the mall, as mentionned in the FFF and advised by experienced players, but it's also hard to master, as demonstrated by some other players who despite their (alledged) experience are still not getting all the details. It's also easy to not opt-in, and even opt-out, like OP from the discussion , if one think quality's too complex for them.

I think if a player is unfamiliar with the game or with math or video-game so that they don't realize using a beacon can be cheaper than adding more of the same machine, or that updating a major version can have impact on their save-game they may be starting further than others to understand the quality mechanic. At least it allows to ponderate the opinion, or to contextualize where it is coming from especially when it comes to criticism about balance or difficulty of the game. I think OP when asking for things that may have been missed showed a kind of self-awareness that leaves room for learning new things which was absent from the subsequent complaints which had this closed for good seemingly defiantly and proudly at the same time even so childishly that trolling is the only word that came to me.

[quineotio]

Well, the thing about rhetoric, is that I'm supposed to come to some mutual understanding where possible.

Yes.

I suppose the point I'm making is that not having the recycler is not fun, and not good for teaching the concept. Kovarex said it himself in the quality reveal:

"it can be a HUGE trap to try to get too high quality of too many things too early." - FFF #375

Why would you design it this way (a HUGE trap)? And why wouldn't you adjust it when lots of people react by not using the system at all? It's such a weird thing to do to players ON PURPOSE. You spent time making the system. Don't you want people to use it? Is it a deliberate troll?

It's not as if there aren't things that COULD be done to ease the pain. I've suggested ways to make it better in the early game, but another alternative is to make it a purely late game thing so that people have more familiarity with the game systems and access to all the tools when it's unlocked. In terms of difficulty (as it currently is designed), it would fit being unlocked on Aquilo. This isn't my preferred approach though.

The thing about quality (and Gleba) is that I believe a major cause of the issues people have are a result of the way these things are presented, and this serves no long term benefit. If you can overcome the initial hurdle of learning the systems, it doesn't matter that it was hard to learn - it doesn't effect your experience after that. Teaching systems badly only hurts the new player experience. Is there any good reason to make things unnecessarily difficult for new players?

Another thing that makes no sense to me is that Wube hasn't really talked about quality (and Gleba) beyond "it's working as intended" and "we don't want to spoil your fun but we're removing space casinos". They've spent so much time on quality of life and bug fixes. I don't understand the priorities. Which is why explaining it is hard without invoking egos being hurt due to critique.

Space Age could be a LOT better with relatively little work. So much work has been put into the underlying systems. I understand getting tired of working on something after a long time, but if this is the case the project should be handed over to other people. There's plenty of design space left. It just feels like so much is being left undone and it's such a shame.

"Generally, we are happy with the game design of Factorio and Space age. The progression is good, things are mostly well balanced (one or two exceptions), and there isn't anything we feel is majorly missing." FFF #440

This statement is a borderline lie. I find it very difficult to believe that they actually believe this.

I still don't understand how what you're saying about gambling is relevant.

[mmmPI]

"Generally, we are happy with the game design of Factorio and Space age. The progression is good, things are mostly well balanced (one or two exceptions), and there isn't anything we feel is majorly missing." FFF #440

This statement is a borderline lie. I find it very difficult to believe that they actually believe this.

They have more regular player than ever, and overwhelmingly positive review : https://steamdb.info/app/427520/charts/#9y , and they did some balance changes since then so it's likely closer to the intended balance now .

It's not as if there aren't things that COULD be done to ease the pain. I've suggested ways to make it better in the early game, but another alternative is to make it a purely late game thing so that people have more familiarity with the game systems and access to all the tools when it's unlocked. In terms of difficulty (as it currently is designed), it would fit being unlocked on Aquilo. This isn't my preferred approach though.

Both are inconsistent and are restrictive, it's not making it better in the early game if you remove players the possibility to make "rare" before another research, it's delaying the benefit and adding another pre-requisite. It's worse to restrict quality to only at or after Aquilo, it's just punishing everyone for you don't want to hear about quality till then, just don't use the module and don't even do the research why would you feel better without the choice ?

They've spent so much time on quality of life and bug fixes. I don't understand the priorities.

you can use a mod to make the game easier, not to fix the bugs

[NineNine]

"Generally, we are happy with the game design of Factorio and Space age. The progression is good, things are mostly well balanced (one or two exceptions), and there isn't anything we feel is majorly missing." FFF #440

This statement is a borderline lie. I find it very difficult to believe that they actually believe this.

That is a really unpleasant thing to say about anybody.

It sounds like you'd be much happier playing a different game.

[Tertius]

I am going to break it into three distinct groups: quality, spoilage as in the mechanics itself, and some specifics to the Gleba world itself. This is not an exhaustive list, given the falsifiability condition and the goal of keeping this post as short as possible.

Quality:

• Lack of onboard experience for quality.
• Quality as a mechanic can create an individualized "success or famine" experience where some people struggle, and others don't.

Spoilage:

• There is a limited onboard experience through the tech tree, but everything is upfront all at once. No room to experiment or learn.
• Evidence of both success and failure disappears so quickly, giving designers little feedback, with a potential for no data at all.
• The best approach to craft the most "science value" from Gleba Science packs, with the least amount of fruit needed, having no competing alternative production strategy currently.
• Time delta from spoilage for most spoiling items has little to no impact on the final product's freshness. The sole exception is Gleba Science packs, which start at 100% freshness and lose science value over time. At higher quality tiers, the decrease in science value from time becomes much more noticeable.

Gleba:

• Gleba has poor visibility due to a heavy visual clutter aesthetic when it comes to finding areas to grow fruit and has minor cosmetic impact. The minimap search function partially mitigates this issue. I am seeing a lot of new people who don't even know this search function exists.

What is the purpose of your list? What should someone do with it? And who is this someone? It's not meant to be a rhetoric question, it's not my intention to dismiss anything. But such a list is pointless if no one does anything with it.

The only use I see is to give the developers a hint what they might perhaps improve in the game, from the perspective of some specific players.
However, this ship has sailed. The devs made it clear the corresponding game implementations are working as designed and they don't plan to do a change. Either explicitly in words or implicitly by not providing a corresponding change with the last major game update. The topics on the list aren't new, they have been brought up since the release of Space Age in October 2024. There have been major and game breaking changes for 2.1, and the above has not been included, so more major changes are not expected.

So what do you expect for this list? Isn't it better to drop it and instead use your time for exploring the existing game deeper and take the shortcomings as challenge to overcome by building a better factory?

As example, I tell you what I did with the quality mechanic. I still keep up my complaint about lack of direction, but I guessed a year ago already there would be no changes in this game part. So I had the choice to stop and not use the quality part of the game. The game works 100% well without. Or I see this as challenge and find some direction. So I explored deeper and researched and did calculations, and I found direction. It was nothing new, what I found has been posted end of 2024 already. However with all those posts about quality back then it wasn't possible to detect that this specific finding was the way to go for me since there were so many other ways seemed viable as well.

So a month after I vented all my complaints and took a break from the game, I started to develop satisfying quality handling for my factory anyway. The game must go on. So I created nice blueprints for a complete legendary quality mall implementation for every production building in the game. My science production (legendary buildings, normal science) isn't complete yet, and my platforms are not yet all-legendary, this is what I currently do in the game.
Initially, I didn't want to develop everything a second time just to get bigger numbers, but actually all-legendary high throughput has new construction challenges I didn't encounter before, so I took these challenges, and it was fun and not tedium as I initially thought. There were new challenges. I didn't see it as walls that stopped me to do something, I did see everything just as challenge. I even did a legendary biter egg production - the thing I previously considered the most tedious and stupid thing in the game, together with uranium upcycling. It's still kind of stupid, but I have a blueprint now.

While doing this, I learnt something new about sushi belts, item sorting and filtering, stack inserter control, crafting machine behavior, belt spaghetti. It improved my game skills, and it's not just quality specific.

This is what I consider a constructive approach. Just creating a list of shortcomings and expect someone else do something to fix it for me isn't a constructive approach.

[mmmPI]

As example, I tell you what I did with the quality mechanic. I still keep up my complaint about lack of direction, but I guessed a year ago already there would be no changes in this game part.

That's the intent imo, if there was "one" direction like the space casino, or felt like it was "the" direction, then people would spoil themselves doing only it, judging from the dicussions about it. It's unfortunate it was removed imo because it reduce the amount of different things that a player CAN make, but it seem to be for the purpose of increasing the variety of what people ACTUALLY make in their game, and it was less than a year ago !

[XT-248]

• Spoilage onboarding: As both Hurkyl and myself have pointed out: There is onboarding. There are trigger techs. By engaging with those, players will inevitably get to experience spoilage; immediately. And they will keep experiencing it after that.

Part of the spoilage onboarding experience unlocks recipes that are entirely opt-in and don't improve the Gleba factory in any meaningful way; see ore bacteria from fruit recipes. The last two steps of the onboard experience require an actual factory. Most steps are partially achievable via handcrafting. IE: Spoil -> handcraft -> nutrients. Overall, the onboarding experience feels disjointed and does have room for improvement.

Once again, I will reiterate. I am not saying spoilage doesn't have any onboarding experience. That is an exclusively quality problem.

• Quality onboarding: I can see a miniscule argument for this, but I don't think it's required at all. Many mechanics in the game, especially in space age are much more complex and you are just expected to figure it out. OP highlighted this quite well: once he put quality modules in, he immediately saw things change. That MAY be irritating at first, but it's very noticeable. And players can literally opt-in and out in a dozen different ways: Disable it entirely, only use it on endproducts, only use it on certain planets, only use it after beating the game, don't research it at all, remove all modules for a short period etc. etc. It's clearly not meant as a mechanic specifically for beginners (doesn't mean beginners are forbidden from using it). Dumbing down or restricting an end-game mechanic is not the way to go in my opinion.

It is not a minuscule impact when people react to adding quality modules in the same way OP did. The lack of onboarding experience leads OP to make the choices that caused them to divest from quality entirely.

Quality has been out for what? Almost two years? How many more reactions like this before it becomes widely recognized as something that needs fixing?

• Time delta: Simply not true. Fresh bioflux is very valueable for shipping throughout the solar system. Also agricultural science are not the exception, they are THE goal here.

An understandable mistake about both the exception and time delta.

The exception is that the "freshness" impacts the outcome of the item being crafted. When a Bioflux recipe gets mostly 50% freshness ingredients, the outcome is 50% freshness. Gleba Science Pack recipe resets freshness to 100%, regardless of the ingredient's freshness. Time delta matters all the time for all spoilage-based items. For Gleba Science Packs, freshness decreases with time delta, and this translates directly into lower science value. Crafting Bioflux doesn't reset the freshness.

Your response to both points indicates that you completely missed the point here.

• The rest is nitpicking about graphics and ignoring feedback already presented. Can the graphics be improved and are the monitoring solutions somewhat advanced circuitry? Yes. Does it break factories in the current version? No.

Once again, this is a limited list of falsifiability issues. Gleba's visuals and aesthetics are so cluttered currently that everyone has the same problem, regardless of how well they can see. This is tangential to the issues that "break" factories, but it highlights that the biggest problem is a minor visual issue and drives home the point that spoilage and quality have systemic issues with more impact or severity than the world of Gleba itself.

It doesn't take much effort to see the point I'm trying to make: that I have no strong feeling about Gleba itself. This directly contradicts something you said earlier about how I have *strong* feelings about Gleba.

• Quality science: Is a different argument. Quality science being non-optimal has nothing to do with factories breaking or spoilage/quality being bad. There have been different threads about this and they are valid. But arguing that quality (and spoilage) break factories because quality science is not perfectly efficient is... interesting.

Okay, imagine for the sake of a hypothetical that I am working on balancing for Factorio, and I see different ways of doing the same thing from the community. Good so far? Then I get reports that a certain kind of factory is appearing everywhere. People simply choose it for a good, compelling reason. That would give me a reason to double-check and make sure it isn't so optimized that it makes everything else look inefficient by comparison.

There are a couple of options to fix this. One option is to adjust it so this kind of factory is a bit less optimized than before, so it stands out less as the most optimized choice. Another option is to make the other non-optimized factory better to match the optimized one.

I would still love to see some of your factories.

And what would that do exactly?

I believe I posted a few pictures of a fully functional, hiccup-free Gleba factory a while ago, and you can look them up on the Factorio forum. It is the one that looks like there are at least three distinct groups of parallel belts and beacons.

[XT-248]

What is the purpose of your list? What should someone do with it? And who is this someone? It's not meant to be a rhetoric question, it's not my intention to dismiss anything. But such a list is pointless if no one does anything with it.

The only use I see is to give the developers a hint what they might perhaps improve in the game, from the perspective of some specific players.
However, this ship has sailed. The devs made it clear the corresponding game implementations are working as designed and they don't plan to do a change. Either explicitly in words or implicitly by not providing a corresponding change with the last major game update. The topics on the list aren't new, they have been brought up since the release of Space Age in October 2024. There have been major and game breaking changes for 2.1, and the above has not been included, so more major changes are not expected.

I gave a few discrete action points (see my post above), plus a few other stuff across various multiple conversations I have had in this thread, and they are mostly for the developers of Factorio.

I am fully aware there is little to no chance of gameplay improvement, and future players who buy and play Space Age will likely hit most, if not all, of those issues, plus a few other non-"breaking" issues I am aware of.

So what do you expect for this list? Isn't it better to drop it and instead use your time for exploring the existing game deeper and take the shortcomings as challenge to overcome by building a better factory?

As example, I tell you what I did with the quality mechanic. I still keep up my complaint about lack of direction, but I guessed a year ago already there would be no changes in this game part. So I had the choice to stop and not use the quality part of the game. The game works 100% well without. Or I see this as challenge and find some direction. So I explored deeper and researched and did calculations, and I found direction. It was nothing new, what I found has been posted end of 2024 already. However with all those posts about quality back then it wasn't possible to detect that this specific finding was the way to go for me since there were so many other ways seemed viable as well.

So a month after I vented all my complaints and took a break from the game, I started to develop satisfying quality handling for my factory anyway. The game must go on. So I created nice blueprints for a complete legendary quality mall implementation for every production building in the game. My science production (legendary buildings, normal science) isn't complete yet, and my platforms are not yet all-legendary, this is what I currently do in the game.
Initially, I didn't want to develop everything a second time just to get bigger numbers, but actually all-legendary high throughput has new construction challenges I didn't encounter before, so I took these challenges, and it was fun and not tedium as I initially thought. There were new challenges. I didn't see it as walls that stopped me to do something, I did see everything just as challenge. I even did a legendary biter egg production - the thing I previously considered the most tedious and stupid thing in the game, together with uranium upcycling. It's still kind of stupid, but I have a blueprint now.

While doing this, I learnt something new about sushi belts, item sorting and filtering, stack inserter control, crafting machine behavior, belt spaghetti. It improved my game skills, and it's not just quality specific.

This is what I consider a constructive approach. Just creating a list of shortcomings and expect someone else do something to fix it for me isn't a constructive approach.

Remember, I enter the conversation intending to discuss the shortcomings with a few actionable pieces of feedback. Some are harder to turn into a discrete action or change the developers can make (example: how to add onboarding experience to opt-in for quality mechanics/modules?). Some are so much easier to point out and have something that developers can act on (Gleba Science Pack interacting weirdly with quality mechanics, causing the quantity method to be better than quality. Can be fixed by changing number values on the science packs themselves).


As an aside, I just recently solved a fun problem with the Ultracube: Age of Cube Space Age edition mod pack ( https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-age-ultracube ).

So, I launched myself into Space and landed on the moon to get access to coal/better-oil-recipe/crystals. I found myself stranded on the moon without a rocket silo. I could craft everything but two ingredients to craft a new rocket silo on the moon.

My main base back on homeworld had no logistic bots (gated behind crystals). So I had to abuse construction drones, making them do double duty moving items around like logistics bots, via fake deconstruct orders, until I could ship Ultracube's equivalent of advanced circuits and lubricated engines to the moon.


I honestly expected a better experience from Space Age. It is unfortunate it wasn't what it could have been: a great expansion without flaws. But it does have flaws.

So, I have found myself drifting and not playing vanilla Space Age as much as I thought I would.

[Hurkyl]

• Time delta from spoilage for most spoiling items has little to no impact on the final product's freshness. The sole exception is Gleba Science packs, which start at 100% freshness and lose science value over time. At higher quality tiers, the decrease in science value from time becomes much more noticeable.

• Time delta: Simply not true. Fresh bioflux is very valueable for shipping throughout the solar system. Also agricultural science are not the exception, they are THE goal here.

An understandable mistake about both the exception and time delta.

The exception is that the "freshness" impacts the outcome of the item being crafted. When a Bioflux recipe gets mostly 50% freshness ingredients, the outcome is 50% freshness. Gleba Science Pack recipe resets freshness to 100%, regardless of the ingredient's freshness. Time delta matters all the time for all spoilage-based items. For Gleba Science Packs, freshness decreases with time delta, and this translates directly into lower science value. Crafting Bioflux doesn't reset the freshness.

Your response to both points indicates that you completely missed the point here.

This is misinformation: the freshness of a newly crafted agricultural science pack does depend on the freshness of the inputs.

[coffee-factorio]

Well, the thing about rhetoric, is that I'm supposed to come to some mutual understanding where possible.

Yes.

I suppose the point I'm making is that not having the recycler is not fun, and not good for teaching the concept. Kovarex said it himself in the quality reveal:

"it can be a HUGE trap to try to get too high quality of too many things too early." - FFF #375

Why would you design it this way (a HUGE trap)? And why wouldn't you adjust it when lots of people react by not using the system at all? It's such a weird thing to do to players ON PURPOSE. You spent time making the system. Don't you want people to use it? Is it a deliberate troll?
...

I still don't understand how what you're saying about gambling is relevant.

Rhetoric is for developing a mutually stronger position, and not exactly for winning, as it was taught to me.

You've put me in a bit of a spot because I think I can simply win at the expense of a mutually strong position. There's a sandbox mode with infinite quality parts of any kind in it. That's to practice until you're familiar with a task.

Beyond my own opinion that a normal play with quality is balanced by throwing in mechanics that make the system feel completely frustrating and are derived from gambling. Kovarex said that he made it for himself. So in terms of balance if we continue much further we'll argue a lot but all that will come of it we're very different people who see eye to eye that the early game isn't functioning as intended.

For the record, on Gleba I did what I normally do with mods: wander around for about 20 hours figuring out how each thing works from the bottom up, before I touch the subject of top down at all. Not in the editor, I needed to know how long it took for pentapods to rush in after I blew up a nest or they smelled seeds to know if I needed to always make bases in the editor or not.

It turned out to be not. I just, figured out I didn't need to be scarred. I'll have to figure that out in 2.1.

You proposed yourself that if you had the only the metaphor of gambling it would be frustrating. I provided some metaphors and some things you find in gambling, that also are a part of another discipline of engineering. I'm going to propose a question to you: What metaphor do you have that you think applies to quality? If you want to give me an answer my DM's are open. But at a certain point, we just agree we're different and I don't feel like pressing that point. It's a personal question on a public forum. I'm mainly just curious because the outcomes we're having are so different.

You seem like you know what you're doing. You're polite as someone who got a radically different product than they were expecting can be. The product is, by my own understanding, meant to be a challenging puzzle. Love to talk about how this stuff falls apart but hard to do that without a common set of metaphors or language. Top down planning is normally the way to go, that was the standard in 1.1.x.

[mmmPI]

Quality has been out for what? Almost two years? How many more reactions like this before it becomes widely recognized as something that needs fixing?
Gleba Science Pack recipe resets freshness to 100%, regardless of the ingredient's freshness.

I think what has been fixed so far were your incorrect assumptions and statement on this thread x) This is another one.

how to add onboarding experience to opt-in for quality mechanics/modules?

That's funny because it's typically suggesting what is already there under the form of the research, but presented as if it was not in the game and needed addressing, as if the goal was to make sure the situation OP faced couldn't happen, when in fact it is the case of a player mistake that can be made when you discover the new mechanic and is part of the normal experience of the game, the things you learn when you play, the moment you realize THAT was the opt-in choice you made.

Remember, I enter the conversation intending to discuss the shortcomings with a few actionable pieces of feedback.

That didn't seem to be the case initially, because there was no actionnable feedback that was provided . Then you proposed to make wood spoilable, but it was not meant to adress anything related to your initial non-actionnable feedback if anything at all. And then you must have either lost the intent, or decided to stop acting toward such intent because none of the feedback as been actionnable unfortunatly. It look like more of the same list of incorrect statement that aren't even coherent with each other. I imagine it's in order to cut on those that was suggested you post some actual factory of yours where you experienced the most problems would illustrate most likely.