Factorio Forums

Alfonse215 wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2024 3:30 pm
Also, carrying your inventory seems like a very strange request. The game gives you a button to void your inventory. It gives you the ability to launch that inventory to a platform. It gives you the ability to carry that inventory to other planets. And once you drop down, it gives you the ability to reconstitute that inventory.

Alfonse215 wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2024 3:30 pm Can you go into some details with regard to the difference between walking around on a space platform using your inventory to place stuff and using remote view to use the platform's inventory to place stuff? Despite these two things being functionally identical, why does it feel meaningfully differently to you? They're both placed from an inventory that you control.

Also, carrying your inventory seems like a very strange request. The game gives you a button to void your inventory. It gives you the ability to launch that inventory to a platform. It gives you the ability to carry that inventory to other planets. And once you drop down, it gives you the ability to reconstitute that inventory.

Indeed, one of the reasons why space platforms are remote view only is to teach players just how much remote view can do. This is a vital tool because players will spend significant amounts of time on other planets. Without a clear understanding of how remote view works and what you can do with it, they may think that they need to hop on a platform in order to fix a problem on some other planet when it could be handled remotely. So before you can even get to a planet, you have to learn to deal with remote view.

Yes, most ways around the inventory-on-a-platform involve the use of logistics bots. But... what's wrong with that? The game gives you these tools, and they are very useful tools. It is 100% OK for the game to expect the player to use them. And it is 100% OK for the game design to make avoiding those tools increasingly difficult or completely non-functional at some point.

You mentioned not being forced to use belts. Yes, you could play through all of Factorio without belts.

But can you do it without pipes? At some point, you need advanced oil processing. And there's just not enough room to get barrelling assemblers around all of the fluid inputs/outputs of an oil refinery. You can probably do some manual switching of stuff to eventually scrape by.

But Space Age basically says "no" to that. Most new fluids cannot be barreled, so being functional on Aquilo or even space platforms without pipes seems very unlikely.

The developers should not feel like they need to bend the game design to accommodate players who just don't like pipes.

Tertius wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2024 1:48 pm It seems you didn't completely internalize the concept of automation, which is core in Factorio. The engineer doesn't do anything himself, he isn't carrying all stuff himself. Instead, he does it once, then automates it.

It's a pity you're not using bots. That's really a game changer. You put down construction orders, then some magical fairies come and build it. It's like magic! You need to breed them of course and create nice little homes for them (called roboports), but once you did it, they will do everything for you.

It's a slightly different thing from building everything yourself or let the personal roboport build it for you, but if you practice and you get used to remote view, it doesn't matter any more where you physical character is. You need the character only once on any planet: the first landing. Ok, and when you expand and subdue the land. But if you build a bot infrastructure on every planet, you can do everything everywhere, with the snip of a finger. You don't need to drive there.
And with this, your personal inventory gets less important.

In the past, I needed presence as well, but as soon as I was on Vulcanus and my base back on Nauvis required tending, I investigated what I need to do everything remotely. It was not much new to learn. The main base was already robotified, so I was able to send as many supply rockets to Vulcanus as I needed to skip initial bootstrapping. And I added automation to the outskirts and outposts, so I was able to service my outposts without physical presence. Even exploring new mines and clearing new areas from biters is possible remote with the tank (it can be driven remotely and it has an equipment grid) - you don't need a spidertron for this.