Quality levels completely break factory

[NineNine]

In the original game, major systems were changed over time. The way science was made changed - no more collection of alien stuff when killing bases and different recipes. Things were tweaked. Factories broke and needed to be redesigned. And this made the game better.

But the game wasn't live. The era you're referring to was just beta testing. Major design reworking is fine when you're still putting the thing together. But once you go live, once you have a proper release, you can't just go break everyone's base on a whim.

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

[Alfonse215]

In the original game, major systems were changed over time. The way science was made changed - no more collection of alien stuff when killing bases and different recipes. Things were tweaked. Factories broke and needed to be redesigned. And this made the game better.

But the game wasn't live. The era you're referring to was just beta testing. Major design reworking is fine when you're still putting the thing together. But once you go live, once you have a proper release, you can't just go break everyone's base on a whim.

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

You're basically saying that you should never expect a Factorio update to preserve your save. That your current run is entirely ephemeral and it's going to constantly be destroyed and remade. And the only way to avoid that is to stick with a particular version, eschewing any bug fixes or features added to the new ones. And you must do so in perpetuity so long as you want to keep that base around.

This is the fundamental difference between "early access" and "release". Early access builds are expected to be constantly changing. The developers and playerbases both understand this and players expect it. With a release build, there is an expectation of stability, that periodic updates are not going to just break your base.

I can't think of other released games where minor updates are expected to overhaul large parts of the game to the point where you have to restart or retool vast parts of your base. MMO expansions may encourage you to make new characters, but you can just use your old one. Even Terraria expansions, which often add content that requires new world generation, still keeps your old worlds functional. You may not be able to access new content, but the old world is still there.

Even Space Age did not overhaul the early vanilla game or its intermediates and production structures. It made very targeted changes, but they didn't change anything that they didn't really need to.

[NineNine]

In the original game, major systems were changed over time. The way science was made changed - no more collection of alien stuff when killing bases and different recipes. Things were tweaked. Factories broke and needed to be redesigned. And this made the game better.

But the game wasn't live. The era you're referring to was just beta testing. Major design reworking is fine when you're still putting the thing together. But once you go live, once you have a proper release, you can't just go break everyone's base on a whim.

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

You're basically saying that you should never expect a Factorio update to preserve your save. That your current run is entirely ephemeral and it's going to constantly be destroyed and remade. And the only way to avoid that is to stick with a particular version, eschewing any bug fixes or features added to the new ones. And you must do so in perpetuity so long as you want to keep that base around.

Yes, so what?

What are you suggesting as an alternative? To never update the game, ever? Or, do force everybody to update with each update, and the developers can write code to update everybody's factories? I'm trying to understand what, exactly the problem is. Factorio is not an MMO.

[quineotio]

2.1 breaks some factories.

[coffee-factorio]

You might be surprised if you go to look at the original blog post. Kovarex explicitly laid you how he thought the strategy would play.

I am.

In practice, a small number of quality items is almost completely useless - the exception being personal equipment (and maybe space platforms). For example, you have 20 assemblers for green circuits and 2 of them are uncommon? It doesn't matter - it's easier to just build more normal assemblers. You design around what you have, so either it's normal quality or some other. So in practice, if you're going to engage with quality in a meaningful way, you need a good level of reliable production - which you CAN'T have until after you leave Nauvis and get the recycler.

If you want to upgrade your factory to quality using the recycle loop method only, that's really, really boring and wasteful. And when I say wasteful I don't mean of resources, because who cares (resources are unlimited). It's wasteful of your time and effort. And even if you do it this way, you're eventually going to get all you need, and then you've built a bunch of infrastructure that doesn't do anything any more, which goes back to my point about quality in the lategame.

And then there's the other trap for quality, which is that your builds will break if you didn't account for additional tiers after Gleba/Aquilo. I can't help but feel like it would be better if all tiers were available at the same time, and there were ways to limit which outputs you got. Having to account for 5 different outputs every single time you put a quality module anywhere is also annoying, especially after recyclers where you're getting 5x the number of ingredients outputs.

Quality items themselves are fun, but so many things make the system unwieldy. It's just so strange that other areas of the game have had so much polish and quality of life and bug fixing, but so little has been done to address probably the most complained about thing in the game.

Part of me, tries to imagine what the game designer was thinking. For some reason, when people do that, it's a weird daemon. Because it is a daemon, it knows all.

Is not a man, with finite knowledge and energy.

One of things I figured out in the map editor is, you have your own story of what the gambling mechanics are. But my story is "optimization" and not "gambling mechanics". A lot of the things that I think are appropriate criticism of Wube's approach is that they are not being clear that the quality system is supposed to have the traits that I associate with an optimization process.

Ambiguity, complexity and context sensitive problems are all parts of optimization. When you look at it from that perspective, they meet the criteria for the system. There's a requirement I feel that is enforced where the quality levels are to make a safe sandbox rather than one where things truly break, which makes things feel too similar till you start upcycling on multiple planets.

I can have my opinion that it is a dishonest engine meant to make you deal with context sensitive problems that yield context sensitive results. I'm not sure I can defend the developer's approach or should.

And I have to add, the problems with quality (and some other things) arise in part from the lack of iteration upon game design choices in Space Age. It's one thing to design a system that works in theory, but when it comes into contact with the broader playerbase, issues arise.

And this is one of my longstanding complaints about Space Age. The game was released and then there was silence for 1.5 years. There was a dire need for iteration based on player feedback, but this didn't happen. And now, after almost 2 years, the design has become baked in, and now it's difficult to change anything.

Yeah. I interpret this as a standing assumption that players will design something that corresponds to a prompt that makes sense. Make a Red / Blue choice (and blue is evil? I dunno...) . The reality is that you optimize the blue pill, which now has a decorative five dot label. And I still don't know if the blue pill is evil because ambiguity is, part of the design criteria.

[coffee-factorio]

Here are some changes that I think will help smooth the transitions between before and after introducing of the respective mechanics tremendously.

Some ingredients could have been given the "spoilage" treatment on Nauvis to ease new players into Gleba without Quality. Repeat for quality mechanics; after all, OP indicated they had spent considerable time building out factories without quality modules before deciding to do a small experimental run and go all-in on quality modules. That kind of experience ultimately turned the OP away from using quality modules, which is a problem.

Then, in the end, players can take what they learn and combine it into a functional design that incorporates one of the mechanics, or even both. Nothing currently exists that could resemble an introductory experience for each world's unique mechanics, with one small, noticeable exception: Vulcanus (liquid/petroleum handling).

This is an interesting idea, but it lacks specifics (as it relates to quality). And those specifics are kind of important.

For example, I feel that the Tips&Tricks entries on quality are not just poor introductions to the concept, but they are actively harmful to properly building setups to produce quality goods. The biggest offender is the setup showing a bunch of gear makers with quality modules in them that put their outputs onto the same belt, with no filtered splitters in sight.

The first setup players see for making quality intermediates should not brick their base within 5 minutes of trying them using the provided example. So there is a lot to be said for improving player guidance with regard to the quality mechanic.

In that tutorial there isn't a demonstration of how the outputs fill up a logistics line. There isn't a demonstration of how the outputs fill up a warehouse. There's a demonstration of some ratio of parts and an assumption players will build on that ratio. There isn't a demonstration of new build concepts like automalls which make it so that you can make on demand production work on 10 buildings versus a traditional mall where it was 1 building per entity.

If I go down the rest of your strategic assumptions in this post. I can give you counter examples but conceptually you're right so why argue? Some of the solutions sound so trivial they come off as cynical. For instance, the steel furnaces problem: just run a gig of nuclear and don't use steel furnaces. Out of context it sounds like I'm arguing against solar panels, in context it's even more hilarious because I'm buying solar panels as part of a command economy.

I run another command economy of landfill and throw the result into a lake so I have a box of parts for a spaceship and oil refineries. It looks like Yolo's rather than an Edge Lord (oh, political extremists got that label too... what do you call someone who just enjoys hard content?) running a series of small command economies that he worked out on his lunch break.

Edit: And just to take it a step further. Those are all potential failure points where suddenly adding byproducts generates operator errors. And it is pathological, to the quality system. That doesn't stop, just because you have a big economy. You just change where you experience it.

[Alfonse215]

2.1 breaks some factories.

It breaks small parts of some factories. Specifically, hazard concrete recycling, asteroid cycler platforms, and certain cases of assembler recipe controls. These are non-trivial changes, which is why they waited until a point release.

But the level of changes we're talking about would break significant parts of basically any factory that engages with quality at all.

[Alfonse215]

In the original game, major systems were changed over time. The way science was made changed - no more collection of alien stuff when killing bases and different recipes. Things were tweaked. Factories broke and needed to be redesigned. And this made the game better.

But the game wasn't live. The era you're referring to was just beta testing. Major design reworking is fine when you're still putting the thing together. But once you go live, once you have a proper release, you can't just go break everyone's base on a whim.

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

You're basically saying that you should never expect a Factorio update to preserve your save. That your current run is entirely ephemeral and it's going to constantly be destroyed and remade. And the only way to avoid that is to stick with a particular version, eschewing any bug fixes or features added to the new ones. And you must do so in perpetuity so long as you want to keep that base around.

Yes, so what?

What are you suggesting as an alternative? To never update the game, ever? Or, do force everybody to update with each update, and the developers can write code to update everybody's factories? I'm trying to understand what, exactly the problem is. Factorio is not an MMO.

To do what every other game does: when you release the game, you don't keep developing on it like it was still in a pre-release state. You respect that your audience bought a released game and you don't massively change it out from under them without a version change. And even then, you respect your audience by doing your level best not to change major system unless it is absolutely essential to do so. You make the minimum changes necessary to solve some problem, and only if that problem is substantial enough to warrant it.

Released games are not in early access, and game developers ought to respect the difference between those two things.

If WUBE wanted to do an early access version of Space Age, that would have been an acceptable environment for them to redesign a major system like quality. But they didn't; they released it. That effectively promises that there are levels of changes they aren't willing to make anymore. At least, not without a major version release.

And again, 2.0 didn't make major changes to the core recipes, intermediates, and the like, except where it was needed by Space Age.

[XT-248]

This is an interesting idea, but it lacks specifics (as it relates to quality). And those specifics are kind of important.

For example, I feel that the Tips&Tricks entries on quality are not just poor introductions to the concept, but they are actively harmful to properly building setups to produce quality goods. The biggest offender is the setup showing a bunch of gear makers with quality modules in them that put their outputs onto the same belt, with no filtered splitters in sight.

The first setup players see for making quality intermediates should not brick their base within 5 minutes of trying them using the provided example. So there is a lot to be said for improving player guidance with regard to the quality mechanic.

The problem is how you do it without actually changing the nature of the mechanic.

See, quality is a very open mechanic; almost every recipe participates in it. So you have a lot of choices for how to engage with it. But at the same time, quality engages with one of the most difficult elements of Factorio's logistics: handling byproducts. By putting a quality module into any intermediate's production, you are opting into a process that produces unwanted byproducts.

A player who is new to Factorio, who hasn't even set up advanced oil processing before? That person is never going to get into quality intermediate production early on. And that's the big catch-22 of quality.

The simplest, earliest means of producing quality stuff is just putting modules into end products and hoping for the best. But in order to understand later means of producing quality stuff, you need to have a grasp on a concept that that method never uses. Namely, that quality intermediates can be used to produce equal quality outputs. This is the core of any quality cyclers setup, as well as any method of making quality that relies on intermediates.

But making quality intermediates early-on is a trap. Not unless you know about quality mining, and even then, you'll need to know how to find out if your buffers are filling up and to add more.

First, you can't put quality modules in steel furnaces, so at the moment QM1s become available, you can't use them to make quality plates (without knowing about quality mining). Getting quality gears is a bit easier, but many thing that take gears (or even circuits) also take plates. Which you don't have.

And even if you do get quality intermediates, the ratios almost never line up. You'll always have too much of one thing and not enough of the other. You need some kind of escape valve for having too many intermediates of an undesired quality, some way to prevent items from backing up and blocking something.

Quality mining is a good idea, but the issue is that players need to know about it and try it. And even then, backing up can be a problem unless players are able to buffer with more and more chests. The ratios still don't line up, and there's not a simple answer to solve it. Driving a train through a car loaded with the excess is a good way for a skilled player to automate disposal, but an unskilled player almost certainly won't think of that.

The only thing I can think of is out-right forbidding the player from using quality modules in any intermediate recipe until they get recyclers. Note that mining drills don't execute recipes, so they can still use them.

This would have the effect of limiting the player to exactly 2 modes of interaction with quality: end products or quality mining and crafting up the chain. As these are the two most effective ways to engage with quality early on, it makes sense.

Of course, this has a number of negative side-effects. It nerfs Vulcanus's ability to make quality stuff; not entirely (resources are still cheap and you can still dump things in lava). But 2/3rds of Vulcanus's resources are impervious to quality mining (you can still make quality tungsten carbide and plate from quality coal and quality tungsten ore). Gleba becomes even more hostile to quality without Fulgora.

How to improve, or even add introductory experience to quality while retaining the original "openness" of the quality modules, is a hard question to answer or even come up with an idea for.


I could answer the question of how to introduce spoilage much more easily because wood is one of the most disposable materials we have in Factorio.

[NineNine]

But the game wasn't live. The era you're referring to was just beta testing. Major design reworking is fine when you're still putting the thing together. But once you go live, once you have a proper release, you can't just go break everyone's base on a whim.

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

You're basically saying that you should never expect a Factorio update to preserve your save. That your current run is entirely ephemeral and it's going to constantly be destroyed and remade. And the only way to avoid that is to stick with a particular version, eschewing any bug fixes or features added to the new ones. And you must do so in perpetuity so long as you want to keep that base around.

Yes, so what?

What are you suggesting as an alternative? To never update the game, ever? Or, do force everybody to update with each update, and the developers can write code to update everybody's factories? I'm trying to understand what, exactly the problem is. Factorio is not an MMO.

To do what every other game does: when you release the game, you don't keep developing on it like it was still in a pre-release state. You respect that your audience bought a released game and you don't massively change it out from under them without a version change. And even then, you respect your audience by doing your level best not to change major system unless it is absolutely essential to do so. You make the minimum changes necessary to solve some problem, and only if that problem is substantial enough to warrant it.

Released games are not in early access, and game developers ought to respect the difference between those two things.

If WUBE wanted to do an early access version of Space Age, that would have been an acceptable environment for them to redesign a major system like quality. But they didn't; they released it. That effectively promises that there are levels of changes they aren't willing to make anymore. At least, not without a major version release.

And again, 2.0 didn't make major changes to the core recipes, intermediates, and the like, except where it was needed by Space Age.

"Every other game" doesn't let you play any version of the game indefinitely. WUBE lets you do that, so your complaints don't make any sense. Nobody is forcing you to change versions mid-game. That's 100% your decision.

[Alfonse215]

Nobody's base was broken unless they updated Factorio to a new version while they were playing an existing game (which is a bad idea for the reason you stated). If you choose to break your game, that's on you. Factorio doesn't force anybody to change versions.

You're basically saying that you should never expect a Factorio update to preserve your save. That your current run is entirely ephemeral and it's going to constantly be destroyed and remade. And the only way to avoid that is to stick with a particular version, eschewing any bug fixes or features added to the new ones. And you must do so in perpetuity so long as you want to keep that base around.

Yes, so what?

What are you suggesting as an alternative? To never update the game, ever? Or, do force everybody to update with each update, and the developers can write code to update everybody's factories? I'm trying to understand what, exactly the problem is. Factorio is not an MMO.

To do what every other game does: when you release the game, you don't keep developing on it like it was still in a pre-release state. You respect that your audience bought a released game and you don't massively change it out from under them without a version change. And even then, you respect your audience by doing your level best not to change major system unless it is absolutely essential to do so. You make the minimum changes necessary to solve some problem, and only if that problem is substantial enough to warrant it.

Released games are not in early access, and game developers ought to respect the difference between those two things.

If WUBE wanted to do an early access version of Space Age, that would have been an acceptable environment for them to redesign a major system like quality. But they didn't; they released it. That effectively promises that there are levels of changes they aren't willing to make anymore. At least, not without a major version release.

And again, 2.0 didn't make major changes to the core recipes, intermediates, and the like, except where it was needed by Space Age.

"Every other game" doesn't let you play any version of the game indefinitely. WUBE lets you do that, so your complaints don't make any sense. Nobody is forcing you to change versions mid-game. That's 100% your decision.

A lot of people play the game on Steam, where auto-update is on by default. It often happens in the background without your knowledge. So it's not "100% your decision".

Also, many games do let you play older versions of the game indefinitely. Those games do not treat new release versions like early access updates either.

[Alfonse215]

I could answer the question of how to introduce spoilage much more easily because wood is one of the most disposable materials we have in Factorio.

Having seen a lot of posts from people who have trouble with Gleba, here are a list of the issues I've seen people struggle with:

* Seed shortages, either due to lacking productivity or allowing fruit to spoil.

* The inconsistent nature of Agricultural tower harvesting and its effects on processing and spoiling.

* Dumping a dozen recipes on the player, such that they will often flat-out forget some (burnt spoilage being a very common thing that players don't realize is there).

* Using a short-term spoilable as a fuel.

* Figuring out which nutrient recipe to use.

* Figuring out how to get power consistently.

* Not realizing that spoilage->nutrients and mash/jelly->bacteria are for kickstarting a process, not for legitimate long-term production.

* Figuring out how to restart a Biochamber setup without manual intervention.

None of these things individually is hard. The problem is that a less skilled player is tossed into the middle of a minefield of noob traps. And your suggestion with wood barely addresses these problems.

Coupled with this is that Gleba is basically a big positive feedback loop. The more success you have, the more likely you are to have further success. But also the more failures you have, the more likely you are to have further failures. You can get stuck in any one of these traps and not realize that it's what is holding you back from solving the problems in your base.

[mmmPI]

"Every other game" doesn't let you play any version of the game indefinitely. WUBE lets you do that, so your complaints don't make any sense. Nobody is forcing you to change versions mid-game. That's 100% your decision.

Yes

2.1 breaks some factories.

This is why it's a different name than 2.0, if you change the version to the experimental one before it is stable and/or in the middle of a game, this is on you.

A lot of people play the game on Steam, where auto-update is on by default. It often happens in the background without your knowledge. So it's not "100% your decision".

2.1 is still experimental atm, so it means players have opt-in for "experimental" instead of stable, it is your decision also to play on steam, it's not like factorio is a MMO and you join server and it has an update and your stuff is ruined you can't go back. You can back up your save and your version of the game which i recommend if you opted in for the experimental version.

I could answer the question of how to introduce spoilage much more easily because wood is one of the most disposable materials we have in Factorio.

It doesn't appear relevant to the "quality" topic, is still a bad proposition for desert map, and fish is already being there.

Part of me, tries to imagine what the game designer was thinking. For some reason, when people do that, it's a weird daemon. Because it is a daemon, it knows all.
Is not a man, with finite knowledge and energy.

It's a riddle ? I think the answer is a machine, it has finite knowledge but its energy means it can output always without sleeping some stochastic series of characters , some with more quality sometimes and other times no quality at all, i think it relate to quality !

If you think of it a little , it's like the whole discussion on this thread, since everyone is talking mostly past each other with their own points on which they are fixated that are unrelated to the thread that started the discussion, the resulting discussion doesn't appears to be one, on the contrary it appears like a bunch of agents filling in the space with a juxtaposition of plausible sentence.

Obviously those agents would have had to learn their way of expression from somewhere which leaves the infortunate case of a person whose natural expression is heavily plagiarized by agents to the extend that when they speak, one may doubt they aren't themselves just one more. You can imagine the difficulty for the others to distinguish ... I think it's what you mean there :

Ambiguity, complexity and context sensitive problems are all parts of optimization. When you look at it from that perspective, they meet the criteria for the system. There's a requirement I feel that is enforced where the quality levels are to make a safe sandbox rather than one where things truly break, which makes things feel too similar till you start upcycling on multiple planets.

I can have my opinion that it is a dishonest engine meant to make you deal with context sensitive problems that yield context sensitive results. I'm not sure I can defend the developer's approach or should.

It feels like for you the "difficulty" threshold starts when you upcycle on multiple planet, i think we're onto something more concrete there, there is hardly any reason to call the engine dishonest at this point, when you face the complexity it's easy to call it bad names because it makes your brain hurt, but it's also the fun in the game to learn how to play with it. If really someting is still breaking when you try to upcycle on multiple planets, instead of stopping at this as an observation, you could see it as a starting point of a journey, where such rigid classification of where complexity start is no more, where this threshold will be moved by your experience and learning.

I read your sentence as extremely verbose and convoluted way to say "" the system is nice and difficulty starts when you upcycle on different planet"" . Things can change if you learn ! Some of the tips and tricks mentionned in the thread makes a system that used to appear complex much more manageable. But it's easier to be provided help on the part that you find the more complex if you actually mention them instead of just refering to them. Maybe there were some things you may have done differently had you known some of the tips and tricks that would have influenced your opinion on what constitute a difficult or a complex task, when trying to upcycle on different planet. It's not immediately clear how upcycling on different planet would increase complexity in a way that is not self-imposed for me, but it's also possible to do so if one really set this as a goal without "breaking" anything, i think it was the topic of the thread initially.

[Alfonse215]

A lot of people play the game on Steam, where auto-update is on by default. It often happens in the background without your knowledge. So it's not "100% your decision".

2.1 is still experimental atm, so it means players have opt-in for "experimental" instead of stable, it is your decision also to play on steam, it's not like factorio is a MMO and you join server and it has an update and your stuff is ruined you can't go back. You can back up your save and your version of the game which i recommend if you opted in for the experimental version.

We were not talking about 2.1 specifically. It was a very theoretical discussion. It's not about the nature of experimental updates; it's about the nature of released updates.

That is, the question was whether it would make sense for WUBE to treat 2.0 and SA the way a developer would treat an early access game. In an early-access game, at any time, a patch release can come along and break everything you've done. All mechanics in the game are ephemeral and can be changed on a whim. If you want to keep playing in a particular run, you need to scrutinize every patch update to see if its something you actually want.

Space Age was not advertised as a beta product; I certainly didn't pay $35 to beta-test Space Age. I bought a release game, and WUBE has treated it like a released product, respecting the existing mechanics and not massively pulling the rug out from under players at a whim.

Whether it could have been better off if they gave it an early access period is a different question.

[mmmPI]

We were not talking about 2.1 specifically.

I was, specifically to adress the point that there shouldn't be any complaint about it breaking factories as it's still in experimental phase and as such it's expected that it can be the case, if that is a problem there is always the possibility to not opt-in for it, there is no reason to feel compelled to undergo a breaking change in your factory whatsoever. You can still play the version you had at release or any of the subsequent stable version as far as i can tell without any breaking change.

That's the only part i found related somewhat to the thread, about how "not to break " your factory. It's better to stick to "stable" if you don't want to play with the continuous update from the experimental branch, precisely because there was some change to quality, amongst other things, there may be others, the version isn't "stable" yet , that's why it's called "experimental"

[XT-248]

That's a really astute observation about how these mechanics work. I think the intended analogue to that idea would be that people would be given the option of playing with the mechanic at chemical science.

And then... success!?

The practical reality is just different. When we ask that question of where? And imagine starting at different points in play, and assume a player who can succeed at that point. You always are presented with four choices: no quality, ores, components, entities in general (i.e. buildings).

Can I make it work with that early on ramp? Sure. It's pretty easy actually.

Does that make it easier? If you wait you get a number of options to keep your assembly line safe and functioning over time. Plus a number of "effectively infinite" supply chains.

The on ramp practically has to be tailor fit to the person, and not the other way round. People will have their way of working on an idea like this and their pace.

People who do game design have to think like that. Thankfully, that is not my day job.

I don't think the introductory experience has to be "tailor-fit" to individuals, because when I look at other introductory experiences, they are universal to everyone who plays Factorio.


How players respond to the introductory experience is unique to each individual. Some might experiment before committing. Some might just go all-in on spaghettification. Some might just do something unexpected.

Game designers can create an introductory experience, but they can't control how individuals respond. At best, they can offer some amount of guidance without going overboard.

To be honest? I don't think there's a good onboarding strategy. Yeah, you can have a winning strategy you feel sells.

With the mixed quality stuff, you can store it, dispose of it destructively (there's a number of ways), or recycle it.

I think everybody, on some level, agrees that having nearly no onboarding strategy is worse than having some onboarding experience, at a minimum. Plugging a module into a machine to find out what it actually does is a recipe for disaster.

The main point isn't having a way to get rid of potentially unusable items. It is having to pay a tiny bit of mental attention tax to the "clean up" operation.

For example, recycling doesn't 100% get rid of everything. If I have six of a certain quality level and put them in a recycler, I get one back and an unprocessed second item. Those remaining two items will never be processed.

I know some people in the Factorio community avoid taking the destructive approach to get rid of unused items. What do they do after divesting from quality? Do convoluted math to find the best possible outcome to get rid of everything? Good luck to anyone who tries to do that.

But you run into a thing where, there's a tremendous motivation to justify the time investment in a strategy since it takes 50 times longer than normal? And that's applied randomly and to the extent people can having winning strategies right next to really odd ones that work with one persons experience. But don't do what they think they do.

Always has been the case for almost everything in Factorio when it comes to competing strategies.

See: Space Casino. It was a dominant strategy for many people to the point that WUBE decided to intervene and make some adjustments.

However, the reverse can also happen, where a very competitive strategy is misunderstood, and many people don't use it for one reason or another.

That is, a really. Really hard question you posed there. It might be an individual topic. It's related to the issue people are talking about where, the system feels like it presents red herring or has a lack of direction.

See the game design comment a few paragraphs earlier in the same post, which is relevant here.

The power economy is what I'd see a designer would be worried about. You have to imagine a capable player who will look at the wood, and say "I'll burn this for 2MJ". And then they open up a good old fashioned can of "use this strategy to the point of exhaustion". So wood replaces coal in boilers in the early game. That lets you have, in turn, more coal for any application you want: chemical science, military science, advanced circuits top the list.

I can actually partially break Krastorio by modding in Dectorio because of that. The decorative flooring I make, allows me to bypass the need to use biodiesel. Because, it has a higher energy value when tossed into any kind of furnace unit.

It's not necessarily a bad idea but it's beyond the scope of quality levels completely breaking here. "Ideas or Suggestion" off the top of my head?

A couple of counterpoints:

Reducing the current wood's fuel value. The new wood pole fuel value doesn't have to match what it used to be (4 MJ for the old wood pole - source: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... or_4gj_of/ ). Both items could have an extremely low fuel value, making it not worthwhile, since it would cost more energy to burn either item for energy than to burn coal.

Another option is to block productivity modules on the wood pole recipe and not give the wood pole any burn value at all. Instead, players should recycle them into raw wood and copper wires. The upside is that crafting and recycling burn energy, which makes it even more likely to be energy-deficient. The only downsides are that players must reach Fulgora and unlock the recycler to do it, and those without Space Age can't get rid of wood poles this way without access to recyclers.

Players can currently recycle wood poles to burn or get rid of wood, with a 75% material loss. Yet no one is scrambling to craft wood poles en masse, only to burn them later as wood in boilers. This is a good place to start: give the wood pole a fuel value of at most one-fourth of 2 MJ, or 500kJ. For comparison, a Steam Engine provides 900kW of energy per second, or 900 kJ. If that is still somehow remotely energy positive, then adjust to a lower fuel value until it becomes negative. Let's look at the item spoil, which has a fuel value of 250 kJ. So going that low has some precedent.

[XT-248]

Having seen a lot of posts from people who have trouble with Gleba, here are a list of the issues I've seen people struggle with:

* Seed shortages, either due to lacking productivity or allowing fruit to spoil.

* The inconsistent nature of Agricultural tower harvesting and its effects on processing and spoiling.

* Dumping a dozen recipes on the player, such that they will often flat-out forget some (burnt spoilage being a very common thing that players don't realize is there).

* Using a short-term spoilable as a fuel.

* Figuring out which nutrient recipe to use.

* Figuring out how to get power consistently.

* Not realizing that spoilage->nutrients and mash/jelly->bacteria are for kickstarting a process, not for legitimate long-term production.

* Figuring out how to restart a Biochamber setup without manual intervention.

None of these things individually is hard. The problem is that a less skilled player is tossed into the middle of a minefield of noob traps. And your suggestion with wood barely addresses these problems.

Coupled with this is that Gleba is basically a big positive feedback loop. The more success you have, the more likely you are to have further success. But also the more failures you have, the more likely you are to have further failures. You can get stuck in any one of these traps and not realize that it's what is holding you back from solving the problems in your base.

I solved Gleba a long time ago.

I had a mixture of both successes and failures. I couldn't build on successes or learn from failures because there is only so much I can do when the evidence disappears, regardless of success or failure.


I hit an issue where the successful Gleba factory ran flawlessly for 6 or 7 hours, then suddenly shut down completely while I was not looking for a few minutes. I only have the aftermath to build on my understanding of the "how" and "why" it went into cascading failure. I wasn't happy with that design, so I redesigned everything from scratch, and I still don't know whether another cascading failure might or might not occur with the new design.

How do I go from being uncertain that a design has a hidden cascading failure baked in to being confident I won't have to monitor and intervene for weeks? Pay more mental attention tax for a dozen hours?


When I switch to classical non-spoilage production chains, I have plenty of experience to know intuitively whether something will work or won't, and why. I don't have to pay as much mental attention tax to make a new design or experiment.

Having a good foundation to build on from prior experience really helps more than people think it does, pun intended.

[quineotio]

I couldn't build on successes or learn from failures because there is only so much I can do when the evidence disappears, regardless of success or failure.

Another related thing about Gleba is that the cost of failure is high, especially when designing. You need the seeds in order to maintain production, so if your fruit spoils you can run out of local fruit (automated production with ag towers).

And there is a lot of spoilage to clean up when things go wrong.

I've NEVER designed for Gleba in game - I ALWAYS do it in the editor. You need to see things running to understand how it works, but it's difficult to keep things running as you design without the ability to just delete and re-paste things in editor mode.

And there's a big difference between a well designed, never jam, spoilage clearing, cold starting Gleba and just a basic "it's working at the moment" Gleba. It's a LOT to throw at the player - especially new players.

Part of the problem is that there is no easy production on Gleba at all. Even iron/copper are quite complicated to design - and you need bioflux too, and rocket fuel also if you want to smelt it reliably.

As a thought experiment, imagine if the Gleba recipes were available on Nauvis. It wouldn't be anywhere near as big a deal, because you'd already have a factory and could tackle the Gleba recipes one at a time. But with Gleba as it's own planet, you kinda need to design the whole factory at the same time. And you can throw on top of it all the new concepts introduced there, like spoilage and soil and seeds and the ag tower etc. It's no wonder people give up at Gleba.

But relating this back to quality:

Adding a quality module to a machine doesn't only slightly increase complexity, it multiplies it, and in ways that aren't obvious. And if you manage to work through all those issues, but forget about epic, you have a bunch more issues when you unlock that (woops, everything is jamming). And cleaning up belts filled with quality items is a major pain, because unlike spoilage, you can't just burn it. So like Gleba, it's easier to design quality setups in the editor than in game.

Successfully implementing quality modules into your factory can be vastly more difficult than anything else you could do at that stage of the game (blue science). And also, you don't have the tools (recycler) to solve one of the main problems you'll encounter, which is surplus quality items. So it's no wonder people have issues with quality. It's not even very good in the early game with the modules only giving 1%.

There's also a disconnect between expectation and reality. Some people complain that quality is gambling, and the reply is "no, it's the law of large numbers". Except that for many people, quality IS gambling, because what's the alternative?

Consider how someone might encounter the quality mechanic. They learn about quality items, decide to get some good armor, so they make some modules and see "1% quality chance". "Ok, that's terrible, what am I suppose to do, make like 50 power armor mk2s and hope I get one at higher quality"?

And so you explain, no, you can do a recycler loop and upscale your resources and then build it. After you get the recycler.

Or, you can put quality in the mining drills and completely design your factory around managing quality (after you get the recycler). Except woops, you've already built your factory before you were even thinking about quality. So you redesign, put quality modules in your mining drills, eventually get what you need to make your armor. But now you have to take out the quality modules because you don't need quality any more.

But you got your armor now!

[mmmPI]

There's also a disconnect between expectation and reality. Some people complain that quality is gambling, and the reply is "no, it's the law of large numbers". Except that for many people, quality IS gambling, because what's the alternative?

The alternative to repeating again "quality is gambling" when someone tells you it's about the law of large number, is to actually learn what is meant by law of large numbers. Pretty sure it was actually mentionned in the FFFs. I think it's largely illustrating of a lack of understanding of the game dynamic , even at moderate scale, if you continue to picture quality as gambling. There are plenty of alternatives to just complaininhg that quality is gambling which itself is not a very productive activity, it would be like complaining that science takes too long. It's unfortunatly telling more about the limitation of the player than it is of the game imo As the solution is the same in both case, increasing the scale, so you wait less for science, so you have a predictible outcome with quality ...

Consider how someone might encounter the quality mechanic. They learn about quality items, decide to get some good armor, so they make some modules and see "1% quality chance". "Ok, that's terrible, what am I suppose to do, make like 50 power armor mk2s and hope I get one at higher quality"?

And so you explain, no, you can do a recycler loop and upscale your resources and then build it. After you get the recycler.

Or, you can put quality in the mining drills and completely design your factory around managing quality (after you get the recycler). Except woops, you've already built your factory before you were even thinking about quality.

I don't know why you want us to imagine players are this simplistic when they play, are you ? If you get only 1% chance of quality , then it means you need on average 100 item for 1 to be upscaled, what's your production rate per minute of those item ? Is that enough to achieve a reliable production or does it need scaling ? That's at this stage that you may understand the relation with law of large number and anticipate your needs, because if your production is large enough per minute, say 1000 iron plate , then you are smoothing out the production of quality too, to 10, but if your production is too small, say 10 per minute, then it will look unreliable if you are checking every minute for a new quality plate. The numbers are not large enough ^^

So you redesign, put quality modules in your mining drills, eventually get what you need to make your armor. But now you have to take out the quality modules because you don't need quality any more.

That's funny to imagine someone getting thru the trouble of making quality ALL the way from the mining drill to the armor mk2 instead of just a recycling loop for that one product if that's the only one they want and someone told them about recycling loop, and then deciding they prefer to stop using quality, and remove quality everywhere again when at this point they could just use the quality ingredients just fine, the armor mk2 being made of speed module for instance, player can just use quality speed module x). That's quite showing an uncharacteristic inability to use some basic advice x).

I'm sorry if that's what happened to you, but otherwise i don't think that's likely to happen to an actual player repeatedly, this is something on which i believe anyone would see room for improvement, which is like "the factorio game" for so many players !

I solved Gleba a long time ago.

When I switch to classical non-spoilage production chains, I have plenty of experience to know intuitively whether something will work or won't, and why. I don't have to pay as much mental attention tax to make a new design or experiment.

That's re-assuring to hear, but it doesn't appear consistent with the many complaints you have been posting on this unrelated thread about the difficulty you appear to still have. I imagine it's the case where there are multiple solution and if the one you found is the source of so much angry noise, i imagine it also means there are still room for improvement, you would most likely receive similar help than the one that has been provided about quality if the topic was about Gleba. Regarding quality, you said you avoided it altogether on Gleba , sure you can solve the planet just fine without it, like without beacons, but if that choice was made by default to avoid the complexity of the task, then it would seem like you should not be pushing back on the attempts from other players to highlight some parts you have missed.

[mmmPI]

How do I go from being uncertain that a design has a hidden cascading failure baked in to being confident I won't have to monitor and intervene for weeks? Pay more mental attention tax for a dozen hours?

If your design randomly fail every 6 or 7 hours, you can be certain there is a design failure, there is no need to monitor anything, it's only when you understand the system that you can be certain you don't need to intervene, i'm surprised this isn't a conclusion you have reached too, i felt it was necessary to consider solving Gleba, but i guess you can still make it with a system that need manual purging every now and then. The same apply to quality, but i would hardly consider anything "solved" in that case.

If you really have trouble monitoring the cause of a design failing you can increase the frequency of autosave and use a connected speaker to monitor when the design fail, reload the previous autosave and look at it. That works for quality too, there is no need to monitor a design for dozen hours to see when it will fail or not.