Friday Facts #160 - Playtesting

[GlassDeviant]

So what happens to alien eggs if the new purple science potions are now going to be made from other things, purple omelettes?

[lingnau]

Kovarex, please give us your final save! I think it will be very useful and helpful for growing our factorio-skill for many of us.

His base is made in 0.15, so we can't open it in 0.14.
Edit: But some pictures would be nice

I'm not done as I need to make everything nice and figure out the proper setups, but the current state looks something like this.

LIKE.

[mrvn]

I am red/green color blind and I have always found the map difficult to use because of the color choices.
Does the map show the spread of pollution? I've never been able to tell.
Does it show where I can mine rocks?

I see the creeper nests, I see oil patches, I see coal patches, I see iron patches, I see copper patches, and water.

Im red/green color blind too, and i have never had a problem seeing the pollution spread on the map

Pollution is shown on the map and even minimap as shaed of red. But that is optional. Check your graphics settings for the setting of showing pollution on the map and minimap. Also try hitting ALT to show/hide the additional informations. Depending on the settings ALT will toggle pollution on/off on the map.

If all that still doesn't help then it might very well be the color that you are missing. But I would hope that even with red/green color blindness you would notice that there is something overshadowing your map around the base in various degrees of intensity. I basically can't see anything inside my base on the map with pollution on because it's all red.

[Tallinu]

Merging items with different health. - We didn't do the item merging, as we didn't want the player lose his precious items as two 49% items would merge into one, which would prevent the player from repairing both for just a few repair. In reality, I feel that the annoyance of having 8 different stacks of laser turrets/walls in my inventory is not worth the rare possibility of losing an item or two.

Please do not implement this in such a way that it is possible for a badly damaged item to somehow "merge with" another badly damaged item. While this might not be an issue with simple items like walls, the more complicated and expensive the item is, the more I would be pissed off by this. Imagine picking up two damaged rocket silos to save them from being destroyed by a biter attack or some griefer throwing grenades, only for them to magically merge into one less-damaged silo. Yes, that's an extreme and unlikely example, but it would really suck. A more likely example is laser turrets, which are not cheap when you first get access to them, and there have been plenty of times when I picked up one or two dozen laser turrets without first repairing them, because it's a bit safer to do that back at base than to stand there in the wilderness with your repair packs out, potentially being hit by additional biter waves and taking more damage.

The previous changes that make placing a damaged item pull another damaged item out of your inventory so you can plop them all down for repairs make it easy enough to get damaged items out of your inventory. They don't need to be magically combined into fewer items, particularly if they were all nearly destroyed and would compress into one item worth a tiny fraction of the construction cost as if the others had simply been destroyed instead of picked up. If I'm picking up an item, it's because I want to save it, not let it get destroyed!

If you can accomplish it in such a way that the total number of items is never allowed to go down, that would be fine. For example, "transfer" the damage from an item that's barely scratched to another damaged item, combine the now full health item with the usual stack, and keep the damaged item separate. When you pick up another damaged item, check if the total amount of damage between that item and the one already in your inventory is greater than 100%, and if not, transfer damage to create another full-health item. If any damaged item would be "destroyed" by stacking, keep it separate until you pick up an item which is lightly damaged enough that this would not happen, and transfer the damage over.

The result of this, as you pick up damaged items of the same type, would be the accumulation of a small number of heavily damaged items in addition to the usual stack(s) of undamaged items, with far fewer total damaged items in your inventory, but no loss of total item quantity. The heavily damaged items could be placed in the world (requiring potentially far less space than the original number of damaged items that were picked up) and repaired using the same number of repair packs as it would have taken to fully repair the original number of damaged items, because the total amount of damage taken has been preserved while the amount of inventory space occupied by those damaged items has been minimized.

[sekanz]

Kovarex, please give us your final save! I think it will be very useful and helpful for growing our factorio-skill for many of us.

His base is made in 0.15, so we can't open it in 0.14.
Edit: But some pictures would be nice

I'm not done as I need to make everything nice and figure out the proper setups, but the current state looks something like this.

I love it!!

[Mylon]

I couldn't wait for low level personal robots, so I made this: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Mylon/Bluebuild

[unobtanium]

With the new multiplayer working, i would like to see another feature for personal roboports. Let us keybind a button which turns the personal roboports on/off. This allows us to manually tell when we want to build or destruct stuff. Robots would stay in the inventory or return back to it. This would prevent them from start building or repairing stuff, when i am just driving around in my car or my friends are building/destructing something around me with their robots, i dont even want to be part of. This problem usually occurs when having a lot of personal roboports and therefore a larger range on them.

While we are at it, what about the roboports robots recharging speed? The robots usually place two items on the ground and then return and want to be charged back up, but barely went below 1MW. And then 50 robots sit around me doing nothing, because every robots wants to be charged up again. What about lowering the minimal energy required or checking if a recharge spot is available, otherwise keep working. If it falls below 0.1MW it then waits for a free spot no matter what. This way building and destructing with robots would be way faster and efficient.

[Supercheese]

With the new multiplayer working, i would like to see another feature for personal roboports. Let us keybind a button which turns the personal roboports on/off. This allows us to manually tell when we want to build or destruct stuff. Robots would stay in the inventory or return back to it. This would prevent them from start building or repairing stuff, when i am just driving around in my car or my friends are building/destructing something around me with their robots, i dont even want to be part of. This problem usually occurs when having a lot of personal roboports and therefore a larger range on them.

There's a Mod for That™

[mrvn]

While we are at it, what about the roboports robots recharging speed? The robots usually place two items on the ground and then return and want to be charged back up, but barely went below 1MW. And then 50 robots sit around me doing nothing, because every robots wants to be charged up again. What about lowering the minimal energy required or checking if a recharge spot is available, otherwise keep working. If it falls below 0.1MW it then waits for a free spot no matter what. This way building and destructing with robots would be way faster and efficient.

That's what happens here. IF there is more work to do then the construction bots just keep flying. Only when they are idle or have flown a number o round trips do they come charging.

[CharitableClas]

My only problem with the damaged stacking is with turrets and laser turrets. scenario is you go to place a healthy turret down and you could place an almost dead turret instead as you have no idea which one is going to be placed. if you have it where when you combine the damaged turrets together either with each other or a healthy one it disassembles the damaged ones and makes a healthy one with the good parts of each damaged one and any left over good parts can be recycled back into the player inventory. also if you do have it disassemble you can have like junk parts and have it where you can put them in an assembler and it turns so much of the junk parts into usable parts and then it can go from that to a random intermediate item but only to what you have researched up to. like an algorithm that when it crafts it it checks your research level and what you have researched then chooses a random item from that list. or you could have it where it checks like the logistics network and sees which you are lowest on and produces that.

early game personal roboports would be nice and a way to do that would be that it uses either wood or coal from the player inventory to run itself (wood= 1 item dropped before refueling, coal= 2 items dropped before refueling, etc.). and for the robot frames it can use regular engines instead of electric engines and iron instead of steel and have half the health of the later game robots. as for a personal roboport why not have a special armor to craft for it that has an antenna for robot signals and the construction grid size be like 20x20? and if you right click to open the armor it has a special slot for robots so you dont have to waste inventory space on the robots. and the robots can be upgraded later for the later game robots.

also it would be nice if we could disassemble items that we dont need anymore like burner miner drills and things like that back into iron plates and stone.

[Hicsy]

Play don't starve.
The item stacking is fair, expected, and not too hard.

say you have a stack of 5 items with 100% health
- 500 / 500 (5)
you add one with 49%
- 549 / 600 (6)
you add another with 49%
- 598 / 700 (7) ... so the average health of the whole stack is 85%

note that you aren't losing any counts of items, it's just averaging out the health across the stack - which is fair i think...

so:
place one of the (7) stack down
- it is placed at 85% health
- the remaining stack is still 85% health (no need to track individuals, and it's fair)
- 512 / 600 (6) remaining

[Grimakar]

Play don't starve.
The item stacking is fair, expected, and not too hard.

say you have a stack of 5 items with 100% health
- 500 / 500 (5)
you add one with 49%
- 549 / 600 (6)
you add another with 49%
- 598 / 700 (7) ... so the average health of the whole stack is 85%

note that you aren't losing any counts of items, it's just averaging out the health across the stack - which is fair i think...

so:
place one of the (7) stack down
- it is placed at 85% health
- the remaining stack is still 85% health (no need to track individuals, and it's fair)
- 512 / 600 (6) remaining

That needs to be tested while repairing your towers. Esp. when I am attacking a nest, if one tower is almost destroyed and I loot it, I do not want all the others towers to become damaged. I want "healthy" towers in the first row. Maybe for a game like don't starve this works, but I am not sure, if that is a good idea for Factorio.

[CharitableClas]

Play don't starve.
The item stacking is fair, expected, and not too hard.

say you have a stack of 5 items with 100% health
- 500 / 500 (5)
you add one with 49%
- 549 / 600 (6)
you add another with 49%
- 598 / 700 (7) ... so the average health of the whole stack is 85%

note that you aren't losing any counts of items, it's just averaging out the health across the stack - which is fair i think...

so:
place one of the (7) stack down
- it is placed at 85% health
- the remaining stack is still 85% health (no need to track individuals, and it's fair)
- 512 / 600 (6) remaining

That needs to be tested while repairing your towers. Esp. when I am attacking a nest, if one tower is almost destroyed and I loot it, I do not want all the others towers to become damaged. I want "healthy" towers in the first row. Maybe for a game like don't starve this works, but I am not sure, if that is a good idea for Factorio.

The way I figure it could work is a recipie that checks for damage tags and health percentage. Say you have a turret with 90% health then it either crafts a repair pack if you do not have one or uses one in your inventory to repair it back to full health. If it is like less than 70% health then it could look for other turrets with the same amount of damage or lessand combine the two to make the health somewhere around 80 - 90% health and then you can use the repair pack recipie to fix the turret back to full health but doing it that way the down side to it is the more damaged the turrets are the less return yield you will get back because you would have to use more turrets to repair damaged ones which would cost you more resources than to just build new ones and the ones repaired this way would be easier to damage for biters because you are using damaged parts to repair turrets.

[steinio]

Play don't starve.
The item stacking is fair, expected, and not too hard.

say you have a stack of 5 items with 100% health
- 500 / 500 (5)
you add one with 49%
- 549 / 600 (6)
you add another with 49%
- 598 / 700 (7) ... so the average health of the whole stack is 85%

note that you aren't losing any counts of items, it's just averaging out the health across the stack - which is fair i think...

so:
place one of the (7) stack down
- it is placed at 85% health
- the remaining stack is still 85% health (no need to track individuals, and it's fair)
- 512 / 600 (6) remaining

That needs to be tested while repairing your towers. Esp. when I am attacking a nest, if one tower is almost destroyed and I loot it, I do not want all the others towers to become damaged. I want "healthy" towers in the first row. Maybe for a game like don't starve this works, but I am not sure, if that is a good idea for Factorio.

Yes this combination thing is bullshit.

If i have 10 turrets with 0% damage and one with 30% damage all turrets have damage after putting them back in the inventory.
Sorry but this idea is the biggest nonsense i've heart.

Greetings steinio

[Anson]

place one of the (7) stack down
- it is placed at 85% health
- the remaining stack is still 85% health (no need to track individuals, and it's fair)
- 512 / 600 (6) remaining

sounds reasonable at first, but only for one second until you think of practically using that method:
have a stack with 50 items and place one, that one item is then damaged to 50% and collected again. now, all the stack is at 99% health average. try to repair the items ..... you would need to place all 50 items first, then repair all 50 items, and then collect them back :-(
similar bad results from one healthy item and collecting an item with 99% damage: when placing items from that stack, they have 50% health only and are easily destroyed before you can repair them.

but collecting damaged items and automatically combining their health doesn't always work nicely either (except eg in the case of science packs which are used in a completely different manner):
have a stack with 10 items, place them and collect them when they are damaged to an average of 90% (either one almost destroyed item at 1%, or all slightly damaged to 80-100%). instead of 10 items that are partially damaged and can be repaired to get 10 healthy items again, you now have only 9 items left, requiring you to restock first to continue placing 10 of those items.

and the old method might be worst:
place 10 items, collect them after they are all damaged to different degrees, and end up with an inventory of 10 single-item stacks which have different health. maybe there isn't even enough space in the inventory to collect them all.

what about combining all methods ?
all items are always put on max two stacks, one for healthy items and one for damaged items. the healthy stack can be used for placing healthy items without problems, and the damaged items are averaged so that their total number stays the same but on placing they are all damaged to the same degree. to repair them, any number can be placed and repaired and upon pickup would return to the healthy stack.

as additional feature, when repairing in the backpack, there could be two different repair packs, one to repair the whole stack slowly until all are repaired to 100% at the same time, and one repair pack to repair one after the other. the latter might be difficult in practise since a partially repaired item would probably be combined with the damaged stack again and thus result in the same effect as repairing the whole stack at the same time, unless a single repair pack that is powerful enough (introduce tiers of repair packs?) can repair an item directly to 100%.
alternative for repair: in the inventory, normal repair packs would slowly heal the whole stack, and an additional "repair by combining" tool could be researched that (only on demand) compresses a damaged stack to a corresponding healthy stack with fewer items. (eg for each use of that tool, pull one healthy item from the damaged stack and reduce the health of the remaining stack; or for each use reduce the item count of that stack, keeping the total health and thus increasing the average)

[rapus]

Regarding the increase of the stack sizes for given items, what about making an upgrade out of it? Since as you stated, it is only important in the late game!

In general more convenience-upgrades (as long as they aren't over expensive) would be really nice.

+1 for infinite upgrades

[Deadly-Bagel]

A note on the interactive tutorials (if it hasn't been mentioned already), probably the most important one is explaining Refineries when one is built, that you need to deal with ALL outputs and also explaining Advanced Oil Processing.

[Klonan]

A note on the interactive tutorials (if it hasn't been mentioned already), probably the most important one is explaining Refineries when one is built, that you need to deal with ALL outputs and also explaining Advanced Oil Processing.

Thanks for the suggestion - Adding it to my list

[CharitableClas]

another thing to put an interactive tutorial on is circuit network and the things with it along with the power switch because i still have no idea how to use either one effectively i just recently learned how to prioritize which side of the splitter items need to go down first

[Grimakar]

another thing to put an interactive tutorial on is circuit network and the things with it along with the power switch because i still have no idea how to use either one effectively i just recently learned how to prioritize which side of the splitter items need to go down first

And of course we need a tutorial on how to make a movie player with the circuit network.