Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of mechanics

[LemonZawodowiec]

no its just a useless limitation and just slows things down - first you have to spend around 15 minutes to get the ass2 tech then 2. you have to use assembler 2 units on crafting items that are not required to use the speed of assembler 2 --- i find removing this limit is the best thing since a long time - its so much more painless to automate things in early game

basically what you say is that this game only needs one type of assembler and that's it.
now you don't need Assembler 1,2,3 they can just add a research that speeds up crafting speed of machines

[Rythe]

...So again, nice swan song for a way that never really was in Factorio. But tech updates immediately in Factorio, and with that the last remnant of a justification for the useless pickaxe in the user interface is gone as well.

I made it quite clear why the pickaxe isn't useless. It's a teaching mechanism for players who have never played Factorio nor a game like Factorio. Among other things, like basic thematic introduction.

Your disregard for these things is the smug condescension of someone who no longer needs them, and so make the claim of uselessness based entirely on you, and only you, no longer having a use for them.

The other point is that generic tech tree number upgrades is an easy but lesser path. Balance issues? Just add another research bonus. Don't worry about the why, just throw more numbers at it.

These types of upgrades are busy work in order to get something to do what you needed it to do in the first place. In Factorio, they expand out the game artificially to cover for a lack of other meaningful content. And Factorio already has the solution in production modules, just not the all the UI features to finish making modules non-tedious.

The pickaxe isn't the bloat. All the % damage and fire speed research on all the weapons is the bloat.

[dog80]

no its just a useless limitation and just slows things down - first you have to spend around 15 minutes to get the ass2 tech then 2. you have to use assembler 2 units on crafting items that are not required to use the speed of assembler 2 --- i find removing this limit is the best thing since a long time - its so much more painless to automate things in early game

basically what you say is that this game only needs one type of assembler and that's it.
now you don't need Assembler 1,2,3 they can just add a research that speeds up crafting speed of machines

no getting crafting speed to assemblers should cost per assembler as is now - but the limitation of recipe ingredient count is just something that doesnt play a role in that and is annoying

[dog80]

no its just a useless limitation and just slows things down - first you have to spend around 15 minutes to get the ass2 tech then 2. you have to use assembler 2 units on crafting items that are not required to use the speed of assembler 2 --- i find removing this limit is the best thing since a long time - its so much more painless to automate things in early game

basically what you say is that this game only needs one type of assembler and that's it.
now you don't need Assembler 1,2,3 they can just add a research that speeds up crafting speed of machines

you might leave it in for mods why not - but still you can specify the exact buildings that are able to craft a recipe so this is just a workaround as well...

[meganothing]

...So again, nice swan song for a way that never really was in Factorio. But tech updates immediately in Factorio, and with that the last remnant of a justification for the useless pickaxe in the user interface is gone as well.

I made it quite clear why the pickaxe isn't useless. It's a teaching mechanism for players who have never played Factorio nor a game like Factorio. Among other things, like basic thematic introduction.

Yes, but it teached to produce stuff by hand which a) is something Factorio is NOT about and b) which you have to do for other stuff anyway, so there are a lots of opportunities for beginners to learn crafting by hand.

Your disregard for these things is the smug condescension of someone who no longer needs them, and so make the claim of uselessness based entirely on you, and only you, no longer having a use for them.

Maybe. But a tutorial can use the first belt you have to craft for teaching crafting by hand. Or the first inserter. No shortage of candidates.

These types of upgrades are busy work in order to get something to do what you needed it to do in the first place. In Factorio, they expand out the game artificially to cover for a lack of other meaningful content. And Factorio already has the solution in production modules, just not the all the UI features to finish making modules non-tedious.

The pickaxe isn't the bloat. All the % damage and fire speed research on all the weapons is the bloat.

Yes, % research instead of a hierarchy of better machines/items could be considered a lazy path for the developers. But it extends the game where adding more items or modules would fail for lack of developer time and UI space. And upgrading modules (the research would make the module better instead of having another module) would just change the object the infinite research would affect and make another busy-work step necessary for the player.

Your standpoint on this merits some thought and feel free to try to convince players, modders and developers, but by making the pickaxe the cornerstone of your argument you weaken your argument in my opinion. The pickaxe is absolutely unimportant in the grand scheme of the world of Factorio. If you think modules should replace infinite research, argue that.

[Rythe]

To make the pickaxe thing as blunt as possible:

A pickaxe is a tool that is meant to help you do something. It's not an end unto itself. Crafting a pickaxe first thing is telling the player that you craft things to achieve a separate goal in Factorio.

But crafting a building first thing says that making a building is the goal, that your factory is the whole point of the game.

The difference is subtle, but the two different starts really represent two different games.

With Freeplay being the focus for so long, and the goal of pushing back the biter hordes no longer interesting, people shifted to just understand that the factory is the goal, because it was the only goal-like thing left, and thus years of complaints about the void or lack of endgame.

Campaign and Freeplay are different beasts in that the point of a campaign is to have a goal where freeplay is more purely exploratory.

Now that a campaign is back in the works, it's important not to lose the pickaxe and where it fits into Factorio. It would be nice if freeplay environment was able to generate some challenges/goals for the player to overcome besides the vanquished biters, but again, probably not a 1.0 addition.

[meganothing]

To make the pickaxe thing as blunt as possible:

A pickaxe is a tool that is meant to help you do something. It's not an end unto itself. Crafting a pickaxe first thing is telling the player that you craft things to achieve a goal in Factorio.

But crafting a building first thing says that making a building is the goal, that your factory is the whole point of the game.

The difference is subtle, but the two different starts really represent two different games.

Too subtle for my taste. The first thing you do in many games is watching an intro movie. Do those games tell you that your job is to passively watch? The first thing you do in Fallout 3 is talking to friends. The first thing you do in Half Life is boarding a subway train.

With Freeplay being the focus for so long, and the goal of pushing back the biter hordes no longer interesting, people shifted to just understand that the factory is the goal, because it was the only goal-like thing left, and thus years of complaints about the void or lack of endgame.

Campaign and Freeplay are different beasts in that the point of a campaign is to have a goal where freeplay is more purely exploratory.

Yes, and because Factorio is a game about building factories it would be senseless if building factories did not provide the solution. In the same way that shooting solves problems in a shooter and driving races solves problems in a racing game.

The campaign doesn't need a pickaxe. It needs goals that make you produce factories. The only campaign goal ever to be in Factorio was just that, built a factory to send a rocket into space.

[Oktokolo]

The problem with that is, that the burner stage is a necessary crutch to create your first electric network at the moment. That's pump, boilers, poles, pipes, steam engines and electric miners you'd need right at game start in order to skip straight to the electric phase. Nevermind coal, iron, and copper and wood resource collection in order to make anything useful. That's a very complicated start and a lot of items needed to pull it off.

I would expect the burner furnaces to be kept when axing the burner phase, because the bruner furnaces are efficient and proven technology borrowed from real life.
So the only problem would be, how to get and power the first miners, because nobody would want to spend an hour hand-mining the stuff needed for that.

If you would start with enough materials to build four miners, a tiny power plant (pump, pipes, a boiler, a steam engine), some electric inserters and some power poles - then it would be fine. You could then just remove burner inserters and burner miners - and would have streamlined the start considerably. Players would still have to run between ore fields to transfer stuff initially, because belts cost iron and your starting iron is better spent for miners and the initial power plant.

Instead of just giving the player the start resources, they could be present as remains of a crashed space ship that have to be mined first. That would also make the vanilla freeplay start more believable.

There also would be nothing wrong with having some lumps of solid iron or copper sprinkled over the map (we already got rocks containing stone and coal), wich could be mined and give plates without the need for smelting them. You would concentrate on mining them by hand early game and switch to exploiting the ore fields as soon as you got your first miners.

So, dropping the burner phase is rather easy and does not need new graphics. But a crashed space ship and some shiny rocks could help make the early phase less boring.

That said, if they would drop the burner phase, it would be pretty easy to mod it back in. So you could be sure, that someone would do that. There are not much fans of the burner tech - but some of them make mods.

[pleegwat]

If you bring the crashed ship idea into it, having the ship act as a power source (or charged non-rechargeable battery) makes more sense to me than it happening to have power plant parts loaded on it.

[meganothing]

So, dropping the burner phase is rather easy and does not need new graphics. But a crashed space ship and some shiny rocks could help make the early phase less boring.

I don't have any fear they will remove burners. Why should they? it is a nice and slow "entry level" for beginners (slow is important to give them time to look around all the menues and the world). And for power gamers who want to leapfrog the starting game Wube would have to axe a lot more to make them happy.

Actually I often use burner inserters for supplying shotgun turrets without using energy far into mid game. And just two days ago I built a mining outpost that used a burner miner as an automatic bootstrap starter for the steam engines there.

[ske]

I honestly think it'd be great if AM1 was burner powered. Players are forced too early and too hard to get electricity and there's too many new concepts being piled on players in the early game as is. As a burner device it is almost enough burner content for players to run a complete burner tier base (add a burner research lab to open up a path all the way to blue science). At the very least it sounds like a fun achievement run.

The problem with this is, that the devs will be more likely to completely remove the burner stage than to extend it. I love having the option for using burner stuff so much, that i forked Klonan's BurnerLeech. But there is probably a reason, the burner stage is incomplete and you are forced into electricity for your very first research. They also never fixed burner inserter behaviour to not suck as hard as it does in vanilla (something i try to fix with my mod). It would have been easy for them to do in the inserter logic (wich sadly is still untouchable for mods).
They are probably thinking about axing the burner phase completely right now and i would totally understand that. It does make no sense, that the stranded cosmonaut is using burner inserters that magically can recognize stuff like their electric counterparts. It is much easier to get the game believable without the burner phase. Also, vanilla burner phase sucks hard for most players (new and old) as it is now. So axing it completely would probably be the best option for them and the new players for 0.17.

That BurnerLeech is so cool. This plus if the burners were fixed so they never run out of fuel and start blinking plus the burner assemblers it would extend the steampunk part of the game quite a bit. I can understand that those cool features would get axed like the axe on a cleanup. You could do everything by handcrafting in that stage. Maybe even some solar panels in your pocket left over from the crash to jump-start the factory. That said, I'd welcome a burner expansion pack to the game where electricity doesn't exist (no copper required). I'd even pay for the DLC.

[meganothing]

That said, I'd welcome a burner expansion pack to the game where electricity doesn't exist (no copper required). I'd even pay for the DLC.

A steampunk DLC? Home of the steam-powered Spidertron. Count me in.

[BuilderOfAges]

EDIT: Things that were not removed from the game egine are out of the way, so let's talk things that were removed - pickaxes So did any mod use the tool slot for anything iteresting? (Don't care about Diamond pickaxe with mining power 5, just change it to technology research bonus, as steel axe was changed). I thought maybe Nanobots, but I just checked and it uses weapon slot, not tool slot.

Might I direct your attention to the mod I've been developing for the last couple of months: Stone Age Factorio. It's primary mechanic: the tool slot. Why? Because I wanted the game to be more difficult, and more diverse. I also noticed that the vanilla tools weren't used much. So I decided to expand it, to make it more interesting. Now I haven't been around long enough to have witnessed a version of Factorio that had a stone axe in vanilla (I've only heard the legends), so I have no idea if what I've made looks anything like what once used to be the standard.

Of course, the day after I release the second version of it, the tool mechanic gets axed . I still intend to continue it though, perhaps by making the player hold the tools in their hands as they mine, or something. I'm not upset though. Like I said: I had also noticed that the tool slot did little in vanilla. I decided to expand it, you decided to remove it. As you should: the core game should not have to base its decisions on us modmakers.

I do agree however with many others in this thread, and with Rythe's essay: the current freeplay moves from an early to mid-game where your factory serves you, ever increasing what is possible for you to do, to a very disappointing end-game, where you serve your factory by continually feeding it more resources and tweaking numbers at one place to get higher output numbers somewhere else.

Once there are no new discoveries to be made, no new possibilities to be unlocked, the game ceases to be interesting. Whenever you remove an unlockable possibility without adding a new one elsewhere, you make the overall gameplay less compelling.

[Monara]

Since it was yet another thing that had to be explained somehow, we decided to just remove it.

This is such bizarre reasoning. The more I read it and try to make sense of it the more confused I get.
Wasn't one of the main things you were working on improving the tutorials/campaign to better introduce new players to the game? Why do you bother at all if this is your reasoning? Instead of adding tutorials, just take everything that has to be explained and delete it from the game! Who cares if it completely butchers all progression and enjoyment, at least now it doesn't need to be explained, right? Don't you see how ridiculous this is?
We can take it one step further and also remove things that are indirectly explained through gameplay. Such streamlining!
If that's the direction you want to go, why not add a crafting recipe that is unlocked from the start, that costs only the starting materials, which instantly builds a fully optimized 1k spm base.

[AsherMaximum]

I love all of these, except the fuel efficiency. It made the choice between steel and electric furnaces an interesting and viable one. If you had petrochemical based power, then steel furnaces were in some cases better than electric, while electric becomes fully superior in solar/nuclear builds.

Furnaces and furnace efficiency are a core part of the game, and absolutely central to the decision making process when building. I think it was one step too far.

Ya, most of the changes are fairly legit for the vanilla game, but this one will reduce the relevance of steel furnaces considerably. In the early mid game upgrading to them and sticking with them for as long as possible rather than upgrading your power and deploying electric furnaces was a nice option for people paying close enough attention to see the efficiency gains. With this, steel furnace efficiency is cut in half, and the benefit to keeping them around is eliminated. That's too bad.

Agreed. Keep the efficiency as is. If you want to make it easier to understand, instead of displaying an efficiency percentage, display an energy consumption #mj, and an energy output #mj.

[Uristqwerty]

Reading through this thread, I'm now wondering whether the assembly machine input limit actually simplifies the game, since it puts an upper bound on routing complexity until the player has done some research and hopefully automation.

For all of us who find conveyor routing trivially intuitive after having played a lot, read a lot about, and/or watched a lot of Factorio being played, perhaps that complexity introduction is nearly invisible. But maybe new players would still be best off if recipes were (mostly) still tiered by input count, just with a subtle indicator (slight background tint?) to help draw attention to prerequisites.

[Oktokolo]

If you bring the crashed ship idea into it, having the ship act as a power source (or charged non-rechargeable battery) makes more sense to me than it happening to have power plant parts loaded on it.

My idea was, that the player would mine basic materials like plates and circuits from the ship and use that to get started. But also salvaging a limited power source (fully charged glitterworld-tech super capacitor, huge chemical primary cell, nuclear decay generator, high-efficiency solar panels...) from the ship is a good idea and would probably shorten the bootstrap phase further.

That BurnerLeech is so cool. This plus if the burners were fixed so they never run out of fuel and start blinking plus the burner assemblers it would extend the steampunk part of the game quite a bit.

I tried to fix the run-out-of-fuel part in InserterFuelLeech. Burner inserters only starve, if there is no fuel available at their pickup position (wich might be another burner tech entity). The next update (i know how to do it, but don't know when i get to do it) will bring performance improvements and probably will also work reliably without the fallback-teleport-cheat wich currently guarantees, that inserters can't run out while they could in theory refuel themself if their behaviour would be directly modable.

[eformo]

Looks like I'll just be sticking to 0.16 then, to avoid the downgrade to 0.17.

Some of these "features" that are being removed don't add squat to vanilla, I'll happily admit. And vanilla will be a better game without them. But I lost interest in vanilla factorio years ago. It's heavily modded factorio that has gotten me up into the 3k-4k hour range of playtime. And those mods make good use of these features to add significant value to the game. There's a reason that, even with all the other games I've bought since Factorio 0.9, I still play Factorio. I don't play the others any longer. It's because Factorio had complexity that the others didn't. Had, in the past tense.


<Sarcasm>
You know what I've actually gotten stumped on many times in this game, and spent countless hours figuring out ways to work around? Building a Factory. Would be good if the game just provided a factory blueprint for you and all the items too, so you don't have to actually build it. Talk about streamlining!
</Sarcasm>

That's about how this FFF reads to me though. Let's take out the fun and complexity and give the players just another game.

On the positive side, Thanks Dysoch! Thanks Bob! Thanks Angel! Thanks Pyanodon! (You 4, in chronological order, have given me thousands of hours of enjoyment! Thanks to all of you, going back to Vanilla Factorio now is unthinkable.)

[emp_zealoth]

Disclaimer: I pretty much play bob's + angel's exclusively now. Also, it's 2 am. Rambliness to be expected
Disclaimer 2: I bought the game at least 3 times over, gifted to 2 my friends, who can't play with me now since I'm too high on mods

I don't agree with most of the changes. Do they impact UPS in significant way?

Personally I'd like to see durabilities wholly removed since they add nothing but tedium (and is pretty silly, since I ususally rightclick a whole bunch for armor and pickaxes and call it a day), BUT, crafting that steel axe (and later upgrades in mods) really feels nice for working in the base or just obliterating a few trees that are in the way. I can feel making progress when I can rework the base quicker. Also, producing advanced materials for modded pickaxes is a LONG but ultimately rewarding journey. Plus, it's been a part of the game for a long time.

I don't think you should remove assembler limits, as others have said, making the jump from T1 to T2 feels amazing, no matter how many times done before. Personally I think recipes should simply be tagged with assembler tiers that can craft them, regardless of ingredient number - it would allow recipe tiers to be decoupled from their ingredient count, it would be more transparent to new players, since you could implement UI filter for recipes craftable by tier and explainable in a concise tooltip. It also opens up interesting possibilities for modders.
I can't stress how bland will unlimited crafting make the game. For me, having to contend with limited automation capability means building those early spaghets, part wooden chest, part belt, part hand fed abominations to work towards those blue saviours. Without it I'll just build neat rows that make literally anything I need, and then I'll just make them blue eventually.

Efficiency is another feature that is pretty important for mods. Getting more efficient boilers and machinery also helps to keep the sense of progression on.

Please don't absolutely wreck mods with mining changes, other than that I can't really say much, i think it is used to make fluid tanks take longer to pick up? It's a neat thing to have.
Resistances, again, laying waste to bob's mods

From an addict modders perspective vanilla factorio should embrace and expand on those features, not axe them. Efficiency - more tiers, Resistances - more varied enemies, weapons, turrents, defences.
I know this probably will be quite unpopular, but after changing from bob's + angel's to just bob's, bob's feels to me like where vanilla should be heading. It's astonishingly well balanced (apart from sniper turrents) and pushes for what Factorio seems to be about - figuring out how to automate producing complex and varied array of things. And isn't as neurotic as Angel's...
Vanilla Factorio now feels grindy and kinda deranged - people using hundreds of 8-64 trains to feed copypasted blobs of beaconed smelters. It's an exercise in parallelisation, which works pretty well will bot spam
That's why it hurts to see my fanon of "vanilla" so heavily hit. Pretty much all of those features add soul to bob's mod's. There is a nice quirk where for building next tier of electronics you have to use normal T2 assemblers instead of electronic's assemblers. It's another milestone like with the jump from T1 to T2 and is memorable.

[Rythe]

Time for me to take yet another tack.

I'm a player from the Experience camp, which is on the side of the Puzzle Player camp farthest away from the Power Player camp. I don't use bots, so I spend a fair bit of time mining out trees and rocks by hand. This is part of the experience for me, and was once an expression of care for disturbing the environment as little as possible when fitting my factories between all the forest patches. Building and equipping both the iron and steel pickaxes was a part of my experience for doing so made those early steps of progression far more real than the research tab annoying me with incessant blinking.

The way I play expands out the burner phase a little and the oil phase a lot. This is all pickaxe territory, a remarkably hands on approach, and it's also Factorio at its most authentic, which is to say, consistent in regards to experience. The game peaks out and ends for me as soon as that first rocket launches into space because showing off all the really cool graphics work that Wube put into it is the last thing my factory does for me. Whatever the player dropoff is between rocket launch and nuclear power, that's basically me. (I'm also one of the super weird people who did Lazy Bastard without bots.)

This is also the stretch that many try to skip as fast as possible, particularly the Power Players, so I do get it.

But the way I play mirrors the progression path of first time players. I do it because it speaks to me most. They do it because they don't know any better. This is why I focus on the things I do, because I know what makes those first universal hooks that catch people and carry them to the point where they do know better and can start enjoying the game in the different ways that most veterans do. I can still get what it's like for a newbie to craft and equip the steel pickaxe for the first time. Whereas for veterans, it's a long forgotten, rather meaningless blip.

So yes, game consistency matters. Getting the little details right matters, even if the effect of it is invisible to the players. Many of these things are suppose to be invisible as a natural, hand-holding progression that just works so that people don't even realize its working or they're having their hands held. The pickaxe fits into that very neatly as the invisible hand-holding that gets a player into oil for the first time. 56% of Steam players got to oil in Factorio whereas 33% get the first achievement in SpaceChem (whatever that takes). 61% have the Fort Joy achievement in Divinity:Original Sin 2 which is maybe the rough equivalent of oil in Factorio. Whatever is in the magic formula that gives Factorio this edge where it can hold people almost as well as Original Sin 2, I can tell you that the pickaxe as an item that is crafted first is a part of it.

Which is also why I dragged the burner phase and the research tree into this slowly but surely. Which is why I'm making a point of asking what kind of game Wube intends Factorio to become once 0.17 lands, and making it clear what that decision looks like and means as an extension of this FFF and their past development. This isn't about tying Wube's hands so they can't change their own game; it's about raising the flags on them trying to fix things that aren't broken or worse - depending on what kind of game they've decided Factorio is going to turn into.

So let's talk research tree a little more and how that can be integrated into the concrete crafting of the game a bit better. I may have exaggerated the 'super easy fixes' a bit, but the changes needed to transform the current tech tree into an almost pure research -> craft -> enhancement mechanically consistent setup aren't that complex.

-Tie the toolbelt expansion to equipping Heavy Armor+ and shift Heavy Armor research to late red science(50-100x). (Removes toolbelt research completely so simpler research tree.)
-Bot modules for bot count/speed/damage (roboport/armor modules) or continue to cheat with bots because it's a Power Player dynamic anyways.
-Continue to cheat with inserter stack size, braking force and robot cargo (The one little betrayal that slips by unnoticed/software upgrade!).
-Decide on whether to have combat modules for turrets/weapons/vehicles and/or balance biters to Ammo type.
There're more ways to kill biters than there are discrete biter variants at this point. Skipping the combat modules isn't a problem given expansive player loadouts, but it would be an interesting addition if blueprint ghosts could be player fulfilled in that it causes a building/turret/vehicle to be placed with all modules and ammo included without bots. This would be a huge benefit to placing gun turrets with the correct ammo count in the early game and vehicles all fueled and ammoed up in general.
Either way, damage bonus/firing speed research really is bloat/crutch.
-Tie infinity research to tier 3 module bonuses in Freeplay, which could get really interesting really fast with the productivity modules. Makes mining productivity research very obsolete.

And I think that's everything that would be needed to clean up the research tree?

Armor and Pickaxes would no longer have durability. Equip and forget. It's worth noting that the current punishing mining speed without any pickaxe equipped is Factorio's way of telling you that you really, really need to use your tools, but I'm not even that much a purist to keep pickaxe durability in the game for it.
Equipping and managing Pickaxes, Armor and Weapons should happen in the inventory UI, not the bottom right corner of the screen always there and causing confusion UI.

And speaking of Rocket Launch, would be nice if the satellite gave vision to a large chunk of the map as an upgrade to radar. That way, the rocket would do something for the player even in freeplay.