Friday Facts #267 - Experiments, Explosives & Extended tags

[bbgun06]

It sounds like you guys need to get some playtesters in and have them each play with the different gui options to figure out which should be default.

Though i'm not sure if i woudln't want more expensive robots/roboports for that for balancing.

There is already bot capacity research.

[Kryptos]

I really hope the "3 inserters" comment refers to a future FFF of the upcoming version, not just a dead thought that won't be seen for a long time..

(cross-post from reddit because I don't know how the devs do except that they mention forums on FFFs)

On first thought I agree

On second thought, I don't. Do you really gain a lot by having robots carry multiple things? While I would say yes, that window is either small or insignificant. This is only a problem between the time you get the first robots and the time you automate robots, which is maybe a few to a dozen hours of gameplay (assuming you aren't a veteran who's already got frames automated as soon as they're researched). Before that, robots don't matter, and after that, you can just build more robots.

The biggest problem I see with this, is that Factorio has a (I believe, since I haven't seen anything change it) hard limit on 600 build orders being checked at once. Things won't necessarily be built any faster, it will simply be fewer robots flying around. Considering the traveling salesman calculations are gonna be harder than the a to b as the crow flies method the robot uses, we would be trading significant CPU for negligible benefit.

Basically, you get the same effect by having 10x more robots.

Third thought: This might be useful for player roboports well into late game, actually. I do not know if that would make the CPU hurt less or not.

Thought 2.1 (unrelated, but don't want a new post):
Since there seems to be a lot of pickaxe complaints, and a lot of complaints about the space above the armor, can we have a toggle minimap button there? It always makes screenshots a bit of a pain. Maybe there's such a button in settings, but that requires finding it. Plus, you normally have a map icon next to your armor icon in most other games, so this would probably make sense for new players. Maybe have it toggle to the full map as well. Keep the current button though, it's pretty intuitive.

[eformo]

Kovarex wrote:
"Two years ago, I was under the impression, that we need to eradicate all the weird options, to make the game just work for everyone. Over time and after all experience and feedback we have gathered, I started to realize that different people have different expectations, and their brains are wired differently. "

I hope he can talk some sense into the guy who wrote last week's FFF.

Oh, wait....

[Jan11]

It seems all okay . I prefer the Entity info at the side of the screen.

But there is something else what bother me, a scrollable inventory?

[mrudat]

Um. The various inventories already scroll? Presumably they continue to do so in future.

[Oktokolo]

Like #266, #267 only brings good news and even more polishing. Nice.

So i only mention, that cliffs could (maybe, i got 1k hours in the game so i might be biased) be more intuitive if they where just extra-big mineable rocks taking a longer time to mine away. They could become ordinary rocks after mining them a bit and then the rocks could be mined to fully get rid of the obstacle.

[Daenoth]

That empty spot above the armor looks like a great place to put a player portrait or something else to further identify you.

If that doesn't work another weapon slot is always good.

[Jap2.0]

Yes. Options are not bad. We need more of them. The defaults should be reasonable and changing things shouldn't be necessary, but having options for those who want them is always a good idea.

[RaviorMetal]

Whats that in the last gif in those armor slots? Is it that?



What a coincidence! I just watched Back to the Future yesterday

[Bishop89]

can we get a simple creative/sandbox mode for building blueprints? it doesn't even have to generate a whole world, just grey area with tile marks on the ground + infinite power + infinite resource (incl fluids).. right now every single time I want to test something I have to go to sandbox, enable all tech, enable cheats, disable starting items, enable all day, place some solar power farms, connect it all up and finally I can start building what I actually wanted to build.

Also, can we get something done already with blank blueprints sitting in my inventory? It is so much easier for me while just copy and pasting something (or marking it to be deconstructed) while hitting "b" and doing what i want, than opening my inventory and searching for that little red/blue square.

[samr85]

Please could you introduce some way to either scroll the tool tip, or find what information is being cut off if it's too long? Especially for circuit networks - I can see the start, but most of the info just gets cut off... Or maybe an extra tab when selecting a roboport displaying the network contents would get round the need to scroll it.

[eradicator]

Though i'm not sure if i woudln't want more expensive robots/roboports for that for balancing.

There is already bot capacity research.

That is for logistic bots only. Construction bots carry whatever amount is required to build one object. E.g. they can carry 4 rails to build a curve, regardless of reserach.

I really hope the "3 inserters" comment refers to a future FFF of the upcoming version, not just a dead thought that won't be seen for a long time..

(cross-post from reddit because I don't know how the devs do except that they mention forums on FFFs)

On first thought I agree

On second thought, I don't. Do you really gain a lot by having robots carry multiple things?

Here's what i see as a mod dev familiar with balancing issues:

botrange.png (227.82 KiB) Viewed 7865 times

Explanation:
A typical construction run looks like this: A bot comes from it's port, grabs an item from a chest, carrys it over to the ghost. Next it can either go to grab another item or to recharge at the nearest port. Usually roboports are at least a few dozen tiles away from the nearest supply chests, and the ghosts several hundred tiles away from the nearest supply chest. While ghosts are very close to each other. This effectively results in each SmartBot™ doing the work of several StandardBots™. So what changes if smart bots can build 3 things at a time?

• Flight distance energy cost: SmartBots™ would only consume a third of the energy.
• Recharge slots: SmartBots™ would reduce the number of required roboports to one third (not usually a problem for construction only networks).
• Speed: SmartBots™ build blueprints three times faster.
• Crafting costs: You need three times fewer SmartBots™ to get the job done. And also less roboport space to store them.

Conclusion:
Energy cost for small construction (read: not when you build 1M solar panels) isn't that big to begin with, but faster, cheaper bots is still a significant change.

Do i want that?:
Sure why naught. Let's buff bots. Nobody could be against that, right ;)?

[gustaphe]

Some types of constructions would definitely benefit, have you ever tried to pave a base using robots? If a robot could pick up 5 concrete and drop it like a bucket of paint that would alleviate quite a lot of pain. Belts (and rails?) are already considered continuous entities behind the scenes, I could imagine that you'd be able to make single robots build long stretches of belt without worrying too much about the single pieces.

BTW, the videos/gifs in FFFs can't be viewed in chrome on Android (for me?), have you considered optional formats?

[factoriouzr]

This is all great guys and girls, but can we have more of the quality of life features requested in the past. These include:

+allowing robots to be requested to a certain roboport of each type into their own reserved slots. For eg. 1 construction and 1 logistics bot that will always land there permanently so they can be removed by inserters to keep the robot counts under an upper limit (there are other ways to solve this, but this might be the simplest in the current version of the game). The reason for this is to allow a guaranteed way to remove robots from the network. Right now in large networks you can't reliably remove robots if they don't land at that roboport or are all busy

+have a dedicated slot in roboports for launching robots, or when put in from an inserter, have them auto launch into the air right away. This is to allow adding robots to ports that are completely full. Having a dedicated auto-launch slot would also allow players to insert their robots into them even when the roboport is full

+another feature that we requested many times is to have robots stay within the construction zones of the roboport network when traveling. This would prevent issues with them suiciding on non rectangular networks and give the players more freedom to make cool networks, have corridors and all kinds of cool shapes for bases. Given the extra logic in calculating explosive radius with robots destroying cliffs that you have added, and are doing more calculations, now would be a great time to implement this feature as well.

+can we also have the ability for robots to place landfill and concrete tiles

+can you please improve the biters. They have been neglected for a very long time. Please make them more interesting, harder (can be configurable), more varieties of biters (no cheesy ones though that bypass defenses, eg. by burrowing under them), more interesting behaviours, more interesting nest setups, bigger nests, boss nests, boss biters

From your gif, it looks like the robots don't pick up cliff explosives first, or it's not shown. If they don't pick up explosives, then why does the player have to make them to blow up cliffs? Maybe they should be removed like the pickaxe. If they do pick up cliff explosives, then it makes sense and it's consistent.

Thanks again for all the great work

[5thHorseman]

Whats that in the last gif in those armor slots?

It's the Portable Fusion Reactor and yes, it was inspired by BTTF. As was the 1.21 gigajoules from nuclear fuel.

[Pinga]

For those giving us ideas of what could go into the "empty hole" after the pickaxe:
The "main screen gui" is going to change lot. We have quite a concrete plan already that will be shown in some future FFF. I believe that most will like it

Hopefully it will have a few extra dedicated blueprint tool slots. For example, include a blank deconstruction tool by default. And the new upgrade planner too. Saves the repetition of having to re drag it those from the book every game, and leave the toolbar for other things.

[Cobaltur]

After making this system it has made me think if I could apply some variant of it to robots building things, so a robot could theoretically grab 3 inserters and build all 3 quickly in series. It's an interesting thought for another time...

Yes, defenitly. The most annoying build thing by robots is concrete. It takes too long. It's much better to fill the chracters inventory and increase the build area by '+' and walk instead of watching the robots building just one tile.

[RamiTech]

The interactive tags are so cool !
I always used them in Terraria, and most of the time wanted to use it in factorio too, that's now possible, awesome

I guess the interactive tags would be also used by compilatron

[pertm]

If you can remove cliffs might be cool to be able to do trees in same way with grenades.

[slantedSunlight]

can we get a simple creative/sandbox mode for building blueprints? it doesn't even have to generate a whole world, just grey area with tile marks on the ground + infinite power + infinite resource (incl fluids).. right now every single time I want to test something I have to go to sandbox, enable all tech, enable cheats, disable starting items, enable all day, place some solar power farms, connect it all up and finally I can start building what I actually wanted to build.

Also, can we get something done already with blank blueprints sitting in my inventory? It is so much easier for me while just copy and pasting something (or marking it to be deconstructed) while hitting "b" and doing what i want, than opening my inventory and searching for that little red/blue square.

It seems like you would really benefit from creative mode https://mods.factorio.com/mod/creative-mode-fix