Feedback from a new player

[knightelite]

Hello,

I got my wife to try the campaign last night. This was her first time playing Factorio, other than one brief attempt at the campaign in 0.16 when she was too tired to get into it that only lasted 5 minutes or so. Some background on her: She's been really into minecraft for the last 6 months. In that game she's managed to build a pretty huge base in her survival mode game. She's made a number of automated farms, and special enclosures for rare creatures (basically a zoo), etc... She's built stuff out of redstone and is familiar with the automation concepts in minecraft, though most of her designs in that game were copied or slightly modified from youtube videos.

I think there's a quite a bit of useful feedback I gathered from watching her play the campaign, so here it is:

1. Early on she was annoyed because she didn't know how to drop an item she had picked up. I told her about "Q", which she used for the rest of the tutorial.
2. There was another point where she wanted to pick up iron plates from a conveyor belt, and couldn't figure out how until I told her to use "F".
3. She almost quit at the point of building the first assembler and connecting it to electricity. It wasn't obvious to her what the source of electricity was, or that buildings would be powered if they were within the blue zone of the power pole (I think she was assuming a wire would connect from building to pole like they do from pole to pole). Because of this, she wound up using up all her copper wire making power poles, and couldn't start the basic circuit board assembler right away, which she found confusing. She would have quit at this point had I not coached her a bit and gotten her to build a copper cable assembler first.
4. She was going through objective lists backwards at first. She wanted to check off the top item in the list, and then move down. To her the nesting wasn't obvious.
5. She also didn't always read the hints section, and I think some audio calling attention to it would have been beneficial.
6. She consistently would consistently build more of an item when what she meant to do was pick the item up from the inventory, even after about 2 hours in the tutorial when she was getting the hang of a lot of stuff.
7. She would regularly complete the objective, and not realize she had completed it. Some kind of "Objective Complete!" and "New Objective loaded!" sound effects (I remember these from some RTS games) would probably have been helpful there.
8. The objective at one point says "build a laboratory", and she was mousing over items to read their names from the build GUI, and didn't initially realize "lab" was "laboratory". I think the prompt should be changed to say "build a lab" and "do research with the lab" instead of "laboratory".
9. "Can't Reach" for doing things too far away from the engineer isn't clear enough I think. A couple times when this happened, she said things like "What, I can't build power line over cliffs?" and I had to point out that it meant she was too far away. I think changing the message to "too far to reach" or just "too far away" would be better.
10. The first couple times she set up mines in the second base, she did them like in the screenshots below, and was confused by the burner inserter taking coal out of the burner mining drill. She expressed from frustration at this point that the previous base was no longer available to use as a visual reference for building new mines.
    
    
11. She did hate the biters. The tutorial did a good job of making her afraid of them at first, and then dislike them as they slowly started attacking her iron mine after moving to the second base.
12. She was definitely getting into the spirit of the game by the time she stopped to go to bed (and as expected from Factorio, that was much later than she had been intending). She was running conveyor belts to get copper over to her red science assembler, and was then frustrated by the lack of iron plates, built more belts, etc...

She's not finished the tutorial yet, so I'll update if there's more of interest once she does finish, but I think the main points I would take away from watching her play are these:

• Better hints for the initial electricity section, or some delayed additional hints from compilatron if you haven't figure it out in five minutes or something might be helpful.
• Better audio queues for a lot of things would be helpful; not just a sound effect, but an actual voice saying "factory is under attack" and "new objective ready" or something
• Some kind of notification for "your boiler is out of fuel" would be helpful, perhaps similar to what compilatron does for turrets.
• Similarly, a notification for "your lab is out of science" would be good, as she basically loaded some plates and some gears into the assembler and would often run out while she was over at the iron mine working on improving that or something else where the lab was off-screen. Several times the lab was idle due to the science assembler having run out of ingredients. She was finally automating this at the time she decided to go to bed.

[zOldBulldog]

I completely agree with every point made by knightelite.

- As a tutorial it has a long way to go before it can be considered that it really "teaches" how to play Factorio. It also tends to frustrate and annoy players, to the point that a "New Game" with the right settings gives a better and more enjoyable experience than trying to use this as a tutorial.

- As a campaign it is too verbose and too restrictive.

[knightelite]

For what it's worth, she died a few minutes into her next play session due to not having automated turrets sufficiently and getting overrun by biters when they ran out of ammo and destroyed her iron mine. But she liked it enough she decided to buy the game and start her own, so it's a win I suppose ?