Version 0.17.60

[crambaza]

While reading posts, I keep coming across people referring to "useless solid fuel".

I am perplexed.

My Normal progression, before 0.17.60 "fixed" oil was:

Build Oil
Put Construction Bots online ( batteries, frames, lubricant, et al.)
Put Solid fuel into mass production (light and excess heavy (I set up lubricant first, then solid fuel later in the Heavy Oil chain, to prioritize lubricant)
Hook Up the Solid fuel to the smelter line on Priority input, this saves coal for plastic.
Immediately build 2 more full power plants ( 10 boilers and 20 steam engines each ) (Well to be honest, I build 1 boiler, and 2 steam engines, then copy paste the rest to be built by bots)
I hook up the Solid fuel to these boilers too.

I needs the Electricity, cause my factory is about to get kicked into high gear, and coal just isn't going to cut it! Solid fuel is a blessing, not a curse! Love thy solid fuel.

(/PS, I hate that the "oil change" is pushing back construction bots, and also that the change also pushes back mass, cheap, energy production)

[zenos14]

While reading posts, I keep coming across people referring to "useless solid fuel".

I am perplexed.

My Normal progression, before 0.17.60 "fixed" oil was:

Build Oil
Put Construction Bots online ( batteries, frames, lubricant, et al.)
Put Solid fuel into mass production (light and excess heavy (I set up lubricant first, then solid fuel later in the Heavy Oil chain, to prioritize lubricant)
Hook Up the Solid fuel to the smelter line on Priority input, this saves coal for plastic.
Immediately build 2 more full power plants ( 10 boilers and 20 steam engines each ) (Well to be honest, I build 1 boiler, and 2 steam engines, then copy paste the rest to be built by bots)
I hook up the Solid fuel to these boilers too.

I needs the Electricity, cause my factory is about to get kicked into high gear, and coal just isn't going to cut it! Solid fuel is a blessing, not a curse! Love thy solid fuel.

(/PS, I hate that the "oil change" is pushing back construction bots, and also that the change also pushes back mass, cheap, energy production)

Mine's much the same, in my first playthrough the whole thing that got my attention with oil was solid fuel, the idea of moving off of coal to something better energywise really appealed to me and one of the things I didn't expect to bother me as much as it does with this change was the loss of heavy/light oil to turn into fuel, first thing I usually do after BOP (once I got enough electric engines and batteries to craft 100 or so con bots by hand at least), is belt solid fuel into my smelting/boiler belt with coal now serving as a backup source of fuel for both, there's a few other things minor things that bother me about it like belting sulfur long distances or seeing 100 crude become 45 petroleum feeling bad to me, but yeah, the loss of bots and (reduced) fuel production really, really bother me about this change

[mmmPI]

My impression is you seem to underestimate the power of statistics because you always think of only one event (your metaphor and your youtuber, you always talk about single isolated events). Statistics is about analyzing MANY events.

I try to take simpe example i could take an infinity of different event, i tried more generic term and it didn't work, also i'm not english native so it makes it harder when the person makes no effort trying to get the idea but just decide to be picky on any example, since of course an example is not the reality, if you don't want/can't to see the analogy and gets picky, like but do you think players are ice cube ? it gets annoying trying to find more.

I laughed a bit inside you should have PMed i'm not going to lose anymore time for each things, but i realised you are right. I will analyze the many previous lottery, so many data, and i will predict the next one, easy.

Also i am confident you'd propose your method to Wube and work those details out, hopefully , sorry i tried to warn you.

[netmand]

I guess that's the rub, right?

Before when first tech'd into oil, we were producing 100 units of petroleum (40), light oil (30), and heavy oil (30) from 100 units of crude. Now although we're saved the logistics of managing the light and heavy oils, it's super inefficient; 45 units of petroleum from the same 100 units of crude. I can understand the loss of what some people have cleverly done with the oils before and that would be missed.

Meanwhile, by the time we reach advanced oil processing, oil wells are significantly tapped and we're already needing to reach out to more fields.

The recompense doesn't really show up until coal liquefaction. Where you get 90 units of heavy (for 25) when before you only got 35 (for the same 25).

I'm not criticizing to the point of disliking this change, just putting my observations forth for discussion. Now that I've played 0.17.60 into blue science, I'm already needing to reach out to my second oil field, when before I would've needed to reach out to my second iron ore field first. Still that's not very far behind, so really this change makes the game of factory building busier for me. A good thing when the game is about factory building? I dunno I guess it depends on the threshold of too much the needs to be done versus enjoying the what is being built.

In my past games where I had used solid fuels effectively as described above; it caused the side-effect of me always having plenty of coal. So it's coming out that this change requires a change in game playing, but at least it's not all one-sided.

[huancz]

[...]
I feel that worst was the way it was communicated. What I'm missing is some reason, or data. In all that 70+ pages of comments (I read most of them, but not 100%) I failed to find official reason WHY do devs even think that something as radical as this must be done, and on such short notice.
[...]

Didn't these cover it ?

OK, I know nothing about developpement - I play, write & teach music - but I know for sure when I'm facing someone passionate about his work, and what I read here makes me a little bit mad. Everyone complaining about being ignored should read those 4 posts :

viewtopic.php?f=38&t=73684&p=445621#p445621
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=73684&p=445733#p445733
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=73684&p=445794#p445794
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=73684&p=445843#p445843

and look at the date : 3 of them were written on a sunday. Did you read them ? Did you test the Oil changes mod V453000 made to allow us to test these changes ? From what I know, the oil changes were delayed to allow the team to look further on this, but it wasn't a guarantee that your solution got picked.

Requiring more consideration from Factorio devs is basically asking for a personal Factorio 24/24 hotline.

----

Remember that in 0.17 there's a huge new change that is impacting how we build our factories :
the new ghost item / blueprint tools !

Now, like conbots, they are not intended for new players, and so are hidden by default... maybe for good reason ?

I saw those posts the first time they were made. Even on pages I skipped I at least scrolled through them for dev posts, they are easy to recognize. It's admirable how much work V put in them, on weekend. But I got the impression that he wasn't delegated to act as spokesperson for the change, he took it upon himself.

“It has been working fine for years.”
Has it? Sure, most of us here figured it fine more or less. But also many of us report that oil is tedious, and some of us aren’t here because they have already quit because of it.

This is definitely not the answer I had in mind. How many is 'many'? Who is 'us' anyway (devs? people on the forum?) I could say I have 100% agreement in my group (size=1 person) that this was probably useless and very little will change in terms of drop-out or % able to launch rocket, only the sour mood of some percentage of players will remain. But even I can recognize how silly such claim would be, it's perfectly possible that this was the right thing to do and will help significantly with the goal. But was "more people able to launch a rocket" even the goal? Hard to know with the information I have seen.

“Is this change to reduce complexity, refactor the tech tree, or rebalance the oil production recipes.”
It’s pretty much the first two, in the sense that it should improve the flow or the game (though the technology changes), while making the basic oil processing step less complex. A lot of negatively responding people say it is only for new players, but we really believe the flow of the game is really important for repeated playing, if not even more important.

This is better. I did read it before, just half forgot I did, there was a lot of text in those threads. Still no convincing argument why they think that basic oil is the main source of the blue complexity wall, but at least they believe that this will improve the flow of the game for both new and repeated players. But it's hard to argue with belief, those concepts are pretty much incompatible. They at least proved that their beliefs usually make a good game. Still...

Guys. Over past 6 months we have seen about 15 prominent forum users grow silent and 3 youtubers to move on to other games - all of them were loudly expressing that oil is way too difficult to grasp and tedious to setup, regardless if you are newbie or experienced player. Not to mention at least one negative Steam review about every other day, most expressing the same. Plus we have some statistics from Steam that we can't really share because NDA and such, which confirm this too. We have internally agreed that there is way too much going on in the blue science phase, and oil is both major part of it and place where the change will hurt the least. Whatever the solution, it will probably mean some rebuilding for existing factories but this time we think it's necessary. Here is what we are going to do, unless any of you have better idea [...]

... said no-one with the authority to say it. If this came in the FFF304, I'd be in awe how much thought they put to it before they started breaking people's factories. Anytime during the two weeks would still go a long way towards calming the discussion.

I'm not entitled to their data or methodology of collecting it - all I'm entitled to is some arbitrary version that they decide to call 1.0 and could have developed behind a closed doors if they wanted to. Just saying that I think something like this would have helped to calm the storm. But I was always too optimistic about peoples' ability to accept rational explanation too.

[RocketManChronicles]

I prefer to avoid logibots too, as I don't really like how they change logistics to be about recharging (etc.) rather than layout...
Heck, I'd rather use logicarts instead !

Logisitic Carts are a lot of fun! I use them a lot before even Bob's logistics come online. And still, I use these things to transport goods on the ground between areas, where demand for what they carry is not always throughput driven. For example, where I build most military turrets (Bob's/Natural Evolution/Modular/etc); where the Logistic Carts bring in the intermediate goods these items desire like bearings, gears, electronics, etc. Plus, having these guys running around doing their work is quite satisfying.

Watch out for the Will O' the Wisps mod! The purple drifting wisps will destroy your stickers!

Wouldn't be super-hard to make them immune, but you should probably be protecting your critical infrastructure with weapons and/or wisp lights. Both work, but only wisp (UV) lights work against the purple things, and everything degenerates to a drifting purple doom every time. OTOH, like the "machines need maintenance" mod, it mostly just adds a bit of repair work.

The only challenge I found with the carts, which are fun, was that they have frustrating fill/empty behaviour from the automated points. I should check and see if I can build a circuit network / inserter based fill and empty for them, since I definitely wanted the train-ish "depart after filled, or after N seconds", and smarter emptying when multiple stops existed.

Trying to use them when I first got them, they got stuck at a miner group that was filling a box with coal ... from 4 electric drills. Just fast enough to trigger the "being filled, stick around" timer reset every time one coal trickled in, so it would just sit there until 200 coal were mined...

Yes, I use the UV lights, but some occasionally sneak through. Also, yes, you can use the circuit network with inserters to manipulate the logistic carts. In fact, these can be useful to moving Light Oil and Heavy Oil barrels, since the use of such is limited now with this update.

[FuryoftheStars]

While reading posts, I keep coming across people referring to "useless solid fuel".

I am perplexed.

Yup, this an others that, based on the way they post, seem to think the only way to (reliably) deal with the extra oils is to build more/void tanks.

[Theikkru]

While reading posts, I keep coming across people referring to "useless solid fuel".

I am perplexed.

Yup, this an others that, based on the way they post, seem to think the only way to (reliably) deal with the extra oils is to build more/void tanks.

What bugs me about the situation is that the solution implemented was one that completely gimped both solid fuel supply and demand. Abandoning solid fuel altogether when it already has the recipes to work as a balancing factor seems like a big waste to me. On that note, shameless plug.

[Oktokolo]

What bugs me about the situation is that the solution implemented was one that completely gimped both solid fuel supply and demand. Abandoning solid fuel altogether when it already has the recipes to work as a balancing factor seems like a big waste to me. On that note, shameless plug.

I would still switch from coal to solid fuel early on to keep the boilers and furnaces well fed. And i would still rush to AOP to get my refinery blueprint fully working. Also updating my AOP base was just about replacing solid fuel with sulphur on my main bus (still think, that they should not make you put raw ingredients on the main bus, but that wasn't better before the update).
And beeing just recipe changes, they are super easy to mod away anyway (but i didn't)...

[Theikkru]

I would still switch from coal to solid fuel early on to keep the boilers and furnaces well fed. [...]

I've seen at least 1 anecdotal report that using solid fuel like this in the 0.17.60 series is considerably worse, and it's not hard to see why; solid fuel now directly competes with plastic and sulfur products, and the total output of basic processing is so much lower now. Granted, this will probably just result in faster AOP rushing for most people, but it ends up just making basic processing feel bad.

[Oktokolo]

I've seen at least 1 anecdotal report that using solid fuel like this in the 0.17.60 series is considerably worse, and it's not hard to see why; solid fuel now directly competes with plastic and sulfur products, and the total output of basic processing is so much lower now. Granted, this will probably just result in faster AOP rushing for most people, but it ends up just making basic processing feel bad.

As i wrote, i indeed would still rush AOP. So gameplay didn't really change at all. Also, it doesn't matter, that the yield of BOP is bad as long as the first oil outpost has the usual 6+ wells and still yields enough initial oil throughput to get to AOP easily - with or without converting half of it to solid fuel. BOP always was bad. Only the cause for it being bad has changed a bit. Rushing AOP was always the best option and still is.

[Tricorius]

I would still switch from coal to solid fuel early on to keep the boilers and furnaces well fed. [...]

I've seen at least 1 anecdotal report that using solid fuel like this in the 0.17.60 series is considerably worse, and it's not hard to see why; solid fuel now directly competes with plastic and sulfur products, and the total output of basic processing is so much lower now. Granted, this will probably just result in faster AOP rushing for most people, but it ends up just making basic processing feel bad.

After starting a new game (death world marathon) last night I can confirm.

I also used to setup basic oil (on circuit network controllers) to push excess petroleum, heavy, and light to solid fuel when needed. I added a buffer chest section (to ensure it could still buffer even if my base wasn’t burning solid fuel) that fed (via priority) into power, vehicles (trains), and smelting (in that priority order).

I had a reasonable five oil field “nearby”. When I pushed out to the field and enclosed it into my base, I setup basic oil. I setup a modified version of my old solid fuel dumping build using the new basic oil recipe.

(Incidentally, I would usually, at this point, rush out a basic robot factory, and sometimes even modular armor and personal roboports to help with the huge ramp up in construction projects to handle all of this. It was nice to have robots and all that solid fuel to burn for a very small roboport “network” that I dismantled and moved around with me to build out defenses and these small, temporary builds. But...yeah...not this time. Had to manually go back and backfill all the security lines with turrets, walls etc...biters hit *hard* nowadays until you out-tech them...again...partially self inflicted. But I’m trying to point out some flaws in quality of life that the new system brings. This is what I mean when I say the “tedium” ramps up around blue science.)

It was emotionally grating to see so much of the crude wasted with only petroleum to gain. It was additionally grating to watch it convert into solid fuel (I knew the recipe was quite wasteful, but I wanted to try it as close to the old way as I could).

Obviously, it didn’t create enough solid fuel to spill over from power to anything else very often.

With the old recipes I would have solid fuel for days off the first oil field. It would saturate and spill over from power to smelting to trains. And I still had plenty of plastic, sulfur, and lubricant...I usually didn’t rush advanced oil because the setup was very functional and advanced simply made it more efficient (use less overall crude and “wasted” less heavy and light oil to get what I needed out).

By the time I hit advanced oil with the new setup, the wells were running dry, and I had zero solid fuel burning through the system. I was running low on a coal supply (that would otherwise have lasted nearly twice as long).

I had to go out and supplement every resource patch I had, instead of just going for more iron and copper.

Now...this is fine. And that may actually have been intended for this change. I don’t mind wading through biters to setup outposts (that is why I play death world / marathon / both).

However, I think it is even easier to paint yourself in a corner now. And I did feel the conversion ratios for the new oil and construction bots being gated further down the road. Most of this is of the “get off my biter trampled lawn” variety of complaint/observation, I know. But if one of the main goals was to reduce complexity and tedium with the end goal of retaining players...finally getting your advanced oil and blue science up just in time to find out you’re *very* short on resources might not be an amazing feeling. You now have to rush out and build every kind of outpost. And I hope you planned ahead with a box of rail and some locomotives and cargo wagons.

It isn’t enough for me to not want to play the base game, but it absolutely feels “dumbed down” even though I try to avoid that phrase (as I think it is too often an oversimplification). However in this case I do, literally, have fewer and less-complex options available to me at a point where before I would have several.

[adam_bise]

I don't like the oil changes.

There are plenty of ways to balance basic oil. Working out how was part of the fun. What's next? Reduce the game to a $30.00 "I win" button? "New players aren't able to launch a rocket in their first sitting, by god someone do something!"

I always wonder where the dumbing down trend comes from, because you see it in virtually every modern game. Is it a profit thing? Did your financial advisor tell you that most people are dumb and lazy, so make your game more dumb and lazy for a larger target audience? This is an honest question, because I really don't understand the trend.

[Koub]

I always wonder where the dumbing down trend comes from, because you see it in virtually every modern game. Is it a profit thing? Did your financial advisor tell you that most people are dumb and lazy, so make your game more dumb and lazy for a larger target audience? This is an honest question, because I really don't understand the trend.

Because imposing oneself a very challenging goal and overcoming it may please some people, but not most of them ?
Why buy food, cook your meat, warm clothes for the winter, and use your ... whatever vehicle you have when you could hunt with your bare hands, eat the meat raw directly from the carcass, endure manly the cold, and run bare foot like a boss ?
Is it because you're dunb and lazy ? OR is it because you'd rather live a convenient life with just the right amount of challenge ?

Why not everybody tries to climb the everest, run an iron man, or whatever ? because they think that the potential pleasure of overcoming the challenge does not match the challenge itself.

Just because you overcame a challenge does not mean you should despise and look down on people who don't.

[Aflixion]

Just because you overcame a challenge does not mean you should despise and look down on people who don't.

But at the same time, you can understand why we're upset that part of the challenge that drew us to the game was removed because it was determined to be too hard for people to figure out. We can be upset and not despise and look down on people who haven't overcome the challenge. I personally would get excited for people to encounter the challenge of oil processing to see how they'd solve it or how long they'd take to figure it out, but now a good chunk of that challenge is gone or severely minimized.

[Deadlock989]

I always wonder where the dumbing down trend comes from, because you see it in virtually every modern game. Is it a profit thing? Did your financial advisor tell you that most people are dumb and lazy, so make your game more dumb and lazy for a larger target audience? This is an honest question, because I really don't understand the trend.

Because imposing oneself a very challenging goal and overcoming it may please some people, but not most of them ?
Why buy food, cook your meat, warm clothes for the winter, and use your ... whatever vehicle you have when you could hunt with your bare hands, eat the meat raw directly from the carcass, endure manly the cold, and run bare foot like a boss ?
Is it because you're dunb and lazy ? OR is it because you'd rather live a convenient life with just the right amount of challenge ?

Why not everybody tries to climb the everest, run an iron man, or whatever ? because they think that the potential pleasure of overcoming the challenge does not match the challenge itself.

Just because you overcame a challenge does not mean you should despise and look down on people who don't.

Pointless straw man argument. Just because I don't climb mountains or don't hunt my own food doesn't mean I can't want my challenging games to stay challenging.

[azesmbog]

I have played 5200 hours in this game, I hope I will be allowed to put my five cents here.
I am against ANY change that reduces the complexity of the game, to please new players, or to those. who set themselves mundane goals, for whom the button "WIN ALL!"
The game should be difficult, any. The well-known Spider Solitaire has three levels of difficulty, for beginners and for those who really play it seriously. For some layouts it takes me many hours within 2-3 days, as a result, from 150 times it develops. But someone after one failure lays out a new one.
It’s not difficult for me to rebuild my refineries if it really increased the complexity of the game, but as an example, my last field with a productivity of 203287% is used by force by 10%, only 3-4 wells are involved. And this is only for one plant, a huge factory for the production of shells.
And at the main base, the field is half-exhausted, 10,626%, and I think it will be enough for several thousand hours of play.
I use solid fuel only for the production of rocket fuel, 34723 satellites have been launched, but I don’t need a lot of them
so in the end I am against changes that simplify and facilitate the game.
Only hardcore! )
Thanks for attention.

[Koub]

But at the same time, you can understand why we're upset that part of the challenge that drew us to the game was removed because it was determined to be too hard for people to figure out. We can be upset and not despise and look down on people who haven't overcome the challenge. I personally would get excited for people to encounter the challenge of oil processing to see how they'd solve it or how long they'd take to figure it out, but now a good chunk of that challenge is gone or severely minimized.

As an irrational human, I understand people can be upset to have been compelled to get through something difficult, before a change makes things easier for the others. Why should it be easier for the others to learn while it was such a pain in my ass when I had to learn ?
But on second thought, I'd rather fight my own irrationality, and prefer the "I'd rather see the difficulty curve as smooth and regular as possible, so that I drop as few people as I can".

Pointless straw man argument. Just because I don't climb mountains or don't hunt my own food doesn't mean I can't want my challenging games to stay challenging.

Of course not. But my point is that everyone has their own sweet spot of challenge. And what is "just as challenging as it should" for you might be "meh boring" for another, and "omg who could be instane enough to endure such difficulty" for another. Why should the default vanilla game difficulty be centered at your own convenience ?

[Deadlock989]

Of course not. But my point is that everyone has their own sweet spot of challenge. And what is "just as challenging as it should" for you might be "meh boring" for another, and "omg who could be instane enough to endure such difficulty" for another. Why should the default vanilla game difficulty be centered at your own convenience ?

It has nothing to do with "convenience". The bar was lowered for the benefit of players who don't have the capacity to figure it out or can't be bothered to. The early-mid game is now easier and more trivial. I won't be playing vanilla again, not just because of this but it certainly hasn't made it more likely. That is all.

[Koub]

Overall, there's still the same path to follow between the first ore you mine and the space science endgame, but the oil+blue science cliff has been made into a more climbable hill.
Well in the end it's not that I really care, I'm not trying to convince you that vanilla is the best experience. The devs have made their game better, and if you're not ok with that, you can mod it to your hearts content. The average player has fun, you have fun, everything is for the best.