Friday Facts #306 - Experimental Demo

[Neruz]

Saw some glitch in land tiles.

[BlueTemplar]

Oh, almost forgot to mention. The bounding boxes for the diagonal cliff edges are too big.

This is being looked at.

Thanks Factorio Spaghetti Monster !

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The cliff bounding boxes are a PITA, one shouldn't have to turn on the show-collision-rectangles debug option just to be able to deal with them !
(This also happens with trees, ore field edges, and water edges, but all those are very minor in comparison...)

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eh.... honestly the demo having the huge wave of enemies is a terrible decision. Biters/enemys in general should be disabled by default in the demo and the game. Leave the biters on as an option for for people wanting more of a challenge. They really do seem to be not liked as a general consensus. But I can understand as a developer disabling biters also takes away a huge chunk of the game aka researching military/weapons/etc.... But honestly.... the game is still great and fine without that. It really should just be an added difficulty experience. Not a default one. Just a personal opinion

And I just saw a comment basically saying that Death World should be the default game settings !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGpa4dM ... 3rF4AaABAg

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[...]
12- The power plant serves as a power pole AND generator in one. Which makes me wonder why we don't have that already on the 4 current power generators. It'd be handle, and could help simplify some builds. Imagine a solar panel blueprint that doesn't need to leave room for the substations in it. It may help some new players who can't understand why their steam engines are not working, since you didn't put THEM under a power pole. Having a power pole connect to them automatically would be interesting. I'm not sure how solar panels would work like this, but having a wire come from a pole on the steam engine/turbine or accumulators would be neat. You could even let them chain wires from engine to engine, so it indicates all the engines in an array are part of the same array. Giving them a small power provider range around them (even one square) would help sync up with them being like a power pole.

*- (Now that I think more about that, can we please get this? Let power producers give out a wire connection, and auto-connect to nearby poles/producers.)

One of the genius of Factorio is how you are able, from very basic entities, to build a very complex Factory.
I fear that this suggestion would go against this KISS principle...

[factory33]

Played only until the evacuation, but here my impressions anyway:

Compilatron:
He is way to fast in my opinion. This already bothered me when I played a bit of the new campaign/tutorial when it came out some time ago (2 months ago or so?) and it is still the same issue. If as a new player you try to follow him but he is faster than you and you loose him and have to search for him, I imagine this is annoying. I just zoomed out to see where he is going, but do new players know they can zoom out (also talking about players new to games in general)?
On the other hand if Compilatron would be very slow it would be annoing to wait for him (happens in other games with NPCs sometimes). So a compromise would be the best solution here imo.
Suggestion: Make Compilatron *slower* than the player for the first several tasks of the Campaign/Demo/Tutorial so totally new players can keep up. At some point increase his speed to what it is now. Or even better increase it twice from slower to equal to faster than the player speed at certain key points. Perhaps once the lab is working to equal speed, and for the bitter "attack"/evacuation to faster, since there greater distances have to be covered (and maybe the player knows how to zoom out by now).

Also the pathfinding or movement of Compilatron seems to be bad. He bumps into buildings and "struggels" to get to where he wants. He never got stuck in my playtime but it looked really strange. Almost as if you want to show that he is dameged and some of his sensors are broken. This also fits with the quite high movement speed. That is how I can imagine a robot moves that is broken. Way to fast and bumping into stuff since his perception of the surrounding is wrong or missing.
But is this feeling you want to convey?

[Ojelle]

While playing I was thinking the following:

• Factoriobots pathfinding is wonky from time to time. Mostly the trembling just before doing something is weird, especially in the beginning

• A burner inserter does not take an item when a belt takes a corner in front of it and the items are on the 'far' end of the belt, is some kind of warning neccesairy?

• The destrucable spaceship parts feel a bit odd graphic wise. I guess they are not revamped yet? They feel out of style compared to the interactable spaceship objects.

• All questst - top left - you start with the end goal and go down to the goals before, I found it weird and expected it to be the other way round. (last goal at the bottom, first at the top)

• The lone radar gets destroyed before I even noticed it was there
  • Something fun would be that the radar is powered by 2 solars, those only activate when you get close. maybe even walled in so neither the player nor the enemys can get those.

• And when finishing, just generating a random world around the starting world? That way a new player can immediatly continue his first world? Just use the standard settings for generation. This item would ad a lot of value to me when I would start playing Factorio a first time. I would feel a bit sad I need to leave my first base so early on in the game just to do the exact same thing again. (only 2 hours in the game and a startover is required, its only 2 hours, but you need to set up again a lot of things witch you know already, this means another 2 hours of doing stuff before encountering 'something new'"

In general a very nice intro! Great job guys! And now I'll read the FFF

[Ojelle]

After reading the FFF: A new world is indeed optional since its the free tutorial level.
Also: when clicking the hotbars you still can select any item in the game. Its a hint about what is to come or clutter depending on how you look at it.
And I feel sad I didnt get that massive presure attack :O It was indeed easy.

[Deadlock989]

[Moderated by Koub because off-topic. Reason described here : viewtopic.php?p=447727#p447727

[Deadlock989]

[Moderated by Koub because off-topic. Reason described here : viewtopic.php?p=447727#p447727

Presumably you'll be removing the post I quoted as well then.

[Blaster]

One quick nitpick: In the evacuation stage it asks me to pick things up. But I'd already picked up everything I wanted in the previous step.

If there is nothing left to take, the quest should auto complete. Ill look into it.

I did the same thing.

Game: "Prepare to evacuate"

Me: "Packin' Up!"

[Jap2.0]

Ahh, I meant the original pre 0.15 Demo, which is still available on our website. Load it up and have a go. I remember your previous playthrough of the earlier versions of Introduction Scenario. Thanks for the feedback you gave.

Wait, was there much of a difference between .14 and .15? All my playthroughs of the demo (prior to "the introduction") were 0.12-0.14. The oldest saves the game will load are 0.15 now (hence why it won't load). I actually still have them sitting around :

demo.png (8.9 KiB) Viewed 7859 times

(I never actually played through the 0.15 demo, that was just to test something quick.)

Man, was that really over three years ago?

Yeah the Introduction scenario is the same in the full game and in the demo. We would expect that it is the first thing a new player plays, regardless of if they paid for the game or not.

Cool, thanks.

[CXZman]

Hi there. Here's a bit of feedback/QA on the Demo experimental build [0.17.62]. I've got 200+ hrs on the game, but I've tried my best to view the game... :

1. as a newcomer
2. as someone who learns only if being taught (NOT by myself)
3. NOT as an antagonistic user. I played fair, and didn't try to mess things up

There are, to me, a lot of small problems that should be fixed to get the best out of the Tutorial. FFF #306 said that Tutorial was ok for all public, but I do not agree, not in this current state.

MENUS:

• From the start, when you click on "Play", then "Start campaign", the player is prompted with a choice... and THEN another choice, both of which are generic and redundant. No (real) choice available, but yet the player is asked to make one. Doesn't feel right.
• I felt I lacked a lot of context to understand the drive to craft and survive. The text on the Campaign screen was barely enough for me to entirely get the point of the game. This feeling was already there when I discovered Factorio a long time ago... but I knew I was trying out an Early access curiosity of a game, so it was fine. But eventually, especially in campaign mode, newcomers will need something to get what the hell is this game about.

GAME:

First and foremost, the Hints listed in the "More hints" list are way too important to be hidden by default. I must strongly recommend to invert how this window behaves: it should unfold with each new important hint, and the button should say "Fewer hints" to provide the option of seeing less things. either that or showing those hints in the game, either in one of the glitchy Hint boxes, as lessons or any other way... Some of the things listed there, if the Player misses them, they are guaranteed to be stuck and frustrated.

• Right at the level start, Hints to teach the player basics WASD controls arrive way too late. Of course, the player can try it for themselves, but it doesn't hurt to show it earlier imho. Great hint boxes by the way! Nice visual
• Everytime the game turns into "lesson mode", explaining how panels work, there's a problem: you are teaching the player how to manipulate things, but in a situation where they cannot try it for themselves (player can only press TAB). In some situations, the game teaches like 2-3 shortcuts or mouse clicks in a row, and by the time these become actually useful, the player is likely to have forgotten about them. Either allow the player to interact with the game in those situations, or split these teaching moments into much shorter ones, so that after each "lesson", the player has an opportunity to try it (and hopefully remember it).
• There are also rare situations where two hint boxes stack on top of each other, mostly because a first hint box tells us to open a new panel, and then the next hint box sometimes appears over the first one. Worse: opening the panel at the very moment when the first hint box is glitching actually makes it loop in the background, which is VERY disturbing to the eye (it's okay for a split second, it's NOT okay for like twenty seconds ).
• Ship parts that are called "Large shipwreck" have a description that leads to believe they are containers, but they are not. Confusing as hell
• On many occasions, what should be accomplished during the tutorial is offscreen, but there's no way to tell. One might find themselves stuck right at the start. There should either be an offscreen pointer on the side of the game view, or the game should teach the player to use mouse wheel to zoom in/out. Also, map located objectives could be eventually appearing on the minimap once it is researched, but I believe that they don't.
• After having crafted the Stone Furnace, the game never tells players how to actually build said Furnace. There is an instruction to grab it from the inventory, but placing an object on the floor isn't intuitively a "building" action, especially if the player's inventory contains both objects (can be dropped), tools (can be used) and buildings (can be built). The game should explicitly tell the player (at least on the very first building of the tutorial) how to build an available and crafted building.
• Compilatron could be using ghost buildings to suggest where the player should place the first Tutorial buildings. It would clear a lot of confusion, and smoothly introduce the concept of ghost buildings.
• The "Insert coal" instruction is way too vague, way too early. It implies that the player knows about different minerals, about what they look like, that some minerals are in fact fuel, that fuel is a thing in Factorio... so many things that the player should know before being remotely able to understand what the "Insert coal" instruction is about, and what is expected of them. The game should start by tasking the player to look for the mineral, ask them to put it in the built furnace, and THEN show them "oh by the way, this mineral is actually a fuel, you can insert it to power machines, like with this furnace".
  There IS a tooltip when the player rollover the Furnace's fuel slot with the mouse, but it's very unlikely players would learn the whole concept of fuel by accident.
• Talking about Furnace, I would suggest putting icons similar to the Fuel icon on the two other slots to symbolize input and output. We vets are used to it, but it's probably confusing for someone new. The game tells the player once what the left one is, and what the right one is, but if the player needs a reminder, it's too late. Icons would solve that.
• To finish with Furnaces, I believe the game never explains that Furnaces will clog up and that, at some point, the player should consider emptying the right slot in their inventory... and that picking these items IS the whole point of using Furnaces Without this explanation, newcomers will probably never understand on their own that the Furnace isn't working anymore because an arbitrary amount of product inside the Furnace, and in a specific slot, WILL make it stop.
• When tasked to build a Burner Mining Drill, the player can easily miss how to actually do that. It's a building that must be built at specific places, contrary to many other buildings. The error message when trying to place it anywhere is a good clue, but it's probably not enough. Compilatron could be pointing out a thing or two at that stage (like using ghost buildings).
• For a couple of objective achievements, the green floating message doesn't appear, because there's an open window/panel in front of it. If you play without hearing the sound, one might easily miss it and get confused.
• The game never teaches the player that Trees are not just part of the backdrop (like the floor and the plants) but are actually harvestable.
• I've just realized something that is absolutely NON-intuitive, and might easily throw off newcomers: a couple of coal gravels sitting at the mouth of a mining drill can clog it, but a BIG wooden box is NOT obstructing the mining drill. There should be an explanation about how containers behave specially in that case, or maybe change how products pile up in front of drills' chute. As of now, it actually doesn't make any sense (now that I think of it... 200 hours later ).
• The ATL key shortcut should probably be taught way earlier. When the game points out that some "structures contain items" would be a good place to teach this.
• Some texts mention building things "beside" other things... idk... it fells like a very weird choice of word. "Next to" is probably less weird.
• Each time Compilatron says "Engineer required", the cutscene should trigger when the player is in close proximity, NOT when it actually touches Compilatron. It took me some time to realize that contact was mandatory (in the rest of the game, the Player is always able to reach out from afar to interact with everything... it doesn't fit well with this contact thing).

Once the Player gets a hang over the basics, I believe they can much more easily tackles the rest of the game, but I've found that Factorio isn't exactly the Nth clone of some big successful video game franchise, that everyone has already played to, which makes it reasonable to expect all newcomers to already have basic knowledge over how the game is played. Factorio is a one of a kind experience, with very unusual control schemes and interaction concepts, and about a third of them are absolutely ignored/never really mentioned in the Tutorial. It feels to me, as a working game designer, dangerously incomplete, regarding the tutorial's ability to provide newcomers with what they need to know so that, later on, they get to enjoy playing the rest of the game.

I believe the whole campaign/tutorial concept is very good, but I think teachings and lessons are incomplete in this current state. Almost there, though...

[warlordship]

Thanks for the long feedback.


It seems that a few of your points are simply you becoming confused because your regular Freeplay methodologies are not available in this scenario. I will address the other points because you have some good feedback here.

No problem. I tried to justify my thought-making, as obviously I can't just snap back to "newbie" thought level perfectly, but I try my best. Where the tutorial and freeplay differ, I bring up points in order to try to minimize possible new player confusion. I know that *I* get a bit confused when two separate sections of the game have different rules, and I prefer that rules are the same all the time.

Of course, feel free to justify your choices to me (or not, its up to you). I just want to give my honest feedback, and you can take it or ignore it.

3- Also, what happened to the belts and miners I already placed and used in order to make the belts and inserters he asked for? It felt a bit rude he tore up a functioning setup in order to set down a sub-par setup that put belts on top of ore.
...
5- The game doesn't teach storage to me soon enough. I had settled in with the thought that I can't/shouldn't build anything the game hadn't taught me to do yet.

You are contradicting yourself here. If you are doing only what you were told, why did you build your own iron smelting setup?

Eh, fair enough. I see now that I had explained away my storage issue as confusion over no tutorial, then proceeded to make a smelting. However, while the game didn't TEACH me to automate a smelting process yet, I had no idea it wasn't going to.

While the compilotron wanted such a few number of items, I felt like I wanted these items more in order to make more items faster. So I got greedy, kept the items, and made more furnaces. Then made more furnaces and miners. Yes, I built miners and put them on ore before the game SHOWED it to me, but I absolutely detest manual mining. I thought you had - a while back, but a quick internet search fails me - decided that having the player manually mining for too long was bad, and planned to minimize it. If I was supposed to manually mine all the iron, then put them into a smelter and make the things compilotron wanted, I'd be a bit annoyed, but fine.

Maybe not punish a player that jumps the initiative and builds on the iron ahead of time. Perhaps he can put the things he removed into a chest.... I dunno... That sounds clunky.

The low res sprites from a bygone era are going to be replaced eventually, but ALL the minable ones should contain Iron gears.

Alright. It took me a while to discover I could shoot the old style no-function ship chunks. They still offer a description of "these may contain useful items!" on the right, which is not correct and should go away.

Perhaps offer to let us mine them up (for resources, or just to clear space. I like the idea of more ship chunks, and they are like trees but for metal - aka clearing space to build on). If not that, indicate we can shoot it to remove it. That'd double as a "manual shooting by pressing C" tutorial.

2- The robot tore up my current iron production to lay down some inefficiently placed miners and belts and furnaces. It also appears to have placed way more items than I gave it. It was strange to hand the guy one or two burner inserters only for him to lay down 5, plus more miners, and more belts. I'd recommend you have him request ALL that he puts down (to show that this is what you can build with what you made already) or build less.

This is to give new players a bit of a speed boost. Since production growth is exponential in Factorio, this helps get them over the very early stage.

Ok, speed boost is nice. Maybe have him start out saying he has most of the materials already, and just needs a few MORE. If it already does say this, fine, ignore my question. I did have a habit of just glancing at these quest steps and finding out what I need to do, ignoring the lore.

The toolbar tutorial will come when it and all the GUIs are complete. For now, it is actually more confusing for new players to use than just accessing their inventory.

Alright then. Just be sure to put some attention into it (not that you don't ). There's quite a bit of posts on the forums about the toolbar after the change. I still have some issues with it, and I absolutely LOVE the change.
(FYI, the issues I have is the inability to over-write a filter by dropping an item onto another, thus being forced to middle click the filter out before. Yes, its leftover from before when items were items on it. I'm not sure exactly how we can resolve having filters and LOCKABLE filters, I just know that something feels off about it. I'll maybe expand more on it when I get back to playing some more later).

Oh, and I had finished it. A bit weird for the campaign here in the actual game to thank me for playing the demo. I like that you let me keep going, but once I realized there wasn't much to do, I got bored. I started by trying to clear the map of biters by hand. I had done 1/4 of it, and had ran out of ammo near the furnaces in the upper left. On my way back along the upper cliff edge, I noticed... that all my work was undone. Biters had moved back in below, and more kept approaching from behind. Since I didn't put up turrets, or make any fortifications, all that hard work undone. Bit discouraging, but interesting scripting.

Oh, and I do like the biters moving to a spot and violently EXPLODING into worms and nests. Please do that in freeplay. It's a bit strange to see biters just slow to a crawl, freeze in place, then instantly replaced with a biter base.

Also, have freeplay biter nests also scatter some biter creep (ground gooey debris) that vanishes when the worm/nest corpses fade out like it does in this campaign. Gives a sense of this land REALLY being theirs, rather than a nest among rocks...

[userchron]

Tech Tree made no sense, because once you start doing green science, you can research military 2 and finish the tutorial, why the other research?
Electric Smelters on NW were pretty useless. Same goes for resource patches outside the base. Maybe they were supposed to be used farther in the campaign?
Killing biter Bases made the game easy, basically, what should be done in the first place, a suggestion for new players on how biters work would be good. Like, less bases, less biters. And since one respawns with everything in the inventory, there isn't even the danger of losing stuff or having to pick it up.
In short, add a tutorial for new players on how to clear enemy bases (using turrets or car to attack for example, how aiming works, etc)

[Amarula]

I haven't played any of the scenarios before, so thank you for the push to go try out the Introduction Scenario! I agree with the feedback from others who have posted here, just a couple of observations.

First observation: To start, I chose Play, Scenario. Hmm, there is no Introduction in the list of available scenarios. Go back and choose Campaign, ah only one choice here, Introduction. So if the Introduction is a scenario, why is it not in the list of scenarios? What is the difference between Campaign and Scenarios? Could they be combined?

Second observation: I play with biters on low difficulty (no expansion or evolution), so I don't have much experience with biters before I get lazer turrets and artillery trains. I was trying to play as a new player without using my biter experience such as it is. So I found the task to get rid of that first tiny nest almost impossible. I placed my two turrets protecting the iron field. I ran towards the biters to attack... and almost died. Run away! Waited for my health to come back up and ran towards the biters and almost died... repeat. As far as I could tell I never inflicted any damage on the nest. (Go ahead and laugh, combat is not my cup of tea ) I eventually researched and built a couple of repair packs, picked up a turret and placed it close enough to attack the nest, and kept the turret alive using the repair packs long enough to take out the nest and the worm.

I think a new player might need a few more hints: using the space bar to fire the pistol (hmm the wiki talks about how much damage the pistol does, it doesn't actually tell you how to operate it, that is hidden under keyboard bindings, hey you can use C to shoot a selected target! (ok go ahead and laugh some more)); that they can use a turret to take out the worm if they find the pistol isn't enough; that they can move buildings including turrets (yes they saw compilatron move some things but it was in a cutscene); that the turret will have to be close enough to attack the nest/worm, and how the attack radius of the turret is shown. The requirement to research and build repair packs should come sooner in my opinion, I don't think a turret would last long enough to take out the worm without repair.

Overall it was a pretty good experience, I think you are on the right track.

[jodokus31]

Second observation: I play with biters on low difficulty (no expansion or evolution), so I don't have much experience with biters before I get lazer turrets and artillery trains. I was trying to play as a new player without using my biter experience such as it is. So I found the task to get rid of that first tiny nest almost impossible. I placed my two turrets protecting the iron field. I ran towards the biters to attack... and almost died. Run away! Waited for my health to come back up and ran towards the biters and almost died... repeat. As far as I could tell I never inflicted any damage on the nest. (Go ahead and laugh, combat is not my cup of tea ) I eventually researched and built a couple of repair packs, picked up a turret and placed it close enough to attack the nest, and kept the turret alive using the repair packs long enough to take out the nest and the worm.

I agree, if you have no idea how the biters work, it's pretty tough to destroy a nest AND a worm. Maybe one nest without worm as start is enough?
You get a second nest with worm later on the right,

[DaveMcW]

Tech Tree made no sense, because once you start doing green science, you can research military 2 and finish the tutorial, why the other research?

If you're on the free demo you can't close the tutorial and start a new game.

[userchron]

Tech Tree made no sense, because once you start doing green science, you can research military 2 and finish the tutorial, why the other research?

If you're on the free demo you can't close the tutorial and start a new game.

ok, that makes sense for a demo.

[warlordship]

Can the chest be filled by the wrong item, and clogging it?

Just try it next time and tell me if it is bugged.

Not bugged. I spent an hour slowly making gears. Got to about 1.6K gears in the chest before I got bored and wanted to see what else I could put in. Turns out the chest will take any item, so I proceeded to fill up slots by putting a single wire, circuit, iron ore, copper ore, etc onto the belt and letting it be filled in. After a bit of doing this, I decided the single gear assembler was going too slow, so I dropped iron plates. Figured any item is as good as any other when filling slots (technically, ore is better since it's 50 per slot.... but whatever).

After a bit, the gear count was down to 1.5K! Wait, was it there all along? I remember thinking to myself that 1.6K was exactly half-way to filling up a 32-slot iron chest (which the compilotron chest changes into once the objective is done). So there is no way I stopped at 1.5K before I filled it with plates and other stuff...

After another few minutes... yep! The chest started deleting gears to make room for the next item. After a bit, I was down to 1.3K gears, and 200 iron plates and some other misc. Well, if the chest can delete other stuff to make room for newly inserted copper, my experiment was over.

...

Or is it? What happens if it deletes an item I cannot live without? At this point, I have no assemblers, so the limited circuits and copper wires I currently HAVE might screw me up if they are deleted. Time to find out if the chest will delete the oldest entry, or whatever fills it the most (the gears). Will notify later.

Edit: Ok, it appears to be slot-based. The chests have 32 slots. Once it tries to insert an item that would need a new slot, it determines which item it has the most of and deletes a stack of that item. I saw this when I alternated between gears and plates. As soon as plates took over as the biggest stack, adding one more item stack deleted some plates. Interesting.

One last edit: Ok, so the new devices you made have a wierd footprint. It must be all one layer, as inserter bases and belts lay down underneath the (admittedly cool) dirt piles kicked up by the device crashing. Entities placed there still function, but are just invisible. Might want to break them up into multiple layers and let our stuff sit on top of the outside layers:

[idgod]

"Research the Crash site black box"..... okay I was "trapped" about 2-5mins... I thought I have to search for the black box in a wreck part which are now accessable. I couldn't find anything, I thought this was my fault or a bug, that I cannot find a item anywhere, until I checked the technology tree.

Change to "Research the Crash site black box in the research tree" possible for newbs like me?

[Engimage]

I have played the new Introduction. Being a pretty old experienced player here are some of my thoughts.
I have not played Factorio since interface changed so I will add opinions on that as well.

I tried playing like I have never played making simple builds with spaghetti without massive overproduction of items.
First step I found to be not convenient was placing burner drill on coal. I know the trick and I placed 2 facing each other so I can actually make use of coal. At this point a player has no iron plates yet (for belts) so you should probably guide him to use a chest for the output, as the player may find it kinda not working as noticing a lump of coal in front of it on the ground (coal) will not happen. Maybe it is me but I did not notice any hints on this.

I did really like the idea of many recipes not being hand craftable. I liked it so much I just wish it was a part of a base game without research enabling it! This does forcibly teach a player how to automate stuff without simply ignoring the need to. It seems quite natural that intermediates can only be crafted in machines while end products can be assembled by the player.

Regarding the new toolbar. I wanted it to be implemented very much. However it has its own issues:

• Shortcut keys are not displayed and only item count is. I would definitely add those but with much dimmer color (grey or something) just for the player to catch up how to use it.
• It took some time for me to swap already set item to another. I figured out from previous times that I have to clear the slot first by pressing middle mouse button buth this was pretty awkward to do so. I did expect that whenever I pick an item and put it on a toolbar it would go there and instead I just kept selecting the existing item. I do understand that it is kinda controvercial as you might just click 1st item then click second and it would then generally swap them but still... Maybe it would do so when your inventory is open? And when it is closed behave as is... But definitely if I open the inventory I want to put item on a toolbar I just click the item and then bring it to the toolbar slot no matter if it is assigned or not - I am expecting it to accept the item.

In the research window I did not like the start research button as it does not stand out. I think it has to be of much more contrast and maybe green color so it would be obvious you have to press THERE.

About Compilatron. Someone mentioned but it is really easy to lose sight of him when he guides you. Maybe it would be nice to see his hints on the edge of the screen (in the direction towards Compilatron) even if he is off screen? With a probably arrow added to make it clearer where is that coming from? Maybe significantly more transparent in this case.

Also Compilatron's hints are not clickable through and often those hints just blocked interactions with objects under them. I mean something like "Drill missing coal" with Compilatron rushing towards the drill did cover my chests or something else with the hint so I had to solve the issue to get rid of it and only then proceed.

Overall I was pleased with the pace of introduction. It did not really rush me anywhere while still showing all required stuff. Biter threat was also pretty much balanced. I did overengineer defences but still I could judge them as adequate. However pointing the player towards destroying biter nest when he has only a pistol is pretty brutal. It is easy with turret creep but you have to know about that one and how to properly fill turrets with ammo quickly after placing them.

And as a personal experience - I did try out clearing biter bases with SMG and yellow ammo (and without turret creep) and succeeded no matter if there were worms or not. I do love these worm changes so you can actually avoid their attacks and not just get smacked from the get go.

I absolutely love how cliffs enrich the map. It feels so much alive!

So good job on the NPE. Some minor improvements and its golden.

[pwoland]

I don't know how good the "endgame" of the introduction is to a new player but at least you can make a 1000 spm base in it
https://i.imgur.com/doblWbe.png
I'm just not quite sure how interesting a few stacks of concrete are as a reward for exploration. Maybe give the player something more fun to play with?