Friday Facts #306 - Experimental Demo

[aka13]

I could be a translation problem: English: Research and explore. German: research and explore use the same word "Erforschen"

Would it not be better to use the word "entdecken" for explore? I realize its translation to english is closer to "uncover" but I think it would be a suitable word.

Imho the proper word for geographic exploration would be erkunden.

Example "Die Umgebung erkunden".

[abregado]

Oh, so that's why the "expanded map" (that was previously accessed by clicking on "Continue"?) was presented as being "new" in this FFF?

Basically yes, nobody ever saw it previously.

[abregado]

Maybe the devs could update the old campaign
...
After release of course...

Don't worry, the experience you are looking for will be in the new full campaign

[BlueTemplar]

Oh, so that's why the "expanded map" (that was previously accessed by clicking on "Continue"?) was presented as being "new" in this FFF?

Basically yes, nobody ever saw it previously.

Hey, I'm not "nobody" !

Re: Friday Facts #284 - 0.17 experimental

I miss ruins.

The "hidden" easter eggs (and the not hidden Solid Fuel) are pretty cool !

It's a shame though that biters are tame by that point, so you don't really have to fight them for those...
(On the other hand, would most people bother to ?)

It's likely to be pretty hard to power that radar though?

[Martinowitsch]

Today i testplayed the new Campaign in German translation.

• First Base / Crash Site
  • There is no real explanation how to become iron gears or copper cable.
  • The toolbar appears, but nothing tells you what this is.

• Second Base from scratch
  • Baue die Fabrik mit Strom ... > Errichte(1) eine neue(2) Fabrik mit Strom aus Dampfmaschinen
  • Baue eine Offshore-Pumpe > Errichte(1) eine Offshore-Pumpe

  Code: Select all

  (1) Baue means produce/fabricate and Errichte install/put up
  (2) Build a new Fabrik, not the same.

After the Campaign is finished, yes you can continue to play this limited map.
And i think also the allready hidden easter eggs are fine to show that there will be more.
For an Gamedemo i think its okay, but its not a complete Gametutorial.

Also at the finishing Message should be mentioned that the complete Game has many more Items, Strukturs and harder enemys.

[plepper1]

The other night, I sat down my recently retired dad to play the NPE.
He's never seen Factorio before, but likes video games; however, most of his experience is either on a console or a Diablo-style game.
Also, his vision isn't the best, but he does ok and he's color blind and has issues with greens/reds.

I loaded up the demo level and walked away, hiding in the background watching as he played but only commenting when absolutely necessary (and mentioned below.)

As he looked it over, he had to read the tip from Computron about moving with WSAD and asked if there was click to move. I told him there was not and he quickly figured out the movement.

The first time he opened a GUI, he was surprised by the tutorial overlay and confused that he didn't see anything it was talking about - I let him know I'd already put in a bug report about showing the GUI first - When the gui displayed, he then didn't know how to close it. I had to tell him E closed the window.

When he was told to collect stone, he wandered all over the map and ended up harvesting the scrap before finally stumbling across the stone deposit.

When told to craft a furnace, he did go into the character gui, but missed the furnace option. Later, he did find it.

Once he'd crafted the furnace, he attempted to place it with the gui open - which forced him to place it more than the 9 units away you're allowed to build, so kept getting the 'Can't reach' response. He did eventually close the gui and was able to place the furnace.

When he opened the furnace gui, he tabbed too quickly through the hints and didn't read any of them. Given the color/placement, I'm not sure that he even saw them (re: color blindness.)

Once he had the furnace running, he closed the gui and went off to craft the miner using the gears he'd collected from the scrap piles.
After getting the 'not enough ingredients' message, he noticed that iron gears are in fact, not iron plates. He then returned to the furnace to retrieve the plates and craft the miner.

He then tried to place the miner next to him, but he did not seem to notice that it was the red ghost you get when not on resources - maybe again due to his color blindedness. He then moved it over to the copper resource and tried to place it again, but was too far away. I don't think he was able to see a difference between these two colored concepts - ghost of too far vs red ghost of 'no resource'.
After clicking around for a while, he did eventually move closer to the copper resource, and placed the miner.
When he got the notice of needing fuel, he walked down to the coal deposit and manually mined enough coal to get the miner working, walked back over, opened the gui of the miner, placed the coal in it and closed the gui.

As I watched him play, I kept noticing that he always wanted to click the search icon in order to close the gui screens - then he'd catch himself and find the E key instead.

When the copper landed on the ground, he went and crafted the chest and then placed it next to the miner - but instead of in front of the output chute, on the square to the right of it.

miner.png (38.31 KiB) Viewed 6210 times

When the miner continued to be blocked, he built a 2nd chest in front of the output chute.

As the chest filled, he opened it and realized that the contents were copper ore, not coal. He then tried to click/drag the miner to the coal - which just opened the miner gui. He then opened the character gui as he asked me if you could move the miners and started to build a second miner until I told him that they could be moved.

Through all of this I kept watching painfully as he would open the character gui, craft/pick up an item, close the gui, build the item, then open the character gui and manually place the item back into the square with the hand icon - Is Q taught anywhere?

Next, he went over to the iron deposit and manually mined enough iron to make a burner inserter.

Computron was nice enough to build his smelter rig...

This is the point where he started using ctrl+Click to get the coal from the chest. But he was still manually placing coal into furnaces, etc - he never split stacks or placed single pieces of coal. Is this taught anywhere?

For the next couple minutes, he ran around trying to keep the smelters going, but the one miner was not pulling up coal fast enough for him to be able to keep everything running (remember, the entire full-ish stack pulled from the chest went into the first burner inserter to complain about needing fuel) so to supplement, he manual mined coal.

Eventually, he built a 2nd miner on the other coal deposit.

I think at this point, he noticed that he had a new quest goal as he started looking through every item in the inventory/craft menu and finally asked me where to find computron's chest inserter - it was off the screen to the north.

He then built a burner inserter and tried to build it at the end of the belt containing the plates the inserter pulled from the furnace. However, he placed it facing onto the belt, so it never did anything.

inserter.png (31.97 KiB) Viewed 6210 times

At this point, he was getting frustrated by not being able to get things into the chest. To help him get a little progress towards the quest goal, I told him you could use Z to place items on belts.
He then alternated between pulling plates from the wooden chest and holding Z until he had 50 plates in the computron chest.

He had no trouble building power poles - chopped down trees without hesitation, retrieved the copper that he'd mined at the beginning, smelted it into plates, etc.

Then he placed his first power pole right next to the power generator - it connected just fine. He placed his 2nd pole 2 places to the right of the first pole - nowhere near close enough to the assembly plant to power it - then he logically pulls out the extra copper wire in his inventory and tried to use it to connect power to the assembler - only to be greeted with a 'Manual wire dragging is disabled' message.
At this point, he was getting frustrated again and I had to step in - I helped him move the power poles farther apart in order to proximity power the assembler.

He was then tasked with building gears and placing them into computron's chest - he'd collected enough from scrap that he just Z'd 50 of them into computron's chest.

By now, he was clearly not enjoying the game and was only continuing because I'd asked him to play it. He even asked if I was having him beta test it.
I decided to just try getting him to the end of the first part before teaching him all the tricks...

He then went to get more copper plates and I showed him how to use ctrl+Click to place the copper ore into the furnace.

Then he would hold the copper ore on the cursor and ctrl+Click the furnace - which I know was pulling the finished plates from the furnace - but confused him why it didn't place the ore into the furnace, so he would sigh and open the furnace gui to manually place the ore into the resource slot.

He then went to get more coal for the furnace and was surprised when the chest was empty - I then had to teach him about 'expected resources'.

He then went back to manually mining what he needed - he said it was less frustrating.

He then refueled a burner inserter with a full stack of coal - he really needed to know how to split stacks!

Then it was back to the copper deposit for more manual mining.

I suggested that he make more miners to do that for him, to which he replied "but that takes more coal."

After a while of manual mining, he did finally make another drill for the copper.

Once that filled up enough to get him his 50 copper plates, he clicked the chest, clicked the ore, clicked in the character inventory to drop it and then said to me "They should let you move this easier" - so I taught him to shirt+Click things in chests.

This is the point where he stopped for dinner and had no desire to return to the game afterwards.

Factorio 0.17.66 8_19_2019 11_24_07 PM.png (4.39 MiB) Viewed 6210 times

I promised him I'd teach him 'the fun way to play' another time...I have some serious damage control to do.

He never crafted a single belt, never tried or knew he could rotate things with the R key.
I'm not sure that he noticed when the quest objectives changed - it generally took him a while to start working on the new objectives vs continuing what he was doing prior.
He also never once opened the 'Hints' window. I don't know if he didn't notice it, didn't realize he could open it or thought maybe it was a 'spoiler' type of thing.

Left by himself, I don't think he'd have made it past the first computron chest - he'd have just quit and never looked back.

I'm over 1200 hours in.

Before I bought the game, I played the old 0.15 demo. I ran through the scenario at least half a dozen times before deciding to buy the game. I loved the building (I was playing FCE at the time) but hated the biters, so I'd finish up, go back to FCE and then come back and play the demo again. It took me 3 months of doing that before I finally bought factorio.

Now, I kick myself for waiting!

You guys have made an amazing game that I love playing. Thank you!

[RickJS]

I got my lady, Joy, to start playing the Intro inside 0.17.64. She is not a gamer, but is not a complete newbie to Factorio, as she has watched me play 10-20 minutes and heard me tell tales. I later went back and played the 0.17.66 demo, looking for differences, and this report is somewhat adjusted for that.

Before telling the tale let me summarize a few things:

BROKEN:
⦁ scrolling by mouse wheel is unusable;
⦁ sometimes picking gears off of belts causes them to vanish instead of going into inventory;
⦁ picking things off of belts gives no error message when it fails
⦁ picking things off of belts stops working part way through the Intro and the demo
⦁ gear wheels vanished when we changed the recipe in an assembler;

PERSISTENT ANNOYANCES:
⦁ GUI windows that appear in the middle, right over us and what we want to see
⦁ Dvorak keyboard compliance: many keys have been mapped to be the same physical location, which is not helping. She asks me how to close the inventory, I say E, and it doesn't work, because now it is period.
⦁ You have to feed coal to burner miners but not burner inserters. Seriously?
⦁ Some commands were said once, but could not be found in hints, especially clearing the mouse pointer and closing GUIs
⦁ REAL newbies don't know to look in Settings to find out what commands are available.

THE PLAYTHROUGH
I started up 0.17.64, deselected all the mods I use, let it do its restart thing, started the tutorial, and handed the command chair over to Joy. I tried to be silent unless asked a direct question, and even then, I tried to guide her to finding the answer.
She was able to follow Compilatron's lead pretty well, though it's surprising what things are vague to a newbie. "Bring fill-in-the-blank to Compilatron" led her to ask what was that. No, we hadn't been introduced to Compilatron. Then she wanted to how she was going to hand something to the bot.

"Put fuel in the left slot" is actually confusing if you haven't yet got a grip on entity GUIs (there is nothing that is slot-shaped). "Have a burner mining drill": does that mean in the inventory, on the pointer, or on an ore patch? "Mining drills drop raw material directly on the ground in front of them..." is misleading; you might replace "in front of them" with "as indicated by the yellow arrow (triangle)".

I had to explain the outline structure of the objectives (writers use outlines in an entirely different way).

A bit later we got to the objective "Repair Assembling machine", with task "use the inserter to put iron plates into the Compilatron chest". She spent time looking at the iron mining operation. By the time she had the plates, the bot was down by us, nagging about structures requiring fuel, so she tried to put the plates in the bot, with no success. It was the only thing visible that had Compilatron in the name. I finally surrendered my silence and told her about zooming the view. Then there was a whole lot of manually moving iron plates. It would be a handy clue to have an earlier (lower) task to make 20 transport belts. By the time we were laying down belts, Compilatron broke in to tell us we could drain the iron output chest with control-left-click, and we couldn't place any belts until we did that! After complaining about a miner that was out of coal, he went back to whining about emptying the chest.

It had us craft two power poles, then string power to the assembler. It was unclear how close a power pole had to be to the generator, because Compilatron had generated a blue cursor, so the usual pole-is-close-enough blue cursor was out of business. Guess what, if you place the first pole beside the generator, it takes 3 poles to get to the assembler.
Next it wanted us to insert gear wheels in the NEW Compilatron chest, clearly indicated by a blinking blue cursor. Then we are told it is non-operable. So sad. OK, we'll just drop the gears on the belt. Oh, we don't know a command to put things on a belt. So frustrating. I broke silence to tell her about the z key. Except it failed. The key is semicolon on the Dvorak keyboard. She said, "If I hadn't watched you play this, I would be mystified."

Incidentally, while running the 0.17.66 demo, I discovered the guidance about feeding plates into the gear machine and taking out gears are gone. oops.

So far there has been no instruction about picking up or dropping partial stacks, which would be handy for handling the coal issue. I can understand leaving it out; the mouse click situation in Factorio is a nightmare. It took me 3 tries to make a chart that was useful.

A bit later, we are setting up to do research, and we don't have enough power poles to reach the repaired lab, and no way to make more, because we can't make copper cables. I advised her to replace the power poles using the blue cursor trick. And then I discover the generator didn't even need a nearby pole. I recall being told to put one beside the generator.
She got really annoyed when she obeyed a flashing message to "Press Y to start new research". She tried the white technology, the green ones, and the black ones. So what is the new research it wanted her to start? Frustrations levels rising...

Building electronic circuits involved crafting copper cables with our assembler, then repurposing it to make the circuits.
A bit later she built and installed a radar. Uh, oh, cockroaches coming our way. The objective says research the steam power technology, but "Press Y to start a new research" is NOT flashing". This can't be good. She opened the technology screen and found no technology labeled steam power. She hasn't learned to read all the other information on this screen. With frustration approaching fury, she starts the only research she can, "Crash site black box".

That research done, the aliens start moving in. She said, "Where's my gun?"
"You don't have one," said I. "Can you craft one?"
"No!" she said, clearly unpleased.
"Check your tech tree." It was clear we would need Improved personal equipment, but it wouldn't let us even start that.
"I'm tired, I don't want to do this any more!" she exclaimed.
***********************
I did get her to play some more later, using the actual 0.17.66 demo. I'll report on that later.
Perhaps this has been of some help.

[Pi-C]

⦁ You have to feed coal to burner miners but not burner inserters. Seriously?

Seriously. Burner inserters do need fuel, but they feed themselves if they can take the fuel from a belt or a box. That's why many players use burner inserters to feed the boilers of their steam engines long after they've switched to electricity: In case the belt carrying fuel to the boilers runs dry, and the steam engines can't produce electricity, electric inserters won't help you even if you somehow manage to fill the fuel belt in front of them. Burner inserters, on the other hand, can just grab enough from it to power themselves, then proceed to feed the boilers, so you're back in business again.

EDIT: While burner inserters can fuel themselves, you also can feed them fuel manually. Just click on one, and you'll see a fuel slot there just as the burner miners have.

[Impatient]

I got my lady, ...

And what is your name?

It is the internet bro. You never know who is interested in, collecting and connecting what private information you reveal. As a matter of principle, don't reveal any! Think!

[RickJS]

I got my lady, ...

And what is your name?

It is the internet bro. You never know who is interested in, collecting and connecting what private information you reveal. As a matter of principle, don't reveal any! Think!

Yeah, the names have been changed to protect the engineers.

[Impatient]

Yeah, the names have been changed to protect the engineers.

+1

[RickJS]

Continuing the report I posted on Aug 23, 2019 07:37 am

It may have been a mistake telling Joy about the earlier forum discussion where the devs stated the design criterion that the Introduction should be challenging even for experienced players.

I figured I needed to learn a solution to the post-radar debacle, so I could help when needed. I grabbed her _autosave3 and saved with a name. This save pre-dates installing the radar. I downloaded the 0.17.66 demo. Then I poked around a while, discovered that I could punch out a biter, verified I could not take out a worm without a weapon, died, watched Compilatron kill a worm and therefore tried to move him, hunted for more resources (none found), tried to find a way to do research, tried delaying the objectives, and tried rushed objectives. I finally caught on that “Craft necessary items before leaving” was supposed to be a key clue. OK, I’ve been mostly reading the details of objectives and the titles of objectives haven’t been getting through to me.

After escaping to the new land in the east, I verified it is not all that hard to fail the scenario “Secure the Factory” if you don’t realize you have to have high-speed science consumption and fast magazine production at the same time. I got the research started, left the labs running hot, and went off to increase magazine production. By the time I got that handled, all available research was done, and I was not getting credit for science consumption and there was no way to get that high any more. Which brings up the suggestion that the demo should train the user in using named saves.

Having completed an escape, I was able to convince Joy to continue her play-through, loading that saved game into the 01.17.66 demo. Now that I was able to tell Joy there was a solution to the problem she had found so discouraging, I was able to get her to try some more. I didn’t tell her any solutions, I just said to read your objectives carefully.

She then declined to install the radar and spent hours mining and crafting, to a bit of an extreme. She proceeded with great caution, delaying objectives to avoid triggering alien attacks. As a result, she was exploring at the far eastern edge of the map when accomplished "Craft necessary items...". The new objective then said “Escape toward the east ...” with the subtask of “Go to Compilatron”. She was flustered because she was as east as she could go and there was no sign of Compilatron. Now that the objective had changed, she figured the aliens were probably on the move and she didn’t want to go back toward them. I gave up and told her to zoom out to find the bot. Even then, he was not visible, just part of his text about “Native aggression at unsafe levels...”. Given that frightening announcement, I had to flat out tell her that gears-for-brains was exaggerating and she could go pick up some gear. She said that “Collect some equipment” was totally unhelpful, especially considering she had already picked up the major equipment to get ahead of the expected alien swarm..

A bit later, while setting up steam power and labs: the boiler was confusing, appearing to need two water sources. Opening a lab seems to indicate it wants red and green science packs, but she had no way to make green science packs.

She got annoyed with me when a burner inserter failed to self-fuel when the coal was on the far side of the belt (a straight section), because I had told her that would work. Who knew?

Eventually she got tired of the biters-versus-magazines race and declined to play any more. 7.5 hours of play time. That does not count my investigating time (6th and 7th paragraphs above).

She showed some signs of a potential Factorio addict, such as being pleased at working out an automated iron mining and smelting array. The aliens have made the game just too stressful. I told her we can turn off aliens, but her actual experience weighs far more than my assurances.

I think this game can reach beyond the traditional pool of players, but it needs better marketing to do that. I hope this report helps.

[BlueTemplar]

So, were the biters made harder for new players compared to the 0.17.0 intro version ?
(Especially, before the challenge started.)

[plepper1]

She got annoyed with me when a burner inserter failed to self-fuel when the coal was on the far side of the belt (a straight section), because I had told her that would work. Who knew?

Oh! Do you have the save for that? I had the same thing happen to me, but can't get a save to reproduce it. #74471

[Oktokolo]

She got annoyed with me when a burner inserter failed to self-fuel when the coal was on the far side of the belt (a straight section), because I had told her that would work. Who knew?

Yes, burner inserters only are maintenance free when there always is fuel on the near side of the belt.

[stuk71]

I very much enjoyed the experimental demo, and was sorely disappointed when it ended...

I prefer to get pointers on where to go/get to with the fun for me being how I will get there. But I lose interest too quickly if I have no immediate goal. I am missing out on all the amazing open world games out there because I just lose my way.

Does anyone know of a more fleshed version of the demo? I know that sounds like a strange request! Because the answer will undoubtably be... Factorio!

I liked the computron giving me pointers on what I should be doing next.

Maybe I am alone in this request?

Mod? Can you delete this post, I just ready about the 2020 vision and scraping the new campaign and bring back the original tutorial.