Some items becoming "useless" in lategame & changing recipes

[MeduSalem]

I've been playing a bunch of different maps already... and basically I ran over a few items that lack usefullness or a way to get rid of in mid/late game no matter how I play the game. ^^

The following items often end up in my "waste chest" (a chest full of stuff I don't need anymore because of superior upgrades):

• Burner Inserters: Should they be a requirement for normal inserters? Would people use more burner inserters if they could upgrade them?
• Burner Mining Drills: Should they be a requirement for Electric Mining drills so you could upgrade them as well ?
• Stone/Steel Furnaces: Should there be an upgrade path from "Stone Furnace -> Steel Furnace -> Electric Furnace" to encourage people to craft Steel furnaces rather than leaping right ahead to Electric Furnaces?
• Iron Chests: Should they be a requirement for Steel Chests so they can be repurposed later on?
• Personal Armor: Should each tier of armor be a requirement for the next so it makes sense not to skip ahead? (Thanks to bobingabout)
• Disassembling: Or should there be a more general way to disassemble items and gain back some of their initial resources once they have outlived their usefulness?

Officially Resolved

These here will/have been be changed:

See here for kovarex official post: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 605#p48605

• Basic & Fast Splitters: Should they be crafted from their previous tier like Underground Belts?
• Small Electric Poles Should they be burnable?

The poll sadly got reset due to me adding bobingabout's armor suggestion, but I saved the votes:

First Poll Results

11 Votes for "A general way of disassembling of Items that are no longer needed"
4 Votes for "Craftingpath: Stone Furnace -> Steel Furnace -> Electric Furnace"
3 Votes for "Craftingpath: Burner Inserter -> Inserter -> Fast Inserter -> Smart Inserter"
2 Votes for "Craftingpath: Burner Mining Drill -> Electric Mining Drill"
2 Votes for "Craftingpath: Iron Chest -> Steel Chest -> Smart Chest -> Logistic Chests"

(I'll collect the opinions on those above and give them a rest once enough people are for or against something. Altough the poll does only reflect supports I respect everyones opinion. It's a pity there's no way to make a more detailed poll like for example strength of support/rejection.)

[TheWombatGuru]

This was a nice read, I am in favor of adding the previous tire into the next tire's crafting recipe so you don't have a bunch of them left in late-game. I wouldn't remove items like the steel furnace, I often use them if I want to make a compact but rather fast factory because they are smaller than the electric furnace.

And being able to burn the small electric pole in boilers would be great, as well as being able to burn them in stone furnaces as fuel.

TheWombatGuru

[The Phoenixian]

I disagree with your assessment of, and proposal for, burner inserters; When I fuel boilers, I find myself using burner inserters exclusively. My opinion is that the lack of utility for them and boilers stems mainly from the fact that solar panels desperately need to be rebalanced.

That said, that's my only big disagreement with you. As far as Iron chests and steel furnaces go, I am in complete agreement and the only reason I'm not with splitters is that I've never been pushed to upgrade all my belt systems to top tier. If I had, I would and even without that the disconnect between how underground belt recipes progress and how splitters recipes progress irks me terribly.

[Align]

Though I personally pretty much exclusively use small poles (wood is plentiful, especially once construction bots show up), I'd definitely like old stuff to become reusable somehow.

[MeduSalem]

And being able to burn the small electric pole in boilers would be great, as well as being able to burn them in stone furnaces as fuel.

Updated OP to consider this as well. ^^

I disagree with your assessment of, and proposal for, burner inserters; When I fuel boilers, I find myself using burner inserters exclusively. My opinion is that the lack of utility for them and boilers stems mainly from the fact that solar panels desperately need to be rebalanced.

I'm in fact using the Burner Inserters for all things related to power production as well... and in my latest two maps I just refuse to build solar farms because I think that it takes away a lot of the "maintenance"-gameplay-factor of factorio & the need to expand into the unknown to gather more resources to maintain your factory, since solar panels/accumulators are just "plop&forget" a.k.a "one-time investments" that don't require any further attention at all on top of creating free energy with no pollution whatsoever thereby not attracting any biters that may cause even more havoc therefore leading to an almost peaceful gamemode with no purpose to keep on playing (as long as there's no real other endgame content obviously).

I'm even going so far to call laser turrets unbalanced as well because they also don't require any further attention and maintenance while gun turrets do.

There's a good portion of the community saying "they have higher initial setup costs and the walls get damaged with laser turrets and they need energy so that's the upkeep with them".

The initial setup costs become insignificant the longer you play the map because of an eventual break-even point. The walls get damaged no matter if you are using gun turrets (because of shorter range) or laser turrets (because of projectile travel time)... at least if you are surrounded by huge hives with 100+ biters attacking at once from which 30-50 are big biters. The only way to delay the inevitable is to place fast/express belts in front of the walls pushing the biters back long enough so that the turrets can kill them all before they are able take a bite into a piece of wall in the middle of nowhere. The energy part is completely negligible or becomes totally non-existent alltogether thanks to solar farms providing the free engery without further investments.

In my opinion currently Solar Farms bundled with Laser Turrets is cheating the purpose of the game, thereby rendering the gameplay boring all by yourself. It's like playing a shooter with "enemies become unaware of your presence" and "infinite ammo" on at the same time. If I wanted that I'd play the game in a peaceful sandbox mode.

So what I'd do about that is following: For the most part I wouldn't change solar panels... but I would change the accumulators and laser turrets in that they require battieres for "ammunition" because the batteries/accumulators heavily degrade during many load/unload-phases much like in reallife... and thereby slowly consuming them. For accumulators the slow consumption happens during the unload/reload phases in the night/at dawn and for the laser turrets basically the same when they are shooting and recharging. The exact balancing for that would be very much debateable but since the batteries are a little bit more complex to assemble they could last quite a long time as well as the solar panels having a greater energy output to make up for the increased infrastructure need. At least the "plop&forget"-aspect about that stuff resulting in boring gameplay would be gone and you'd have to think about how to feed those batteries into the turrets and accumulators. That's how I'd do it... but I'm not deciding things.



Back to the topic of items losing their purpose since the solar stuff is an completely unrelated topic altogether:



The burner inserters may fullfil a purpose for steam engine backups as I wrote in OP already, but if you are not using steam engines at all which is true for the most people once they switch over to solar power (because solar power is currently overpowered and unbalanced) and they start tearing down the boilers/steam engines they always gather a lot of burner inserters back which they can't use on anything else. Some people don't even use the burner inserters beyond the start up... because they use normal inserters to feed the steam engines even if it means a total black out if the normal inserters become slowed down during maximum energy usage.

I'm also in for a compromise: You can craft normal inserters without Burner Inserters as intermediate product or you can decide to upgrade your existing burner inserters to normal inserters by just adding some electronic circuits... both ways legitimately resulting in a normal inserter. This compromise could also be used for Burner Mining Drills to upgrade them to Electric Mining Drills by adding circuits and during the process you get 1 Electric Mining Drill and 1 Stone furnace back, eventually solving the problem for the Burner Mining Drills as well.

It's the mere thought that items end up unused eventually depending on your gameplay style, which is somehow sad because there's not a legit way to get rid of them otherwise, for example disassemble them to get back the initial resources you wasted on them. That's why I'd prefer a tiered "upgrade" system rather than disassembling them with a loss in items.

[bobingabout]

I never use steel furnaces either, i hang in there on stone untill I can build electric.
but I usually convert my stone furnaces to boilers, even with solar, I keep the steam power grid online for night use and backup.
And as for electric poles, I actually still use the small wooden one quite extensively even when the medium is available, I use them a lot at the factories between the inserters.

[ssilk]

I use the whole steam setup as "emergency power". Because in all your building you soon forget to look at the energy. Nothing is more bad as having really no more energy, cause you switched fully to solar/accu. If accus are empty in the middle of the night - cause you brought your new smelters online last day - this is really a bad thing and if the biters then attack you will have a big problem, which may cost you 1 or two hour to fix (cause of the destruction they made).

If you have then an emergency system, based on steam-engine/boilers, that is really enough to keep the lasers a bit filled during the night.

https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... _hot_water
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=3724

I describe my current system (from my current world) in words:
- one pipe, feeding the big tanks (about 30 storage tanks). There are pumps (5-6 small pumps can feed a pipe, always working!) at some points, to guarantee the biggest possible throughput. This cannot feed the power needed for more than 3-4 nights, but the complete system is also refilled after 3 days without usage.
- The big tanks feed the hot water into four "Pre-tanks", some tanks directly before the steam-engines. They are filled also by small pumps (always on). This is to guarantee the shortest possible way. So, even if the big tank is not full (for example day 4 of not enough power), the pre-tanks can be filled during the day to their max.
- Then the steam-engine-clusters after the pre-tanks. There are also small pumps, but they are turned only on, when needed (an own electric network needed for that, that is the most complicated part in building, cause you easily mix that with the main-power. I think it is possible to feed about 16 steam-engines like so, cause the water has the full pressure.

Setting this up needs some hours. Nothing for speedrun. Hoping for new electric circuit elements in 0.12.

[boro]

some thoughts:

-Steel furnaces are just as fast as electric furnaces without modules. They have the benefit of not requiring any change in layout when upgrading from stone furnaces. I find myself using them a lot for copper and iron smelting in my first melting area (when coal is abundant on the map). It takes an extra reason for me to replace them with electric furnaces, like really wanting modules or having to rebuild the area anyway.
-You don't have to transition into solar power. I usually add solar power to my existing steam engine setup (which I keep big enough to power my entire base for safety reasons) or skip solar alltogether. Added benefit to attract biters with lots of pollution to combat boredom.
-I like the iron chests for anything that I want to limit output from (limited slots) compared to wooden/steel chests cause wood takes effort and steel takes 5x more resources.
-The only thing I tend to skip nearly always is burner inserters, because they are slow, use resources from a belt that quite easily has throughput issues later on, and have an ugly color . Plus it's so easy to skip if you just feed some coal once in your first boiler manually. You don't even have to research electric inserters, you can build them right from the start (but if this was changed I still would almost never use them).
-I'm all for added complexity in recipes, so in some cases it would be cool if the next-tier item would require the previous-tier item instead of just the same kind of resources+something else (like in the case of splitters). But I don't think that should be the case for everything. Variety is king here.
-My waste chest just has some burner miners, wooden poles,axes, gun turrets and combat gear. And splitters in the late game. The only waste items that use lots of resources are power armor MK1 and portable solar panels, not enough to bother me.

[xnmo]

You are definitely right about some things, though I disagree with some points which I will elaborate on.

I used to have your opinion on small electric poles, but then I looked at the cost between them and larger poles and changed my mind. 1 small poles costs a mere 1/2 a copper and one wood plank, while one medium pole costs 10 iron and 2 copper. Big poles cost 25 iron. And after you get construction bots it is easy to rack up tons of wood and there is little else to use it for, so it is prudent in my opinion to use small poles wherever possible, especially (and rather ironically) for long distances that do not require the bigger reach of medium poles, as you can save a fair bit of iron this way.

On regular transport belts, remember that it costs less to build 2 belts side by side than use fast belts, and you get the same throughput. Fast belts to express is even less cost efficient. You could build 7 lanes of normal belts for one lane of express belts, giving you over twice the throughput! So until you factor in space and travel speed, it is always more cost efficient to use normal belts, so I don't see why they would need to be changed.


I also find use in steel furnaces for a much much longer period than stone furnaces are used. They smelt at TWICE the speed of stone furnaces and require no additional energy usage so essentially every time you use a stone furnace you are spending twice as much coal for fuel as you need to. Electric furnaces do not smelt any faster nor do they use less energy, so there is little reason to use them until you want to start putting modules into the furnaces. In fact, I believe that electric furnaces use more coal than steel furnaces as boilers have an 'effectivity' of 0.5, which I am assuming means you only get 4kj of power for every piece of coal burnt as apposed to 8. If it really works how I think it does, then that means electric furnaces are actually only as efficient as as stone furnaces!

On the issue of power, I do not think that the problem is with solar panels being overpowered, rather I think that it is the lack of choice in alternatives. You either use solar, or if you don't want to you use steam. The only way to get steam is to use primitive stone boilers that are not very efficient. If you want to use productivity modules in everything your power usage will skyrocket and if all you are using is steam you will burn through your coal supplies like there's no tomorrow. Why is there no nuclear power? Wind turbines? Hydro? Steel furnaces (With module slots)? The lack of fusion power is especially baffling since you can make portable ones but not building sized ones . The answer obviously being that the game is not finished, so hopefully more choices will become available. If such was the case then solar panels could be rebalanced to be less cost efficient than they currently are, but if you just nerf solar panels without giving a better alternative, IMO the results would be not so good.

[Align]

I haven't checked but don't stone furnaces also consume coal at 2x the rate?

[MeduSalem]

some thoughts:

-Steel furnaces are just as fast as electric furnaces without modules. They have the benefit of not requiring any change in layout when upgrading from stone furnaces. I find myself using them a lot for copper and iron smelting in my first melting area (when coal is abundant on the map). It takes an extra reason for me to replace them with electric furnaces, like really wanting modules or having to rebuild the area anyway.
-You don't have to transition into solar power. I usually add solar power to my existing steam engine setup (which I keep big enough to power my entire base for safety reasons) or skip solar alltogether. Added benefit to attract biters with lots of pollution to combat boredom.
-I like the iron chests for anything that I want to limit output from (limited slots) compared to wooden/steel chests cause wood takes effort and steel takes 5x more resources.
-The only thing I tend to skip nearly always is burner inserters, because they are slow, use resources from a belt that quite easily has throughput issues later on, and have an ugly color . Plus it's so easy to skip if you just feed some coal once in your first boiler manually. You don't even have to research electric inserters, you can build them right from the start (but if this was changed I still would almost never use them).
-I'm all for added complexity in recipes, so in some cases it would be cool if the next-tier item would require the previous-tier item instead of just the same kind of resources+something else (like in the case of splitters). But I don't think that should be the case for everything. Variety is king here.
-My waste chest just has some burner miners, wooden poles,axes, gun turrets and combat gear. And splitters in the late game. The only waste items that use lots of resources are power armor MK1 and portable solar panels, not enough to bother me.

I know that the Steel Furnaces don't require any change in layout compared to Stone Furnaces, but I tend to use Electric Furnaces once I'm able to because I'm able to put modules in there and because of the easier setup (no fuel). I'm progressing quite fast through the tech tree so most of the time I'm already able to provide advanced circuits for the Electric Furnaces at the point where I'm researching the Steel/Electric Furnaces. So I tend to hold out with Stone Furnaces quite some time and that's why I'm able to leap ahead the tech tree thereby saving resources.

It's nothing wrong about using Steel furnaces at all if you like them... I just don't use them because there's no way to get rid of them once I have crafted them. It's more the fact that they would end up in my waste chest since they can't be used in the recipe for Electric Furnaces which is the topic of this thread. So it's basically not a discussion of "Are Steel Furnaces good/bad?" more than "What am I going to do with the Steel Furnaces once I've upgraded to Electric Furnaces?" and that's why I don't craft them. They are an intermediate solution without possibility to upgrade them, which is quite sad and that's why I feel that the recipes should be changed a bit to give things a bit more purpose.

So all I'm asking for is to change some recipes so that you can craft steel furnaces out of stone furnaces and electric furnaces out of steel furnaces, thereby rendering them all more useful and easier to upgrade to the next tier without wasting resources. It would make sense to have such a progression and it would encourage people to use steel furnaces while holding out for electric furnaces, while currently you aren't encouraged to do so, which is why I'm skipping put on them to save myself some resources which I need a few game minutes later for electric furnaces anyways.



I also know you don't have to transition to solar power. In fact I'm refusing to use solar power in my latest maps completely because I think it takes away a large portion of the maintainence & expansion gameplay. But this playstyle is honestly not everyones playstyle so at some point many people will end up with a lot of boilers and steam engines in their waste chest. I don't think that this is bad for boilers and steam engines, because I think there's something with the oil industry coming later where the boilers will be reused. So stone furnaces are much less of a problem since they will find a use in boilers later, but still they should be upgradeable to steel furnaces and steel furnaces to electric furnaces so that at no point you have the feeling "well dump them into the chest" because of the lack of things to do with them.



The iron chests... are just... nah. At least currently. xD

They probably should be upgradeable to steel chests, thereby steel chests requiring a little less resources to craft. I just don't like having early/mid game things sitting in a waste chest to rot forever because of no way to re-use them later on. Steel Chests are easily upgraded to Smart/Provider/Requester/Storage chests... but iron chests just sit there and I wish I would never have crafted them. So in the early game I'm only using wooden chests and if I don't need them anymore I just throw them into a random boiler and they are gone.



It's not all about added complexity for recipes but a way to re-use items later instead of dumping them in a chest because of the lacking purpose later on. I think changing a few recipes might be a good alternative... because the only other alternative left is to have a disassembler so I can get back some of the resources I wasted earlier on. Somehow I don't like the later thought... somehow I like a tiered progression more than just disassembling everything I don't need anymore. No matter what there are items which become useless later on. ^^

You are definitely right about some things, though I disagree with some points which I will elaborate on.

I used to have your opinion on small electric poles, but then I looked at the cost between them and larger poles and changed my mind. 1 small poles costs a mere 1/2 a copper and one wood plank, while one medium pole costs 10 iron and 2 copper. Big poles cost 25 iron. And after you get construction bots it is easy to rack up tons of wood and there is little else to use it for, so it is prudent in my opinion to use small poles wherever possible, especially (and rather ironically) for long distances that do not require the bigger reach of medium poles, as you can save a fair bit of iron this way.

On regular transport belts, remember that it costs less to build 2 belts side by side than use fast belts, and you get the same throughput. Fast belts to express is even less cost efficient. You could build 7 lanes of normal belts for one lane of express belts, giving you over twice the throughput! So until you factor in space and travel speed, it is always more cost efficient to use normal belts, so I don't see why they would need to be changed.


I also find use in steel furnaces for a much much longer period than stone furnaces are used. They smelt at TWICE the speed of stone furnaces and require no additional energy usage so essentially every time you use a stone furnace you are spending twice as much coal for fuel as you need to. Electric furnaces do not smelt any faster nor do they use less energy, so there is little reason to use them until you want to start putting modules into the furnaces. In fact, I believe that electric furnaces use more coal than steel furnaces as boilers have an 'effectivity' of 0.5, which I am assuming means you only get 4kj of power for every piece of coal burnt as apposed to 8. If it really works how I think it does, then that means electric furnaces are actually only as efficient as as stone furnaces!

On the issue of power, I do not think that the problem is with solar panels being overpowered, rather I think that it is the lack of choice in alternatives. You either use solar, or if you don't want to you use steam. The only way to get steam is to use primitive stone boilers that are not very efficient. If you want to use productivity modules in everything your power usage will skyrocket and if all you are using is steam you will burn through your coal supplies like there's no tomorrow. Why is there no nuclear power? Wind turbines? Hydro? Steel furnaces (With module slots)? The lack of fusion power is especially baffling since you can make portable ones but not building sized ones . The answer obviously being that the game is not finished, so hopefully more choices will become available. If such was the case then solar panels could be rebalanced to be less cost efficient than they currently are, but if you just nerf solar panels without giving a better alternative, IMO the results would be not so good.

It's not about the costs. In one of my maps I've 10 million iron plates and nearly as much copper plates... but even if it would be only 10000 plates I would stop caring about the costs. So at some point I will run around only with medium/big electric poles in my inventory. But every time I stumble across a small electric pole or the chest containing them I'm just "URGH, wish I could burn that stuff" and free the chest up.

So what I'm doing lategame is... gather all resources which I can't burn/upgrade to something else, place them in a chest and crash a car into it or something. It's a waste of resources obviously but somehow I'm just to frustrated that I can't re-use the stuff anywhere else and as a perfectionist it's bothering me too much to just not care.



In most maps I've also an abundance of express belts... so I'm using them and reserve parallel belts only for massive loads of items like for example plates. Everything else wastes too much space in my opinion and renders maintainance a chore.

Also I'm not for changing the belts themselves but the splitter recipes. I'd like to craft Fast Splitters out of Basic Splitters and Express Splitters out of Fast Splitters so I have a way to get rid of all the useless splitters once I'm only using express belts/splitters everywhere. I'd just prefer if the splitter recipes work similar to the underground belt recipes, because that way I can get rid of all the low tier items which I don't need anymore later on without having a bad feeling for having wasted resouces on them early on.



About the Steel Furnaces refer to what I wrote to boro. It's not that I think Steel Furnaces have bad statistics, it's more the fact that I can't do anything with them once I've replaced them with Electric Furnaces. The only thing I can do then is dump them in a chest and let them rot, which is sad and a waste of resources.



And yes there's a lack of choice in how to produce power, more different ways would be appreciated, but a "plop&forget"-way to produce free energy forever is overpowered. It's quite an important balancing issue. In well balanced games there's no such thing as "free forever without negative sideeffects". In well balanced games there's always a major trade-off in every alternative approach provided. In a game that's about building and maintaining a factory (which is the slogan of the game ironically) a "plop&forget"-way of doing things is unreasonably unbalanced and unfun because it kills the maintainence part thereby making things quite boring fast. (As long as there's no endgame yet obviously, with proper endgame things may be different and I'll argue differently once we know what endgame for Factorio will be like)

Increasing the initial setup costs for Solar Power is not enough to counter the balance problem because eventually there's a break-even point no matter how much the initial costs. The only way to balance Steam power&Gun Turrets with Solar Power&Laser Turrets is to give Solar Power/Laser Turrets a maintainance factor as well or otherwise it is a no-brainer that Solar Power&laser Turrets always wins the "return on investment"-question. There should be no way to produce free energy forever with a onetime investment or having a defense without needing any sort of ammunition (energy is free forever thanks to solar farms so that's no ammunition), because it kills the need for expansion to gather more resources and therefore the only reason to further explore the map. ^^

But the solar farming/laser turret stuff is a complete topic on its own with many threads discussing about that so back to the topic of how to make unuseful early/midgame items useful in endgame.

[kovarex]

(Didn't read the whole thread).

But I made some changes, splitters depedenncies (same as for belts/underground belts) and I also made the basic electric pole burnable.

[DerivePi]

The iron chests... are just... nah. At least currently. xD

Is there any reason to have them? On one side you have wood chests and on the other side you have steel. To me, if iron chests were taken out of the game, I wouldn't notice.

As for the Underground Belts and Splitters, the recipe to go to express UG or express splitter from fast UG/splitter should include lubricant to balance with the advance from fast to express belts. Currently, I don't even use normal splitters once I get fast belts (I use fast splitters for normal belts and fast belts). With the rebalancing of recipes I might discontinue this practice.

[MeduSalem]

(Didn't read the whole thread).

But I made some changes, splitters depedenncies (same as for belts/underground belts) and I also made the basic electric pole burnable.

Nice to hear that you got time to look at that even you are fully submerged into getting the MP ready! Wouldn't have thought to get a response on the matter before at least 0.11 is out.

I've updated OP to reflect the upcoming changes... the other stuff is still up for discussion until further notice. ^^

The iron chests... are just... nah. At least currently. xD

Is there any reason to have them? On one side you have wood chests and on the other side you have steel. To me, if iron chests were taken out of the game, I wouldn't notice.

As for the Underground Belts and Splitters, the recipe to go to express UG or express splitter from fast UG/splitter should include lubricant to balance with the advance from fast to express belts. Currently, I don't even use normal splitters once I get fast belts (I use fast splitters for normal belts and fast belts). With the rebalancing of recipes I might discontinue this practice.

I wouldn't notice it too if the Iron Chests would be removed, but I respect that some people may use them early on. That's why I think an upgradeable solution might be a way to make them worthwhile even for players who don't think about using them currently, which is the same as Steel Furnaces or Burner Inserters for example. Some people use them, some don't because they can't upgrade them any further. ^^


As for the Express Belt/Splitter/Underground Belts... I could perfectly live with Express Splitters/Express Underground Belts requiring Lubricant for the upgrade process. It would be just fair to do that because there are too less Lubricant consumers anyways. xD

[xnmo]

Power generation is definitely another topic, so I will leave it at what I already said.

some thoughts:
It's not about the costs. In one of my maps I've 10 million iron plates and nearly as much copper plates... but even if it would be only 10000 plates I would stop caring about the costs. So at some point I will run around only with medium/big electric poles in my inventory. But every time I stumble across a small electric pole or the chest containing them I'm just "URGH, wish I could burn that stuff" and free the chest up.

Right. I was meaning to offer the following suggestion in my previous post, but I completely forgot lol:

It seems what is needed to fix the problems you mentioned is not any kind of rebalancing of recipes and such, but a way to recycle items back into their base components. So a new building; a recycling plant, disassembler, giant grinder (hehe) or what have you. It could even be a specialized furnace. But the end result no matter what is the same: put stuff in and it spits the raw metal and copper and whatever out, easy peasy lemon squeasy. Whether there are any inefficiencies in the process (I.E. Some resources end up disappearing. This would probably have to be the case for liquid components) or the only cost is a high power and/or time cost is up to the implementor, but I think it would be a very Factorio-like solution to getting rid of stuff like your obsolete weapons and armor, wooden poles, burner stuff, and anything else you don't want around any more.

It also might make me not regret building iron chests

[MeduSalem]

Right. I was meaning to offer the following suggestion in my previous post, but I completely forgot lol:

It seems what is needed to fix the problems you mentioned is not any kind of rebalancing of recipes and such, but a way to recycle items back into their base components. So a new building; a recycling plant, disassembler, giant grinder (hehe) or what have you. It could even be a specialized furnace. But the end result no matter what is the same: put stuff in and it spits the raw metal and copper and whatever out, easy peasy lemon squeasy. Whether there are any inefficiencies in the process (I.E. Some resources end up disappearing. This would probably have to be the case for liquid components) or the only cost is a high power and/or time cost is up to the implementor, but I think it would be a very Factorio-like solution to getting rid of stuff like your obsolete weapons and armor, wooden poles, burner stuff, and anything else you don't want around any more.

It also might make me not regret building iron chests

Actually this was one of my first thoughts as well when I saw how many items end up wasted in a chest by the end of the game.

A disassembler would be nice (I could live with that), but I don't know how far this goes against the basic thoughts of the game so I tried to come up with the upgradeable/tiered items alternative. ^^

[xnmo]

Correct me if I'm wrong but an upgradeable/tier recipe system is already in place for pretty much all the items that make logical sense (belts, non-burner inserters, assemblers etc.). And unless you made it a requirement for absolutely every single item that has a superior version (Like requiring the hand gun to make the sub-machine gun, needing previous armors to make better ones) you would still end up with some amount of useless junk. I personally think that adding in a new building to get rid of useless crap is more in the spirit of Factorio than re-jiggering all the recipes around to avoid waste. Not to mention it still wouldn't fix the problem if you say accidentally made an extra handgun or deconstruction planner.


Maybe another suggestion that would make obsolete items even less of an issue would be the ability to 'hide' recipes that you don't want to see in the crafting menu. It would certainly let you clean up the military tab.

[bobingabout]

But I made some changes, splitters depedenncies (same as for belts/underground belts)

Don't forget to add Lubricant for Express.

[kovarex]

But I made some changes, splitters depedenncies (same as for belts/underground belts)

Don't forget to add Lubricant for Express.

I'm not a newb

[bobingabout]

But I made some changes, splitters depedenncies (same as for belts/underground belts)

Don't forget to add Lubricant for Express.

I'm not a newb

Not sugesting you are, but someone forgot it from underground belts the first time round.
I'm sure you read my topic about it. https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =16&t=6067