Friday Facts #342 - The new old tutorial

[riking]

I enjoyed the NPE a lot, but I unfortunately agree that taking it out is for the best.

The thing that finally convinced me was the realization in this article that the NPE campaign was promising a questing experience that Factorio was never going to deliver.

Sure, with infinite budget an entirely new team could be hired to spend $Lots on creating a long campaign that does actually deliver that questing experience. But why? There's no point. That's not what Factorio is, ultimately.

I expect to see something like that sprouting up once the game stops having balance updates or anything that could potentially break such a campaign breaking, but it probably won't come from Wube.

[sCiphre]

I'm just here to say "A New Hope" rail mission is what got me hooked on Factorio.

More of this please.

[abregado]

Sure, with infinite budget an entirely new team could be hired to spend $Lots on creating a long campaign that does actually deliver that questing experience. But why? There's no point. That's not what Factorio is, ultimately.

That is pretty much what we already did, but it turned out to be more work than anyone expected. Making something of high enough quality that we would feel comfortable releasing it is not going to happen before 1.0.

[abregado]

Just to confirm: The new old tutorial (First Steps) will end with the car, rather than having the ruined rail map, combat mission, and "escape with the plane" bits from New Hope?

First Steps ends at the end of the "Build Radars" mission. The Car mission was the first level of New Hope.

[abregado]

Please, leave the assets in the game. Compilatron is useful and shallow water should be incorporated into regular maps rather than deleted.

The assets will stay in the game. The crash site assets are amazing and the modding community has already been using them.

In general, personally I would keep the dead end scenario, but repurpose it. Expose all the scripting and turn it into "how to make scenario" tutorial, with this easy and quite short mission as set of examples. It maybe all is already accessible somewhere, but with few professional touches it can have good value compared to "read the scripting wiki".

"easy and quite simple" is not the right term. Because it is a tutorial, it is actually incredibly complex compared to a more straight forward scenario. The NPE code was also never polished and is quite a mess.

I would very much like to include some simpler scenarios to demonstrate how to make them, but lets see if there is time (probably not). At a minimum I will release some scenarios as a modpack.

[abregado]

There are nice things to learn from (how to interact with player for example) and a nice little Story.
I fully understand the decision of not to have it as demo and first steps. But I don't understand why you've decided to remove it completely.

Leaving it in is problematic because there is no way to tell a new player "Hey this is not really completely finished but we just left it there for that guy on the forum who knows it is not finished".

Mod content. Ill probably put it in a "level designers cutting room floor" scenario pack.

[TheRaph]

Mod content. Ill probably put it in a "level designers cutting room floor" scenario pack.

Yes please!

Edit:

... because there is no way to tell a new player "Hey this is not really completely finished but we just left it there for that guy on the forum who knows it is not finished".

You could name it as it is: "Unfinished starter campaign (an historical leftover)"

[bobucles]

It's great that the devs have the guts to make the hard calls, instead of bashing their heads against something that isn't working out. I mean, it also sucks, but that's life I guess.

[Jap2.0]

... because there is no way to tell a new player "Hey this is not really completely finished but we just left it there for that guy on the forum who knows it is not finished".

You could name it as it is: "Unfinished starter campaign (an historical leftover)"

Absolutely - I agree with the change in tutorials, but I would be all for a "historical scenario pack."

[conn11]

At least for steam: as dlc, with a little warning of beeing phased out, for the known reasons.

[JC1223]

Honestly, the bit with the toolbar in the tutorial reminded me (its been a while since I played) how much I miss when the toolbar auto-populated. I don't really like having to open my inventory to assign a new item for the first time, and wish we had an option to turn auto-population back on, or a special toolbar row that contains the 10 most recently crafted or collected place-able and consumable items, because especially something I'm not going to be using often, but i'll be using a lot of at a time, like laser turrets for instance, I don't want to assign a permanent slot to, but if i don't want to do everything 1 item type at a time and risk having to undo a ton to make them fit better at a later item, I have to assign them a slot and either unbind it later or deal with the slot.

I personally found the auto-populating bar so much easier because of stuff like that.

[Heintje]

Does this "First steps" include the "New hope" story?

The best thing about it was that "new hope" got you till oil processing. THE part of the game you want in a relax setting except in your first default setting free play.
Also very usefull is that you enter a number of premade bases that give you some ideas on how to get things functional. Like setting up steam power and utalizing both sides of a belt.

Although i do remember the level where you had kill a lot of bases, this level was a bit hard because you didn't have much of a base to fall back on. Even though it is needed to learn how to push out bases it didn't feel as factorio as the other levels.

So i hope the whole story will come back and not just till "Build a radar and survive for 15 minutes" And maybe even expand up to a rocket.

[Dune]

When you reference a Friday Facts, such as in this,

Kovarex discussed his reasoning in FFF-327, but a lot of ...

Can you please add a date with that. Nobody knows when these were published, and a date would put more context to when it was last discussed. Otherwise they are just numbers and have little meaning.

[valneq]

Can you please add a date with that. Nobody knows when these were published, and a date would put more context to when it was last discussed. Otherwise they are just numbers and have little meaning.

It is really easy to look this up, and the reference was to what was decided upon and not when. So I don't think this is fair criticism.
FYI, this particular FFF can be found here
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-327
and was published on December 27th, 2019.

[Kostriktor]

i loved the first tutorial !
one of the best videogame-experiences ive made in 30 years.
best devs ever !

[TheRaph]

Can you please add a date with that. Nobody knows when these were published, and a date would put more context to when it was last discussed. Otherwise they are just numbers and have little meaning.

It is really easy to look this up, and the reference was to what was decided upon and not when. So I don't think this is fair criticism.
FYI, this particular FFF can be found here
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-327
and was published on December 27th, 2019.

Agree with that.

And the most people here know, that there is a FFF every week. This is currently the FFF 342. Therefor it's easy to calculate that it must be 15 weeks ago (which is a good estimate for being not too long in the past) . So "Nobody" might be more than you thought.

On the other hand, the FFF are sorted numerological, so there is no date needed to find. It's like an alphabetical sorted list, if you refer to something under letter "M" you know where to look. You don't need the additional information that "M" is the 13th letter.

[esotericist]

while i try to keep up with the FFF posts, i somehow completely missed that the campaign was cancelled, and that the new player experience was going to be tossed.

this is somewhat disheartening, because I was more or less waiting on that kind of content to come into focus for my next attempt at playing the game. due to my cognitive limitations, free play is overwhelming for me; if I can do anything, and I don't need to do anything in particular, i find it difficult to do anything at all. early on this isn't much of an issue; the things you need to do are fairly constrained by the fact you can't do much yet, but there hits a point where the number of possible ways to proceed are beyond my ability to evaluate.

but i can understand needing to limit things in order to meet quality and production goals. it's just very sadmaking, because at this point most of the things I was actually looking forward to when I bought the game are no longer on the table.

disappointing, but comprehensible.

[Amarula]

if I can do anything, and I don't need to do anything in particular, i find it difficult to do anything at all.

Thank you for sharing this in such a thoughtful, non-judgmental way.

I have a couple of ideas for things you might try when you reach a point where you cannot decide what to do next:
1) roll a D6 - in other words, just pick one option at random. (This is what I do when I can't decide. This does require somewhat of a zen attitude, being relaxed enough to accept that any choice is good enough.)
2) make a post here in the forums with a title like "Oh great and wonderful Oz, what shall I do next?" Put in a few of the options you are facing, and get some community input to help you make a decision.
2a) Rather than ask for help for a single decision, ask for ideas for a complete scenario, then you have a path to follow as if the game was providing you direction.

Namaste. You seek balance. Here is my wisdom. Your mistakes have no cost but time, and the deconstruction planner even reduces that cost. Most games punish you for building, demolishing and rebuilding. Not Factorio. Let your anxiety wash away as you perceive that every belt placed can be moved. Every assembler is but a visitor to where it resides. The only significance is life, which leads to the further wisdom. Look both ways before you cross the tracks.

[kizrak]

+1 to all the people who want this keep as a Legacy Scenario. I think most of the pro/cons have been discussed. I'm just adding voice to keeping it in some way. Thanks!