Friday Facts #382 - Logistic groups

[<NO_NAME>]

i can fit rocket silo in my pocket, i can fit rocket silo in vagon, but rocket is too weak to carry rocket silo

but i get it, neither me or train is doing liftoff (inb4 galaxy express), and fuel consumption would be high to get that into orbit.

This has a surprisingly simple explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvEe3Y3B2cg

[wizcreations]

Regarding rocket capacity:

Now you’ve identified the ignored problem of the player carrying multiple tons of equipment. I don’t want you to limit player inventory, but this is a major inconsistency.

[computeraddict]

Regarding rocket capacity:

Now you’ve identified the ignored problem of the player carrying multiple tons of equipment. I don’t want you to limit player inventory, but this is a major inconsistency.

I'm already imagining the masochism mods that will apply this system to all containers and it's making me happy for the inevitable Dosh playthrough of it.

[Mike5000]

we lowered the cost of the rocket by 20 times

This may be the best part of the update. A bootstrap base (and now maybe also a space platform) can have an interesting layout but once you need a bazillion identical assemblers churning out identical widgets it's practically impossible to avoid a cookie cutter design.

[Khagan]

Very minor point but the rocket capacity is listed in the GUI as 1 ton. Ton is the imperial measurement (with several different possible values because yay imperial system). The metric measurement is a tonne (t).

As you say, there are several different tons. One of which is, of course, the metric ton, by definition equal to a tonne.

Are there even ANY in existence games that have both a slot and weight based inventory system. How does that work?

I gather you have never played any vintage Rogue-likes (e.g. Angband).

[iestynne]

I have a question regarding traveling to other planets... how am I not going to be terrified to leave my home planet and main base behind, when it is almost certainly under constant siege by biters and I know I won't be able to get back quickly should a breach occur?? Seems like this will make me very reticent to travel off-planet until I'm way over-prepared in teens if automated defenses...

Second, is it possible to exclude hand-crafted items from the 'trash unrequested' feature? You almost certainly aren't hand-crafting things in order for bots to immediately take them away from you, so adding a temporary exclusion on those stacks in your inventory seems like a simple answer.

All in all, I've been astounded by the quality of features shown in the recent FFFs and I have never been more excited to play Factorio. You guys are doing amazing work!!

[TheRaph]

In current version 1.1 you have two numbers: Minimum for starting logistic request if inventory count is below. Maximum for trashing if inventory count is above.
On Your Screenshot I can only see one number ...

Since trash unrequested is ticked, there is no need for the second number, since everything not requested is automatically trashed, so min and max for every item is the same.

I've to disagree.
It is not clearly described how it exactly will work. But I can not imagine a case where it is prior to the current system (except from adding the general trash feature and groups).

If the expected behavior is to EXACTLY hold the amount of items requested, then it comes to a nervous refill and trash.
Imagine being on a building site and rearranging some belts:
50 Fast belts are requested and existing in inventory.
I place 10 fast belts. The request started and I immediately got 10 belts as refill.
Than I deconstruct 14 belts. Now a bot starts to trash the 14 items over ...
And so on ... every time I put something down or take something up the bots start to swirl around me.

If the expected behavior is to just take the configured number as MINIMUM, then it possible comes to an overload.
Imagine you like to have 3 stacks of concrete walls in your pocket. Now, after establishing a new defense wall you like to deconstruct the old one. In that case you might end up with additional 10 stacks of concrete wall in your inventory. To get rid of them, you need to trash it manually.

Both cases doesn't sound better than the current setting.

It would be nice to have both features available: Having min and max for requested items and trash everything else.
That would also work for Items you don't want to trash but also don't want to order at all - Just set min to 0 and max to a suitable value.

[malecord]

Regarding rocket capacity:

Now you’ve identified the ignored problem of the player carrying multiple tons of equipment. I don’t want you to limit player inventory, but this is a major inconsistency.

I'm already imagining the masochism mods that will apply this system to all containers and it's making me happy for the inevitable Dosh playthrough of it.

Why? Wasn't officially clarified that Factorio is set in Dragon Ball universe? The reason why player can carry several Rocket silos is because of capsule corp. technology.

[jaylecool]

Only one landing pad is limiting for mega factory if you must import and export from other planet. I does make sense that having limitless landing pad make logistic problem easy to solve and a late game logistic problem being easy is not desired, But this is limiting the potential of the player.

I think if the number of launching pad is link to a research like follower robot count is. It could be a just middle. The research could be very expensive so that you "complete" the game without researched it, because it not worth it for your throughput, but player that want to push thing to the limit could increase the amount of launch pad and could also be place on an infinite research with the price scale appropriate for the challenge you want the player to experience. So if you intend the player to transport a certain amounts of items in the landing pad, but no less or else it would be easy. Then you could scale the research to be the base cost of research * current number of max landing pad.

Also, the scale could be different and be exponential like the artillery researched is. It would make it a challenge to have a lot, but way less limiting than only one landing pad. And fix the problem of player just afk'ing to get a lot of increase in max landing pad and trivializing the logistic problem by placing it like trains stations.

[Bloodred217]

Cool stuff! The platform construction animation looks amazing and the logistics groups feature makes a lot of sense. I can only say that I hope we also get something similar for train schedules, since having to change schedules on each train individually right now is a huge pain if you have more than a handful.

The weight system for lifting things into orbit and for interplanetary logistics in general also makes sense, though the idea that a single landing pad is allowed per planet is a bit worrisome. If there's only 1 building allowed and all your interplanetary logistics need to go through it, doesn't this effectively add a soft cap to how big you can build a base? There is currently no such limit in vanilla Factorio (other than your computer's performance, of course), but you can only get so many inserters around a landing pad and even if the pad works with the logistics network there would still be some upper limit since you can only get so many bots to charge in the pad area so you'll ultimately still hit some sort of throughput soft cap in this single bottleneck. Is there some way to design around this so big bases in Space Age don't hit the limit in this single, non-optional choke point?

Now I'm not saying that landing pads should be completely unrestricted, as that would lead to what I'd consider very undesirable "optimal" designs where you just place them directly where you need them and this would be very boring and kill the logistics challenge, but I feel like there needs to be some sort of solution to allow uncapped scaling and I hope a solution for this is already covered by unrevealed mechanics or something along those lines.

[SquirrelsBane]

Tiny Spidertrons as space construction bots.

[Abarel]

About the drama on Weight and the different inventories:

Thrust_capacity.jpg (65.84 KiB) Viewed 3786 times

Are there even ANY in existence games that have both a slot and weight based inventory system. How does that work?

Have you played X-COM (or any variation like the Open Source UFO:AI)?
You not only need to care about total weight carried, but also need to play tetris on your inventory slots (equipments as well as inventory areas like belt, backpack, etc. have different sizes and shapes).

[FuryoftheStars]

Oh, finally!! I can't tell you how much I've wanted a weight system in this game that didn't require a bunch of hacky hacks!

Now, I'll say this: regardless of the decision pending feedback and debates over whether it makes sense or is appropriate, please do not remove it from the backend so us modders can still make use of it! And please allow us (modders) to apply this to all inventories!

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However, after reading, I have a question -- since you adding a weight system to every item in the game, will it also affect Cargo Wagon weight? In other words, will the train carrying iron gears (each stacking to 100 and costing 2 iron, or 4x stacks of iron ore) be slower than the iron ore train?

Weight system: I hope that this is expanded upon the train system, to make train builds and -optimization more diverse and challenging. But with a different "axiom": Where the rocket is weight limited, the trains should be space-limited:

[...]

The weight of the items would then be added to the weights of the locos/wagons for the final acceleration calculation.

Further diversificaion of wagons and locos in the sense of a speed/acceleration trade-off could also be neat.

While this would be nice, I'm not holding my breath. The devs have already said they won't have this type of affect on ramps due to UPS cost, though this would technically be a smaller UPS cost, so maybe it has a better chance.

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A thought on recycling and weight.
Maybe the weight difference should be a multiplier on recycling yield.
If 20kgs of stuff went in to making the item, but the item only weighs 18kgs then 2kg were lost in the assembly process.
So absolute best you can only get 18kgs of ingredients back. Which could be done as a 90% (18/20) random chance on each ingredient.

I think they've already said in the Quality FFF that recycling will have a return yield of something like 25%.

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Are there even ANY in existence games that have both a slot and weight based inventory system. How does that work?

To add to what several of the others have mentioned, Empyrion Galactic Survival also uses a slot, mass, and volume system, although for that game they used volume as the additional limiter and mass just affects lift/acceleration.

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Will there be an automatic way to tell [construction bots]: wait until attack ended?!

I'd love this, too!

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I would prefer having a "safety range" of like 10k tiles or maybe even more that prevents you from having dense landing pads for rockets, instead of a single one per planet.

Agreed! Maybe combine this with a limit on how many drop pods can be launched from the platforms per minute?

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bro i want that building-construction animation everywhere, not just on the platform! its so good looking, feels like im playing old time rts again!!

Yes! I've always wanted more building animation then simply "*plop* there it is!" Hopefully the devs will add it, or at least leave it as moddable!

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I'm already imagining the masochism mods that will apply this system to all containers and it's making me happy for the inevitable Dosh playthrough of it.

[varundevan]

Suggestion 1 :
Can you please make the space platform look nicer. Now it looks like it is made of junk.

Suggestion 2:
Please give at least one more rocket upgrade (preferably 2) that carries more cargo (given that you are intentionally going to limit the landing pad per plant to just 1).
Like falcon9 (1 Ton capacity) --> falcon heavy (2Ton capacity) --> starship (5 Ton capacity)
either increase capacity of rocket or increase the landing pads, right ?? - else the game will have inbuild bottle neck.

[FuryoftheStars]

Suggestion 2:
Please give at least one more rocket upgrade (preferably 2) that carries more cargo (given that you are intentionally going to limit the launch pad per plant to just 1).
Like falcon9 (1 Ton capacity) --> falcon heavy (2Ton capacity) --> starship (5 Ton capacity)
either increase capacity of rocket or increase the launch pads, right ??

The limit is on landing pads, not the launch pads. You can have as many launch pads as you want firing rockets up into space. The limit is one landing pad for bringing items back down, though they don't go into more details on how that'll work.

[hanli427]

If the formula for weights is automated, does this mean that items weigh more on marathon settings, since more items went into crafting?
Does recycling on marathon yield more resources back (I would assume so, since it should be based on the crafting recipe).
Can one manually set the weight for any item in-game through modding, instead of using the formula. You seem to imply as much, but just to confirm.
You base the weight on the ores, but I feel like plates would be a better base. Logically smelting reduces weight by removing impurities and slag. It is already easier to store and transport (in rail system) plates since they stack higher. And who would recycle a plate anyway. I feel like plates should be lighter than ores, who would send ore to space when they could send plates. Or maybe I am overthinking it.

[Roxor128]

My solution to the "weight" system would be to simply copy the modular armor system.

Damn, that's a really good idea! It's such a simple solution.

I'm all for it. Devs, give this idea some playtesting!

[aka13]

So now every entity has an additional property that players need to learn about, but it only matters in one place.

It would be logical, if it influenced trains? SInce the trains already use weight for calculations, and items have weight now, seems like a nobrainer to me.
Wonder if that's gonna happen.

[varundevan]

Suggestion 2:
Please give at least one more rocket upgrade (preferably 2) that carries more cargo (given that you are intentionally going to limit the launch pad per plant to just 1).
Like falcon9 (1 Ton capacity) --> falcon heavy (2Ton capacity) --> starship (5 Ton capacity)
either increase capacity of rocket or increase the launch pads, right ??

The limit is on landing pads, not the launch pads. You can have as many launch pads as you want firing rockets up into space. The limit is one landing pad for bringing items back down, though they don't go into more details on how that'll work.

corrected it

[robot256]

If the expected behavior is to EXACTLY hold the amount of items requested, then it comes to a nervous refill and trash.

(...)

If the expected behavior is to just take the configured number as MINIMUM, then it possible comes to an overload.

(...)

It would be nice to have both features available: Having min and max for requested items and trash everything else.
That would also work for Items you don't want to trash but also don't want to order at all - Just set min to 0 and max to a suitable value.

The "trash all items not requested" button toggles the max between infinity (autotrash off) and the requested minimum (autotrash on). 19 times out of 20, I already set the maximum equal to the minimum, and it's just extra clicks. The rest of the time, I don't care if the maximum is infinity--any finite maximum I set is either not enough to hold everything, or it overfills my inventory before I notice.

One fun fact is that if items get moved to your trash slots and then later your inventory requests them, logistics bots sometimes come to your character and move the items back from your trash slots to your inventory without taking them anywhere. Maybe they can make this automatic instead of requiring bots.

Crucially, the FFF makes it very clear that the autotrash button is intended to be toggled proactively by the user. If you know you're about to start deconstructing and don't want the items immediately trashed, that is when you disable autotrash. Once you finish rebuilding everything, re-enable autotrash to get rid of the leftovers.

Items I don't want to request or trash, other than blueprints, where disabling autotrash temporarily won't work? I can't think of too many scenarios where that's important. I would absolutely disable autotrash while handcrafting buildings to finish a blueprint, for example. The item requests will still be active (to bring raw materials for handcrafting). You just have to re-enable autotrash when you're done to trash the wood that was collected while building and any excess intermediates that were crafted.