Friday Facts #399 - Trash to Treasure

[akxcv]

Um, does this mean that UPS usage from distinct electric networks will be fixed? Because this sounds like it would destroy perfomance in 1.1.

I am also interested in hearing if this issue will be resolved.

It has been fixed in 2.0

Out of curiosity, was this mentioned by Wube anywhere?

[morse]

So, the alien civilization mined the planet dry and left? Seems far-fetched, to be honest. Aliens had to get the resources to build all their stuff from somewhere, and now, somehow, these resources are nowhere to be found? And also, aliens use the very same intermediate products as you do? Aren't aliens supposed to be, you know, aliens? Imagine we find the remains of the ancient alien civilization on mars, start digging, and find out that they used MOS6502's in their computers. This is what this alien recycling looks like.

Also, capturing the lighting to produce electricity? Come on, most of your player base are engineers, they know better.

[MrFaul]

- You have to build defensive coverage everywhere you build - check, although this time it seem you don't get a planet-wide solution, but HAVE to do it on every point. Can't wait to have additional entiities on mining outposts which have to be delivered and stamped down in a grid.

This is the only point that is remotely valid.
Everything else can either be turned off or is part of the unique environment.

like:

165953.png (14.82 KiB) Viewed 3844 times

You don't have to buy the expansion.
You will still benefit from all the optimizations and QOL improvements like:

This is flipping in action and it looks amazing.

But you could try Shapez, while not as visual striking its a amazing chill factory builder.

[aka13]

Thank you for your condescending reply, I could not have decided myself to buy or not to buy the expansion. I would have bought the expansion even if I did not like anything in it, simply to support the devs, since I have been getting pretty solid content all those years.
Funny how you also do not understand, that I am not complaining about cliffs in the current version, since cliff removal tech is easily achieved, which will not be the case in the expansion, according to currently available information.
I'd appreciate if you let me have an opinion and influence on the content to come, like I did in the past 11 years on this forum.

[jackthesmack]

This if flipping in action and it looks amazing.

What?

[<NO_NAME>]

The hype train is going so fast now, it itself is slowly reaching the escape velocity.

[Enderbsd]

The features are starting to compound in a good way, and you can really see how they took concepts from the SE mod and turned them into deeper full new game features / mechanics.

[mmmPI]

So, the alien civilization mined the planet dry and left? Seems far-fetched, to be honest. Aliens had to get the resources to build all their stuff from somewhere, and now, somehow, these resources are nowhere to be found?

That occured to human settlements accross history, depleting tin copper iron gold coal or oil, and then their civilization vanish, migrate, evolve, and the region is no longer considered a source of "tin gold copper or iron" for people coming later in history and they also wonder who and how were builts some of the monuments from the past.

And also, aliens use the very same intermediate products as you do? Aren't aliens supposed to be, you know, aliens? Imagine we find the remains of the ancient alien civilization on mars, start digging, and find out that they used MOS6502's in their computers. This is what this alien recycling looks like.

No the recycler is retrofitting some things ! i suppose , ok that one is a bit weird, for metal it make sense but for circuits ? I'm going to pretend some circuits are like microchip with a single function, like an accelerometer, or a memory block, and with little technology, it's the engineer that is able to use alien tech or make it compatible for some use, not the alien who have human tech.

Also, capturing the lighting to produce electricity? Come on, most of your player base are engineers, they know better.

Engineers are allowed to dream too ! Lightsaber are not real but they are super cool !

[XT-248]

The concept of salvaging/recycling as the central theme of Fulgora is intriguing but not appealing enough to make me want to select it as the first destination. I will elaborate more on why as I go along.


The weather is tame on Nauvis, and one can build enough infrastructure off-world to deal with a potential loss of factories, logistics, and others due to night lighting, which is more than I can say for a particular Space-theme mod starting area having such loss early in the burner phase.

I suppose I could get used to the idea of having to build lightning rods or near alien ruins for protection, but I am not in love with the concept.

Does the power pole connection to and from remote islands require a lightning rod? How will one build power poles in the oily lowland without being damaged or destroyed by lightning strikes? A new hardened/grounded power pole? There are in-real-life buildings with lightning attractors on top of them to channel the energy to the ground instead of a distinct separate building.




Initially, I was skeptical of the challenge and fun involving a non-deterministic production line. In the end, I am disillusioned with the concept of scrap recycling. I get that WUBE is trying to avoid repetition; there is too much reliance on the recycling process. Having a few items removed as a source from recycling scrap to mineable deposits (stone is a good candidate for this) or already having an alternative source (heavy oil to solid fuel; remove from scrap) should help mitigate the overreliance.

Some aspects looked interesting initially, but I can see myself dealing with high-end products by reserving some for end-product production and recycling high-end products for raw materials.

From a high-level perspective, restricting holmium ore to only show up from recycling scrap sounds like a fresh concept from a story point of view. I have had my share of experiencing non-deterministic recipes from mods that approach the same idea in the same way as presented in the blog.

One inherited problem involving non-deterministic recipes like those is that one of the outlets can become bottlenecked if consumption is not balanced. For example, solid fuel is the second most common material on average. Lightning rods absorb energy during the night into accumulators, Ice + offshore pump-Heavy-Oil-to-solid-fuel boilers to generate energy during the day, rocket launches, and maybe rocket fuel for train logistics.

Then I look at the bottomless pool of heavy oil on Fulgora. I can crank as much solid fuel as I want or need. Why do I need solid fuel from recycling? Or even concrete or stone? Can I unlock the Fulgora landfill early enough to prevent a complete gridlock because all logistics are full of stones blocking/backing-up to the recyclers?


One of the fewest highlights of the blog I am excited about is the electromagnetic plant with its five slots and built-in 50% productivity.


PS, I will repeat one of the requests I made some time ago. Please allow us to change to a different name scheme, something appropriately less fantasy-theme—Q1 to Q5 or optimized or some other options. I will be glad if an alternative name scheme exists that doesn't remind me of a legend in a Role-Playing Game.

I think it also make a good gameplay to have to deal with some fix income ratio of material and to deal with the byproduct, it is well adapted to what we can do in factorio , many way to tackle the problem, many ways to consider one's priority and strategize for it.

Erm. I can't entirely agree with the 'fixed income ratio' bit; as said in this blog explicitly, the existence of recycling avoids repeating the typical miners 'fixed' incoming material mechanics that players are used to on Nauvis (burner miner, offshore pump, electric miner, and pumpjack) and Vulcanis (big miner).

The existence of non-deterministic and non-handled excess byproducts creates unique challenges that conflict with other production lines or block them from producing other necessities. There is no question that it can and will do this. Acting like it can be 'solved in many ways' will not change the reality of oscillating, starved, or blocked production lines.

I would be remiss to point out that it is not fun or challenging to "return to Fulgora to manually clear stones or ice or whatever excessed product" for the umpteenth time. I know this to be true because it has happened to me in mods, especially those well-known for having production lines with imbalanced input/output and non-deterministic in some cases.

[Qon]

Um, does this mean that UPS usage from distinct electric networks will be fixed? Because this sounds like it would destroy perfomance in 1.1.

I am also interested in hearing if this issue will be resolved.

It has been fixed in 2.0

Out of curiosity, was this mentioned by Wube anywhere?

Yes

[tjark_neutronium]

Can you pls add a battery wagon to transport energy by train

[malecord]

Thank you for your condescending reply, I could not have decided myself to buy or not to buy the expansion. I would have bought the expansion even if I did not like anything in it, simply to support the devs, since I have been getting pretty solid content all those years.
Funny how you also do not understand, that I am not complaining about cliffs in the current version, since cliff removal tech is easily achieved, which will not be the case in the expansion, according to currently available information.
I'd appreciate if you let me have an opinion and influence on the content to come, like I did in the past 11 years on this forum.

My 2 cents... cliffs and water (and soon lava, tar and whatever else) adds complexity to the puzzle. You need to build a factory design that fits in the terrain. And so every playthrough is slightly different.

Now in vanilla every veteran player knows what's the goto route, until late game megafactory at least. It's main bus. You can build it directly if you have space, or you can build a small factory, unlock cliff explosives and then build the main bus and scale until megafactory (or until you're tired).

Pushing landfill and cliff charges later in the game means to remove main bus as a "one design fits all" for every planet. It makes every planet a more interesting challenge in each playthrough, as you have to improvise something everytime.

I can see that in every game I will have to land on a planet, build a factory that fits the terrain, unlock tech and go next planet. Then later on, when I need to scale the machine to reach victory or just grow, redesign each planet using end game techs like fill and explosives. And I'm fine, I can see why devs want that way.

Always remember that this is a very moddable game. I'm pretty sure on day 1 there will be a mod to have explosives and landfill unlocked from start or very early. It's a very easy mod to do even for non modders. And if it becomes popular enough it will become an option at game start.

[pleegwat]

How come the Engineer can build towers to support aerial railways, but not to support power lines?

[jackthesmack]

One inherited problem involving non-deterministic recipes like those is that one of the outlets can become bottlenecked if consumption is not balanced. For example, solid fuel is the second most common material on average. Lightning rods absorb energy during the night into accumulators, Ice + offshore pump-Heavy-Oil-to-solid-fuel boilers to generate energy during the day, rocket launches, and maybe rocket fuel for train logistics.

Doesn't Space Age have ways to throw away items? Just have a priority splitter and if the belt gets backed up, the items go into the garbage.

[Qon]

I suppose I could get used to the idea of having to build lightning rods or near alien ruins for protection, but I am not in love with the concept.

You need power poles all around your factory already, it's not that different. Though these also work like night solar panels as well, so you basically have to put your power plant mixed in with the production.

Does the power pole connection to and from remote islands require a lightning rod? How will one build power poles in the oily lowland without being damaged or destroyed by lightning strikes? A new hardened/grounded power pole? There are in-real-life buildings with lightning attractors on top of them to channel the energy to the ground instead of a distinct separate building.

Yes, the power poles need protection but the wire does not. You don't build power poles on oily lowland, it's impossible, it's like water except you can walk on it. But if you landfill to place poles you can just protect the poles with the lightning rod just like everywhere else.

One inherited problem involving non-deterministic recipes like those is that one of the outlets can become bottlenecked if consumption is not balanced. For example, solid fuel is the second most common material on average. Lightning rods absorb energy during the night into accumulators, Ice + offshore pump-Heavy-Oil-to-solid-fuel boilers to generate energy during the day, rocket launches, and maybe rocket fuel for train logistics.

The existence of non-deterministic and non-handled excess byproducts creates unique challenges that conflict with other production lines or block them from producing other necessities. There is no question that it can and will do this. Acting like it can be 'solved in many ways' will not change the reality of oscillating, starved, or blocked production lines.

I would be remiss to point out that it is not fun or challenging to "return to Fulgora to manually clear stones or ice or whatever excessed product" for the umpteenth time. I know this to be true because it has happened to me in mods, especially those well-known for having production lines with imbalanced input/output and non-deterministic in some cases.

The non-determinism is a red herring, it has no effect on gameplay. You will get everything in proportion and you don't have to consider luck or bad luck.

Excess byproducts can be handled in many ways. There is never a need to manually clear out things you don't have a use for, you can just void them automatically. Fulgora is the planet that gives you the void machine.

[MeduSalem]

- You have to build defensive coverage everywhere you build - check, although this time it seem you don't get a planet-wide solution, but HAVE to do it on every point.

I wonder how you deal with it on Nauvis with biters. You have to build defense... everywhere... and if you use gun turrets and the likes you also need to ship ammuntion, which is even more tedious. There you don't complain or do you play without biters?

At least the lightning rods are stamp down & forget.

- You need to ship in a resource which is usually abundant and is needed in huge amounts - check. "But you don't have to" - yeah, trains will be burning what then?

Well, there seems to be oil for forever and 3 days. Just make Solid fuel. Don't know what you are complaining about there. You basically contradict yourself a few lines further down when you mention that the planet has oil.

On the contrary it should actually be sooo much easier to provide it because you can basically pump oil out of the next lake and make solid fuel out of it. Don't even need a refill-station in your train schedules.

- No "landfill" - you now HAVE to build spaghetti for the third time now, because that's obviously such a fun mechanic somehow, being cramped.

There will be a landfill, just later down the line. They even wrote it in one of the paragraphs.

Also you don't have to build spaghetti. Do it with bots if you don't want weird belt path, or do you have an expensive "I feel too good to use bots"-subscription you can't cancel? xD

I know I will likely do it with bots because I never was the spaghetti-type even on Nauvis.

- Recycling - [...] It is not fun to have 98237546 byproducts, and have to have a convoluted way to delete them from the world is just not fun, and not interesting gameplay. This is the same as robots needing maintenance, assemblers needing lubrication, and other tedium-inducing mods.

Don't be ridiculous. The items the scrap gives are easily broken down into first-tier intermediate items like plates and plastic. You don't even need a 3rd cascade of recyclers to get to it.
It just replaces your usual setup of first tier assemblers like furnaces/oil refineries.
Also there is good use for a lot of the items the scrap gives so you don't have to craft them. So you probably don't even need to recycle everything all the time. I know I won't and I will only start recycling something when I can't get the resource I want otherwise or chests start overflowing from the excess.

[VegaTheLich]

One inherited problem involving non-deterministic recipes like those is that one of the outlets can become bottlenecked if consumption is not balanced. For example, solid fuel is the second most common material on average. Lightning rods absorb energy during the night into accumulators, Ice + offshore pump-Heavy-Oil-to-solid-fuel boilers to generate energy during the day, rocket launches, and maybe rocket fuel for train logistics.

Doesn't Space Age have ways to throw away items? Just have a priority splitter and if the belt gets backed up, the items go into the garbage.

Yes. On Vulcanus you can put unwanted materials back into the lava to destroy it. With recyclers you can feed unwanted output back into itself in a loop, similar to seablock's compost voiding.

[wodzu93]

Doesn't Space Age have ways to throw away items? Just have a priority splitter and if the belt gets backed up, the items go into the garbage.

Yes, there are. On Vulcanus, lava is a resource dump. Throw undesirable material there, all goes poof.

Everywhere else, you use the Recycler. If you feed it a material that is a dead-end (can't be broken down to simpler things anymore, Iron Plate or Stone for example), Recycler will output the same item at 25% chance. All you need to do is connect Recycler's output to it's input and you get an universal item remover.

This makes multiple output recipes like scrap processing immune to deadlocking, simply send excess production to the item deleter setup.

[mmmPI]

Erm. I can't entirely agree with the 'fixed income ratio' bit; as said in this blog explicitly, the existence of recycling avoids repeating the typical miners 'fixed' incoming material mechanics that players are used to on Nauvis (burner miner, offshore pump, electric miner, and pumpjack) and Vulcanis (big miner).

The existence of non-deterministic and non-handled excess byproducts creates unique challenges that conflict with other production lines or block them from producing other necessities. There is no question that it can and will do this. Acting like it can be 'solved in many ways' will not change the reality of oscillating, starved, or blocked production lines.

It is your right, what i meant by fix income is that unlike mining drill that allow to have an income of iron or copper and increase one or the other, the income of material on Fulgora will have "fixed income ratio", meaning you will always have the same amount of iron per copper for income, even if you do not consume the same ratio over the course of the game. This is what you describe as a problem. But to me this is like oil refining, where you can't have more "petroleum gas" if you don't deal with the "heavy oil" or "light oil" that could clog the system.

I think there will be several ways to handle the excess ressources that are not needed and may risk clogging the system, in space you can throw them out of platform, in Vulcanus you can throw them in lava, and in Fulgora i suppose the spotlight is made onto the recycling, so i suppose there will be ways to get rid of excess stone like there is a way to refine heavy oil and light oil. If you consistently have an excess of one ressource, it makes it a good candidate for exporting over space, or making high quality, this is part of the strategy to me, figuring out the "most efficent" use of such ressources, in that particular game, at that time. Weighting in if it's worth it to build a recycling facility or a sorting one, or a zone for assembly, or an export area ,this is part of what i like as a challenge in space exploration, localizing production based on the environment and available ressources is made more exciting when there are very different environment & ressources that have significant impact on the strategy.

I said i think it could be difficult on a remote planet where you may have to travel accross half the galaxy to fix it, so i'm not totally unaware of the thing i share some of your concern, but i'm confident it will be fun to solve when released

[BEEFE]

Fun stuff, and very tickled that all the stuff that was hinted at last week is real.

Looking at the scrap recycling products, I'm reminded of how the advanced electric poles all use copper plates instead of wires. That was always kinda weird, but it seems like it'd be a lot more jarring on Fulgora. Substations take steel and red circuits directly from the scrap, but you have to recycle the copper wire into a less refined state?

I guess you recycle batteries to get iron plates for transport belts and inserters, which yields a ton of copper plates too, and I have no idea how that surplus works out, but either way it feels tonally weird.


That minor (and easily fixed, even if by modding) gripe aside, super exciting stuff!