[2.0] Brave New World

[Omnifarious]

This mod will need to seriously change for 2.0. Mostly, it will get a LOT simpler as 2.0 supports doing practically everything via map view.

I'm thinking of, instead of removing the character, confining the character to another surface (the "Control Room") where they manage what's going on on Nauvis.

I'm also thinking I might add support for a special item in Space Age where, when you land it on the planet, it automatically turns into the starting setup with a roboport and the like.

I'm open to ideas.

[Rafe]

One of my favorite mods. I don't think you need the player character at all as you are the factory. The canon in my head has always been that the direction of factory growth is done by an advanced AI or that a post-human has forgone his humanity and fused with technology and his entire being and identity is embodied as the factory in some unseen mainframe or maybe still in orbit. The belts being like his circulatory system, the steam valves and pistons being his lungs, the little bots flying around being his hands to the radar dishes being his eyes and ears.

As you say landing on a planet is the tricky part as the engineer has to be there to facilitate the initial start and put the platform down as well as atleast one robotport a few bots, and some sort of power solution. A package that deploys automatically might consist of a construction cost of 1 roboport + 20 construction bots and it automatically deploys when dropped near where the map view you are keyed into is.

Another thing I would like to see is if you could remotely drive buggies. For whatever reasons tanks and trains are possible to remotely operate but they didn't offer the same for buggies. Tanks offer robust security without being stationary.

Speaking on buggies having an early buggy or some defensive vehicle at the start along with a few roboports may streamline the the beginning and offer an emergency defense if you are hit by biters due to some unforeseen gap in your defense but that's at your discretion - maybe a personal robotport, bat and solar for one beginning vehicle. As 2.0 stands now you do not need to do any work figuring out a way to refuel or rearm or load equipment on vehicles because the ghostview/map view allows this easily as long as these vehicles are in robotport range so that work is done.

Anyway, love your mod. Played the hell out of with seablock and angels and bobs.

[Omnifarious]

One of my favorite mods. I don't think you need the player character at all as you are the factory. The canon in my head has always been that the direction of factory growth is done by an advanced AI or that a post-human has forgone his humanity and fused with technology and his entire being and identity is embodied as the factory in some unseen mainframe or maybe still in orbit. The belts being like his circulatory system, the steam valves and pistons being his lungs, the little bots flying around being his hands to the radar dishes being his eyes and ears.

The reason I was thinking about having your character "up in space" on an inescapable platform is technical.

Factorio 2.0 has fixed everything that was a major challenge for BNW in 1.0. There were a lot of things in 1.0 that can only be done by your character. And so BNW in 1.0 uses "god mode" to have what is effectively a character with no sprite. This is what allows you to drive vehicles, and why 1.0 BNW, internally, has a bunch of code to try to make sure only a select few items end up in your "inventory" because you can only manipulate these items as a character.

So, effectively, you have a character in BNW, you just can't see it, and there's a bunch of code to prevent you from carrying anything but modules and a few other things in your inventory.

But in Factorio 2.0, you can manipulate everything through the map view if you want to. So, there's no reason to make the character disappear. You can just confine the character.

But, for you, that would break what made the mod most interesting.

See, I was thinking that you were someone sent to exploit the resources of a star system only glimpsed through telescopes, and you weren't given the hazard equipment you would need to actually land on them in favor of a remote controlled bunch of machines that had much wider environmental tolerances than even you could in a hazard suit of some kind.

Hmmm.... so, it sounds like for the mod to be as interesting to people I will still have to remove the character.

There is another issue... I have ideas for how to make the mod compatible with space age. For example, constructing a "landing pack" that had all the stuff you needed to land on your chosen planet. The components would be the roboports, chests, and walls that would be deployed and there would be trigger code that when a cargo pod with a landing pack landed, it would auto-deploy into a BNW starting base.

But, some planets would have peculiar requirements for your landing pack. For example, on Fulgura, there is no way to have a roboport network that spans the map because you can't build on the oil covered ground or in the oil ocean. I'd have to add a special kind of landfill that let you do that in order for BNW to work.

And I think Aquila will pose some unique challenges as well that will make things hard for BNW.

I'm doing a full Space Age playthrough while I think about this.

BTW, BNW isn't "my mod". I've been basically given it by the original author (canidae). But he deserves most of the credit. Almost all of the code in it is his at this point.

[Rafe]

When I zoomed out I noticed that your character name was always hovering where you had recently zoomed out so it makes sense how this mod worked.

If you did confine the engineer to a installation It would be the same, in my opinion, as having some sort of AI mainframe or some transhuman synthetic intelligence integrated into some massive server farm that, both agents, whatever their origins, are interfacing with all the objects and equipment. I don't think you would ruin the experience for me if you had some centralized installation where the putative engineer "exists" in some form or another, it's all head-canon at that point - it's accessory narrative

What always drove me nuts about Factorio was picking up buildings manually. Long iterative sequences of : pickup this lightpole, pick up this inserter, pick of this lightpole x 50 and so on. BNW solved this by giving bots early game alleviating you from this really painful interface task of removing buildings, you simply designate them to be removed and, after some time, they will be. IT didn't so much feel like a cheat mod because you still couldn't build bots and had to research their construction.

Another pet peeve of mine is the idea of a common human running around with 75 metric tons of cement and 20 chemical plants in his backpack - its' a bit more egregious than having a few chemical plants on a belt segment.

Factorio is an amazingly fun game but but the pain of tedium of doing all those repetitive tasks while wrestling with the absurdity that a single mortal man is lifting the weight of an ocean-going cargo vessel's freight is something this mod solved as a gameplay design issue.

I'm also playing through the main game - slowly to experience it fully - I have bots now so it's not so bad. I've been using mods so long that I never had a single achievement. Don't feel you need to rush the mod, i think many of us want to do a vanilla play. Anyway i'm glad I discovered the mod and thank you for your work on it as it solved these issues that are just personal things for me.

[BraveCaperCat]

This mod will have to be renamed to "Brave New Worlds" as there are now multiple such worlds.

[amr_rider]

I myself loved BNW in the last version just i was insane and added uhhh stuff like K2 and SE to it which forced me to add a Few extra items to make it possible to automate i loved the idea of no character it makes you think in different ways to automate i just asking please when most overhaul mods are updates Please make them possible to beat without editor mode. And i think there should be a version for people who dont got the dlc yet [Like meh sad ] plus locking up the player is just asking for players to break the mod