The +300% productivity cap should be documented in-game or removed

[xylo]

TL;DR

The +300% cap on the productivity bonus is not documented anywhere in-game; it should either be mentioned in the Factoriopedia or (preferably) removed entirely.

What?

Factorio has many gameplay restrictions currently undocumented in-game. Such restrictions should be either documented or removed. The worst offender IMO is the hidden productivity bonus cap at +300%. It is especially bad since the game strongly hints that no such cap exists, and since the player needs to spend at least 580k automation, logistic, chemical, production and electromagnetic science packs to reach "processing unit productivity 13" and possibly hit the cap. That's a lot of resources to spend before realizing that the recycler loop the player was likely planning to use is not actually allowed by the game.

The reasons a reasonable player could think there is no productivity bonus cap are:

1. The efficiency module description mentions the efficiency cap. The productivity module description doesn't mention the productivity cap. A player will expect consistency, and deduce that any description not explicitly mentioning a cap means that the corresponding bonus is uncapped.
2. The productivity technologies are all infinitely repeatable. If the productivity bonus was capped at +300%, surely the repeatability range would have been 1 — 30 instead of 1 — ∞, right?
3. The large amount of science required, the fact that the there would be no way to "dupe" any item whose raw materials include stones, uranium, or any planet specific resources or items, and the fact that processing units have a liquid ingredient all suggest that the game was actually balanced with recycler loops in mind for the late game.

BTW, the other undocumented restrictions in 2.0.15 I can think of are:

• The construction surface conditions of the cargo landing pad don't mention the 1 per surface limit
• Module descriptions don't mention which modules cannot be used in beacons
• The productivity module description incorrectly implies that they can be used for all intermediate products
• The productivity module description misleadingly suggests that they are allowed on a product basis, while they are allowed on a recipe basis (for example, they are allowed for producing nutrients from everything but fish)
• The concept of catalysts is not explained anywhere in the game, as far as I can tell

Ideally, all those restrictions should be either documented or removed. In the case of the productivity cap, I think a removal is the best solution.

Why?

Factorio requires planning, and it requires that the player knows the rules. If a player encounters an undocumented gameplay limitation only after having invested time and resources trying to do something the game does not allow, it hinders planning and feels frustrating, especially when the amount of resources wasted is big. It also breaks the principle of least astonishment.

Generally speaking, a good rule set has as few exceptions as possible, so the best way to solve undocumented restrictions is to lift them, or to rework them so that they are no longer necessary (for instance, why not simply put the recipes that don't work with productivity modules in another category than "intermediate products"?). Of course, documenting said restrictions does the job too, but it feels like a less satisfying resolution. In any case, it is not a good idea to leave important gameplay restrictions undocumented in-game.

Notes

There are already mods allowing to remove the productivity cap. I thought I'd share my reasoning anyway.

[Dixi]

I have a feeling, that author of this post is a lawyer
A lot of games are about exploration, and unpredictable results one can meet on a way or in the end.
Factorio actually has much more information displayed and documented, compared to many other games.

Okay, xylo, you planned to make endless resource production recycle factory but fails due to unannounced game limitation. I think you still had fun on a way, and this shows only that you plan was predicted and limited by Wube. For some reason they decide that endless resources from recycle is not a right thing. Since Space Age already has many endless things, like lava, asteroids, plants, I see no problem at all in this part of game design.

[CyberCider]

I mean, the cap has to exist. It exists to prevent infinite item duplication using recyclers. That has no place in vanilla. And as you said, if a mod wants to make it possible, it can.

[BlueTemplar]

The realistic way to do this (which would also make this cap obvious) would be, for instance, to scale it all down by 4, so default recipes are considered to be wasting something like 75% of their ingredients, and productivity can raise that somewhat (and probably with diminishing returns, so you never actually hit 100% ingredient efficiency, but approach it asymptotically).

But I guess this would make the early game more complicated to figure out
(maybe not the very early game — only when starting to use productivity, since before it wouldn't change anything ?),
which is why Wube didn't go with it
(and also why they removed fuel to power (in)efficiency on vanilla boilers and/or steam engines).

[Zaflis]

I just realized that there is no documented info anywhere if scrap recycling research is affected by 300% cap or not. I can only assume that it is not.

Edit: As it is in 2.0.20 the scrap recycling is affected by 300% limit, even though in bonuses UI it says 310% in my editor save.

However to reach it requires researching for over 2 hours at 1 million eSPM. (I sped the game up 8x) Almost noone is going to reach it.

[zig1000]

No doubt the ship has sailed, but one idea might be for the recycler to return an amount of ingredients inversely proportional to the global productivity level of the given item. This is theoretically bypassable by some loop involving two different recipe chains, but in practice I'm not sure whether it actually is abusable as the number of items with alternate recipes is limited. Would almost certainly end up abusable in some mod though.

[Romayne]

I disagree entirely with the cap being removed for base SA, a mod that removes the cap by choice though? Sure.

+1 for the idea of documenting this feature, -1/2 for clumping two suggestions together, -1 for the idea of removing it entirely.

TL;DR anything over 300% would mean infinite items from recycling, trivially. right now, PUs can break even, and that's rough as is lol

[DoubLL]

A lot of games are about exploration, and unpredictable results one can meet on a way or in the end.

I mean, the cap has to exist. It exists to prevent infinite item duplication using recyclers.

Those are absolutely not valid reasons to not display the cap in-game.
As xylo said, the efficiency cap is mentioned in the description of the efficiency module. You could also say that the -80% cap is something that players should explore and find for themselves, but to what end? What point is there in hiding something like this from the player? This isn’t some cool fancy feature or “spoiler” – though Factorio doesn’t seem to care about spoilers anyway since the Factoriopedia lists everything, regardless of if you have researched or encountered it – it’s simply an arbitrary game mechanic.
Don’t get me wrong, the cap SHOULD exist in my opinion, but it should also be clear to the player that it exists.

Factorio actually has much more information displayed and documented, compared to many other games.

This is just another argument for why it should exist. Factorio has set the standard that it is very well documented and that should be maintained.
It’s also not actually that hard to hit the cap. With 8 legendary P3 modules in a cryo plant you only need plastic prod 10, which costs only 57k science packs, to reach 300%.

And, as a small aside: while I personally think the cap is good and should remain in the game, there really isn’t anything wrong with being able to generate infinite resources through recyclers. As you might be aware,

it’s already possible to generate infinite legendary steel and copper plates without any inputs on Vulcanus. So, infinite everything wouldn’t really be all that unusual.

[DefGie]

I agree as far as it's bonkers that there are infinite research technologies that after a certain number of iterations stop providing actual improvement. I assumed as much since the FFF covering the recycler described this cap as "hard-coded" but obviously players should not be required to read the blog to properly understand the game. I could possibly get behind making everything with productivity infinite research recycle to itself in exchange for removing this cap, but only with clear in-game information documenting what recycles to components vs to self. And it would feel pretty arbitrary, but probably not as bad as infinite research that isn't infinite, if you ask me.

Or they could throw out the entire concept of the recycler (and redo Fulgora from the ground up) since it fundamentally clashes with the much older mechanic of productivity. Ha. Ha. I don't even know what alternative I would suggest if this were a legitimate recommendation.

[IsaacOscar]

I personally have no problem with the cap as it makes sense.
My problem however is that some of the infinite technologies are now a lie.
But the only way to exceed the cap is researching those technologies, if their maximum level was appropriately limited, the cap could then simply be removed.

(I assume the cap doesn't apply to mining drills or pumpjacks though, as that would be totally unnecessary, and the infinite technology makes perfect sense as it makes your mines last longer).

[BlueTemplar]

I gave you an alternative.

The asymptotic solution (where higher infinite research levels stay relevant) might also be implemented without redoing the productivity concept from the ground up, in an ad-hoc fashion for vanilla (knowing what the maximum productivity is possible otherwise).

(Unless there are double-dipping productivity researches, steel and light density structures are suspect here, though steel only self-recycles, so maybe it isn't a problem ??)

[IsaacOscar]

I gave you an alternative.

The asymptotic solution (where higher infinite research levels stay relevant) might also be implemented without redoing the productivity concept from the ground up, in an ad-hoc fashion for vanilla (knowing what the maximum productivity is possible otherwise).

(Unless there are double-dipping productivity researches, steel and light density structures are suspect here, though steel only self-recycles, so maybe it isn't a problem ??)

Honestly, I didn't understand your suggestion much. Can you give like an example with some numbers?

[BlueTemplar]

The first one or this one ?

For this one :
- You know from practice that the maximum productivity you can get for a recipe, without infinite techs, is ×A.
- So you make it so that each subsequent productivity tech level has a smaller effect, and the cumulative effect of that infinite series is ×B.
- Where A×B = 4.

[IsaacOscar]

The first one or this one ?

For this one :
- You know from practice that the maximum productivity you can get for a recipe, without infinite techs, is ×A.
- So you make it so that each subsequent productivity tech level has a smaller effect, and the cumulative effect of that infinite series is ×B.
- Where A×B = 4.

I read both your comments as being essentially the same suggestion.

But yes, the infinite techs having diminishing returns makes sense. (so you can approach 300% productivity, but never reach it).

[BlueTemplar]

No, my first suggestion would require a complete rework of at least how recipes and productivity are displayed, and also maybe how they even work.

The second one is just about tweaking some infinite tech numbers.

[jaylawl]

I read a bunch of posts here associating recycling productivity with re-cycling of items. The research is called scrap recycling productivity though and exclusively affects the scrap recycling recipe.

[IsaacOscar]

I read a bunch of posts here associating recycling productivity with re-cycling of items. The research is called scrap recycling productivity though and exclusively affects the scrap recycling recipe.

No, that's not the problem.
The problem is this:

if you have say a +400% recycling productivity on say iron gear wheels, that means 4 iron plates will make 10 iron gear wheels (usually you only make 2 iron gear wheel).

Now a recycler, returns 1/4 of the ingredients (on average), so putting 2 iron gear wheels gives you pack 1 iron plates (on average).
So if you put our 10 iron gear wheels into the recycler, we get 5 iron plates! But we started with 4 iron plates!
Hence we can make free iron plates.
Now we can use these iron plates to make more iron gear wheels, and recycle them.
So we have a system that creates iron plates, without needing to mine anymore iron ore!

(That was just a hypothetical example, you can't get 400% productivity on iron gear wheels, but you can on other recyclable things like low density structures or processing units).

[Orum]

The +300% limit needs to stay in, at least for the things that it currently affects. What's a bit confusing is that this limit does not apply to everything; e.g. mining productivity research can go well above +300% and is not limited.

I think the best way to solve this for the researches that are limited by the cap is to simply not falsely label them as infinite researches, as they currently are. Once you get a base +300% productivity for them, those techs can no longer be researched.

What if someone that has researched +300% tries to use productivity modules? Well, here the UI should indicate it, much like it does with efficiency modules, which alert you to the -80% limit of energy.

[Nemoricus]

Yeah. Productivity modules should state that they are limited to +300%, inclusive of machine innate bonuses, and productivity researches should be limited to 1-30.

[spacedog]

At the very least, please cap the infinite technologies at level 30. This is technically a bug right now -- the in game tooltips tell you they will increase the productivity to 310%+, but they actually do not. It's a trap for people not paying attention, resulting in a huge amount of wasted time and science packs.

Given how much the devs obviously care about the quality of their game, it's sloppy to leave this as it currently is. If mods want to remove the 300% cap and make these technologies infinite again, they can totally do that.