The Kids have won.

[Pippaf1]

Well after along hiatus from the game I decided to return. To my surprises and disgust I fond that the classic oil processing mod no longer works. Well the game is now just of those that no longer think, The dumbing down for the kids is now complete. So it is great reluctance and profound sadness I now must abandon the game. Unless as I hope there is a answer.

[Klonan]

Unless as I hope there is a answer.

I would suggest giving 2.0 a try regardless of your previous preference to the classic oil processing recipes.
Often when we make a simplification in one area, it can leads to opportunities in other places for complexifying.

[eugenekay]

I fond that the classic oil processing mod no longer works.

There were numerous changes to the Lua Mod API between 1.1 and 2.0 - thus, the Version Number was increased.

There are several Mods available for 2.0 which affect oil processing which you may find interesting:

• Steam Cracking includes an option to change the Basic Oil Processing recipe
• BPPOil makes several changes to Oil production chains

If there is a specific Mod which you would like to see Forked/Updated for 2.0 you can try the Ideas and Requests For Mods subforum, or even attempt to Port it yourself.

[Koub]

To my surprises and disgust I fond that the classic oil processing mod no longer works. Well the game is now just of those that no longer think, The dumbing down for the kids is now complete. So it is great reluctance and profound sadness I now must abandon the game.

[Koub] Moderator-me speaking : Some time ago, I had little patience for the trolls and other drama queens. But that was before, now I have none left. I encourage you to fix your attitude.

[pioruns]

Well after along hiatus from the game I decided to return. To my surprises and disgust I fond that the classic oil processing mod no longer works. Well the game is now just of those that no longer think, The dumbing down for the kids is now complete. So it is great reluctance and profound sadness I now must abandon the game. Unless as I hope there is a answer.

Dumbing down? Where exactly has Factorio been dumbed down, seriously?

If you feel the game has become too simple, I strongly suggest trying Pyanodons Mods. I'm currently playing the full Py modpack - already like 200–300 hours in — and I’m still nowhere. It’s incredibly complex and will definitely give you the challenge you're looking for.

[aka13]

Man after all this time I don't even remember what the classic oil processing was exactly. I believe, that instead of gas only, you would receive all 3, without the ability to crack, right?
I remember beelining to t2 oil proc because of it, and spamming tanks. I mean, you could stay in that specific "era" of the game for whatever reason, and the only drawback would be to construct more tanks, or construct-deconstruct in the old times to void it.
Or am I misremembering? If I am not, I still would say it was a change for the better, to not have the intro to oil be a too big a step at a time.

(Sulfuric acid and oil imo still remain the biggest step-up in pre-SA games, nevertheless)

[Shirasik]

Well after along hiatus from the game I decided to return. To my surprises and disgust I fond that the classic oil processing mod no longer works. Well the game is now just of those that no longer think, The dumbing down for the kids is now complete. So it is great reluctance and profound sadness I now must abandon the game. Unless as I hope there is a answer.

What? When vanilla Factorio was any complex? Try real-life engineering. In Factorio you don't have to deal with millions of different materials (not exaggeration, google for lists of alloys, different plastics, composites etc), climate/weather conditions, dumb users, irresponsible operators, maintenance, regulations, etc etc etc etc. Even always-keep-in-mind stuff like grid oscillation for power grids never was represented in Factorio. Man, in vanilla Factorio you can transfer any power using. A. Single. Copper. Wire. This ignores even Ohm's law which is school-grade basic stuff. Not even rust or any other sort of material degradation is in Factorio. Vanilla Factorio always was a fun action movie not any sort of engineering simulation.

[jaxmed2]

Not sure if troll or just seriously nitpicky, but realistically what additional benefit or challenge is there to having to juggle multiple outputs before you can unlock the cracking research? Just force some additional busywork of adding a bunch of extra tank buffers? What interesting gameplay mechanics does that offer? Unless your suggestion is to just remove basic oil processing altogether and make cracking available from the outset then I don't understand the complaint. Forcing players to juggle multiple outputs before there's any real solution available to actually manage or balance those multiple outputs doesn't make for an interesting experience.

[mmmPI]

Won ? I think in those years what most kids have done is GROWN

If you are refering to this mod : https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Pre0-17-60Oil , that wasn't updated for 2.0, it appears that someone still do the maintenance, so you should probably contact them , maybe your positive energy will inspire some motivation x)

[quyxkh]

[…]Where exactly has Factorio been dumbed down, seriously?

While I don't agree that oil processing has been dumbed down, the three-fluids problem was still there and still not optional last I checked, a *lot* of things that used to require in-game cleverness now only require knowing which checkboxes on the UI to check or have been removed entirely.

Used to be, assembler buffers were small enough that using speed modules on the very fastest recipes, copper cables and green chips for instance, you could overrun them, you could build an assembler that ran so fast you couldn't fit enough inserters on them to load and/or unload fast enough the assembler would stall waiting for ingredients or output buffer space… unless you were clever. Now you just bung on more modules and enough inserters, having the fastest assemblers isn't an achievement any more, it's not even an option. The game got *spectacularly* dumbed down for that one, you don't have to wire up your inserters to keep their pickups staggered or anything. You don't even have to ask.

Used to be, you had to be clever to filter a belt. Now it's a checkbox. But hey, at least you can still build a belt filter, a multi-item or selective filter can be useful.

Used to be, splitters would balance the belts per item type, they'd remember which belt they last put say steel on and try to put the next steel on the other belt if they could. You could achieve some startling effects with this. There was this guy XKnight who build a filter splitter *using just splitters*. But the effects were too startling, the sort of little boys whose parents failed them so badly they'll publicly and ceaselessly blame games for their private embarrassment when they encounter any a challenge harder than knowing which "I win!" button to push, the mommy-make-it-easy-for-me whiners, just kept coming. So now splitters are dumbed down, you can't push them hard enough that they do anything neat or startling any more, getting peak performance doesn't require you to be clever any more.

Used to be, you had to get clever to get trains to choose the best say mining outpost for ore pickup, and as your train network grew you had to get clever-er. Now it's just "train limit". Global train routing doesn't require you to be clever any more.

Those are the ones that I could still get mad about if I fed and watered that part of my character. Just answering this was enough to do it tttt, genuinely sorry for however much of that leaked into the tone here. They're the challenges that elevated it a bit above "just a game" for me. Now? Now it's "just a game". Anybody looking for harder-core engineering challenges and wants the world to feel realer than say a Zachtronics game, wants the challenges to feel intrinsic and implicit, there's Stationeers, or Space Engineers on survival with all the rates and capacities turned down to "realistic", in either of those things that look ridiculously tedious or even just broken are the game's way of telling you to get more clever with what you've got available: they've still got the kind of puzzles that Wube have steadily stripped out of Factorio. Both of those shops have let the kids whine endlessly about how brooookeennn things are, Keen's got a public bug-report site and it's got ten frikking years of ceaseless bug reports about several in-game challenges; Keen have never once responded with so much as a "you can achieve this in-game already" and their communities remain mostly silent too.

[h.q.droid]

While I don't agree that oil processing has been dumbed down, the three-fluids problem was still there and still not optional last I checked, a *lot* of things that used to require in-game cleverness now only require knowing which checkboxes on the UI to check or have been removed entirely.

Used to be, assembler buffers were small enough that using speed modules on the very fastest recipes, copper cables and green chips for instance, you could overrun them, you could build an assembler that ran so fast you couldn't fit enough inserters on them to load and/or unload fast enough the assembler would stall waiting for ingredients or output buffer space… unless you were clever. Now you just bung on more modules and enough inserters, having the fastest assemblers isn't an achievement any more, it's not even an option. The game got *spectacularly* dumbed down for that one, you don't have to wire up your inserters to keep their pickups staggered or anything. You don't even have to ask.

Used to be, you had to be clever to filter a belt. Now it's a checkbox. But hey, at least you can still build a belt filter, a multi-item or selective filter can be useful.

Used to be, splitters would balance the belts per item type, they'd remember which belt they last put say steel on and try to put the next steel on the other belt if they could. You could achieve some startling effects with this. There was this guy XKnight who build a filter splitter *using just splitters*. But the effects were too startling, the sort of little boys whose parents failed them so badly they'll publicly and ceaselessly blame games for their private embarrassment when they encounter any a challenge harder than knowing which "I win!" button to push, the mommy-make-it-easy-for-me whiners, just kept coming. So now splitters are dumbed down, you can't push them hard enough that they do anything neat or startling any more, getting peak performance doesn't require you to be clever any more.

Used to be, you had to get clever to get trains to choose the best say mining outpost for ore pickup, and as your train network grew you had to get clever-er. Now it's just "train limit". Global train routing doesn't require you to be clever any more.

Those are the ones that I could still get mad about if I fed and watered that part of my character. Just answering this was enough to do it tttt, genuinely sorry for however much of that leaked into the tone here. They're the challenges that elevated it a bit above "just a game" for me. Now? Now it's "just a game". Anybody looking for harder-core engineering challenges and wants the world to feel realer than say a Zachtronics game, wants the challenges to feel intrinsic and implicit, there's Stationeers, or Space Engineers on survival with all the rates and capacities turned down to "realistic", in either of those things that look ridiculously tedious or even just broken are the game's way of telling you to get more clever with what you've got available: they've still got the kind of puzzles that Wube have steadily stripped out of Factorio. Both of those shops have let the kids whine endlessly about how brooookeennn things are, Keen's got a public bug-report site and it's got ten frikking years of ceaseless bug reports about several in-game challenges; Keen have never once responded with so much as a "you can achieve this in-game already" and their communities remain mostly silent too.

Have you tried spoilage, scrap recycling, or quality? Rather than complaining about the obsoletion of your old skills, you can pick up new ones. Never blame the kids, chance is they're better than us at our old tricks and they just find them too boring. Been there, done that.

[quyxkh]

Have you tried spoilage, scrap recycling, or quality? Rather than complaining about the obsoletion of your old skills, you can pick up new ones. Never blame the kids, chance is they're better than us at our old tricks and they just find them too boring. Been there, done that.

There's fair points in there, but I was answering a specific question about specific ways in which the game has been dumbed down. I was blaming (and their behavior is entirely blameworthy) the ones who go about claiming what many others can do, but nobody's telling, is impossible; the specific tactic, employed endlessly in every challenging-game forum I can recall, is to whine about some puzzle being broken or bad or whatever seems most vile, most likely to get attention, until someone spoils the puzzle, hands it to the ~it is known~ meme-regurgitators just to get them to shut up. Mostly they're so lazy they tire of even whining before someone gets goaded into that.

[Stargateur]

I still don't like the special oil recipe, but say "the kids have won" is stupid. I agree with the dev that oil is a big step for new player I just don't like much their solution.

[h.q.droid]

There's fair points in there, but I was answering a specific question about specific ways in which the game has been dumbed down. I was blaming (and their behavior is entirely blameworthy) the ones who go about claiming what many others can do, but nobody's telling, is impossible; the specific tactic, employed endlessly in every challenging-game forum I can recall, is to whine about some puzzle being broken or bad or whatever seems most vile, most likely to get attention, until someone spoils the puzzle, hands it to the ~it is known~ meme-regurgitators just to get them to shut up. Mostly they're so lazy they tire of even whining before someone gets goaded into that.

Well, I'm now taking this as a part of the modernization. All puzzles have become spoilable in the internet age and their shelf life decreased even more in the tiktok age. Whining about a puzzle can be annoying but the fact is, puzzles get spoiled fast regardless. Going back is not an option, we need to accept that arcane knowledge accumulated through creativity or experience is not as valuable as they were before.

What I see as a promising new replacement is the trend of continuous optimization, here in the quality aspect of Factorio. There is visible evolution from copy-paste upcyclers to space casino, LDS shuffling and ore washing. The current optimal solution at any stage spreads almost instantly, but the community pushes on and keeps coming up with better ones. The short shelf lives of puzzles also forced them to have more depth, which I perceive as a good thing.

[quyxkh]

The short shelf lives of puzzles also forced them to have more depth, which I perceive as a good thing.

I suspect I've gotten far enough into the devs' heads that I understand enough about how they imagine and choose puzzles, that the new stuff I encountered in 2.0 just wasn't new enough to be a challenge any more.

But for the rest there, did you notice me mentioning that some of the puzzles had *not* been spoiled even after ten-ish years?

I mean, you're posting plausible and attractive-sounding speculation, but the long-running questions about those problems, sprinkled with the kind of complaints I mentioned, are on record and I think form a pretty solid argument that their shelf life did not match your description in any way, just that one simple fact.

I distinctly remember being in all but so many words called a liar (not in these forums, elsewhere) because I said train routing with the pre-"train limit" mechanics was solvable with combinators, no mods or train limits required, and this was after the train limits had been added (but while turning a chosen destination off was still possible and forced a repath somewhere else): the entire lifetime of trains up to then, near ten years.

Nobody ever spoiled it. The solutions people posted to the big main-sequence problems were not the best solutions, to my way because they didn't want to spoil them. I suppose it's too late to go back now, the basics of the stunt with the trains was (for pickup, delivery after was the same stunt) to code pickup types into a signal, two bits each, I never used more than, what, five? Anyway:

The low bit of the pair is (when a station sends it) "have" that pickup order, can satisfy it on arrival, and (when carried with a train) "want" that pickup order, want to go to a station that can satisfy it. Red wire along the track carries "want" signals, green wire carries "have" signals. "Have" signals are carried uninterrupted between switch/station entries and the switch/station exits that feed them; at each signal, visible "want" signals are propagated onward when the signal is reserved and cleared when its exit block goes green; switch entry signals don't wait, they immediately propagate the wants, each exit from that junction adds the inbound "have" and "want" signals and turns red/green for no/any carry bits indicating has/wants something available behind that switch exit; switch junction entry "or"s the "have" entries from all its exits and forwards that inwards. That's pretty much it, merges are analogous, the trip back for delivery is almost exactly similar just with "want" and "have" (purely notionally) swapped. With anything short of a megabase mining net you can just name your ore stations "ore" and have them send the "have" signal for whatever ore they've got a trainload of, when some production station wants more ore a train with an "ore pickup" and "ore delivery" and "ore dispatch" schedule gets dispatched with the "wants" signal for that particular ore and at every junction it chooses an exit that lets it route to a station that has what it wants, those having already been set up before it ever arrived. If you're not producing an excess this needs some further sophistication, you need to be sure there's a retry loop, if the pickup route lenghts get too widely spread the really distant ones can get ignored but there's obvious fixes for that, la la, and it can be easier to have separate pickup trains and schedules for each ore type, but the idea works and extending it to a megabase was comparatively straightforward.

I never once saw that solution posted, *every* solution ever saw used a mod, they all scripted schedule updates or just didn't work well. This is less true of the others I mentioned, but filtering a belt was also much simpler and while the splitters only showed their quirks under heavy load I've *never* understood the obsession with "belt compression", except for rail they're *by far* the cheapest thing you build, keep your assemblers running flat out, if you do it with three splitters and six 60% belts or two splitters and four 90% belts, it's the same number of assemblers and inserters either way, if they're 100% utilized in both cases the resource cost amortizes to no difference at all in seconds, the ups cost of, what a handful of splitters in an entire megabase? is a rounding error on nothing and the simplicity benefit of just "enough to handle this and maybe even one more" belt layouts is huge.

It's somewhat the same with Space Engineers and things like early prospecting or survival-mode subgrid projectoring or setting up stationkeeping, they're not hard like the global train routing was but more in "how… how did I not see that?" "duh!" territory but the genius of them is they're (going on ten years of evidence here) they only seem obvious in hindsight. I remember the moment I was thinking "it *can't* be this tedious" about hand drill mining and realized, oh, wait, maybe I can' actually get that far without a bottle.", it was the moment I fell in love with the game, just for asking me to have a little faith that a problem that wasn't explicitly called out as A Problem was in fact solvable anyway, for rewarding that faith. In both SE and Stationeers the very best problems have layer upon layer of progressively-more-clever solutions. Kinda like using assemblers used to be in Factorio, and train routing, and sushi/trash management on belts. Except those *weren't* spoiled. They were simply taken out of the game. You can't even mod some of them back in, it's not just pointless, it's not possible Which did shut the whiners up, but that consequence also factored in to why I described those specific changes, in this thread, to the question I was answering.

Whether or not I like the changes is not debatable. Whether or not the changes simplified the puzzles basically out of existence is not debatable. Whether or not Wube have a perfect right to make exactly the game they want is *also* not debatable, and if the game they want produces lots of happy players and makes them able to do more games they want to make, absolutely yay for them and their players. But the question I answered was very specific and phrased as a rude "put up or shut up" demand. I'd recommend not mouthing platitudes about brusque replies to posturing demands while staying silent about said posturing demands, it leads people to suspect you're aware you're putting your thumb on the scale.

[h.q.droid]

The low bit of the pair is (when a station sends it) "have" that pickup order, can satisfy it on arrival, and (when carried with a train) "want" that pickup order, want to go to a station that can satisfy it. Red wire along the track carries "want" signals, green wire carries "have" signals. "Have" signals are carried uninterrupted between switch/station entries and the switch/station exits that feed them; at each signal, visible "want" signals are propagated onward when the signal is reserved and cleared when its exit block goes green; switch entry signals don't wait, they immediately propagate the wants, each exit from that junction adds the inbound "have" and "want" signals and turns red/green for no/any carry bits indicating has/wants something available behind that switch exit; switch junction entry "or"s the "have" entries from all its exits and forwards that inwards. That's pretty much it, merges are analogous, the trip back for delivery is almost exactly similar just with "want" and "have" (purely notionally) swapped. With anything short of a megabase mining net you can just name your ore stations "ore" and have them send the "have" signal for whatever ore they've got a trainload of, when some production station wants more ore a train with an "ore pickup" and "ore delivery" and "ore dispatch" schedule gets dispatched with the "wants" signal for that particular ore and at every junction it chooses an exit that lets it route to a station that has what it wants, those having already been set up before it ever arrived. If you're not producing an excess this needs some further sophistication, you need to be sure there's a retry loop, if the pickup route lenghts get too widely spread the really distant ones can get ignored but there's obvious fixes for that, la la, and it can be easier to have separate pickup trains and schedules for each ore type, but the idea works and extending it to a megabase was comparatively straightforward.

That sounds like yet another Turing tarpit. Many stuff in Factorio are Turing complete and you can literally do arbitrary computation with them: viewtopic.php?t=12487

That doesn't justify their continued existence in the game. Working with a tarpit you don't need is fun (like all those combinator computers), needing one for something basic (like train routing) is not.

Whether or not the changes simplified the puzzles basically out of existence is not debatable.

I'm just making a point that simplifying the puzzles you mentioned basically out of existence is a GOOD thing, and this is very debatable. There is no need of finger pointing.

[mmmPI]

While I don't agree that oil processing has been dumbed down, the three-fluids problem was still there and still not optional last I checked, a *lot* of things that used to require in-game cleverness now only require knowing which checkboxes on the UI to check or have been removed entirely.

While i agree with most of your says about some of the unproductive whining that flooded as much as it was allowed since the FFF discussion about space age, i dont think that has been having much impact on the development of the game, i see your points that are "not" the fluid system, which i was expecting to read about given the earlier implication of this thread and will adress them, but first i wanted to say a more general thing regarding the complicated train setup you describe :

It sounds like in MMO game, you have "good players" that make tutorial for "players that wouldn't have found how to level up and build otherwise", and then there's "top competitor on the pvp ladder", those do not make tutorial to explain their ways , even if those are arguably the "best", it's not that uncommon that the "best" way to dos aren't the most popular, the most popular are generally the "good enough for the job" 80 % result with only 20% understanding / knowledge/ effort. Some would even say "casual"

Used to be, assembler buffers were small enough that using speed modules on the very fastest recipes, copper cables and green chips for instance, you could overrun them, you could build an assembler that ran so fast you couldn't fit enough inserters on them to load and/or unload fast enough the assembler would stall waiting for ingredients or output buffer space… unless you were clever. Now you just bung on more modules and enough inserters, having the fastest assemblers isn't an achievement any more, it's not even an option. The game got *spectacularly* dumbed down for that one, you don't have to wire up your inserters to keep their pickups staggered or anything. You don't even have to ask.

I don't share the magnitude of the constatation, to me it appears "minor" that it was removed in some places, and you still have this mini-game to play in other places when you consider very fast quality setup where the game engine's limit are reached, when you have super fast sulfuric acid => steam process on vulcanus, and the fluid system caps the output of the plants, or foundries too. So those niche expert skill are still possible to develop and enjoy.

Little quirk like inserter chasing items on too fast belt is less present, but still there nonetheless for niche usage.

Used to be, you had to be clever to filter a belt. Now it's a checkbox. But hey, at least you can still build a belt filter, a multi-item or selective filter can be useful.

The filter on splitter did remove some puzzly parts that require brain-power to handle, mostly about balancers, those are pretty much gone when considering super optimization, but it is still possible to play with them, they are still functionnal, maybe a bit obsolete from a technical standpoint, but they are beautiful, and part of this doesn't obsolete ! And there's this new splitter / circuit network thing that just got updated in the experimental branch last week or something, which maybe you didn't know so i can't really hold that as a strong argument, but it appears to be a new check box that "smart the game up" ? like the opposite of dumbing it down ? since it opens up new possibilities to make over-engineered setup for the sake of it

Used to be, splitters would balance the belts per item type,

Wait wasn't that the previous point ? You can also read belt with a check box ? that's not a dumbing down, that's a QoL to me, you could already do the same, but you had to wire all the belts one by one, it look better now and is more ups efficent

Used to be, you had to get clever to get trains to choose the best say mining outpost for ore pickup, and as your train network grew you had to get clever-er. Now it's just "train limit". Global train routing doesn't require you to be clever any more.

Used to be you could skip stations, and now it's just interrupts...

Sorry it's a staw man if i also make your arguments x)

I have some mixed feeling about the trains, i could add on your list that's what i meant, there were some 'simplification' for sure, but on the other hand there are some new complex things to do that weren't possible before, not saying your described setup was limited, i'm saying you can now parameterize it ! is this dumbing down or smarting up ? maybe there are other ways to consider things, like "the basic tools are made easier to use while new tools for advanced user have been proposed" is more of my feeling than that of a one way dumbing down.

Whether or not the changes simplified the puzzles basically out of existence is not debatable.

Sorry but I think it is debatable ! I think fluid system was simplified a lot ! But for the other points i think it's not so much the case, so maybe what's not debatable is how you feel about it, but maybe you can see why other person have different opinion and why that makes it debatable for me , thank you for your clear exposition of the points from your side of the debate, some are much more valid than points from the side of "no the game has not been dumbed down" , even though my general feelings still goes towards this proposition, if it was this simplistic in my mind.

Some mechanics may have been 'overly simplfiied out-of-existence" i can understand that, but there are some news ones to make up for this, and also the "end goal" is pushed 'further', reaching the victory screen is more challenging now than it used to be, i think it is an explanation for the simplification in the mechanics, some kind of ambition to make more players achieve a more complex task in the end, to allow the expansion to reach a wider audience than only the expert players that also played space exploration, or alike, because there were already mods that did the job well.

[Panzerknacker]

@OP

Lmao, if that upsets you wait till you find out about the removal of the entire 1.1 fluid mechanics.

[mindelos]

People with inflated ego are the worst. Relax bro

[NineNine]

Well after along hiatus from the game I decided to return. To my surprises and disgust I fond that the classic oil processing mod no longer works. Well the game is now just of those that no longer think, The dumbing down for the kids is now complete. So it is great reluctance and profound sadness I now must abandon the game. Unless as I hope there is a answer.

Software "stopped working"? I don't even know what that means. Is your computer plugged in?