Friday Facts #442 - Flip, Flow, and Fresh Paint

[FreakNoble]

Quality locomotives with faster speed? Awesome
How about quality fuels with higher energy?

[Filcius]

My only feedback is about separating the new rocks from their background a bit more, I think their readability could be slightly improved, they're now even harder to spot because they blend into their environment so well, I'll go into a bit more detail.

I second that, I was about to give the exact same feedback. I like that there is a new design, but preferred the readability of the older design : Stromalite seems to be harder to find now.

On the same note, while I'm at it, on my first run on Gleba, I was confused a lot about the requirement to plant seeds. It may have to do with the colors or the in-game guide.

[stillmoms]

The removal of space casinos is unfortunate but expected. My only question is whether the devs will be militantly anti-fun enough to prevent mods from reenabling them, or if it’s still a simple data change (quality modules allowed for these recipes vs not). As long as it’s the latter, all my playthroughs of Factorio post-2.1 will be modded. If it’s the former, I highly doubt I’ll ever return to Factorio again, and that’s after putting in 3500 hours since 1.0.

If you feel like space casinos are “cheating”, don’t use them, but it always felt to me much more elegant than the far, far messier and more tedious methods of obtaining quality materials. I even experimented with the idea of “pre-legendary” space casinos to mass produce rare materials and buildings without relying on Fulgora scrap recycling for it. Getting to the point of having a true legendary-level space casino producing enough materials to then upgrade that ship to legendary was 16 hours of gameplay in an already hundreds-of-hours game. It’s not like you’re starting the game with it unlocked; you still have to progress through all the inner planets and Aquilo to get legendary unlocked, and then still have to work your way up to mass production. It felt like an exceptionally tasty reward at the tail end of a long, satisfying experience. So to treat it as “unbalanced”… I’m sorry, I’ll just never get that take.

Anyway, as long as the change is not punitive towards players who disagree, and those of us who enjoyed the power of the space casino can get it back easily, it’s kind of a nothing-burger I suppose. I’ve already gotten every achievement that isn’t the last two “beating the game in under 100/40 hours” ones, and those sorts of achievements tend not to lend themselves to “space casino”-like mass production strategies anyway, as they’re all about “getting from one thing to the next in as little time as possible”.

EDIT: Just to be fair, since I don’t want to come off as entirely negative, the fluid system fixes and legendary trains sound great and I’m glad those were implemented.

[radical_larry]

Capture.JPG

Since you're changing the arrows, why do the inserters dropping on perpendicular belts not show the arrow on the far lane? You left the arrow adjacent to the close lane when the inserters always drop to the far lane.

Might as well allow us to adjust that too. I hope the devs still plan on adding that.

[ivan_349876]

People use space casino cause exactly was boring solution to logistic problem and it is easy to setup and bypass biggest points of quality. People want easy rewards without putting any work to getting them.

How is the intended solution to quality any less boring?

Factorio is easy to mod so they can bring it back with mods but it always baffled my. If you use sapce casino why not just mod in everything legendary.

Mods still disable achievements. Irrelevant if you already have them all, sure, but I would rather not have to direct new players to downgrade their game so they have a somewhat engaging way to interact with quality instead of just being stuck in upcycling hell.

[BanditFactory]

the point they are trying to make is that space casino trivializes every other method for creating quality products in the game, especially gleba and its complex system for producing quality materials from fruit.

[igrikrus]

It's a shame you decided to remove quality from the platforms. Now I'll have to collect white legendary science packs from planets because I don't want to build a lot of platforms.
I'd like to share my thoughts on the Quality mod.
I think the Quality mod itself is very crude and unfinished. It gives a lot of high-quality items, but in return, it requires time, which, over time, is no longer a payment.
I'm actually a little surprised that everyone only uses the quality bonuses while creating a lot of ordinary science packs and boasting about it.
Few people want to make quality science packs. And the point of quality is lost if you already have all the quality items.
Also, for some reason, there are no quality liquids or a liquid separator for creating them. This would solve the problem with the low-density structure in the foundry.
Of course, this isn't a very good idea, but it would look good as an example. What if you researched Uncommon quality and now labs only require Uncommon quality science packs?
It would simply change the overall attitude towards quality and provide some kind of challenge in the form of creating legendary cans already in by the end of the game and quality would no longer look free.

[Eulenberg]

"And we are very sorry but it is too strong to leave it alone. We don't want to be fun killers, but it just makes any other approach to quality obsolete. So in 2.1 placing Quality modules in the asteroid reprocessing recipes is disallowed. "

Guys if you think about this for 10 seconds, you have to realise that we will get "any other approach" next week, it makes zero sense, to plainly remove casinos with no replacement, if they not give us an alternative. also last FFF before big patches always includes a banger! so i would no stick my head into the ground.

[stillmoms]

the point they are trying to make is that space casino trivializes every other method for creating quality products in the game, especially gleba and its complex system for producing quality materials from fruit.

That’s simply not true; if you want mass quantities of legendary carbon fiber you’re still having to do typical up-cycling work with fruit on Gleba. The only other method is up-cycling tool belts, which has all the annoyances and slowness downsides of every other up-cycling method. Space casinos don’t obviate other approaches for things like holmium or carbon fiber, which require their own approaches. They just make all the basic materials significantly easier to scale up, which—at the tail end of a long play-through, after all the central mechanics have been well-explored—feels like a satisfying reward for the time put in thus far.

[nixCorvus]

How so? If a train stop would move to the other side of a rail, a blueprint would change between left-hand-drive and right-hand-drive, which i think would make it pretty much useless feature since it would create a blueprint that is incompatible with the rest of the rails system.

I think a good solution would be to allow flipping of blueprints in general, even if they contain stations and signals. Here’s how:
First, flip everything that can be flipped without any issues. Then try to place stations and signals on the other side of the tracks. If there isn’t enough space to place the corresponding stations or signals, remove them from the flipped blueprint and display a warning that not all entities can be placed in the flipped version.

When designing tracks, I regularly take the detour of creating a temporary blueprint, removing all signals and stations from it, flipping the thing and place it, manually adding the signals and stations back, and deleting the temporary blueprint. It would be much more convenient if
I could simply use copy, flip, paste insead.

I realize that this is a bit more complicated to implement, but I’m sure it will be worth it.

edit:
Alternatively, it would at least be nice if everything that can be flipped were flipped, and the entities that cannot be flipped were simply omitted. In my opinion, that would be a better solution than the status quo in terms of quality of life.

[sben]

How so? If a train stop would move to the other side of a rail, a blueprint would change between left-hand-drive and right-hand-drive, which i think would make it pretty much useless feature since it would create a blueprint that is incompatible with the rest of the rails system.

I think a good solution would be to allow flipping of blueprints in general, even if they contain stations and signals. Here’s how:
First, flip everything that can be flipped without any issues. Then try to place stations and signals on the other side of the tracks. If there isn’t enough space to place the corresponding stations or signals, remove them from the flipped blueprint and display a warning that not all entities can be placed in the flipped version.

When designing tracks, I regularly take the detour of creating a temporary blueprint, removing all signals and stations from it, flipping the whole thing, manually adding the signals and stations back, and deleting the temporary blueprint. It would be much more convenient if
I could simply use copy, flip, paste insead.

I realize that this is a bit more complicated to implement, but I’m sure it will be worth it.

I already use this.
Create a blueprint, remove non-flippable entites in the blueprint editor, flip & place the edited blueprint.
While this is a bit more work than having it working out of the box, but this way one knows exactly which entities were removed and need to be placed again.

[JohnAlekseyev]

Awesome update!

But one comment now that you're revisiting quality, modules and so on:

Please cap the "X productivity" researches at 30, and possibly point out that levels 26-30 won't do anything for foundries, electromagnetic plants etc. Right now it is possible to research e.g. steelmaking productivity 31, and it does absolutely nothing because productivity is capped at 300%. This is unlike all the non-productivity infinite techs, which always give you something (even if it is of unclear value). So I believe these repeatables should be capped for consistency and clarity, just like the weapon/turret firing speed repeatables on have a couple of levels.

[motmontheinternet]

I'm just going to keep playing 2.0 until a quality asteroid chunk mod comes out, then.

The devs should be under no illusion here, the space ships making quality materials is more interesting than everything they're putting into version 2.1, and it isn't even close.

[Necronium]

People use space casino cause exactly was boring solution to logistic problem and it is easy to setup and bypass biggest points of quality. People want easy rewards without putting any work to getting them.

How is the intended solution to quality any less boring?

You are asking how intended solution in logistical puzzle game with many different paths is less boring than overpowered one with almost no disadventages? Not sure what to say to that. It is kind of argument that making science is boring and assembler should just spit out science packs with putting just ore.

Factorio is easy to mod so they can bring it back with mods but it always baffled my. If you use sapce casino why not just mod in everything legendary.

Mods still disable achievements. Irrelevant if you already have them all, sure, but I would rather not have to direct new players to downgrade their game so they have a somewhat engaging way to interact with quality instead of just being stuck in upcycling hell.

Not sure where the idea that balancing is some kind of downgrade but Im not gonna argue with illogical emotional argument there. And calling space casino as engaging thing when it is just copy paste bp from forum is just overreaching andhonestly a skill issue on player part. "Upcacling hell" is just in players head cause they cant think about anything else. As Ive said some people just some rewards without putting any work into it.

That everything is true especially when it comes to achievements. You want to get honour badge without putting effort to getting it.

[bobucles]

I've done some time on quality, the strategy and factory definitely evolves throughout the game. Early game can only really support skimming, where the factory is largely normal and only exceptional items get skimmed off the top. Put quality on mining drills, skim the quality and you can get a few special items before leaving nauvius. The downside is it doesn't scale, so later stages use more serious builds. The 2 main quality strategies are to either build long gambling chains towards the desired product, or to stockpile high quality basic items that can go anywhere. The former is very resource efficient but requires setup for every upgrade chain, the latter vaporizes resources from aggressive upcycling. Exploring all the options and tinkering the quality chains is pretty fun and will easily soak up many hours of a first time player.

Iron gambling has several useful and satisfying options that will get players legendary stuff in a very straightforward way. Copper gambling doesn't have too many simple options, so if high prod LDS and blue chips get shut down the next best thing will be far weaker. Legendary titanium is trivial, just shred it and power through. Legendary spoilage is trivial, put quality on a single bioflux nutrient recipe and it'll be way too much. Legendary stack inserters are slow but even a slow gleba can get steady output. Probably the worst thing to get legendary is holmium plate. The mining and recycling steps of fulgora reset their quality at the liquid stage, so it takes a huge amount of work to get enough holmium to do things. It doesn't help that an em factory eats up 150 plate, it's the highest cost specialty building by far. I haven't done the space casino, but it doesn't really do much that you can't already do on the ground. Everything can be full legendary, although the aquillo things will take serious effort.

[fryyyy]

This is exciting stuff, particularly the lane placement and tinkering with quality.

I love the quality mod, but I wish you guys would take another look at quality fusion reactors. Naively dropping in quality reactors into a non-quality multi-reactor setup tanks your fuel efficiency. Designing the infrastructure to accommodate the quality reactors completely negates the benefit of a reactor with higher max output.

A non-quality setup will produce more power, take up less space, have a higher fuel efficiency, and be much cheaper to produce than a quality setup. It just feels bad.

[QuackorTF]

Love the QoL stuff!

It would be nice if temperature could be read from heat pipes / generic buildings that require heat as well - no fluids involved.

I'm thinking modded gameplay here - in particular Pyanodons Hard Mode, where various buildings require a minimum temperature to operate. I also use decay and I often want to be able switch off the building that produces the decaying products if the next processing step is not ready to use them in a timely fashion - usually because of shortage of other ingredients, but too low temperature is also a potential blocker.

[nixCorvus]

A non-quality setup will produce more power, take up less space, have a higher fuel efficiency, and be much cheaper to produce than a quality setup. It just feels bad.

What makes you think that a low-quality fusion reactor produces more energy and takes up less space than a high-quality one? You just need fusion generators that match the reactor's quality. The efficiency also stays the same if you limit the fluoroketone supply properly.
You can use the same blueprint regardless of the quality. With higher quality, you generate more energy in the same amount of space. Thats all.

[Khagan]

Noting that we can now read the temperature of a fluid pipe (a largely useless ability in unmodded games) makes me hope that we will similarly be able to read the temperature of a heat pipe (and hence have simple and optimal control of fuel use in a fission plant).

[bobucles]

This is exciting stuff, particularly the lane placement and tinkering with quality.

I love the quality mod, but I wish you guys would take another look at quality fusion reactors. Naively dropping in quality reactors into a non-quality multi-reactor setup tanks your fuel efficiency. Designing the infrastructure to accommodate the quality reactors completely negates the benefit of a reactor with higher max output.

Yeah, fusion reactors are a bit funky. Nuclear power has perfect adjacency, if all the reactors are online then they get the full bonus. Fusion has constantly changing adjacency, a reactor will only give the full bonus when the power grid demands it. From what I can tell, the fusion output averages to give the worst adjacency bonus possible.

For example, take a grid with 4 adjacent 100mw reactors. When the power grid is under 400mw each reactor starts ramping up, until they are all fully active at 400mw with 0 adjacency bonus. As the grid draws above 400mw, reactors 1 by 1 build their adjacency until they are all at max output with the max bonus.

I have also hesitated to upgrade reactors for this very reason. Better fusion plants have a higher baseline cooking speed, so they burn more fuel, and they increase the threshold before adjacency bonus can activate. It's not mechanically that significant because fuel is cheap, but it is a bit upsetting to upgrade fusion reactors and feel like it was a waste of fuel. Upgrade the turbines first, they're always useful, but anything under a few hundred mw should never upgrade fusion cores.

As a side note, I once saw an old bug report that fusion plasma flow rate caps out at 300 or something like that. Will the new liquid buffer mechanics change that and let giga reactors pump out more plasma?