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

[sben]

I think one often overseen thing about space casinos is that you cannot use all of the quality output.
And the change determined to discontinue space casino designs won't stop people from building them, it will only change the way how they are built.

The efficiency assumptions

It is easy to calculate the effect of quality modules × 80% output, but this is in my opinion an often cited miscalculation when it comes to efficiency.

You have a bunch of quality output that you cannot use; eg. who needs that much legendary ice blocks? Who needs that much legendary calcite? You are better off using common quality of these, since the output fluids have no quality. This alone turns roughly a third of the quality output into trash.

When reprocessing the legendary quality oxide chunks, you have 60% chance that it either stays an oxide chunk or it gets lost. These are not easy to turn into something useful.

And depending on what you do, you will need more metallic chunks than carbonic ones (exact ratios will vary), leading into the reprocessing of the overproduction of some of the otherwise wanted legendary asteroids. Here you have only 20% chance of transforming the chunk into the wanted type, while the 20% chance to lose the asteroid makes this loop lose 50% of the input materials.

How much useful quality output you actually get is hard to determine, since this will strongly depend on statistical data about what you craft and which routes you fly to collect asteroids, but the loss of 20% materials instead of 75% at each step is an oversimplified and incomplete representation.

The change determined to discontinue space casino designs won't stop people from building them, it will only change the way they are built.

While the upcycling via reprocessing might disappear, the big productivity bonus on asteroid crushing stays.

Upcycling the asteroids via recyclers and crushing them will be the new way.

Crushing metallic asteroids yield 14-20 output items plus productivity bonus, this way you will need up to 1/14 ~= 7%, so at least 93% less production buildings to produce the same amount of quality iron ores compared to ground-based upcycling.

Greatly reduced building counts make building factories out of quality buildings way easier, cheaper & faster, and also UPS friendlier, even if building in space.
Processing the output items will stay the same as with the current space casino designs, so the old designs will continue to work by only changing the upcycling part.

I don't think people will stop using space casinos, they will only adapt them to the new restrictions. Redesigning only this part is much easier than redesigning (and optimizing) the whole factory design.

This assumes that all the people will want to play vanilla. There is a lot of turbulence about this change, it didn't take even long time after announcement of the FFF till the first mod undoing this future change appeared.

PS:

I never built a space casino yet, but planned to do it.
While it might seem to be a cheaty solution, it actually brings new challenges both on the space platform as well as on the planetary side.
To name a simple example, producing more in space usually means more materials are transported to the planets, requiring further optimization of unloading the cargo landing pad.

[Eulenberg]

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.

To be clear, I'm talking about multi-reactor setups. You need to run the reactor at 100% capacity to get the most fuel efficiency. You need more infrastructure (tons of accumulators and logic to switch the reactors on/off) to capture the higher output of the quality reactors to preserve the fuel efficiency. Two quality reactors will produce less electricity at a worse fuel efficiency than 3 non-quality reactors. Fluoroketone levels have nothing to do with fuel efficiency.

For any given target output, there is a non-quality reactor setup that will have better fuel efficiency and take up the same or less space than a quality setup. The only use case for a quality reactor is when you don't have enough space for multiple reactors, forgoing any efficiency bonus, and need more than 100 MW and less than the max output of whatever quality you have available.

There is not a single non-quality setup that can match a quality setup in space lel at the same max output, only efficiency, both are quite space efficienct compared to solor etc, but you also act like fusion cells are not free as hell ...

[bobucles]

Probably the most useful metric would be to know the expected amount of resources required per 1 legendary output. For example pure upcycling with ore has a 75% recycling loss with ~25% chance to succeed (4 modules), or roughly 16 items devoured per 1 upgraded output. Scoring 4 upgrade rolls to get 1 legendary output would demand ~65k resources, minus the lucky multi upgrades and minus the extra chances from rerolling the failures. Space casino is going to be a similar way. The reroll recipe loses 20% per attempt and has a ~12% chance to succeed (2 modules), so each upgrade would need ~10 lower tier rolls. Four successful upgrades would take ~10k attempts, with a ton of retries to reduce the total chunks required. A third of the final chunks would be the right flavor, and the other types would have to reroll until they succeeded.

Someone smarter can probably figure out the math. Obviously, f the reroll had no cost then 1 normal input would always give 1 legendary output. Some sort of convergence of infinite multiplying series would probably do it.

All in all, it's kind of a funny scenario. Space chunks are like an onion, or perhaps a gobstoper. You peel off one layer over and over until it is the right quality, then peel a few more layers until it's the right chunk flavor. Asteroid chunks have more geologic layers than the planets.

[h.q.droid]

Reading between the words, I think the space casino nerf looks OK: it only prevents quality on reprocessing, but not on *basic processing*. It means you can't easily get early game legendary with reprocessing, but at productivity 30, you can still get legendary stuff en masse with basic processing with roughly the same yield. Just need more by-product disposal.

[Hurkyl]

Someone smarter can probably figure out the math. Obviously, f the reroll had no cost then 1 normal input would always give 1 legendary output. Some sort of convergence of infinite multiplying series would probably do it.

Using legendary tier 3 modules, you average slightly more than one legendary asteroid output per 47.7 common asteroid inputs, so in this metric it's in the same ballpark as craft-recycle loops without any special features.

[Briansama]

I had to dust off the webs of my account just to make a post. It shows a real lack of game testing if you want to remove space casinos in any way. Apparently yall don't play your game, because it is literally the only thing left to do at endgame besides mindlessly expanding for no reason (which is fun too ngl).

I just cannot fathom what caused you to think removing it was the play. It shows a systemic problem most games have, developers get too detached from the actual playerbase and shove something in nobody wants. I thought Factorio was different, but oh well. Same same different face.

Disabling updates so you don't brick my saves and fun with your idiocy.

[RocketManChronicles]

How will the change make the game more fun for you?

It already is fun. I did and do not do the "Space Casino," so I am not reliant on it. This game requires puzzle solving and mathematics to push production and efficiency. Getting Legendary items easily is not part of the plan. I also play this game with mods that make it extremely difficult: I have a 1.1 save file of a Rampant Death-Railworld Extreme, meaning the Rampant mod with all of the extra enemies, with severe deathworld settings (harder than the suggested deathworld) and resources set to the railworld settings. This game is way to easy otherwise. And my 24000 hours shows how much I enjoy this game.

How do you feel about other people being upset at it's removal?

It does not matter, as I am sure there will be a mod made to counter this change. I stay away from mods that make the game "easy" like the far reach and walkthrough mods; those make it too easy. I do enjoy some QoL mods like even distribution. But people play this game how they want to; even use other people's blueprints without laying a thought to solve it themselves. If you want to play the game with everything handed to you, go ahead, I will be at the other end with my mega- and giga-bases that have faced near destruction through evolution.

I've never heard an answer to these questions that satisfies me.

That is your opinion, and I have mine. Just play the game the way you want.

[motmontheinternet]

Reading between the words, I think the space casino nerf looks OK: it only prevents quality on reprocessing, but not on *basic processing*. It means you can't easily get early game legendary with reprocessing, but at productivity 30, you can still get legendary stuff en masse with basic processing with roughly the same yield. Just need more by-product disposal.

All you're telling us is that you've never built one of these ships before. The productivity of the items the ship itself makes are irrelevant, Vulcanus makes all of the legandary products after the ship brings it legendary carbon, calcite, and iron. The point of the ship and the reason to use it over other methods is scale of inputs in the first place. The sources of the materials is high and doesn't need updating when resource nodes empty. Nobody cares about these ships because of productivity, because productivity works on all surfaces.

There's no such thing as an early game legendary item ship, by the way. When you unlock legendary materials you are in the end game.

[quineotio]

How will the change make the game more fun for you?

It already is fun. I did and do not do the "Space Casino," so I am not reliant on it. This game requires puzzle solving and mathematics to push production and efficiency. Getting Legendary items easily is not part of the plan. I also play this game with mods that make it extremely difficult: I have a 1.1 save file of a Rampant Death-Railworld Extreme, meaning the Rampant mod with all of the extra enemies, with severe deathworld settings (harder than the suggested deathworld) and resources set to the railworld settings. This game is way to easy otherwise. And my 24000 hours shows how much I enjoy this game.

How do you feel about other people being upset at it's removal?

It does not matter, as I am sure there will be a mod made to counter this change. I stay away from mods that make the game "easy" like the far reach and walkthrough mods; those make it too easy. I do enjoy some QoL mods like even distribution. But people play this game how they want to; even use other people's blueprints without laying a thought to solve it themselves. If you want to play the game with everything handed to you, go ahead, I will be at the other end with my mega- and giga-bases that have faced near destruction through evolution.

I've never heard an answer to these questions that satisfies me.

That is your opinion, and I have mine. Just play the game the way you want.

This perfectly encapsulates my dissatisfaction with people's answers. I tried to be charitable (maybe there's something I missed), but at the end of the day you just don't care about other people. "Just play the game the way you want" is hypocritical because people WERE playing the game the way they wanted.

This change makes the game better for no-one and worse for some people. There's no good reason to be happy about this.

Thank you for telling me how good you are, it's a good insight.

[Hurkyl]

That is your opinion, and I have mine. Just play the game the way you want.

This perfectly encapsulates my dissatisfaction with people's answers. I tried to be charitable (maybe there's something I missed), but at the end of the day you just don't care about other people. "Just play the game the way you want" is hypocritical because people WERE playing the game the way they wanted.

And you will continue to be able to play the game the way you want after the change.

This change makes the game better for no-one and worse for some people. There's no good reason to be happy about this.

It makes the game better for people who feel being forced into a dilemma between "play well and the game degenerates to become uninteresting" and "deliberately play badly" are both bad options that ruin the fun of a game.

I am very much of the opinion that the game defaults should be well-balanced, and variations that let people play out a power fantasy or skip over parts of the game they dislike should be clearly sectioned off as not being part of the intended game experience. IMO, adding OP features and adding skips to a balanced game works much better than filling up a game with those things and force players that want game balance to guess what things to deliberately avoid -- especially when many (most?) of those players will not have a deep understanding of the game to be able to make those choices or even recognize they need to be made.

[Tallinu]

So many awesome improvements in this FFF. I guess this time that stands for Flipping, Fluids, and Flamethrowers! I'm SO glad that the inserter drop on perpendicular belts can be controlled now!!! That'll open up a lot more options for train unloaders!

[DarkArchitect]

Bye bye vanilla casinos.

I think they were quite a fun way to break the late game, but we all expected this. What I hope is we get another way of obtaining quality materials, because upcycling feels tedious and too "grindy".

A common ground of a difficult but rewarding puzzle to obtain quality would be better that just throw hundreds of recyclers and wait.

That or just a mod that allows quality modules on recyclers again.

Oh, and new flipping options are just awesome! Can't wait to redesign some designs to make them more compact!

Best regards

[quineotio]

And you will continue to be able to play the game the way you want after the change.

To be clear, I don't use the space casino. Although I think this is a bad change, my original comment was more concerned with the attitude "I'm happy about this" coming from someone who it doesn't effect. Why would you care if it doesn't effect you?

I am very much of the opinion that the game defaults should be well-balanced, and variations that let people play out a power fantasy or skip over parts of the game they dislike should be clearly sectioned off as not being part of the intended game experience. IMO, adding OP features and adding skips to a balanced game works much better than filling up a game with those things and force players that want game balance to guess what things to deliberately avoid -- especially when many (most?) of those players will not have a deep understanding of the game to be able to make those choices or even recognize they need to be made.

While I agree with some of what you've said in principle, we're talking about a late game thing that has already been in the game for a year and a half. And Factorio is a non competitive, mostly single player game, and partially a sandbox.

I'm hoping that there are further changes coming for quality, but even then I disagree with the design mentality that has risen to prominence in SA, which is that there are particular things that are arbitrarily allowed, and particular things that are arbitrarily disallowed.

The point of a game is to have fun, and multiple people have stated that they enjoy making space casinos. This idea about disallowing power fantasy or "skipping over parts of the game they dislike" is weird to me. What's wrong with power fantasy in a game? What's wrong with skipping over things you don't like in a game? What's wrong with having easier and harder ways to do things?

As I said above, I don't use space casinos. I tried it, but then I wanted to try something different, so I did something different. It was an interesting challenge, and then I wanted a different challenge. What's the problem?

Achievements have been used as additional optional challenges. Why not just add an achievement that disallows putting quality modules into crushers? That would serve the elitists while still allowing those who want to to make space casinos. If you want a "hard mode" - hooray it would exist. If you want an "easy mode" it'd be there too. There are many games with difficulty options. Should difficulty options be removed because playing on easy is "OP"?

Why not just add difficulty options directly as an option when making a new game? Remove ALL the restrictions on easy - allow me to put quality modules into crushers on planet surfaces, place biolabs on any planet, have multiple landing pads per planet and whatever else. And then have a hard mode with whatever restrictions?

In fact that's a good idea. There are a lot of things I'd like to try but can't due to arbitrary restrictions. I'm not happy when someone's fun is gated behind an arbitrary design choice and an elitist mentality. Give the elitists a medal and give the rest of us the choice to play the game the way we want. What's the problem?

[Valorian]

I got a suggestion regarding the LDS quality issue : what about putting a quantity multiplier on fluide from quality recipes ?

[Hurkyl]

While I agree with some of what you've said in principle, we're talking about a late game thing that has already been in the game for a year and a half. And Factorio is a non competitive, mostly single player game, and partially a sandbox.

And? Are those reasons I should not be allowed to enjoy the process of learning how to play a game well?

The point of a game is to have fun, and multiple people have stated that they enjoy making space casinos. This idea about disallowing power fantasy or "skipping over parts of the game they dislike" is weird to me. What's wrong with power fantasy in a game? What's wrong with skipping over things you don't like in a game? What's wrong with having easier and harder ways to do things?

There are ways to section things off from the main game experience other than "disallow it". Such as making it something you enable with mods.

There's nothing wrong with a power fantasy in a game intending to provide a power fantasy. There's not really anything wrong with a power fantasy in a game providing for other tastes.

There is a problem with a power fantasy in a game providing to other tastes if the other tastes are sacrificed to allow the power fantasy.

There's nothing wrong with having a way to skip over parts you don't like in a game. There is a problem when it's not clear those parts are actually supposed to be the game you're playing and skipping over it is something abnormal for people that don't like that part.

Achievements have been used as additional optional challenges.

The problem is with your framing: you're viewing producing quality in a non-casino way as an "optional challenge". Many people, and the devs it seems, view it as "the main game", and space casino is the optional bypass.

There are a lot of things I'd like to try but can't due to arbitrary restrictions. I'm not happy when someone's fun is gated behind an arbitrary design choice and an elitist mentality. Give the elitists a medal and give the rest of us the choice to play the game the way we want. What's the problem?

Have you tried playing the game in the map editor?

[nixCorvus]

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.

To be clear, I'm talking about multi-reactor setups. You need to run the reactor at 100% capacity to get the most fuel efficiency. You need more infrastructure (tons of accumulators and logic to switch the reactors on/off) to capture the higher output of the quality reactors to preserve the fuel efficiency. Two quality reactors will produce less electricity at a worse fuel efficiency than 3 non-quality reactors. Fluoroketone levels have nothing to do with fuel efficiency.

For any given target output, there is a non-quality reactor setup that will have better fuel efficiency and take up the same or less space than a quality setup. The only use case for a quality reactor is when you don't have enough space for multiple reactors, forgoing any efficiency bonus, and need more than 100 MW and less than the max output of whatever quality you have available.

In this context, talking about efficiency only makes sense in a multi-reactor setup, since efficiency can only be increased through the neighbor bonus.

I guess you haven't figured out yet how to design a fusion reactor that takes full advantage of the neighbor bonus at partial load. With a nuclear reactor, you do this by limiting the fuel supply. With fusion reactors, you have to limit the fluoroketone in the reactors. This ensures that all the fluoroketone can be converted into plasma, but the generators shouldn’t run dry. No accumulators are needed for this.
Hint: Using Pumps for this is a trap. Barreling is the key to precisely limiting the fluoroketone feed rate.

[quineotio]

While I agree with some of what you've said in principle, we're talking about a late game thing that has already been in the game for a year and a half. And Factorio is a non competitive, mostly single player game, and partially a sandbox.

And? Are those reasons I should not be allowed to enjoy the process of learning how to play a game well?

Space casinos don't disallow learning how to play the game well. What are you talking about? Is your argument that NO-ONE knows how to play the game well, and that the reason is because it's possible to build space casinos? If this isn't your argument, then how have some people learned how to play the game well despite space casinos being possible?

There are ways to section things off from the main game experience other than "disallow it". Such as making it something you enable with mods.

Mods are not part of the game. I don't think it's a good idea to rely on third party add-ons.

There is a problem with a power fantasy in a game providing to other tastes if the other tastes are sacrificed to allow the power fantasy.

What is being sacrificed to "allow the power fantasy"? Is building space casinos the only way to play? No. Why do you care? It comes back to the question, "how does this change make the game better for YOU?". How does the possibility of building space casinos make the game worse FOR YOU?

There's nothing wrong with having a way to skip over parts you don't like in a game. There is a problem when it's not clear those parts are actually supposed to be the game you're playing and skipping over it is something abnormal for people that don't like that part.

What is not clear? You can only build space casinos after you've essentially finished the game. You've interacted with the quality system for many hours by then. What parts of the game are skipped?

Many of the comments contain statements like "I find casinos to be more interesting that the other options". So they're aware of other options but prefer building casinos.

Additionally, space casinos are not obvious. I didn't think about it - it only occurred to me that it was possible when I saw other people talking about it.

The problem is with your framing: you're viewing producing quality in a non-casino way as an "optional challenge". Many people, and the devs it seems, view it as "the main game", and space casino is the optional bypass.

Why do you care? "People are having fun in unintended ways - DESTROY IT!"

Have you tried playing the game in the map editor?

1. I gave examples of things that can't be done even in the map editor.
2. The map editor is not the game.

[royce3]

Getting rid of the "Space Casino" is the best thing to see here. I always viewed it as a cheaty exploit and refused to ever do it.

How will the change make the game more fun for you?

How do you feel about other people being upset at it's removal?

I've never heard an answer to these questions that satisfies me.

I too am a little sad at losing the space casino, but I think the team's explanation in the FFF makes a lot of sense: it's so over-powered that the other mechanisms just aren't worth it. They're removing it in order to encourage more divergent gameplay. When I heard a few months ago that they were planning to nerf this feature, I started a new run with the intent to develop quality without the space casino. Making legendary using lds and processing unit shuffles is twice as annoying as the space casino, but it does create more interesting gameplay.

[Hurkyl]

While I agree with some of what you've said in principle, we're talking about a late game thing that has already been in the game for a year and a half. And Factorio is a non competitive, mostly single player game, and partially a sandbox.

And? Are those reasons I should not be allowed to enjoy the process of learning how to play a game well?

Space casinos don't disallow learning how to play the game well. What are you talking about?

Enjoy. Not just the ability -- my enjoyment matters too. What good game balance does is that

It makes the game better for people who feel being forced into a dilemma between "play well and the game degenerates to become uninteresting" and "deliberately play badly" are both bad options that ruin the fun of a game.

and leaves me with gameplay I can enjoy rather than being forced to choose between bad options.

Is your argument that NO-ONE knows how to play the game well, and that the reason is because it's possible to build space casinos? If this isn't your argument, then how have some people learned how to play the game well despite space casinos being possible?

The premise is that the space casino is excessively better than other options, and causes gameplay to degenerate.

So if you are working to make the best factory you can, you are led down this path into making the space casino and pushed into degenerate gameplay that removes an aspect of the game and the game sucks. And maybe it really is the best option and the game just falls apart. Or maybe it's not the best, but it's incredibly difficult to find the fun gameplay because there's too much to unlearn to get out of this local optimum.

If by some miracle you anticipate that you've found a game-breaking exploit -- or are active on forums to know about it(and thus getting lots of stuff spoiled along the way) -- you're now stuck flailing about with the problem of imposing ad-hoc restrictions to avoid the exploits, which is something that generally feels bad, and of course you don't have the knowledge and experience to actually know what needs to change to balance the game so you're likely to do a bad job of it.

It's just really not fun when game have massive imbalances.

There are ways to section things off from the main game experience other than "disallow it". Such as making it something you enable with mods.

Mods are not part of the game. I don't think it's a good idea to rely on third party add-ons.

Mods aren't the only option. But....

Space Age is a mod. Quality is a mod.

Heck, technically speaking, the vanilla Factorio game is a mod.

Talk in the FFFs made it clear that there are some "options" the devs think make more since to be done through the mod interface rather than the settings menu or map creation options. I probably wouldn't complain if you go after the devs for not making the mods official and instead creating the mods on the side or letting third parties do it.

There is a problem with a power fantasy in a game providing to other tastes if the other tastes are sacrificed to allow the power fantasy.

What is being sacrificed to "allow the power fantasy"? Is building space casinos the only way to play? No. Why do you care? It comes back to the question, "how does this change make the game better for YOU?". How does the possibility of building space casinos make the game worse FOR YOU?

Game balance. You're demanding game balance get sacrificed on the altar of your power fantasy. The game is worse FOR ME when it's poorly balanced.

[h.q.droid]

All you're telling us is that you've never built one of these ships before. The productivity of the items the ship itself makes are irrelevant, Vulcanus makes all of the legandary products after the ship brings it legendary carbon, calcite, and iron. The point of the ship and the reason to use it over other methods is scale of inputs in the first place. The sources of the materials is high and doesn't need updating when resource nodes empty. Nobody cares about these ships because of productivity, because productivity works on all surfaces.

There's no such thing as an early game legendary item ship, by the way. When you unlock legendary materials you are in the end game.

Just check my old ship: viewtopic.php?t=130361

The "20% chunk back" thing in basic processing recipes are also affected by productivity. It's easily overlooked due to lack of documentation and difficulty to verify. At level 30 productivity, it gives you 80% chunks back just like reprocessing. It's better than reprocessing at around productivity 26 because it always gives you the same chunk back, with byproducts you can upcycle or use.

By "early game", I mean the point where you have all techs researched.