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

[Hurkyl]

Okay sure, if all factory building is the same to you, then I guess all factory building is the same to you.

This hits on another theme I think is running through the complaint posts: I think a significant proportion of the complaints ultimately have nothing to do with the quality system, and are entirely about people enjoying making space factories. And then we have an XY problem where they demand we keep the space casinos for quality production and (correctly) feel people are never addressing their concerns because the topic is about something else.

(and there is probably some overlap with people who are motivated by wanting the benefits of quality without engaging with the mechanic)

[radical_larry]

I think a significant proportion of the complaints ultimately have nothing to do with the quality system, and are entirely about people enjoying making space factories. And then we have an XY problem where they demand we keep the space casinos for quality production and (correctly) feel people are never addressing their concerns because the topic is about something else.

People want to build space factories in their space game and they want them to be useful. You're absolutely right that this is the core issue here.

(and there is probably some overlap with people who are motivated by wanting the benefits of quality without engaging with the mechanic)

I have no idea why you still hold on to that idea. Those who don't want to engage with quality mechanics will just blueprint the next best lds shuffling/blue chip upcycling method and be done with it, and if that's their fun in the game then the only thing this nerf changes for them is the background color of their quality factory.

[Hurkyl]

(and there is probably some overlap with people who are motivated by wanting the benefits of quality without engaging with the mechanic)

I have no idea why you still hold on to that idea. Those who don't want to engage with quality mechanics will just blueprint the next best lds shuffling/blue chip upcycling method and be done with it, and if that's their fun in the game then the only thing this nerf changes for them is the background color of their quality factory.

Because it seems accurate? And that the only thing this nerf changes for them is the background color of their quality factory? A point that is super relevant when evaluating the drawbacks of the change?

[Bloodred217]

Okay sure, if all factory building is the same to you, then I guess all factory building is the same to you.

I have never said this, don't put words in my mouth. In fact if you go back and read my previous post, the first part of it where I replied to Tertius and not to you, you will find that I explained exactly why I believe the "casino" build to be significantly different and novel, rather than the same as the recycler loop. What is the same to me is building one more recycling loop but with a different recipe in the middle. Yes, I find that samey and repetitive. Talking about how you consider your direct insertion arrangement when building an upcycler or anything along those lines has nothing to do with the quality system in my eyes.

I think a significant proportion of the complaints ultimately have nothing to do with the quality system, and are entirely about people enjoying making space factories.

This isn't really the case for me, but even if some people were to come at it from that angle, is there anything wrong with enjoying useful / novel applications of space platforms in the Space Age expansion? I think not.

As for my own point of view, I think I explained it clearly, my problem with this change is that it removes variety from the game and replaces it with absolutely nothing. I would fully welcome new alternatives that allowed us to approach quality production in other new ways, even if they weren't something happening on a space platform.

[krozu]

To me upcycling is the root cause of this whole mess. Essentially because of this:

Throwing everything into the recycler to have a chance at something better is the same as a slot machine. Boring and disappointing, with the occasional "JACKPOT" moment. Surely I can't be the only one who dislikes that part of quality. All I've seen so far is people complaining about it ruining upcycling, or upcycling is boring or too tedious.

On another note, is there no way to scale the image down somewhat? :/

[radical_larry]

To me upcycling is the root cause of this whole mess. Essentially because of this:

Throwing everything into the recycler to have a chance at something better is the same as a slot machine. Boring and disappointing, with the occasional "JACKPOT" moment. Surely I can't be the only one who dislikes that part of quality. All I've seen so far is people complaining about it ruining upcycling, or upcycling is boring or too tedious.

On another note, is there no way to scale the image down somewhat? :/

The default version of space age finishes too fast for all the content it has because science consumption is so low. Horizontal scaling works well in that case compared to the vertical scaling of quality. At higher science costs quality shines through as a nice mechanic throughout the game.

[NineNine]

upcycling is boring or too tedious.

Perhaps one should consider automating the process.

[Bloodred217]

Throwing everything into the recycler to have a chance at something better is the same as a slot machine. Boring and disappointing, with the occasional "JACKPOT" moment. Surely I can't be the only one who dislikes that part of quality.

The way I see it, the RNG involved in quality refinement is ultimately nothing but a method to demand more resource input for higher quality items. In the end when you've got your loops running, the statistics will even out somewhere and you'll end up with some average amount of resources going into the system before it spits out the desired higher-quality output. The same could have been achieved with just making higher quality parts more expensive in terms of base resources, but I think that truly would not have added anything to the game at all in terms of new gameplay opportunity.

While I find the narrow options for quality repetitive like I said, I think the RNG nature does add something to the game in the sense that the upcycler loop design was never something you'd build without it. It's a new wrinkle in the system which requires a new solution and new design style, I don't think that's a bad thing. The problem to me is that applying it over and over and over just becomes repetitive / tedious, which is why I'd love to see more approaches being possible or quality getting integrated into the rest of the game in a more fundamental way such that it isn't just something that happens somewhere on the side.

[NineNine]

The problem to me is that applying it over and over and over just becomes repetitive / tedious, which is why I'd love to see more approaches being possible or quality getting integrated into the rest of the game in a more fundamental way such that it isn't just something that happens somewhere on the side.

Sure... copying and pasting upcycling loops is boring, but you only do it once. You can do almost all of the SA items in an hour or so. The real challenge is building enough items to feed into the upcyclers. The rest of the game requires building lots of items in order to do science research. Once science research is all finished, Quality gives players an entirely new reason to keep building (much) bigger factories, and it does it in a different way than just adding more levels of science.

[yngndrw]

Sure... copying and pasting upcycling loops is boring, but you only do it once. You can do almost all of the SA items in an hour or so. T

I don't think that's true, because the throughput of each component varies greatly across different recipes. You just end up with either bottlenecks or clogging if you blindly duplicate them.

It is, however, true for space casinos. I think that's the difference - The part which makes one tedious.

[Hurkyl]

To me upcycling is the root cause of this whole mess. Essentially because of this:

This isn't unique to quality; the trend to rush straight to top of the line stuff has been with Factorio from the beginning. Tier 2 modules? Worthless except as ingredients for tier 3. Maybe they don't bother with tier 1 either. Yellow belts? Replace with red as soon as you can. Wait, still using red belts? You should replace them with blue.

One of the things I really like about quality is the wide gap between quality being available and actually being able to afford the top-of-the-line stuff, so that there is a lot more space to find value in the middle quality items.

Of course, that won't stop people from wanting to rush to top-quality or put it off until they can afford to skip the middle qualities (even if they have to limp there).

As an aside, I've been playing around with 100x science multiplier, and I feel like there's so much more to Factorio that I'm missing out on due to the fast pace of the vanilla game. If it weren't for other parts of the game that become somewhat overwhelming I'd even think it should be the default setting for the game.

Throwing everything into the recycler to have a chance at something better is the same as a slot machine. Boring and disappointing, with the occasional "JACKPOT" moment. Surely I can't be the only one who dislikes that part of quality.

AFAIK, this is mostly just in how you approach the system. "A watched pot never boils", after all.

If it's the variance that bothers you, arrange to win the numbers game: a casino makes consistent profit off of a room full of slot machines, after all.

If it's the waiting that bothers you, automate the waiting away. E.g. if you make a craft-recycle loop for mech armors, design it to run unattended and wire up a programmable speaker to give you an alert (and maybe a victory noise) when it detects a legendary mech armor in the chest.

Then you can just put it out of your mind while you're off doing other stuff, and when you get the alarm you can take a break to pick up your prize.

[krozu]

If it's the variance that bothers you, arrange to win the numbers game: a casino makes consistent profit off of a room full of slot machines, after all.

If it's the waiting that bothers you, automate the waiting away. E.g. if you make a craft-recycle loop for mech armors, design it to run unattended and wire up a programmable speaker to give you an alert (and maybe a victory noise) when it detects a legendary mech armor in the chest.

None of that bothers me. The sole purpose of items that don't meet the standard being thrown back into the system to be scrapped and rolled again, and nothing else, is what gets me. Quality only has a single mechanic going for it. Rolling the die. I just want the lesser qualities to have a use that isn't magically turning it into a higher quality version. I want a reason to use them as is.

Sadly, not possible in the current system.

[DmitriiP]

R.I.P. part of the game mechanic...

Fulgora - Recycler
Gleba - Spoilage
Space - Advanced asteroid processing ,"... asteroid reprocessing"

P.S. You can disable Enemies, change % and size of resources, change ..,change ..,change ..,change ..,change ..,change .., but "asteroid reprocessing" overpowered

[etyco_filly]

First off, my god is this an amazing set of changes. Trying to finagle with inserters to make them output on separate sides was always so obnoxiously tricky.

Second, and mainly, I'm very disappointed with the removal of space casinos.
I'm overall not the biggest fan of quality. It feels mandatory when you're megabasing, and it's tedious as all hell to set up. The only fun part of it was figuring out the various optimal solutions to certain items. Some items felt clearly overpowered, and I didn't like using that solution (LDS and blue chips), and some were a frustrating compromise (having to use EM plants instead of supercaps for holmium due to throughput limitations, despite the latter being more efficient).
The one that blew my mind was asteroid upcycling, however, because it didn't feel overpowered for the stage of the game, and it was such a cool solution.
It was one of the more interesting solutions, so it's a shame to see it gone in favour of simple, boring, and inefficient solutions. If it was nerfed, rather than straight up removed, I wouldn't be out here complaining my heart out.

However, if it was removed alongside LDS and Blue Chip upcycling, I also wouldn't be making this post. That's what bothers me more: the decently powerful and very interesting, but limited-in-various-regards solution was removed, while the boring and utterly overpowered solutions were kept. It feels like space casinos were hit because they were easier to hit, and not because they were a bigger problem.

[sarge945]

On the topic of upcycling, I think there's different arguments to be made, both in favour of it and against it, and the fundamental problem seems to be that Quality is a solved problem.

Factorio is a game about automation, obviously. This means at a fundamental level it doesn't really matter how boring a particular mechanic actually is, in fact I would argue that the game is INTENTIONALLY boring - you could craft the required parts for an item by hand, but that's just mindless menu clicking - the entire point is that you rise above the tedium by automating it.

Automation is a lot of fun because it's a very open-ended system. Okay, I need to transport 5 materials to an assembly machine to make an item, do I put them on belts? Use Bots? Trains? Some Combination? What's better for efficiency vs simplicity vs compactness vs other considerations? Automation in Factorio is fun because it's an open problem, and the entire game can essentially be boiled down to "Move items around from resource patches, craft intermediates, and then craft items", but it keeps looping on itself as you get more and more efficient, unlock more techs, and improve at the game. There are several different approaches and playstyles, different players will have different priorities which will facilitate different factory layouts, etc. I think the reason people put thousands of hours into Factorio is because there's so much freedom to solve the automation problem in whatever way they want. It doesn't actually matter if the core mechanic of item crafting is inherently boring - in fact, I think this is a strength of the game because it naturally encourages you to automate to prevent having to do the boring repetitive tasks over and over again.

Quality doesn't really work this way. While a beginner might take a while to figure things out, at the end of the day, there's really just a handful of optimal builds that get slapped down and forgotten about. I think the biggest issue and the main reason why this is the way it is has to do with Quality being largely disconnected from the main factory and the automation puzzle of the rest of the game. Right now, chucking Quality modules into a normal production building is essentially hurting yourself, since it's mostly just going to serve to clog up your production lines, because Quality items count as different item stacks. If I am using containers with a stack size limit, the moment a Quality power pole gets made, it's going to try and put it in the box, realize it needs a new stack, and stop. That's horrendous. Even without limiting the stack size of a box, you're going to run into problems with issues related to stacks. This essentially forces quality to ONLY be used for upcycling. I think this is why we see elaborate upcycling setups that essentially exist outside of the factory, with resources being pumped in on one end and high quality items being pumped out on the other. This contributes to making it really boring because it's all done in it's own little minigame that has very little bearing on anything else. You input some resources, your slapped-down blueprint does all the work, and you output some quality items. That's it. There's no strategy or depth to it.

I feel like the developers need to integrate Quality into the actual game more. That's more likely to solve the underlying problem, rather than simply nerfing upcycling. At the moment quality IS upcycling, they don't really exist independently, because as mentioned above, putting Quality modules into your normal production lines is essentially playing the game on hard mode.

I suspect that Quality as a mechanic would be received far more positively if it was disconnected from Upcycling and was integrated more into the standard game systems, with upcycling being a way to enhance the mechanic and automate it, rather than being essentially the point of quality in the first place.

Here's how I would implement quality, if doing it from scratch:

1. Make higher Quality items stack "on top" of lower quality items. So I could have a stack of 51 power poles - 50 normal ones, and 1 uncommon one. This way, production lines won't stop if something gets made at a different quality level than expected. I could even have a stack of 250 power poles despite them having a stack size of 50, because I could stack 50 of each quality level on top of each other. Holding CTRL and SHIFT together would then allow picking up a single quality stack, for the purposes of separation.
2. Allow any machine to make quality items from the get go without quality modules, at an extremely low chance.
3. Allow any quality of item to be made without specifically needing to make lower quality ones first (so a normal machine could spit out a legendary power pole, it would just be astronomically rare), while keeping the chances higher if using an item of a closer quality level (so Rares would be mugh likelier to become Legendaries, etc).
4. Add filters to allow bots, inserters, etc, to deal with specific qualities (This is already mostly implemented but I would make it even better)

This will naturally integrate quality into the game as a base-level mechanic, that won't get in the way, and will give players a unique logistical problem to solve. Some players will just pick up their stack of 50 power poles, see an extra one, and go "huh, that's neat", and place it somewhere. Others will use circuits and bots to gather up all the special quality items in their factory to put them into boxes for upcycling later, etc. The system would be more granular and allow dealing with these items in different ways for different playstyles, without causing the production problems that come from putting quality modules in normal production lines in the current implementation.

I don't think my solution is particularly great or interesting or anything, and I expect most people to hate it. I am not asking for this particular solution to be implemented either, it's just an example of how I would tackle this particular mechanic.

[Hurkyl]

Right now, chucking Quality modules into a normal production building is essentially hurting yourself, since it's mostly just going to serve to clog up your production lines, because Quality items count as different item stacks. If I am using containers with a stack size limit, the moment a Quality power pole gets made, it's going to try and put it in the box, realize it needs a new stack, and stop. That's horrendous. Even without limiting the stack size of a box, you're going to run into problems with issues related to stacks. This essentially forces quality to ONLY be used for upcycling.

For what it's worth, this is solvable. When I'm skimming early game, I limit my boxes to "# of common stacks I want, plus 2 more". Sometimes I start an extra stack of items before I start a rare stack so I overproduce a bit and it will block when a rare item is made... but it was already supposed to have blocked anyways.

And if I'm limiting chests with circuit conditions (e.g. "enable if # of items is less than 100" on the inserter), it's solved automatically since there is unused space in the chests for them.

And, of course, the option of filtering so that the common and noncommon items aren't even sharing storage space.

Maybe I misjudge, but I very much have the impression that quality was intended to be primarily a skimming operation, and that "I want top-quality everything" was meant to be a late game thing (and "I want legendary science" to be unthinkable).

And I can't tell if the focus on upcycling is a mix of people caring mostly about late game and people who are chasing shiny things or don't want to puzzle through the planning and logistics of a skimming operation, and how much is that it's genuinely more effective to build bigger (more expansions, bigger platforms, etc) than it is to spend that effort towards skimming instead.

I suspect it's the former because a lot of people seem to be blanking even the most trivial skimming efforts, like just dropping quality modules in mass-produced things with useful quality bonuses and putting the better quality stuff in boxes to be used where they're useful. Like the prod 1 modules and furnaces you make for purple science. The bots you're putting into the roboport network. Or solar panels.

[GregoriusT]

I suspect it's the former because a lot of people seem to be blanking even the most trivial skimming efforts, like just dropping quality modules in mass-produced things with useful quality bonuses and putting the better quality stuff in boxes to be used where they're useful. Like the prod 1 modules and furnaces you make for purple science. The bots you're putting into the roboport network. Or solar panels.

Early Nauvis Quality Game mostly revolves around getting Quality Intermediates, which are easy to get even with Tier 1 Common Quality Quality Modules.

You just put 3 into each Mining Drill, and 2 into each Electric Furnace and if you want to reduce pollution, use Efficiency Beacons around those. I tend to always get beacons right away with the first purple packs I make

You can also divert the Uncommon Ores to an Electric Furnace with higher quality quality modules in order to increase your chances of getting Rare. And divert Rare Ores to a high quality productivity moduled Furnace.

Also do not underestimate Uncommon Quality in the earlygame, a lot of people get hung up on "well Rare Quality is the best i can get, so i will get the best at any cost!" instead of doing more economically viable solutions like using your uncommon ingredients to make Mining Drills to deplete your early Ore Patches more slowly, since expanding into Biter Territory for more patches can be quite annoying.

If your problem earlygame is that you cant destroy Items on Nauvis, then just put quality modules into the Assemblers that do Science Pack ingredients (except yellow belts and rails), since those Ingredients are quite useful for other things as well, like getting uncommon Electric Furnaces and Productivity Modules from your Purple Science Setup, or Robot Frames from Yellow Science, or Quality Ammo and Walls from Military Science.

So yeah, people who didnt even try to skim resources, dont know how effective it really is. It is like an Economy focussed subgame when it comes to Quality.

[radical_larry]

If your problem earlygame is that you cant destroy Items on Nauvis, then just put quality modules into the Assemblers that do Science Pack ingredients (except yellow belts and rails), since those Ingredients are quite useful for other things as well, like getting uncommon Electric Furnaces and Productivity Modules from your Purple Science Setup, or Robot Frames from Yellow Science, or Quality Ammo and Walls from Military Science.

So yeah, people who didnt even try to skim resources, dont know how effective it really is. It is like an Economy focussed subgame when it comes to Quality.

I like putting quality modules into my bot mall on Nauvis. Let every assembler produce into a buffer chest that trashes everything not-common into the logistics network, and add a few dozen more storage chests than I usually would. Gives me entirely free quality stuff to work with, and once I've been to Fulgora I can add a few combinators to a requester chest and pull it all out of the network onto a belt and recycle whatever I don't need.

[ssyang]

Awesome update!

[Tertius]

Maybe I misjudge, but I very much have the impression that quality was intended to be primarily a skimming operation, and that "I want top-quality everything" was meant to be a late game thing (and "I want legendary science" to be unthinkable).

And I can't tell if the focus on upcycling is a mix of people caring mostly about late game and people who are chasing shiny things or don't want to puzzle through the planning and logistics of a skimming operation, and how much is that it's genuinely more effective to build bigger (more expansions, bigger platforms, etc) than it is to spend that effort towards skimming instead.

If it comes to me, skimming (putting in quality modules and use whatever will result from it) isn't a feasible approach. It clashes with speed modules, it makes assemblers slower, and it floods the factory with unwanted stuff. I don't do this, I never even considered doing this.

Because of this, I chose to do quality production as extra step. An extra factory, dedicated and specialized to quality production. This way all the quality intermediates can be controlled. And since it's quite laborious to setup, and while you're building this you don't advance through the main game, I postponed this to after the endgame. And since after the endgame legendary quality is available, I just built a factory that performs upcycling from normal to legendary. As blackbox. Normal items in, legendary items out. Completely separated from what I built before.

This is my personal approach to handle quality in general, as result from the constraints of the quality mechanics.

Again, main reasons:

• amount of items is multiplied by (up to) 5, clogging everything, and most items are never being used since they're not being produced in useful amounts. Either way too many or not enough.
• quality modules slow machines down and clash with speed modules