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

[sarge945]

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.

Okay, I see your point.

I still think making higher quality items stack on lower quality ones would solve a lot of annoyances and unnecessary factory blockages, but I get your point.

[arrowcircle]

Please dont remove space casinos

[zeldrakef]

In general, I agree that quality gambling by space casinos is overpowered and makes other forms of quality grinding obselete. But it's very strange that space casinos are getting shadowrealm'd when LDS productivity is not. While you could, of course, delete the LDS productivity cheese too, I think this illustrates a broader problem with quality as a whole: in that the only requirement is to find one way to increase the rarity of items by one (and then loop that infinitely), and then you will optimize it for the most efficient way to get that rarity increase. Currently that's space casinos, but who knows what design is next. (Asteroid crushing?)

The point is that removing space casinos (by removing quality modules in asteroid processors) doesn't actually change anything: you'll find the next most efficient way to upcycle things. I don't know what that will be but I'm sure someone has already made a design for it.

I'd rather change the numbers on quality modules. The small +chance effect you have a ton of non-higher-quality junk that there's nothing else to do but throw into recyclers and feed back in, I'd have an extremely high minus productivity effect with a very high +quality (eg: 3 quality 3 modules guarantee +1 level of quality, but take 100x the amount of resources to create). This might seem like the numbers are shuffled (from # raw ingredients in for chance vs # raw ingredients in to offset -productivity), but crucially upcycling the product by trying to break it down to reroll and grind for better equipment still gives you the "usual" values: so it took 100 iron plates and 200 copper wire (or whatever) to create a legendary circuit, but you break that down for materials and you still only get 0.25 legendary iron plates and 0.5 legendary copper wire.

Thus upcycling (which is the de facto method of increasing quality) no longer becomes dominant and is now competitive (as opposed to totally outclassing) integrating quality throughout the production chain (take regular ore, smelt that 10x to get uncommon plates, forge that 10x to get rare circuits, and shove 10x of those together to get epic prod 1 modules), which is exactly what the reason for this space casino shadowrealm is for: having multiple competitive, viable, and equally strong ways to increase quality rather than "oops all upcycling!" until you get legendary iron and copper and can assemble whatever you want on the spot.



TL;DR: I agree space casinos are overpowered but by removing them all you do is kick the problem to the next most efficient way of upcycling. Rather, consider changing the numbers on quality modules for a huge -productivity (like 5x for a 33% chance, per module) with a much higher chance of quality, making manufacturing with quality modules viable to upcycling.

[rdragonrydr]

Incredible update. I am very excited about the perpendicular belt changes, I was actually just building something and had to put some wonky belts together that this would have mostly solved.

More diagonals feel like heresy (in the fun way) but you won't hear me complain about it. Diagonal flamethrowers are going to be awesome!

I do have a minor concern about the rocks on Vulcanus: They're really hard to spot, except for the glowing ones. Maybe a sulfur crust or something could be added to the normal ones? The cliffs are already hard to navigate around, but I could spot the rocks.

Coal can be hard to see too, there are a lot of small black textures that make it hard to tell the extent of the patch.

I'd love to see quality affect the size of fluid wagons and tanks, yes.

Oh, and on the note of quality items, can we get a way to feed normal nutrients to a biochamber that's also consuming quality nutrients? As it stands now, it's far too easy for the quality ones to end up in the fuel slot and if you're running prod mods, most of them get eaten just trying to cook your ingredients rather than actually make them.

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One last thing, and I know this is contentious already... but can we have a config (like ore richness or something) that either affects quality scales or enables asteroid upcycling?

I absolutely respect your work, and I am pretty sure Factorio has my most hours of everything I've played, but the quality system was really monotonous and doesn't seem to scale well. The "official" way was not fun for me, and setting it up was incredibly tedious for a small amount of throughput. It really felt like the early game method, but there doesn't seem to be anything to graduate to from there if the asteroid casino is removed.

I did in fact try the "usual" approaches to getting quality items (that being putting quality in everything and filtering, and then targeted upcycling of items that support productivity and have useful ingredients) and some level of upcycling of the unwanted items, but I quickly found myself drowning in high-quality random side products and during the first stage I was unable to use prod mods in most of my base so throughput was even worse! It really feels like the "non-optimal" early game solution and while the asteroid casino does feel slightly like an exploit, that's more because space resources are also free; it does still feel like part of the endgame. I had bases on every planet, I already had Promethium, but now I truly had (Nauvis) legendary items in volume.

Even without asteroid upcycling, there's still a clear "right" way we have to do quality, and some specific items and ingredients don't play well and are way harder to get since they have a short crafting chain and don't support productivity for any of their co-products (I'm looking at spidertrons, rocket turrets, and stack inserters, the latter of which I need to use a TON of and the former I still don't have at all). On that note, I have also covered half an island in recyclers and STILL can't get enough Holmium to get a surplus of legendary electromagnetic plants. I'd eventually like to make a quality portable fusion, but I'd probably pop a blood vessel seeing how much time and how many failed products it'll take. I was this close to a breakdown trying to get my legendary armor and then had to reload a save because I accidentally recycled it somehow!

I would absolutely welcome other options, perhaps an expensive machine (rocket silo in costs?) that's slower and takes more resources, but just produces ingredients of its quality? The bootstrap can still use the current quality module process, and let's say it can't increase quality. Call it a precision assembler or something, and heck, maybe even disable prod mods for it or even take as many resources as the modules would have. Just so long as it takes out the random aspect and becomes something that feels like a logistics problem with a progress bar instead of literally spaghetti-ing my way to a very slow victory.


I was literally just planning out an even crazier upcycler ship for the heck of it (run a nuke plant, make everything I can onboard and mail it down), but I'm now not sure what to actually do on the "space" side of things that's exciting and lets me really tweak a design to optimize it. I was considering the challenge to make one that runs as much off of stored solar power as possible while making legendary science, but I'm never going to be able to afford that for the planet-based resources. I'd waste far too much ore and if not using free resources on it, the productivity gain of the science doesn't make up for the resource cost.

...I did consider it for gleba science, but I already have fast logistics so I don't gain enough from the decay time bonus either compared to just making more science.

[yngndrw]

Well we've now had the last FFF and there don't appear to be any major changes to quality to fix the underlying issue. So can we have our space casinos back, please?

[krozu]

Well we've now had the last FFF and there don't appear to be any major changes to quality to fix the underlying issue. So can we have our space casinos back, please?

One does not fix quality in a single week.

Yes yes, it's been over a year. Let me have my fun since they're not gonna overhaul it.
To be fair, you don't learn the shortcomings of a system until you put it under stress. Of which they had over a year now.

[sarge945]

I do think having an alternate "You are guaranteed higher quality, but resource cost is increased significantly" method of upcycling is good overall.

On the subject of quality: People have been asking for quality fluids. What if we could use Quality Barrels to accomplish the same goal.

This would allow people to have their precious quality fluids, while also making barrels actually useful and not a complete meme.