Friday Facts #443 - More Planet Deliveries

[Milo_Thatch]

>unloading bay
Hell yeah.
The 59 tile limit is too small imo, doesn't it limits the size of loading trains to about 18 wagons?
The new legendary locomotives are just begging to pull 64 wagons to max speed. Would it be possible to quadruple that number?
>pump fix
Cursed crude loading, cursed nuclear reactors, cursed spiral factories
The new graphics are incredible, what a send-off

[Skellitor301]

Woah, so many amazing changes! These final touches you guys have been putting in look so good and the features feel like the final product is more and more properly feature complete.

One thing I am curious about with the inclusion of planets in background. I know that many of the mod authors release the visual planets in complete packs. One of the addon mods for visual planets is the option to select which planet uses which pack you have enabled, since some planets look better than others, allowing you to mix n match between packs. Would there be a similar setting put in the game? If so, can there be a way to either give the player a way to view what ach planet option looks like, or let the option be a per player option so it can be done without needing to restart the game? That can give co-op and multiplayer players the option to select the planets they like rather than being stuck on a planet visual that the host likes.

[mindelos]

Very underwhelming update.
You need to make early game less boring by allowing player more interesting toys before unlocking drones.

[Terrahertz]

Stellar work as always!

I think it's funny that the change to the agricultural tower was not explicitly named, if I am not mistaken you can only turn the tower on/off currently so just turning of harvesting is going to be a huge deal for gleba.

Assemblers and the refinery look WAY better now, just one set of entities might be missing: All the furnaces. I get that the basic one cannot have much going on as it is just a bunch of bricks, but the electric one could have something more going on than 2 vents at the top.

Research automation was probably the last thing needed to turn the late game into an idle game

And here I was thinking the future of Nauvis would be just a landing pad surrounded by labs and everything is connected via drones, nice to see that the final version will address this one, also the graphics look amazing.

Thank you for all the effort

[Skellitor301]

I feel like I'm going crazy. That doesn't look like Aquilo in the last planet background slide... It's so different from the icon that I thought they were teasing a new gas giant. I have seen nobody else mention it though so it is proooobably not a whole new planet lol but I still can't shake the feeling telling me that it is ;_; a girl can dream

With the number of visible planet packs already out there I can see someone making Aquillo look more like it does in the icon. NGL I'm excited to see what the new packs will look like now that I think about it

Very underwhelming update.
You need to make early game less boring by allowing player more interesting toys before unlocking drones.

NGL this is more just an issue with sandboxes in general than something missing in the early game. There's plenty to do and plenty of toys before we get drones. It's more that you may feel like the early game is boring cause we've done the same early game thousands of times, and it feels a bit mundane as a result. Fact is, optimizing the early game route gets to a point where needing to do it again feels boring or lackluster, despite the fact there's so much you do get during that stage.

It's the same thing playing Minecraft can suffer from when you play optimally for so long you end up with wanting more in the progression. We know what it takes to get a full set of iron armor in the first couple of days, making leather not as useful. It's a focus on the quick advancement that caused the player to optimize the fun of exploration and trying different things out of the game.

[sarge945]

Very underwhelming update.
You need to make early game less boring by allowing player more interesting toys before unlocking drones.

I use this mod (I disable everything except for the starting drones/harness armour) and it works well.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SurvivalGear

I feel like having some early-game construction robots would be stellar.

Imagine if the crashed ship had a (still functioning) inbuilt roboport and 10 construction robots.

[vipm23]

Going to be disappointed Recursive Blueprints didn't make it in.

Still, this is a fine sendoff to the game. Thank you.

[GregoriusT]

Wait do the Cargo Bay Unloaders only rotate to a Left-Right position and not an Up-Down position?

I really hope this observation is just a quirk of how the Screenshots are taken and not doing things like preventing nice looking horizontal train stops.

[Panzerknacker]

Cool stuff I gotta say, liking the new assembler and refinery graphics, more moving parts ftw.

One question tho, now that we have a proper way to unload from landing pads, could it be a consideration to find a way to no longer require Logistic network as prerequisite for the Rocket silo? Main reason I want this is because I feel that Logistic network is a pretty huge thing for new players, even tho Space age expansion is not meant for new players, just unlocking the tech by itself already litters the UI with many new buttons, learning how to use and configure it takes so much time that you basically end up delaying further research process. If there is anything I dislike in modern games is being flooded with new stuff without even having time to properly use the previous thing. And you can progress to the Rocket silo REALLY fast in SA. Lastly, we can now again have the achievement properly of finishing the game without Logistic network.

[Oktokolo]

Is the third circuit color in the next FFF? Is it blue?

[Super Mikal]

Since you're working on circuit network UX, allow me to plug my feature idea: Improved Circuit Network Selector buttons, in a nutshell: replace the network selector checkboxes with toggle buttons with the red/green wire icons.

Also there was an idea on Discord to localize the red/green wire icons, which I'm considering doing as another mod, but would be nice if it was done in the base game by pro designes (and if not, would love some hints for how you made the existing ones, but I'll do my best)

[SuperBananaBomb]

The circuit improvements are amazing!

Please don't forget the underground belts for circuit network. Even the mine got connection now!
Aquilo designs especially have a lot of undergroundies with all the heat pipes.

Also, it would be useful to have entities be part of the circuit network without any actual connection. Inserters with self-blacklist and belts that stop on some particular item being on them so inserters cant miss picking it up for example. Connecting to other entities causes signal contamination and placing additional entities just for the purposes of enabling the circuit network is wasteful in compact designs. The new input/output separation will help in certain cases, so definitely a win already!

[mindelos]

Very underwhelming update.
You need to make early game less boring by allowing player more interesting toys before unlocking drones.

I use this mod (I disable everything except for the starting drones/harness armour) and it works well.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SurvivalGear

I feel like having some early-game construction robots would be stellar.

Imagine if the crashed ship had a (still functioning) inbuilt roboport and 10 construction robots.

Thank you bro for your mod sugestion but i dont like mods and i only play vanilla because i am lazy bastard avoiding to manage more stuff like mods

I am totally on board with you on having early-game construction robots. That is a great sugestion.

[MEOWMI]

Wow! These are getting even better every week, and that's not an easy bar to beat. Bravo!

One thing about the art I feel like is worth questioning, is the grunge/wear textures on the new refinery and assemblers. It feels just a bit too heavy, even for Factorio's grungy artstyle, compared to other existing sprites. Other than that I like them!

[Ghoulish]

Brilliant update!

[No_exit]

Looks great except for the Research Queue which feels unnecessarily complex while still missing key flexibility. Please consider the following 2 elegant and easy to use solutions:

1) Please allow us to have "Research Fallthrough" that automatically happens for each individual Research lab. This means that each lab automatically helps research progress to the first technology in the research queue that this lab has the necessary research packs for.

So one lab could be researching one thing, while simultaneous a different lab is researching something entirely different because of science pack availability.

Perfect for Gleba science and it also allows for crazy setups where you could for example have some labs on Vulcanus that research Mining Productivity non-stop while Nauvis is researching other technologies which require more science packs, just by adding Mining Productivity to the back of the queue.

2) As for the Research Queue, please add an input field with the "research level" when adding a technology to the research queue, so when picking the next research you can type for example "50" in that input field, and when you press the "Enqueue Research" button it will add a single entry to the research queue that says "Research level 32-50" (provided you are at level 31 of that research).

These 2 changes should be easy to use, add flexibility, remove tediousness, remove micromanagement, and make research more efficient overall.

Thanks for reading

[KillerAnt]

Hype me up, Scotty!

I crave for the separate input/output logistics network. I love the new possibilities with the changes to the landing pad.

But, one caveat: I am playing Factorio because unlike some other factory games, it does not trigger my motion sickness. For that very reason, I had to quickly disable the Visible Planets mod after the first install - the planet rotation already gave me motion sickness. Is there an easy way to disable the rotation or the entire planet background?

[ESI85]

How about making better quality science packs more useful?

[Rebmes]

Looks very exciting, the assemblers make me drool, well done xD

[DamienAlienForums]

looking great! I'm excited to play 2.1. I'd suggest lowering the speed the planet moves during departure/arrival. It's a small detail, but the current speed feels weird to me as somebody who's played Kerbal Space Program. Perhaps it just needs a smoother change in velocity? To get KSP to look like the image in the blog post would require some insane physics. It looks so much better with planets in the background tho. I wonder what the landing animation looks like?