Friday Facts #443 - More Planet Deliveries

[Stargateur]

I don't really understand this unload cargo bay feature. Honestly why limit range ? and why limit landing pad ? Okay you wanted, "busy location" cargo landing pad gameplay but I still fail to see why you force player to play like that. Why not just let player decide if he want to use one or more landing pad ? Even without the limitation I would probably play with only one landing pad anyway.

[RagnarDies]

New here! First time poster.

After this friday facts #442 i felt like i should finally join the forum, the work put in on this is amazing!

With the Folgora ruins and implementing ruins in parts of the oil it seems like such a cool concept for the people who love the lore behind the planets.

It would be awesome to see some kind of damning available with walls or something between the raised scrap islands in the future so you could block off oil and empty whats inside to see what is below, whether its ruins or some kind of resource that could be utilized on the planet. Just a thought.

Thanks for the content yall put out, i have gifted this game to so many friends over the years and its still my favorite.

Cheers!

[GregoriusT]

I don't really understand this unload cargo bay feature. Honestly why limit range ? and why limit landing pad ? Okay you wanted, "busy location" cargo landing pad gameplay but I still fail to see why you force player to play like that. Why not just let player decide if he want to use one or more landing pad ? Even without the limitation I would probably play with only one landing pad anyway.

you know how trains are already a little bit obsolete? if you allowed multiple landing pads and/or too large of a cargo unload area, you would make not just trains obsolete but also belts to a certain extent, since you can just do the "one huge chest" type of logistics.

[toths]

Thanks again for all the hard work, I can't wait to clear my schedule for a fresh playthrough with vanilla settings.

[guy smiley]

Hmm, wouldn't it be better to just make the hub + cargo bays + unload bays exist on a 2x2 grid that is offset by one tile in x and y axis? Rather than this weird 4x5 thing we are getting?

Cos right now the train 2x2 grid and the hub 2x2 grid are both the same, and if those unload bays can't be rotated then that's the devs mandating vertical train stations only. Which I am not a fan of, not least because designing a vertical train station is just harder than designing one horizontally, not matter the orientation you end up actually placing it in. I dunno about anyone else, but I happen to have this wacky piece of technology known as a widescreen monitor, and designing something forced to be taller than it is wide on a screen that is wider than it is tall is pretty annoying. Even ignoring that the fact that the train station is still mandated to be oriented vertically is still bad.

Ahem, assumptions, assumptions, maybe they have some magic solution to this, dunno. But anyway, if the hub grid was offset by one from the train grid, the unload bays could be 4x4 instead and everything would work out perfectly, no?

[Nelyus]

Honestly, if I were in Wube's shoes, once version 2.1 stabilizes and a few minor patches are out, I would consider introducing some kind of pass, like a Battle Pass. It would give the team a fresh influx of money to fund further engine development or new content. Factorio is a pretty niche product, and after so many years of active support, just two purchases is way too little! The pass could be cheap, but thanks to such a dedicated player base, it would provide consistent revenue and motivation to keep pushing forward.

Either way, a huge thank you to Wube for thousands of hours of fun working on the factory!

A battle pass doesn’t look consistent with Wube’s philosophy to me.

If you want to support Wube, you can gift the game. It’ll hook new people, who’ll then want to support Wube, and gift the game to even more people… and so on…

[GregoriusT]

Okay i gotta ask, like what the heck would you even put into a Factorio Battle Pass?

What type of ingame rewards would it give you for playing Factorio with the Battle Pass?

Would those rewards expire when you aren't subscribed to the Battle Pass?

Have the Battle Pass add a Super-Legendary Quality to the Game while unlocking Epic Quality (along uncommon and rare) on Nauvis, Legendary on Gleba and Super-Legendary on Aquilo.

[bobucles]

A circuit connected wall sounds pretty silly, but consider repair bots for a moment. Bots get into trouble because they run into danger, often at the walls. These injured bots summon even more repair bots, with the only job of repairing the damaged bot. The "medic" bots get injured, summoning medicmedic bots that get injured, summoning medic^3 bots and so on. There is absolutely no reason for a bot to repair a bot, they get a free repair job in the roboport so half of this behavior is ridiculous.

Fix the bot problem by giving bots a "don't fix me" tag.
Then add walls to the circuit network by giving them a "disable repair" option. The network will decide when to release bots for repair.
Floors can be added to the circuit network as type of pressure pad. It might have a weight "counter" but could also be a simple on/off. Floor sensors are handy for the circuit network to know when to turn repairs on/off or set alarms or other things.

See? It's so dumb it's almost smart.

[sarge945]

A circuit connected wall sounds pretty silly, but consider repair bots for a moment. Bots get into trouble because they run into danger, often at the walls. These injured bots summon even more repair bots, with the only job of repairing the damaged bot. The "medic" bots get injured, summoning medicmedic bots that get injured, summoning medic^3 bots and so on. There is absolutely no reason for a bot to repair a bot, they get a free repair job in the roboport so half of this behavior is ridiculous.

Fix the bot problem by giving bots a "don't fix me" tag.
Then add walls to the circuit network by giving them a "disable repair" option. The network will decide when to release bots for repair.
Floors can be added to the circuit network as type of pressure pad. It might have a weight "counter" but could also be a simple on/off. Floor sensors are handy for the circuit network to know when to turn repairs on/off or set alarms or other things.

See? It's so dumb it's almost smart.

Honestly, all this can be fixed with a small tweak to robot logic, if they simply refused to move within a certain distance of an enemy, and if within that distance, would retreat in the direction of the furthest force-owned building.

This behaviour could be a (global) toggle that could be turned on or off at any roboport.

No need for fancy circuits and stuff.

I know circuits are "the factorio way", but I feel like this is more of a basic AI problem and fixing it would fall within the purview of QoL. The gameplay effects would be minimal outside of making players less annoyed.

Being able to read the presence of enemies via the circuit network is still useful for other reasons, so it should still be implemented, but using it to fix bots just seems like working around the game's limitations rather than any interesting logistics puzzle.

[eugenekay]

A circuit connected wall sounds pretty silly

Circuit wires can be connected to Wall "ghosts", which persists after it is Built/Revived, or Blueprinted:

06-21-2026, 11-31-03.png (482.92 KiB) Viewed 190 times

This can be used to create a Sensor - if Biters eat part of the wall then the Circuit is broken, activating an Alarm speaker.

0eNq9lk1uwyAQha9SzZpEARv/bXOILqLIwsk0RXIgApw0inz3gi21dZQFm7KxnvH4zQeyn+YBXT/gxUjloHmAPGhlodk9wMqTEn1YU+KM0IB1WuHqJvoeRgJSHfELGjqSF6UGj6ubNPinkI17AqicdBLnBtPNvVXDuUPjnciLRgQu2vpXtAruoV+55gTu0KwYXXNv73md0X3b4ae4Sm1C3UGawyBdqy+o2pNw3tSZAcnPA4Pi2FpUNtR/iN7iGPbxRMTiiOp0RFkcUZWOKI8iChypiHgc0SYdURFHlKUjKuOIWDqiKo6IpyOq44jydER0E4eUMCJpXGqzIiFSXGyzhLFN43KbJcxtGhfc2b/FpJ8GwoQQRoEdJZRkhO7Jji0Un1S+UOWkioWqJ1UtlP8yg/T/zJOe7Sl71t5876Gkw7M/lN+hiEAvOvTTDWzn7by9z0d1RWOnk+IFq/O65lVelP4yjt++SCw9

Copy blueprint

Good Luck!

[Hurkyl]

Honestly, all this can be fixed with a small tweak to robot logic, if they simply refused to move within a certain distance of an enemy, and if within that distance, would retreat in the direction of the furthest force-owned building.

Something to keep in mind is taht there are offensive strategies.
For concreteness, here are a couple offensive strategies where you wouldn't want this behavior.

Is there an attack on an unprotected part of your base? Tell the bots to place a few laser turrets there. Or a cluster of land mines.

Are you assaulting a tough enemy base? Make a blueprint with a large electric pole and 8 laser turrets around it, and you can place a few copies in combat to have bots instantly deploy lots of weaponry. Or a substation and a bunch more turrets.

There's something you can do with using bots to place a block of gun turrets with a handful of ammo each for fighting demolishers, although I'm not sure how to use that effectively.

[GregoriusT]

Honestly, all this can be fixed with a small tweak to robot logic, if they simply refused to move within a certain distance of an enemy, and if within that distance, would retreat in the direction of the furthest force-owned building.

Something to keep in mind is taht there are offensive strategies.
For concreteness, here are a couple offensive strategies where you wouldn't want this behavior.

Is there an attack on an unprotected part of your base? Tell the bots to place a few laser turrets there. Or a cluster of land mines.

Are you assaulting a tough enemy base? Make a blueprint with a large electric pole and 8 laser turrets around it, and you can place a few copies in combat to have bots instantly deploy lots of weaponry. Or a substation and a bunch more turrets.

There's something you can do with using bots to place a block of gun turrets with a handful of ammo each for fighting demolishers, although I'm not sure how to use that effectively.

The reason the bots dont do that is because checking for "if there is an enemy in the path or near the destination" would be quite laggy.

I tend to fix the Issue myself by making sure there is only one Repair Pack entering the Roboport Network at a time, which will make sure bots wont just swarm the Walls or other mass destroyed Items, and just gradually regenerate lost health slowly. If something actually breaks they can just bring a whole wall and leave instantly, since placing stuff wont make the bots hover in place to repair stuff.