Friday Facts #443 - More Planet Deliveries

[Loewchen]

But I came here to ask about the release date, I didn't see any posted but people are saying they figured out from the post?

The experimental release will be this week, more likely sooner than later in the week.

[naxomax]

Love everything in the post except the new assembling machines. The art style just feels a little off compared to most other overhauled buildings. The cogs also feel a bit "fake" in that they don't look like they are doing any meaningful work.

[Aapjuh]

Why not take the opportunity to go for something like this from the get go?


Would save space too.

[alluringMoth7]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-443

I think these guys are doing a fantastic job with the new animations, but I think that it would be important to have an option to turn off a number of them, or perhaps use older and less resource intensive versions for the sake of us who use old and janky computers that already have minor troubles with the game.

also inbuilt disco science. there should be inbuilt disco science.

[waterBear]

Why not take the opportunity to go for something like this from the get go?


Would save space too.

Because it's not specific to trains. Their demo shows that, but it's really just a means to pull from the landing pad with inserters. Whether or not you put things into a train is up to you.

[Primetheus]

06-23-2026, 09-49-22.png (530.63 KiB) Viewed 654 times

Please consider releasing these, cool cell shaded pastel sprites --- as a graphical overhaul mod.
They look so cool, I can only imagine how neat it would look at scale!!!

Heck I would even pay for that! (dont get me wrong i love the current look too) - but this would be an amazing thing to see - anyone agree?

[GregoriusT]

Oh look, ITS RELEASED!!!

[lodar]

What about quality storage tank? Still stuck on 25k volume?

[Tricorius]

06-23-2026, 09-49-22.png

Please consider releasing these, for all the sprites as a graphical overhaul mod.
They look so cool, I can only imagine how neat it would look at scale!!!

Heck I would even pay for that! (dont get me wrong i love the current look too) - but this would be an amazing thing to see - anyone agree?

Well, I would imagine it would be pretty boring since I’m assuming there’s no animation or game integration for concept art. There’s a LOT that happens to concept art before it’s a usable in game asset.

[Ogro]

But I came here to ask about the release date, I didn't see any posted but people are saying they figured out from the post?

The experimental release will be this week, more likely sooner than later in the week.

Thank you for your reply, you were right, it is live now! What a beautiful change log entry!

[macdjord]

- the fluids have temperature but I don't think there is anything using that feature? I assuming you are not adding anything new with 2.1 so it will just become something only mods can use?

Technically there are two uses:

• Steam comes in two variants - 150° steam from boilers and 500° steam from heat exchangers and from the acid neutralization recipe. 500° steam gives more power, but only if processed in a turbine rather than a steam engine.
• The plasma produced by fusion reactors can come in various different temperatures, and this is how the fusion reactor's neighbour bonus works: a reactor with one or more neighbours consumes the same amount of fuel to produce a given amount of plasma, but outputs said plasma at a higher temperature; like steam, plasma gives more energy if it is of a higher temperature, and fusion generators can consume plasma of any temperature.

That said, I do feel the features is underutilized. Steam only comes in those two temperatures and there's never any reason to mix them, so you could easily just make them two separate fluids, 'steam' and 'superheated steam', just like hot and cold fluoroketone are separate fluids. For the fusion reactor's bonus, you could just have the reactor produce more plasma instead of hotter plasma when it has neighbours; the only difference to the player would be needing a bit more fluoroketone for larger reactors.

IIRC it was used a bit more in the past - originally ''steam' wasn't its own resource but instead was just water with a temperature over 100°, and boilers, rather than taking in water and outputting steam of a fixed temperature, would take in water and output water that was a certain amount hotter, so you had to chain boilers to get useable steam, and the more you chained the more steam engines you could fuel with it?

The whole thing feels like its a holdover - that at some point somebody had a bunch of neat ideas for systems involving fluids with different temperatures and manipulating those temperatures in different ways, so they implemented fluids having temperatures, but those ideas mostly never materialized, leaving fluid temperature used just enough that it can't be trivially removed but not enough to actually be interesting.

How it will look with automalls with the new circuit?
Input:
what i want to build
Output:
Recipe (on Green Wire)
What is in the machine (on Red Wire)

Will that work?

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it. It was originally proposed that each of a machine's inputs and outputs would have separate red and green checkboxes, the same way combinators do, but it seems that was not implemented.

How about bigger stack size for prometium? Because the sushi belt storage looks ugly.

The whole point of promethium not stacking is that you aren't supposed to store it at all. The intended solution was that you'd have to load up a ship with all the other ingredients to Promethium Science Packs, head out towards the Shatter Planet to collect promethium chunks, and turn the chunks into science packs as you collect them. All the other ingredients stack, as does the pack itself, so there's no problem transporting them. The issue is, of course, that one of the other ingredients is biter eggs, which spoil in 30 minutes, and worse spoil not into spoilage but into angry big biters in the middle of your ship. Dealing with this hard 30 minute deadline was supposed to be the main difficulty in producing Promethium Science. (Edit: Well, okay, one of the main difficulties. Dealing with the densely packed huge asteroids is tough in and of itself. But even there, the 30-minute time limit made things much tougher, since it restricted your ability to just slow down your ship to make the trip easier.)

Then some joker figured out that if you weaved multiple colours of belt together in both directions, you actually could store promethium chunks with surprisingly high per-tile density, and thus take them home and make the science at your leisure, only sending up eggs as you need them so they never get close to spoiling.

Belt storage is itself an exploit to avoid an intended difficulty mechanic. The solution to it looking ugly is to not use it and actually engage with the spoilage mechanic as designed.