Quality levels completely break factory

[mmmPI]

Consider:
Production science buys beacons. I cannot ship in beacons if I do not research that, which is what happens if someone tries the Rush to Space achievement. So. I can sell that no beacons + basic assemblers and modules, is a component of an achievement.
But saying it is easier than say, the massive power cut, or speed boost beacons could provide starting a planet. Is just. Not. That's either less machines put down or less power generation put in.
I think; mmmPI, that seen from another angle. Your assessment of this person's ideas is correct.

To me what you are saying is even more non sense unrelated to what OP posted, look it's about beacon and/or spoilage.

To what extent do I repeat myself here? It's annoying that the devs refuse to comment on these things. "We don't want to ruin your fun but space casinos make other options less appealing". Ok, so what are the new options? From a different thread:

A lot ! The extend at which you repeat yourself ! And here you complain devs refuse to comment on those things while quoting directly a devs answer. To me it appears contradictory and although you are correct to mention it's a different thread, you still repeated what you posted on that other thread and on some you made yourself about quality which is mostly unrelated to what OP mention imo, aka , the difficulty to handle the different quality level of the byproducts if/when you start to use quality module.

You even start by saying "A couple of issues I have with quality:" which makes it clear that you post your own (unrelated) complain about quality, thing you already did in several threads like one you opened yourself about quality and the one you linked. Since your problems are different than those OPs mention and the suggestion you make are adressing only your problems it doesn't appear that they are really suited in this thread, at least no more than where you exposed them in the first place.

Okay, something got lost in translation.
Nothing I said touched on beacons, production sciences, or anything in the previous post.

Fish or tree could have been used to softly introduce people to spoilage mechanics.

It doesn't appear to be the translation the problem, you are suggesting again something that has nothing to do with quality nor anything OP mentionned, but rather pursing the off-topic you went on since your first comment by suggesting something already in the game 'spoilable fish' so players can have a peak at the mechanic before reaching Gleba. It has nothing to do with the difficulty encountered by OP when first using quality module on Fulgora imo.

[Hurkyl]

A couple of issues I have with quality:

1. The early game.

Without recyclers you can't do much with it. You can't use it in your main production lines because it will jam your factory. And you can't do upcycling. So the only thing you can really do with it is gamble.

Now technically you CAN use it in more ways, but only if you manually clear things. You could argue that this is a legitimate form of progression - you get the base functionality first and then automate it later. But this feels bad, because the thing required for automation (the recycler) is unlocked on Fulgora, which reduces your options with regard to planet order if you want to use quality.

You can skim. Anything you mass produce can be fitted with quality modules to also produce a small stream of higher quality items which you can use in various ways. E.g. store higher quality finished products in a mall, route quality intermediates to a storage area so you can carefully ration them out to produce specific items, automation for a stream of quality intermediates that don't need to be so carefully rationed....

If the "small stream of higher quality items" is too small for you, or are otherwise uninterested in working out how to do the logistics pre-recycler... well, remember the devs wanted planet order to be a strategic decision, and intentionally locked different forms of progression behind different planets.

[quineotio]

I've seen a LOT of people say, "I don't bother with quality until after Aquilo".

This is a sign of a failure of design. Quality is unlocked on Nauvis, at blue science. You'd expect people to start using it then.

A separate mod was made so that quality could be disabled entirely.

This is a sign of a failure of design. If so many people don't like it that you go to special effort to allow people to turn it off, there's obviously a problem.

In this context, saying "working as intended" is pretty funny. It's intended that most people don't use it?

[mmmPI]

A separate mod was made so that quality could be disabled entirely.
This is a sign of a failure of design.

No this is the sign of an optionnal (difficult) feature... It was even written in the FFF annoucing it before it was even released.

In this context, saying "working as intended" is pretty funny. It's intended that most people don't use it?

It's expected that a few players may find it frustrating and some others complain about their displeasure and others to understand that they were not the target for the optionnal feature and turn it off i think, due to the large number of customer for the game, there may even be some frustration of epic proportion excuse the pun, but judging from what players do in public multiplayer server, it doesn't appear to be the case that quality is disabled in games. Not even 10% i would say. I guess most players are able to use it eventually even if sparcely from my observations. They take it as another puzzle, maybe "for later" when they grow up, have more time and more experience, more patience to dedicate to it. But i get that it can be felt harshly to have such humbling experience where you are overwhelm by the complexity of a video game that you used to feel like you've mastered every aspect.

I would encourage nonetheless anyone facing such hardship to listen to the precious tips and tricks delivered by experienced players, I think it's at least the 3rd time that someone has to explain to you on this forum that you don't necessarily need a recycler to do quality, previous times throwing stuff in lava was mentionned if you went Vulcanus first, even on this thread it was mentionned ! Unfortunately not the best example of listening ability from your end, not to mention that it is unrelated to what OP mention, recyclers are the cornerstone of Fulgora, you will necessarily have them and use them there ...

An easy way to take advantage of the benefit with minimal complexity is to use quality module only in the EM plant making accumulators. Those of "no quality" can go into science, and those of "quality" are kept to make the most out of the small island in Fulgora, or for space platforms. You can also use them only for the mech armor, if you like RNG. Choice is up to you ^^

[coffee-factorio]

I've seen a LOT of people say, "I don't bother with quality until after Aquilo".

This is a sign of a failure of design. Quality is unlocked on Nauvis, at blue science. You'd expect people to start using it then.

+1

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375
You might be surprised if you go to look at the original blog post. Kovarex explicitly laid you how he thought the strategy would play.

Strategy implications

I'm happy with the strategy implications, because they add more important decisions throughout the game.

1) You don't have the recycler soon in the game, so you can't really just recycle to get the best stuff, the most common way how to start with the quality is to just insert some quality modules into production of final products, which emits some higher quality products as a by product.
This results in a stage of the game, where you pick the very limited number of higher quality modules, machines etc. made as a side effect, and you can decide what are the most important parts of the factory that need boosting.
2) Later, especially once you unlock recycling, it can be a HUGE trap to try to get too high quality of too many things too early.
The cost is just too high, and you can easily realize, that 90% of the production of your factory goes into trying to get the legendary cool thing you want.
So prioritization of where and how many resources go is crucial. As well as deciding what items are the most important to get in higher quality. It plays a huge role in the speed in which you move forward.
On the other hand, if someone wants to just slow-run the game and enjoy having everything semi-perfect and over-prepare before moving to another planet, the possibility is certainly there.
3) When interplanetary logistics come into play, the quality plays a big role, as things change.
With normal quality products, it might be easier and more productive to make the thing locally on the planet from the local resources rather than having to transfer it through rockets and space platforms. But once the standard goes up, and you start using high quality entities more, the relative cost of the item and the rocket to transport it changes a lot, and it starts to be better to make each item production in one place and just transport it everywhere.
4) It plays nicely with the space platform building part, as the space on the platform is quite limited and expensive, it is very efficient to save the best stuff you have for the platform, at least in the beginning.
5) In big numbers, the quality is basically statistics, but in small numbers the random aspect can be quite fun in a different way. Especially for personal armors and equipment, we always ended up having an assembling machine with the best quality modules in the center of the factory dedicated for people trying to gamble for the best possible equipment for their personal use. The excitement of getting directly a rare power armor from common ingredients when you are super lucky is the same as getting BAR-BAR-BAR in the slot machine, or the wanted item in the pay-to-win lootbox mechanics. But in Factorio you don't have to take another mortgage on your house to enjoy this aspect of the game!

So it isn't "Oh, the developers didn't play this my way or do it my way". Or even "the experts do it this way". It's supposed to be an open system that is done as the player likes.

The gambling nature of the strategy means that there's a lot of valid plays. So it's more likely that someone selects a random play, gets a random outcome, and comes out of it with a much different result than anyone expected. That is heavily biased by, I mean a minimum of 4 hours of time investment on your weekend? That's all your funtime in a day for busy people.

I feel like play 2, from the quote above is chosen more often than not as a starting point because people have to solve the game well at normal quality first.

I don't feel like it will be as fun if a player in that position goes straight to legendary. Feel like they can stage the game to see something like you've seen, where you watch a design standard change, while watching legendary stuff fill up cases, if they start at 500 hours instead of 20.

But in terms of breaking things, or a lack of direction. I feel like that's a design requirement of the quality system to do that, to provide game challenge. Which is... honestly, not actually good. This isn't a chess game where you have an open field with a lot of effective plays because it is, competitive and the other side makes mistakes. The idea of putting recyclers on Nauvis makes a lot more sense than making 50 hours of logistics a player has to, shift into a case and forget about.

[mmmPI]

I've seen a LOT of people say, "I don't bother with quality until after Aquilo".
This is a sign of a failure of design. Quality is unlocked on Nauvis, at blue science. You'd expect people to start using it then.

+1

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375
You might be surprised if you go to look at the original blog post. Kovarex explicitly laid you how he thought the strategy would play.

Strategy implications

I'm happy with the strategy implications, because they add more important decisions throughout the game.

1) You don't have the recycler soon in the game, so you can't really just recycle to get the best stuff, the most common way how to start with the quality is to just insert some quality modules into production of final products, which emits some higher quality products as a by product.
This results in a stage of the game, where you pick the very limited number of higher quality modules, machines etc. made as a side effect, and you can decide what are the most important parts of the factory that need boosting.
2) Later, especially once you unlock recycling, it can be a HUGE trap to try to get too high quality of too many things too early.
The cost is just too high, and you can easily realize, that 90% of the production of your factory goes into trying to get the legendary cool thing you want.
So prioritization of where and how many resources go is crucial. As well as deciding what items are the most important to get in higher quality. It plays a huge role in the speed in which you move forward.
On the other hand, if someone wants to just slow-run the game and enjoy having everything semi-perfect and over-prepare before moving to another planet, the possibility is certainly there.

That's funny because you say +1 but when i read the quote, to me it says the opposite x) And later in your text too, for the words that i understand ( the part with the chess comparaison appears like random words with no sense) but the other part, you and the quote seem pretty clear that quality is a HUGE trap to use too early, so it would be weird to expect people to use it a lot just when they unlock it, it's even a HUGE trap when you just have unlocked the recycler, so it's really the contrary of a +1 i would have used to someone that that complain they expected to use quality when they unlock it at blue science.

This is a sign of a failure of design. Quality is unlocked on Nauvis, at blue science. You'd expect people to start using it then.

" it's a HUGE trap to try and get too high quality of too many things too early " x) You can though, but you have to be strategic about it. Like in chess You can do blunder. It's safer to avoid quality altogether if it may frustrate or be not fun, but you can still learn how to avoid those blunders

You can't use recycler on Nauvis before you get to Fulgora, and now that i think of it, it's actually a good thing because it prevent the worst inneffiencies to happen right away, players only unlock the recycler on a planet where ressources are abundant and no pollution is possible, so they can safely use it to upcycle massive amount things, they even NEED to do it whereas unlocking the recycler on Nauvis would just cause players to risk burning thru their starting ressources unproductively. It's actually some hidden help players receive, they CAN'T easily do that on Nauvis, just voiding ressources for nothing, they can only be voided thru buildings, science or ammunitions. Thinking about OP who just discovered quality, it happened in Fulgora .... it appears to work as intended ^^

[XT-248]

No. I said I took quality in the early game as a technical challenge. Said that you could build an experience that was rewarding every four hours or so out of that.

No one is disputing that people learn.

The lack of learning experience before using quality modules creates a mental attention tax to fully understand quality's mechanics and how to work with it properly before realizing its benefits.

Compare inserting a module into a machine, causing everything to happen all at once up front, vs. starting with basic oil processing and making stuff from petroleum; then subsequently stepping up to advanced oil processing with multi-fluid handling. The first step: basic oil processing gives people limited exposure and encourages them to step up and tackle more involved designs later.

The mental attention tax is spread across multiple steps instead of all at once.

I said if you extended the experience by going to rare layouts it'd be more rewarding, because your layouts wouldn't break as often at legendary.

I've, yet to weigh in on this part of the topic at all in fact. But I've commented on things already in the game that can be used to provide a smoother ramp into it.

I have used massive baseline factories without breaking anything. I generally don't treat higher-quality machines as the first or best option for factories unless I am doing something very particular, and even then I could expand horizontally with less effort.

In one of your later posts, you provide a direct link to the blog post (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375) that explains the intention behind quality and matches my expectations and gameplay choices: higher-quality machines aren't supposed to be the single best way to build a factory.


I have found that when people commit to higher-quality machines in their factories, it adds more mental attention tax to tear up factories and rebuild with newer, faster machines. The end result may be satisfying for many, but as we both have observed, it can turn some people away, such as OP, from using quality mechanics because the learning experience can be rough and unhelpful at times.

Then there is also the question of when people end up in a position where they decide to divest of quality mechanics after partially investing, as happened to OP. What to do with the stockpile of mixed-quality items? Reverting factories to a pre-quality status can also carry its own mental attention tax.

Those things are an option, but are not the option. Particularly quality in mines actually, but for reasons he doesn't know yet.

It may be that the OP didn't know miners work with quality modules for the same thing we have been going back and forth on for some time now. How do we create a great introductory experience that teaches or guides new players to use quality modules and slowly ramps up to a fully realized quality "entire interplanetary factory empire," to use OP's words?

If you do spoilage on fish you run into practical problems: a fish spoils so slowly that it's worth as an aid is questionable. More importantly it's a healing item, and one of the strong combat strategies in the game is to just grab 10 fish and go in guns blazing. So what's to stop me from generating like a hundred fish? And just being sushi man?

With wood its iffy. Because then you make a gigantic power offset for coal. And have to reconsider the power and plastic economy of the game.

You have to make a spoiling item necessary over the 20 hours you're launching your first space platforms to. So the reasons that make quality really intimidating at that time, and make quality "an option" are going to apply equally to spoilage.

They are just ideas. Not to be taken literally, but since we are going down this road.


Fish can be treated as something to farm and kept at peak freshness, with a new fishery structure introduced fairly early game. This can create fun challenges: being limited to the starting water pool and having a limited source of fish over time corresponding to how many water tiles there are, which sets an upper ceiling on how many can be grown at once. If people wanted to make the challenge harder, they could combine limited water in the starting area with other world-generation settings like deathworld.

Or don't add spoilage mechanics to fish; instead, introduce a healing fruit gathered from trees on Nauvis. Or alternatively, a shrub that gives healing fruits that don't stay fresh long but can be canned (think liquid barreling) to last longer after a bit of tech progression.


How is using wood as the introductory spoilage experience problematic?

I imagine a short spoilage time for raw wood grown with a forestry machine (a primitive agricultural tower for Nauvis). The wood pole doesn't need a spoiler timer attached since the point is to expose the spoilage mechanics and teach players. However, wood gathered from mature trees (no forestry machine) would not spoil at all.


I am going to go on a tiny bit of a tangent here: the wood pole used to be "disposable" and was intended to be that way through multiple major versions, going from 0.11 to 0.17.

How were wood poles "disposable"? Well, wood poles used to have a fuel value, and players got rid of them by burning them in boilers, since there was no reason to keep a massive stockpile of wood poles in logistic chests after people got access to iron poles and replaced wood poles with metal poles all at once.

Recycling wood poles has questionable utility. Sure, wood can be recrafted into other items or processed for seeds, but to what end? More wood chests? Shotguns? Combat shotguns? The only saving grace of recycling wood poles is that it can give back higher-quality copper wires.

[mmmPI]

How is using wood as the introductory spoilage experience problematic?

It would make it very bad on desert map where you don't have much wood if it spoil and you have to turn it into something right away, if it doesn't spoil it doesn't serve the alleged purpose of teaching players the spoilage mechanic which fish already does, and when considering the difficulty to use quality, it's unrelated or irrelevant.

How were wood poles "disposable"? Well, wood poles used to have a fuel value, and players got rid of them by burning them in boilers, since there was no reason to keep a massive stockpile of wood poles in logistic chests after people got access to iron poles and replaced wood poles with metal poles all at once.

For the record, it has never made sense to replace all your wooden pole by metal pole all at once, it is and has always been a waste of ressources if you just swap them without reworking the coverage which you do when you rebuild part of your factory. It was also a mistake to make massive amount of wooden pole in the first place, since you cannot automate its production, you would manually chop the needed wood at first, and by the time you had access to bots you would have unlocked metal pole so you would not use them to chop wood for poles; Unless you were doing something wrong, there was just no reason to setup boilers to get rid of wooden pole ... but you could put them in locomotives or car if you had a fuel shortage when outposting in a desert area.

[Alfonse215]

Here are some changes that I think will help smooth the transitions between before and after introducing of the respective mechanics tremendously.

Some ingredients could have been given the "spoilage" treatment on Nauvis to ease new players into Gleba without Quality. Repeat for quality mechanics; after all, OP indicated they had spent considerable time building out factories without quality modules before deciding to do a small experimental run and go all-in on quality modules. That kind of experience ultimately turned the OP away from using quality modules, which is a problem.

Then, in the end, players can take what they learn and combine it into a functional design that incorporates one of the mechanics, or even both. Nothing currently exists that could resemble an introductory experience for each world's unique mechanics, with one small, noticeable exception: Vulcanus (liquid/petroleum handling).

This is an interesting idea, but it lacks specifics (as it relates to quality). And those specifics are kind of important.

For example, I feel that the Tips&Tricks entries on quality are not just poor introductions to the concept, but they are actively harmful to properly building setups to produce quality goods. The biggest offender is the setup showing a bunch of gear makers with quality modules in them that put their outputs onto the same belt, with no filtered splitters in sight.

The first setup players see for making quality intermediates should not brick their base within 5 minutes of trying them using the provided example. So there is a lot to be said for improving player guidance with regard to the quality mechanic.

The problem is how you do it without actually changing the nature of the mechanic.

See, quality is a very open mechanic; almost every recipe participates in it. So you have a lot of choices for how to engage with it. But at the same time, quality engages with one of the most difficult elements of Factorio's logistics: handling byproducts. By putting a quality module into any intermediate's production, you are opting into a process that produces unwanted byproducts.

A player who is new to Factorio, who hasn't even set up advanced oil processing before? That person is never going to get into quality intermediate production early on. And that's the big catch-22 of quality.

The simplest, earliest means of producing quality stuff is just putting modules into end products and hoping for the best. But in order to understand later means of producing quality stuff, you need to have a grasp on a concept that that method never uses. Namely, that quality intermediates can be used to produce equal quality outputs. This is the core of any quality cyclers setup, as well as any method of making quality that relies on intermediates.

But making quality intermediates early-on is a trap. Not unless you know about quality mining, and even then, you'll need to know how to find out if your buffers are filling up and to add more.

First, you can't put quality modules in steel furnaces, so at the moment QM1s become available, you can't use them to make quality plates (without knowing about quality mining). Getting quality gears is a bit easier, but many thing that take gears (or even circuits) also take plates. Which you don't have.

And even if you do get quality intermediates, the ratios almost never line up. You'll always have too much of one thing and not enough of the other. You need some kind of escape valve for having too many intermediates of an undesired quality, some way to prevent items from backing up and blocking something.

Quality mining is a good idea, but the issue is that players need to know about it and try it. And even then, backing up can be a problem unless players are able to buffer with more and more chests. The ratios still don't line up, and there's not a simple answer to solve it. Driving a train through a car loaded with the excess is a good way for a skilled player to automate disposal, but an unskilled player almost certainly won't think of that.

The only thing I can think of is out-right forbidding the player from using quality modules in any intermediate recipe until they get recyclers. Note that mining drills don't execute recipes, so they can still use them.

This would have the effect of limiting the player to exactly 2 modes of interaction with quality: end products or quality mining and crafting up the chain. As these are the two most effective ways to engage with quality early on, it makes sense.

Of course, this has a number of negative side-effects. It nerfs Vulcanus's ability to make quality stuff; not entirely (resources are still cheap and you can still dump things in lava). But 2/3rds of Vulcanus's resources are impervious to quality mining (you can still make quality tungsten carbide and plate from quality coal and quality tungsten ore). Gleba becomes even more hostile to quality without Fulgora.

[coffee-factorio]

No. I said I took quality in the early game as a technical challenge. Said that you could build an experience that was rewarding every four hours or so out of that.

No one is disputing that people learn.

The lack of learning experience before using quality modules creates a mental attention tax to fully understand quality's mechanics and how to work with it properly before realizing its benefits.

Compare inserting a module into a machine, causing everything to happen all at once up front, vs. starting with basic oil processing and making stuff from petroleum; then subsequently stepping up to advanced oil processing with multi-fluid handling. The first step: basic oil processing gives people limited exposure and encourages them to step up and tackle more involved designs later.

The mental attention tax is spread across multiple steps instead of all at once.

That's a really astute observation about how these mechanics work. I think the intended analogue to that idea would be that people would be given the option of playing with the mechanic at chemical science.

And then... success!?

The practical reality is just different. When we ask that question of where? And imagine starting at different points in play, and assume a player who can succeed at that point. You always are presented with four choices: no quality, ores, components, entities in general (i.e. buildings).

Can I make it work with that early on ramp? Sure. It's pretty easy actually.

Does that make it easier? If you wait you get a number of options to keep your assembly line safe and functioning over time. Plus a number of "effectively infinite" supply chains.

The on ramp practically has to be tailor fit to the person, and not the other way round. People will have their way of working on an idea like this and their pace.

I said if you extended the experience by going to rare layouts it'd be more rewarding, because your layouts wouldn't break as often at legendary.

I've, yet to weigh in on this part of the topic at all in fact. But I've commented on things already in the game that can be used to provide a smoother ramp into it.

I have used massive baseline factories without breaking anything. I generally don't treat higher-quality machines as the first or best option for factories unless I am doing something very particular, and even then I could expand horizontally with less effort.

In one of your later posts, you provide a direct link to the blog post (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375) that explains the intention behind quality and matches my expectations and gameplay choices: higher-quality machines aren't supposed to be the single best way to build a factory.

I have found that when people commit to higher-quality machines in their factories, it adds more mental attention tax to tear up factories and rebuild with newer, faster machines. The end result may be satisfying for many, but as we both have observed, it can turn some people away, such as OP, from using quality mechanics because the learning experience can be rough and unhelpful at times.

Then there is also the question of when people end up in a position where they decide to divest of quality mechanics after partially investing, as happened to OP. What to do with the stockpile of mixed-quality items? Reverting factories to a pre-quality status can also carry its own mental attention tax.

To be honest? I don't think there's a good onboarding strategy. Yeah, you can have a winning strategy you feel sells.

With the mixed quality stuff, you can store it, dispose of it destructively (there's a number of ways), or recycle it.

But you run into a thing where, there's a tremendous motivation to justify the time investment in a strategy since it takes 50 times longer than normal? And that's applied randomly and to the extent people can having winning strategies right next to really odd ones that work with one persons experience. But don't do what they think they do.

Those things are an option, but are not the option. Particularly quality in mines actually, but for reasons he doesn't know yet.

It may be that the OP didn't know miners work with quality modules for the same thing we have been going back and forth on for some time now. How do we create a great introductory experience that teaches or guides new players to use quality modules and slowly ramps up to a fully realized quality "entire interplanetary factory empire," to use OP's words?

That is, a really. Really hard question you posed there. It might be an individual topic. It's related to the issue people are talking about where, the system feels like it presents red herring or has a lack of direction.

If you do spoilage on fish you run into practical problems: a fish spoils so slowly that it's worth as an aid is questionable. More importantly it's a healing item, and one of the strong combat strategies in the game is to just grab 10 fish and go in guns blazing. So what's to stop me from generating like a hundred fish? And just being sushi man?

With wood its iffy. Because then you make a gigantic power offset for coal. And have to reconsider the power and plastic economy of the game.

You have to make a spoiling item necessary over the 20 hours you're launching your first space platforms to. So the reasons that make quality really intimidating at that time, and make quality "an option" are going to apply equally to spoilage.

They are just ideas. Not to be taken literally, but since we are going down this road.

Fish can be treated as something to farm and kept at peak freshness, with a new fishery structure introduced fairly early game. This can create fun challenges: being limited to the starting water pool and having a limited source of fish over time corresponding to how many water tiles there are, which sets an upper ceiling on how many can be grown at once. If people wanted to make the challenge harder, they could combine limited water in the starting area with other world-generation settings like deathworld.

Or don't add spoilage mechanics to fish; instead, introduce a healing fruit gathered from trees on Nauvis. Or alternatively, a shrub that gives healing fruits that don't stay fresh long but can be canned (think liquid barreling) to last longer after a bit of tech progression.


How is using wood as the introductory spoilage experience problematic?

I imagine a short spoilage time for raw wood grown with a forestry machine (a primitive agricultural tower for Nauvis). The wood pole doesn't need a spoiler timer attached since the point is to expose the spoilage mechanics and teach players. However, wood gathered from mature trees (no forestry machine) would not spoil at all.


I am going to go on a tiny bit of a tangent here: the wood pole used to be "disposable" and was intended to be that way through multiple major versions, going from 0.11 to 0.17.

How were wood poles "disposable"? Well, wood poles used to have a fuel value, and players got rid of them by burning them in boilers, since there was no reason to keep a massive stockpile of wood poles in logistic chests after people got access to iron poles and replaced wood poles with metal poles all at once.

Recycling wood poles has questionable utility. Sure, wood can be recrafted into other items or processed for seeds, but to what end? More wood chests? Shotguns? Combat shotguns? The only saving grace of recycling wood poles is that it can give back higher-quality copper wires.

The power economy is what I'd see a designer would be worried about. You have to imagine a capable player who will look at the wood, and say "I'll burn this for 2MJ". And then they open up a good old fashioned can of "use this strategy to the point of exhaustion". So wood replaces coal in boilers in the early game. That lets you have, in turn, more coal for any application you want: chemical science, military science, advanced circuits top the list.

I can actually partially break Krastorio by modding in Dectorio because of that. The decorative flooring I make, allows me to bypass the need to use biodiesel. Because, it has a higher energy value when tossed into any kind of furnace unit.

It's not necessarily a bad idea but it's beyond the scope of quality levels completely breaking here. "Ideas or Suggestion" off the top of my head?

[Alfonse215]

That's a really astute observation about how these mechanics work. I think the intended analogue to that idea would be that people would be given the option of playing with the mechanic at chemical science.

And then... success!?

The practical reality is just different. When we ask that question of where? And imagine starting at different points in play, and assume a player who can succeed at that point. You always are presented with four choices: no quality, ores, components, entities in general (i.e. buildings).

Can I make it work with that early on ramp? Sure. It's pretty easy actually.

Does that make it easier? If you wait you get a number of options to keep your assembly line safe and functioning over time. Plus a number of "effectively infinite" supply chains.

The on ramp practically has to be tailor fit to the person, and not the other way round. People will have their way of working on an idea like this and their pace.

I think playstyle should be taken into consideration here as well.

When I see people talking about how hard Gleba is to get into, and when I look at their base, what I've noticed more than anything is that the player in question seems to just... do things.

Vanilla Factorio, as a game, has very few failure states. Advanced oil processing can get into failure states, but even that you can get yourself out of by clicking on a pipe and trashing a fluid. You can slop your way to victory in vanilla. Most problems can be solved by just doing it more.

Space Age as a whole has a lot more cases where YOLO just ain't gonna cut it. You can kinda slop a platform together and get to another planet. But recycling on Fulgora and especially spoilage on Gleba do not lend themselves to victory by beating your head against the problem until it goes away. You have to take care, and you have to have a plan to approach the problem.

And quality is very much the same thing. You cannot tame quality by shoving some quality modules into a machine and just watching the outcome. You have to understand what you're working with and you have to have a plan for exploiting that understanding. Unthinking engagement with quality can lead to you bricking your factory.

That's not to say that the game couldn't be better at teaching the player its mechanics. But there are a lot of problems that result from a conflict between a YOLO playstyle and a set of mechanics that are designed to reward careful play and punish less considered play.

For example, I noticed immediately that seeds were going to be a problem on Gleba, and the solution to that problem was "productivity". But I noticed that in part because I had read the FFF for Gleba and noticed that they talked about seed stockpiles. So I expected that maintaining seeds would be integral for success on planet and was therefore looking for a snag in that area. I probably would have realized it anyway (or never encountered it because I use prod modules everywhere), but that's a thing that I don't think is communicated well.

It's good design to push the player to using biochambers. And being able to use an assembler is a good option to have. But a player working on YOLO thinking is looking at the biochamber, not as a tool to be exploited, but as a problem to be avoided (namely, feeding it nutrients). They're looking for the most obvious solution that crosses the finish line, so they will gravitate to an answer that will likely leave them hurting in a few hours.

The power economy is what I'd see a designer would be worried about. You have to imagine a capable player who will look at the wood, and say "I'll burn this for 2MJ". And then they open up a good old fashioned can of "use this strategy to the point of exhaustion". So wood replaces coal in boilers in the early game. That lets you have, in turn, more coal for any application you want: chemical science, military science, advanced circuits top the list.

As an addendum, mining creates a ton of pollution. Would whatever process that makes wood make an equivalent amount of pollution as coal mining does, MJ for MJ? Because if it's more pollution efficient to make wood, then wood burning starts to compete with more complex, higher-tech power solutions: solid fueled boilers and nuclear power.

[quineotio]

You might be surprised if you go to look at the original blog post. Kovarex explicitly laid you how he thought the strategy would play.

I am.

In practice, a small number of quality items is almost completely useless - the exception being personal equipment (and maybe space platforms). For example, you have 20 assemblers for green circuits and 2 of them are uncommon? It doesn't matter - it's easier to just build more normal assemblers. You design around what you have, so either it's normal quality or some other. So in practice, if you're going to engage with quality in a meaningful way, you need a good level of reliable production - which you CAN'T have until after you leave Nauvis and get the recycler.

If you want to upgrade your factory to quality using the recycle loop method only, that's really, really boring and wasteful. And when I say wasteful I don't mean of resources, because who cares (resources are unlimited). It's wasteful of your time and effort. And even if you do it this way, you're eventually going to get all you need, and then you've built a bunch of infrastructure that doesn't do anything any more, which goes back to my point about quality in the lategame.

And then there's the other trap for quality, which is that your builds will break if you didn't account for additional tiers after Gleba/Aquilo. I can't help but feel like it would be better if all tiers were available at the same time, and there were ways to limit which outputs you got. Having to account for 5 different outputs every single time you put a quality module anywhere is also annoying, especially after recyclers where you're getting 5x the number of ingredients outputs.

Quality items themselves are fun, but so many things make the system unwieldy. It's just so strange that other areas of the game have had so much polish and quality of life and bug fixing, but so little has been done to address probably the most complained about thing in the game.

[mmmPI]

And even if you do get quality intermediates, the ratios almost never line up. You'll always have too much of one thing and not enough of the other. You need some kind of escape valve for having too many intermediates of an undesired quality, some way to prevent items from backing up and blocking something.

Conveniently yellow ammunition require only iron plate, which allows to get rid of any excess of a certain quality and to balance the ratio with copper, make sure you have "less quality copper" than quality iron, and void the excess quality iron with turrets in a controlled manner with priority.

Not recommanded, but doable !

Quality mining is a good idea, but the issue is that players need to know about it and try it. And even then, backing up can be a problem unless players are able to buffer with more and more chests. The ratios still don't line up, and there's not a simple answer to solve it. Driving a train through a car loaded with the excess is a good way for a skilled player to automate disposal, but an unskilled player almost certainly won't think of that.

Along the same line as previous, if you want to make sure you have "less quality copper" than "quality iron", you CAN have different copper patch , one with quality miner and one without, and you increase / decrease the priority automatically based on your buffer of quality iron. => no buffer of quality iron => don't use the quality copper. It is not a simple answer but it is possible to automate. It's just not recommended imo, you need to make sure you can void the undesired quality iron first, via ammunitions , to make sure you can then match the ratio of undesired quality copper that will inevitably form, to make sure you will have "at least enough iron" of the matching quality after you have shot the rest as ammo.

The only thing I can think of is out-right forbidding the player from using quality modules in any intermediate recipe until they get recyclers. Note that mining drills don't execute recipes, so they can still use them.

This would have the effect of limiting the player to exactly 2 modes of interaction with quality: end products or quality mining and crafting up the chain. As these are the two most effective ways to engage with quality early on, it makes sense.

Of course, this has a number of negative side-effects. It nerfs Vulcanus's ability to make quality stuff; not entirely (resources are still cheap and you can still dump things in lava). But 2/3rds of Vulcanus's resources are impervious to quality mining (you can still make quality tungsten carbide and plate from quality coal and quality tungsten ore). Gleba becomes even more hostile to quality without Fulgora.

That would not adress the case from OP of someone being overwhelmed when using their first quality module in fulgora i feel the same situation could happen just the same had their quality module been restricted from the start of the game. One may not have noticed and when first attempting to use them , on scrap recycler, it would yield the same result which i expect is a few uncommon item starting to clog belts and chest here and there of all the different item that comes from scrap.

It prevent someone from trying quality intermediate on nauvis, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, you can use quality module in the first machine of your array of "gears", "plate" or "green circuits", use filter to put the quality one aside, and let the machine back up and be useless when the "aside" is full, it's just 1 machine no big deal. You can use the limited amount of quality intermediate to craft things with lower automation, like a chest feeding an engine machine made just for that one personnal locomotive, or car. Instead of requiring players to gamble for them as finished product and end up with chests of bad cars.

I agree more with the other part of your analysis, that quality require players to think different than "more is always better" , it would have been called quantity otherwise i guess. The factory players are required to make to handle the production of quality items is "qualitatively" different, it is not just bigger but rather doing something different, with additionnal filtering and balancing logic. One cannot add quality modules semi randomly like they can with speed or efficency, that would break the factory beyond simple inefficiencies. But that's also a mistake you only do once. The other time , you know the risk and you can start working on a strategy to not repeat the mistake, or deal with the consequences before they propagate badly.

[mmmPI]

And then there's the other trap for quality, which is that your builds will break if you didn't account for additional tiers after Gleba/Aquilo.

I fall into that noob trap exactly once lol. And then i blamed myself for not thinking more about what i was doing when clicking the research that cost a lot and only adds the "epic quality".

Guess what, when i unlocked legendary , i was ready !

[quineotio]

And I have to add, the problems with quality (and some other things) arise in part from the lack of iteration upon game design choices in Space Age. It's one thing to design a system that works in theory, but when it comes into contact with the broader playerbase, issues arise.

And this is one of my longstanding complaints about Space Age. The game was released and then there was silence for 1.5 years. There was a dire need for iteration based on player feedback, but this didn't happen. And now, after almost 2 years, the design has become baked in, and now it's difficult to change anything.

In the original game, major systems were changed over time. The way science was made changed - no more collection of alien stuff when killing bases and different recipes. Things were tweaked. Factories broke and needed to be redesigned. And this made the game better.

But for some reason Wube seems to think they one-shotted SA, and any critique is due to player error/ignorance/misunderstanding, rather than a mismatch between developer intentions and what players actually do/enjoy in practice.

[mmmPI]

That's quite the funny depiction of the never satisfied person there, just earlier the complain was that Wube had removed space casino, now suddenly it's that Wube think they one shotted SA. Go figure .... Listening to players hopefully doesn't mean taking orders from them x)

[Hurkyl]

And even if you do get quality intermediates, the ratios almost never line up. You'll always have too much of one thing and not enough of the other. You need some kind of escape valve for having too many intermediates of an undesired quality, some way to prevent items from backing up and blocking something.

FWIW, if you line the averages up, it's a rather long time before random fluctuations will overwhelm storage.

E.g. if you want to make green circuits from quality ingredients, you might consider using quality modules when mining iron/copper ore and when making copper cable. But that is a mistake, because the expected rare:uncommon ratio of your copper cable is different from the rare:uncommon ratio of your iron plates! So as time goes on you build up a large stock of uncommon iron plates and rare copper cables.

But if you remove quality modules from the copper ore miners (or the copper cable assemblers), then all of the inputs only go through one quality refining step and so the rare:uncommon ratios line up, so you don't have any excesses to accumulate over time: only random fluctuations need to be buffered around.

I haven't played out all the variations, but this approach seems to me to be the most comfortable way to go beyond "QMs in finished product crafters only".

In practice, a small number of quality items is almost completely useless - the exception being personal equipment (and maybe space platforms). For example, you have 20 assemblers for green circuits and 2 of them are uncommon? It doesn't matter - it's easier to just build more normal assemblers. You design around what you have, so either it's normal quality or some other. So in practice, if you're going to engage with quality in a meaningful way, you need a good level of reliable production - which you CAN'T have until after you leave Nauvis and get the recycler.

Don't put your 2 uncommon assemblers to replace something banal: use them to replace the two assemblers that are loaded with the handful of rare modules you've created so far to accelerate the snowball.

[quineotio]

The most likely explanation for why things are the way they are is that quality is Kovarex's baby, and he doesn't want to work on Factorio any more.

[mmmPI]

Even if this was true, then listening to the advice provided by players on this thread would be the recommended thing to do imo , because that would mean quality won't change anymore and thus complaining is in vain, whereas the tips and tricks are going to stay valid for longer possibly FOREVER ! 2.1 is not considered stable yet though so maybe some details can still change who knows ^^