Quality levels completely break factory

[Hurkyl]

But with Gleba as it's own planet, you kinda need to design the whole factory at the same time. And you can throw on top of it all the new concepts introduced there, like spoilage and soil and seeds and the ag tower etc.

From what I've seen, there's a lot of variation hidden in "whole factory". It's hard to know how much this is intrinsic to the planet, versus some subset of players having a habit of taking overly large bites and stubbornly trying to chew through it rather than rethink what they're doing.

In this context, what "whole factory" means to me is 4 crafting machines arranged to make bioflux, mostly using direct insertion, and hand-fed by dropping yumako/jellynut into boxes while I'm waiting to smelt enough scavenged iron ore to be able to build the transport lines.

I.e. just enough to get a proof of concept of the crafting chain, and then minimally tacking each new recipe as I worked through them.

The few people I've watched try Gleba blind try to set up much larger and more complex factories while they still have absolutely no idea how any of it works.

And this tracks with people I've watched play other modpacks blind; e.g. I once watched a career Factorioer unlock a new building, and then spend probably fifteen to thirty minutes scrounging up the materials to make a dozen of them to lay out in a line, and only then bothering to start looking at what they could do with it.

Even now that I do know the planet, I still make a similar minimal factory because having a reliable supply of bioflux, nutrients, fuel, and seed breeding is pretty convenient while I try to design the 'real' factory I want to make. But for some reason I get the impression this is rather unusual? I often see a lot of revulsion towards the concept of this sort of helper factory.

[mmmPI]

From what I've seen, there's a lot of variation hidden in "whole factory". It's hard to know how much this is intrinsic to the planet, versus some subset of players having a habit of taking overly large bites and stubbornly trying to chew through it rather than rethink what they're doing.

This discussion clearly has a subset of players that could be stubborn for sure , and when a person is stubborn they may mistake that for patience easily, which can leads to adopting suboptimal strategy with perseverance, when sometimes just a side step to look at the problem from another angle can provide the much needed insight. I feel the energy would be spend much more productively trying to fix any problem related with quality, which so far have all appeared to be player's mistake felt as game limitation due to not seeing the options available but i don't think they are necessarily hidden, some have been explained in details and are still ignored by the players who apparently would need it the most, so imo it hints more as a willingness to ignore the options available coming from the players joining the discussion after OP. More like a desire to complain about anything, be it quality , spoilage, the version number , whatever random stuff.

[Hurkyl]

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.

This description is incorrect: I just looked at that entry (in version 2.0.77) and saw it does have a filtered splitter sending the common gears forward and higher quality gears down a different line.

[coffee-factorio]

There's also a disconnect between expectation and reality. Some people complain that quality is gambling, and the reply is "no, it's the law of large numbers". Except that for many people, quality IS gambling, because what's the alternative?

Consider how someone might encounter the quality mechanic. They learn about quality items, decide to get some good armor, so they make some modules and see "1% quality chance". "Ok, that's terrible, what am I suppose to do, make like 50 power armor mk2s and hope I get one at higher quality"?

And so you explain, no, you can do a recycler loop and upscale your resources and then build it. After you get the recycler.

Or, you can put quality in the mining drills and completely design your factory around managing quality (after you get the recycler). Except woops, you've already built your factory before you were even thinking about quality. So you redesign, put quality modules in your mining drills, eventually get what you need to make your armor. But now you have to take out the quality modules because you don't need quality any more.

But you got your armor now!

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.

People who do game design have to think like that. Thankfully, that is not my day job.

I don't think the introductory experience has to be "tailor-fit" to individuals, because when I look at other introductory experiences, they are universal to everyone who plays Factorio.


How players respond to the introductory experience is unique to each individual. Some might experiment before committing. Some might just go all-in on spaghettification. Some might just do something unexpected.

Game designers can create an introductory experience, but they can't control how individuals respond. At best, they can offer some amount of guidance without going overboard.

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.

I think everybody, on some level, agrees that having nearly no onboarding strategy is worse than having some onboarding experience, at a minimum. Plugging a module into a machine to find out what it actually does is a recipe for disaster.

The main point isn't having a way to get rid of potentially unusable items. It is having to pay a tiny bit of mental attention tax to the "clean up" operation.

For example, recycling doesn't 100% get rid of everything. If I have six of a certain quality level and put them in a recycler, I get one back and an unprocessed second item. Those remaining two items will never be processed.

I know some people in the Factorio community avoid taking the destructive approach to get rid of unused items. What do they do after divesting from quality? Do convoluted math to find the best possible outcome to get rid of everything? Good luck to anyone who tries to do that.

Forgive me, I'm working on responses slower because I'm busy.

There's a reason why I'm going "Wait, there's not actually a way to do about this" from the perspective of "optimization".

But there's a valid challenge there: what if you take away the language of stats or optimization, can you get the point of view to translate into gambling because that's all we're given as a prompt? After all, how do we teach an 18 year old this on their first month in the game? Or reteach ourselves in ten years if life plays it's games on us?

From the perspective of "gambling", if my goal is to teach gambling. I want to teach the subject. I don't want to teach a particular game.

But in order to learn a subject, a person has to be able to see the value of it. If I say "you suck because you didn't follow this meme" I'm roleplaying. I'm in it for my own ego at that point. "The meta" is supposed to be a positive meme, but a meme's a meme. If it's valuable in ten years it's rare.

If I'm teaching gambling I'm supposed to teach the perspective of the thrill seeker, and maybe a few games they play so a person knows the difference between a game of skill and a pure game of chance. At that point, I might lose some people to roulette or poker because they hate it... or they bet their house. Then I have to teach them how a dealer works a scheme of a night. Okay, then teach manager skills so you treat 10 dealers fair as they work 100 players fair.

Yeah, the players get their uncommon win from throwing a wallet full of normal dollars at a box. The dealers understand how to work over time because really, it's all income but they are paid a consistent fair wage for fair work. The casino owner spends normal income and then invest a percentage in dealers that consistently can keep their customers showing up healthy.

If I teach quality, then I'm teaching how to run buffers, perform small scale manufacturing, basic Factorio skills like how to make science, and run new mechanics. And depending on what a player wants or isn't familiar with I need to visit part of that first. If someone rushes Fulgora, you know it isn't that they need to do this massive validating meme sort. It's that I need to look at what kind of island they are on and show how to work their real estate well.

On Gleba, it's teaching someone how to work with five minute bursts, and build failure tolerant. So you know, if I have a chest backed up to iron bacteria that means every ounce of jello is hitting a priority splitter and there's a way to get spoilage out. And that I can have construction bots clear any inventory, including a splitters hand. And then there's alarms on things like power which effect the entire operation.

As far as beacons go... well you have to manage how spoilage leaves a layout.

But then when quality comes in, I add a layer of judgement about when and where things always get burnt. What seeds always go into the orchards first (passing through an overflow mechanism or two along the way). You have to have a value for the failures, to go: "It broke here, on this material, what and why? I've got an alarm set up so I can respond in 30 seconds." And then we have a bunch of new points of failures where a factory could break.

A note on the continued details discussions about early game spoilage mechanics and wood:

I'm not saying no. I'm not saying it isn't a good idea. I'm saying that it is an idea that is it's own thread. PM me if you make a topic for idea or suggestions. I was pointing out what I thought would up front effect the game. And I've thought about as something to do or suggest for a mod, there's one or two greenhouse mods for 1.1.x but it would be interesting to have spoilage earlier as part of a tech tree.

[quineotio]

From the perspective of "gambling", if my goal is to teach gambling. I want to teach the subject. I don't want to teach a particular game.

I think there's a disconnect between how simple quality seems (it's just a module you put into a machine) and how complicated it is to implement. It has many hidden layers of complexity that aren't obvious as a beginner. For example, if you recycle blue chips you're going to get a lot of outputs and it can very easily jam. And if you're going to use quality in a way where the "law of large numbers" matters, i.e. in your production lines, you're going to need to build a long list of components for whatever end products you want - so it's a lot of work.

Up until that point in the game, you've been unlocking tech at a gradual pace and the difficulty curve has been relatively linear. You do hit a big jump with oil processing, but basic oil processing isn't that difficult. Then you get quality modules, and if you use them, the likelihood that you DON'T jam your factory and make a mess is extremely low. And unlike oil processing, there's no simple version of it.

Factorio works best when you automate continuous production, and then optimize. But quality is most useful as items in your mall - you don't want endless quality. But you still need to go to quite substantial effort to get the items you want... and then figure out what to do after you've got those items to prevent your factory from jamming.

So basically, over and over there is a mismatch between how things are intended to work and how things actually work. How things are perceived and how they actually are. What people want and what they get. Effort vs reward. Maybe it's a bad system, or maybe it's just badly implemented, or maybe it's unfinished, but I certainly think it could use some work.

[mmmPI]

So basically, over and over there is a mismatch between how things are intended to work and how things actually work. How things are perceived and how they actually are. What people want and what they get. Effort vs reward. Maybe it's a bad system, or maybe it's just badly implemented, or maybe it's unfinished, but I certainly think it could use some work.

There is always a mismatch between effort and reward because players are different and what may looks impossible or very complex for some will be easy for others. It's generally balanced for the average player.

It appears unlikely you would ever use a mod to increase the difficulty or complexity of the quality mechanic even though they are as many as mods that act in the opposite way seemingly on the portal.

It appears to be a different problem than in OP, you don't consider the possibility that you could be doing with some help from players that would be confortable using those difficult mods and be willing to explain for you the vanilla tips and tricks.

It appears that the problem is in how things are perceived, from you , you perceive the system as too difficult and jump from such personnal feeling to a generalization that the system is no longer "perceived too difficult by you", but actually is "too difficult" in general, as if the other players do not exist anymore or that you have no self-awareness.

You used some example of what you felt you couldn't do with quality , like using it before recyclers, but it was pointed out that it was more on your end, as there are method for this , and the FFF mention it is a trap to use too early , it's intented to be for late game. You have then removed the examples but are making more general arguments, " it could use some work" , but that doesn't provide much guidance at this point, only that the complexity should be lowered ? to which extend ? so that not a single person can create a jam in their factory by mistake anymore ? As you mentionned its mostly a perception problem, and as such i believe the solution is rather to try and make the players comes to a realization that their difficulty can be overcome by adopting different strategies. Then they will have a different perception on the same problem, no longer a frustrating one, but rather the feeling of reward after an effort.

[mmmPI]

But there's a valid challenge there: what if you take away the language of stats or optimization, can you get the point of view to translate into gambling because that's all we're given as a prompt?

That look like a prompt for a machine indeed ! I don't think the output is very clear though.

Maybe because it's a worse reformulation of the original :

The alternative to repeating again "quality is gambling" when someone tells you it's about the law of large number, is to actually learn what is meant by law of large numbers.

I see what you did there though in your attempt you have mixed other topics which overall renders the whole post undigest i fear :

But in order to learn a subject, a person has to be able to see the value of it. If I say "you suck because you didn't follow this meme" I'm roleplaying. I'm in it for my own ego at that point. "The meta" is supposed to be a positive meme, but a meme's a meme. If it's valuable in ten years it's rare.

See here it look like you're trying to refer to the space casino, but without mentionning nor without much subtility , it leaves the whole message you wrote look even more like some random output, that's probably not helping the challenge you set yourself.

Difficult challenge anyway because without statistic , you expose yourself to be the gambler when the whole point of the quality mechanic is to understand what it takes to setup your own casino. That's why i think using the term gambling to explain the problem is accurate, but not the solution, quality isn't gambling, it's only second-degree when some people refer to it this way, but for some others it's not, it's the actual experience of quality, and making the difference is what you do when you learn how to do quality imo.

[XT-248]

Forgive me, I'm working on responses slower because I'm busy.

There's a reason why I'm going "Wait, there's not actually a way to do about this" from the perspective of "optimization".

But there's a valid challenge there: what if you take away the language of stats or optimization, can you get the point of view to translate into gambling because that's all we're given as a prompt? After all, how do we teach an 18 year old this on their first month in the game? Or reteach ourselves in ten years if life plays it's games on us?

I am sure you're trying to make some kind of point, but I am not quite understanding the point you're making here.

From the perspective of "gambling", if my goal is to teach gambling. I want to teach the subject. I don't want to teach a particular game.

But in order to learn a subject, a person has to be able to see the value of it. If I say "you suck because you didn't follow this meme" I'm roleplaying. I'm in it for my own ego at that point. "The meta" is supposed to be a positive meme, but a meme's a meme. If it's valuable in ten years it's rare.

On Gleba, it's teaching someone how to work with five minute bursts, and build failure tolerant. So you know, if I have a chest backed up to iron bacteria that means every ounce of jello is hitting a priority splitter and there's a way to get spoilage out. And that I can have construction bots clear any inventory, including a splitters hand. And then there's alarms on things like power which effect the entire operation.

As far as beacons go... well you have to manage how spoilage leaves a layout.

But then when quality comes in, I add a layer of judgement about when and where things always get burnt. What seeds always go into the orchards first (passing through an overflow mechanism or two along the way). You have to have a value for the failures, to go: "It broke here, on this material, what and why? I've got an alarm set up so I can respond in 30 seconds." And then we have a bunch of new points of failures where a factory could break.

Quality is sorely lacking in "teaching" people the value of investing in quality. Having an introductory experience will help with that. Currently, there's nothing that could help people learn the value of quality or how to use it.

Spoilage has a poor introductory experience and struggles even more to teach people how to design properly. I had firsthand experience in trying to work around a one-time flunk after several multi-hour sessions; this is something that people still seem to struggle to understand. The problem is that evidence of potential design flaws disappears quickly as it spoils. The same solution to a lack of introductory experience can apply to spoilage just as well.

A note on the continued details discussions about early game spoilage mechanics and wood:

I'm not saying no. I'm not saying it isn't a good idea. I'm saying that it is an idea that is it's own thread. PM me if you make a topic for idea or suggestions. I was pointing out what I thought would up front effect the game. And I've thought about as something to do or suggest for a mod, there's one or two greenhouse mods for 1.1.x but it would be interesting to have spoilage earlier as part of a tech tree.

All I am pointing out is that adding fuel value to wood poles could have been balanced with little effort, as a response to someone who thought a particular change would break the game in a significant way. That is intended for the base game, if it ever happens.

Remember, I am trying to come up with a few introductory experiences for spoilage mechanics. Wood decaying was one such thought. The idea isn't meant to be a "mod" or anything that might seem like it doesn't come from WUBE.

[NineNine]

From the perspective of "gambling", if my goal is to teach gambling. I want to teach the subject. I don't want to teach a particular game.

Then you get quality modules, and if you use them, the likelihood that you DON'T jam your factory and make a mess is extremely low. And unlike oil processing, there's no simple version of it.

I think you're not understanding a very simple way of doing quality. It can be done very simply, and with no chance of jamming your factory.

[mmmPI]

I had firsthand experience in trying to work around a one-time flunk after several multi-hour sessions; this is something that people still seem to struggle to understand.

I think most people understand your systems can flunk without any difficulty. Answer were already provided :

How do I go from being uncertain that a design has a hidden cascading failure baked in to being confident I won't have to monitor and intervene for weeks? Pay more mental attention tax for a dozen hours?

If you really have trouble monitoring the cause of a design failing you can increase the frequency of autosave and use a connected speaker to monitor when the design fail, reload the previous autosave and look at it. That works for quality too, there is no need to monitor a design for dozen hours to see when it will fail or not.

I think you're not understanding a very simple way of doing quality. It can be done very simply, and with no chance of jamming your factory.

I think ignoring is the proper word ^^

[Tertius]

Spoilage has a poor introductory experience and struggles even more to teach people how to design properly.

That's not how I remember my first encounter with spoilage when I first arrived on Gleba. I had no trouble at all. I observed how my hand crafted intermediates all turned into spoilage before I was able to use them. So I learnt: don't craft these in advance, don't keep a stock. I carefully inspected spoilage times to see which items will last (fruit) and which are for immediate consumption (mash, nutrients).

Later, after production stopped once due to spoilage on the belt, I learnt: if an item can spoil, it will eventually spoil, no matter how inconvenient the place. Just like Murphy's Law. So a design must include spoilage removal from every single place where a spoiling item can be. No matter how probable it is to actually spoil. I also overlooked nutrients spoiling in the fuel slot.
As far as I see, these are the only design additions for spoiling items.

The spoilage mechanic in general told me it's dangerous if power should fail because items will spoil everywhere. So I put every effort into first building a stable power plant. Long before I even started the first bioflux machine.

The power plant used fruit products. To have a stable power supply, I need fruit products, so I need a constant supply of fruits, so I need proper fruit farms. So I need enough seeds. I inspected the recipes producing seeds. Yes, to get enough seeds I need productivity. As much as possible. So I used biochambers and productivity modules. And big enough farms, so I started producing artificial soil long before I even started bioflux. I realized different energy values for the different fruit products, so I realized yumako is mainly for production and jellynut is mainly for power.

The spoilage mechanic in general told me belt congestion is dangerous, because items will spoil on the belt. So I designed belts that never stops and production that never stops.

Upon careful inspection of the different recipes that result in the same item (nutrients, bacteria) I tried to find out why there are different recipes, and what is the most efficient one. It became clear all recipes have their role, and it's not always mass production but usually one for initiating to break the chicken-and-egg dependency, and one for mass production.

[mmmPI]

That's not how I remember my first encounter with spoilage when I first arrived on Gleba. I had no trouble at all. I observed how my hand crafted intermediates all turned into spoilage before I was able to use them. So I learnt: don't craft these in advance, don't keep a stock. I carefully inspected spoilage times to see which items will last (fruit) and which are for immediate consumption (mash, nutrients).

Not that i think it's a good idea to encourage the repeated attempt at derailing the thread , but for the sake of precision, you have fish in Nauvis that do spoil, when you grab a fish it's shown that it will spoil and you can end up with spoilage and have an idea of the mechanic even before landing to Gleba. I think that's typically the thing verified with actual playtester, people who do not what factorio is about, are they likely to pick up the only moving critter in the starting area at least once ou of curiosity and wonder later where that spoilage come from ? Your own experience may be not representative due to the years of playing 2.0 where you learned that picking up a fish wasn't such a useful thing to do with your playstyle. You may have not picked up a fish when playing space age because you had no plan to use it as a health regen boost in combat, nor the curiosity of a new player for that thing that moves that maybe will be useful for later, that hoarding reflex so many games teaches players , you had already gone past that.

I think similar phenomenon can apply with quality were players that spend a lot of time playing 2.0 find frustrating a mechanic they don't understand as much as the rest of the game but they had high expectations about their achieving power and that makes it more frustrating than a new player like a playtester who naturally expect some mechanic to be harder to master and thus can be more resilient to the first few failure.

[Tertius]

Not that i think it's a good idea to encourage the repeated attempt at derailing the thread

This thread is already derailed at maximum, it was already derailed with the 1st reply. But since the thread creator didn't show any interest in their thread and didn't show up even once, I gave up staying on topic that far in the thread. My conclusion: the OP was just a rant, and after venting the poster felt better. It has become an extension and duplication of the huge "I hate Gleba" and "I hate quality" threads of the past. There is nothing new here that hasn't already been discussed before. It's literally all the same.

What changed is the view. In the past we didn't know how the devs will react on the feedback about Gleba and quality. Now, with 2.1 experimental, we know the direction: the design will stay as it is. No change.

[XT-248]

Spoilage has a poor introductory experience and struggles even more to teach people how to design properly.

That's not how I remember my first encounter with spoilage when I first arrived on Gleba. I had no trouble at all. I observed how my hand crafted intermediates all turned into spoilage before I was able to use them. So I learnt: don't craft these in advance, don't keep a stock. I carefully inspected spoilage times to see which items will last (fruit) and which are for immediate consumption (mash, nutrients).

Later, after production stopped once due to spoilage on the belt, I learnt: if an item can spoil, it will eventually spoil, no matter how inconvenient the place. Just like Murphy's Law. So a design must include spoilage removal from every single place where a spoiling item can be. No matter how probable it is to actually spoil. I also overlooked nutrients spoiling in the fuel slot.
As far as I see, these are the only design additions for spoiling items.

The spoilage mechanic in general told me it's dangerous if power should fail because items will spoil everywhere. So I put every effort into first building a stable power plant. Long before I even started the first bioflux machine.

The power plant used fruit products. To have a stable power supply, I need fruit products, so I need a constant supply of fruits, so I need proper fruit farms. So I need enough seeds. I inspected the recipes producing seeds. Yes, to get enough seeds I need productivity. As much as possible. So I used biochambers and productivity modules. And big enough farms, so I started producing artificial soil long before I even started bioflux. I realized different energy values for the different fruit products, so I realized yumako is mainly for production and jellynut is mainly for power.

The spoilage mechanic in general told me belt congestion is dangerous, because items will spoil on the belt. So I designed belts that never stops and production that never stops.

Upon careful inspection of the different recipes that result in the same item (nutrients, bacteria) I tried to find out why there are different recipes, and what is the most efficient one. It became clear all recipes have their role, and it's not always mass production but usually one for initiating to break the chicken-and-egg dependency, and one for mass production.

That may have been your experience with spoilage. That experience is not universal for everybody else.

I figured out the basics fairly quickly; spoilage can appear anywhere so it needs to be removed, shorter travel distance is better, etc. That wasn't the issue I have had with spoilage mechanics.

The problem is that I have to spend a lot of mental attention tax to figure out a reasonable, decent design in "/editor" mode, which breaks the flow and takes me out of the actual game.


When I work on something with a complicated production chain without spoilage, I generally don't need to use /editor mode at all. So spoilage is a noticeable exception, not in a good way.

I was able to build and figure out a good overall design for the Fulgora factory while playing. OP didn't.


This showed me that not everybody responded to the new Space Age mechanics the same way. The sooner people accept this, the sooner we can have a more meaningful conversation.

This thread is already derailed at maximum, it was already derailed with the 1st reply. But since the thread creator didn't show any interest in their thread and didn't show up even once, I gave up staying on topic that far in the thread. My conclusion: the OP was just a rant, and after venting the poster felt better. It has become an extension and duplication of the huge "I hate Gleba" and "I hate quality" threads of the past. There is nothing new here that hasn't already been discussed before. It's literally all the same.

What changed is the view. In the past we didn't know how the devs will react on the feedback about Gleba and quality. Now, with 2.1 experimental, we know the direction: the design will stay as it is. No change.

I want you to consider that the community has to put up with those kinds of threads because not enough feedback was incorporated in Space Age. Remember, this is coming from people who want to play video games and relax. They care enough to come to the forum and share their perspective. Some of them may just be uninterested in having a conversation, which is fair.

On the other hand, those who choose to act on the "hate" discredit those of us who genuinely want to see changes. I am one of those who genuinely want to see changes, not because I hate anything, which is too strong a word.

I did not enjoy the spoilage mechanics; that is the right way to frame it.


We barely had time as a community to provide feedback in the short period after the Space Age release, and development ended soon after the 2.1 patch cycle. This contrasts with the base game, which was in active development longer. The base game had more time to incorporate feedback and improve.

I know the devs reacted to feedback about Gleba at the Space Age LAN party. See: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-431

What you may or may not know is that the original Gleba they showed at this event was very different than the one that come out on the release date, and the feedback they got was such that they had to go back to the drawing board and make changes, with only a few weeks before the Space Age release date.

Space Age release date was Oct 21st, 2024. The FFF-431 blog was posted on Oct 4th, 2024. The LAN party happened on the weekend of Nov 6th, 2024 (see FFF-427, bottom section). That is two and a half months. There was no time to iterate and incorporate feedback until after release, and unfortunately we as the community didn't have many chances to iterate on both mechanics.

Although quality mechanics were in development for much longer than spoilage, it still received limited acceptance, with an "opt-in" option available.

[worph]

I want you to consider that the community has to put up with those kinds of threads because not enough feedback was incorporated in Space Age

The pot calling the kettle black.

Let's turn your argument around:
In my opinion Gleba is the best planet of the DLC, I love the spoilage mechanic and how everything is endless, if you bring enough belts, and guns and handle seeds carefully.
I can easily design factories on Gleba without using "/editor" or feeling like it has a high "mental attention tax". I thrive on it.
I love that quality on Gleba is one of the last few challenges I haven't fully mastered yet (due time-constraints and being CPU limited on my semi-performant laptop).

I also love everything about quality. Sushi belts with spoilage, fruit and nutrients of all quality levels are super cool. It's a shame that there isn't a way to make use of it earlier in the game, like with Fulgora. On Fulgora you can essentially use quality upon landing. You can do the same on Gleba, but it's not very useful. Give me a reason to have those crazy sushi belts earlier on Gleba.

Instead I think Vulcanus breaks quality. Pipes everywhere are boring. Everything being actually free is boring. Only two tungsten intermediaries that are essentially the same thing as the only planet-specific ressource is boring. The LDS-shuffle makes getting legendary steel and copper trivial.
Having to use underground pipe upcycling is a fantastic and interesting way to get legendary iron plates. I want more more challenges like that. Not just throwing coal into a blender on Nauvis/Vulcanus, turn into into plastic using cryoplants and get infinite legendary copper and legendary steel out of it.
What I want is for the devs to make Vulcanus so hard and complicated that I need to go into "/editor" mode, to actually understand what this "mental attention tax" you keep talking about is.
I think there was not enough feedback incorporated into Vulcanus, it's too easy. I want the devs to make it harder. and I will keep replying to everyong in here who things otherwise.

In broad strokes I do think that many of those exaggerated arguments I made have at least some validity. But I am of course playing it up enourmously, to show the ridiculousness of having to argue over someones (questionably argued) opinion over and over again, with no end in sight. Repeating your opinion ad nauseam is not a way to have a discussion, especially if people continuosly highlight that it's not the correct thread to do it. And even more so if many of the points made are not true.

[Hurkyl]

Spoilage has a poor introductory experience and struggles even more to teach people how to design properly.

That's not how I remember my first encounter with spoilage when I first arrived on Gleba. I had no trouble at all. I observed how my hand crafted intermediates all turned into spoilage before I was able to use them. So I learnt: don't craft these in advance, don't keep a stock. I carefully inspected spoilage times to see which items will last (fruit) and which are for immediate consumption (mash, nutrients).

Later, ...

My own experience started off similarly. I see spoilage is a problem early, so I stop handcrafting, stop clearcutting forests, and check out the spoil timers. I proceeded a little differently; I recognized that I should treat mash/jelly/nutrients as ephemeral products, but I zeroed in on making a tiny factory producing bioflux and durable goods like carbon, plastic, and rocket fuel while I was figuring out what's up.

I had not actually realized agricultural products were a passable fuel, and focused on carbon and rocket fuel to fuel the boilers and furnaces. I think this misunderstanding actually helped me rather than harmed me.

Reflecting on the discussion, one thing I notice is that Tertius and I have a story of how we observed the impact of spoilage and adjusted how we did things to better work with the mechanic.

It just strikes me just how much of the anti-Gleba comments I've read seem to view the mechanic entirely through the lens of having to remove spoilage when it appears, or just as some sort of tax on their factory.

[XT-248]

The pot calling the kettle black.

When people start to treat any slight meaningful criticism as "they must hate it", they lose the plot.

I have seen it happen before in other communities, and I am seeing some of the same patterns repeating.

Let's turn your argument around:
In my opinion Gleba is the best planet of the DLC, I love the spoilage mechanic and how everything is endless, if you bring enough belts, and guns and handle seeds carefully.
I can easily design factories on Gleba without using "/editor" or feeling like it has a high "mental attention tax". I thrive on it.
I love that quality on Gleba is one of the last few challenges I haven't fully mastered yet (due time-constraints and being CPU limited on my semi-performant laptop).

I also love everything about quality. Sushi belts with spoilage, fruit and nutrients of all quality levels are super cool. It's a shame that there isn't a way to make use of it earlier in the game, like with Fulgora. On Fulgora you can essentially use quality upon landing. You can do the same on Gleba, but it's not very useful. Give me a reason to have those crazy sushi belts earlier on Gleba.

I don't disagree that other people can and will love different mechanics than I do. The difference is that I am not trying to shut down meaningful criticism about any mechanics.

Instead I think Vulcanus breaks quality. Pipes everywhere are boring. Everything being actually free is boring. Only two tungsten intermediaries that are essentially the same thing as the only planet-specific ressource is boring. The LDS-shuffle makes getting legendary steel and copper trivial.
Having to use underground pipe upcycling is a fantastic and interesting way to get legendary iron plates. I want more more challenges like that. Not just throwing coal into a blender on Nauvis/Vulcanus, turn into into plastic using cryoplants and get infinite legendary copper and legendary steel out of it.
What I want is for the devs to make Vulcanus so hard and complicated that I need to go into "/editor" mode, to actually understand what this "mental attention tax" you keep talking about is.
I think there was not enough feedback incorporated into Vulcanus, it's too easy. I want the devs to make it harder. and I will keep replying to everyong in here who things otherwise.

It might shock you, but I do agree with some of the criticism of Vulcanus.

How do we make quality mechanics meaningful with liquid ingredients? Quality mechanics and liquids don't interact at all. I mean, how would a refinery handle processing crude oil into not three fluids but fifteen possible liquids (five of each one liquid type) with only three fluid outlets? Mixed fluids in pipes? It is already bad enough to accidentally mix fluids, which is still possible when construction bots ignore pipe-mixing restrictions.

Let's take your hypothetical exercise to its logical conclusion. How would you make Vulcanus harder enough to possibly require going into the "/editor" mode? I don't mind having a harder Vulcanus experience.

The question of how falls on your shoulders, since you're claiming Vulcanus is too easy, and I don't disagree. I just choose to accept Vulcanus as it is, with flaws caused as a byproduct of the pipe mechanics limitation (only one fluid per pipe system).

In broad strokes I do think that many of those exaggerated arguments I made have at least some validity. But I am of course playing it up enourmously, to show the ridiculousness of having to argue over someones (questionably argued) opinion over and over again, with no end in sight. Repeating your opinion ad nauseam is not a way to have a discussion, especially if people continuosly highlight that it's not the correct thread to do it. And even more so if many of the points made are not true.

There is an end in sight, and there is a range of possibilities. The community never stops hearing about this until no one plays the game anymore. Or an official patch comes out and changes all worlds in Space Age so more people can live with them as they are. Or something in between.

We are currently on a trajectory closer to one extreme than the other.


I believe you already have the communication tool to get a better response, and you can do better.

[mmmPI]

This thread is already derailed at maximum, it was already derailed with the 1st reply.

I was afraid you may have not seen that people are actually trolling on this thread because of the patience you seem to invest in answering some of the non-sense, i thought over time people learn by doing, and i thought funny to think of people playing dumb and getting better at it.

What changed is the view. In the past we didn't know how the devs will react on the feedback about Gleba and quality. Now, with 2.1 experimental, we know the direction: the design will stay as it is. No change.

I don't know, there were changes from 2.0 to the current state of 2.1, with the removal of space casino, which impact quality, devs have changed their statement about some other mechanism like LDS shuffle which is in the game currently and used for quality too. For now the tips and tricks given on this thread are valid, but some of them may change , not the fundamental of the mechanic, but who can know for sure before it's there ?

Random output

This time what is wrong is the timeline, it's not very subtle, you have been making one grotesque claim after another x)

The pot calling the kettle black.

Let's turn your argument around:

That's an argument that would convince a rationnal person having a sincere discussion to maybe reconsider their point of view, but it would not score a point if the other person just wants you to make ridiculous argument unrelated to the thread they are polluting. You would have been baited by the troll ^^