Friday Facts #86 - Trees

[kovarex]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-86

[sillyfly]

Wow, the new trees look amazing!

Now if you can only make them spawn a little more spaced so it's not so hard to walk through...

It is also very encouraging to see a lot of the mundane tasks getting automated... you'd think you guys are into automation or something

[Zeblote]

How can you show pictures of fancy trees but not one of a fancy forest?!

[MeduSalem]

Nice update about the trees...

Somehow I got surprised to see colorful trees because somehow I was expecting an update about the logic circuit stuff.



About the concrete tiles:

Do we really need a new specialized machine just for concrete?
It would make more sense if that kind of machine would be used for more than just one item/product otherwise it wouldn't be utilized very often because I guess one machine to produce concrete tiles would pretty much be it for most players. Don't know if it would be worth the additional work if it just ends up being something that is placed only once at the edge of the factory with nothing more to it.

I also don't know about using iron ore in the recipe... because I'm Construction Engineer and I pretty much know the chemistry of Cement and Concrete and there's a lot of stuff inside mostly Calcium Carbonate (aka Limestone). There are a lot of other components like Silicates (SiO2) and other Oxides (Al2O3 for example) in there too, depending on what wants to achieve (mostly the stuff changes behavior like the speed at which Concrete hardens or if it hardens under water or not). There are some cements using Fe2O3 too but it's like 1-5% of the overall chemistry and it's mostly coming from inserting slag which is a by-product of smelting iron ore and which would have otherwise no use and would have to be dumped. So most of the cements use CaO (20-60%), SiO2 (>20-30%) and Al2O3 (~15-20%) to a huge extend.

So if at all it would be better to actually have Sand and Aluminum deposits in the game and use them in combination with stone instead of iron for creating cement. Both Sand and Aluminum would be actually good to see in the game anyways because there are like a ton of recipes that would make much more sense if Sand and Aluminium would be available rather than trying to do everything with Iron or Copper. And I don't think that it should be something left for mods because both Sand and Aluminium are actually quite common components.

Iron or better yet Steel would make more sense in combination with Concrete when creating reinforced concrete structures, which would be nice to see in the future as an upgrade to walls for example. At least don't use iron ore inside cement because that's not how the few negligible percent of iron gets into cement at all, neither is it a requirement to get cement in the first place.

[DerivePi]

OK, everyone got that? Albert needs more work!

On a side note: A pet peeve of mine is when people (especially people in the business) call the truck with the spinning mixer on the back - a cement truck.

[Drury]

Hi FactorioBot, make yourself at home.

...you wouldn't destroy your home and kill all inhabitants besides yourself, would you?

[Albert]

How can you show pictures of fancy trees but not one of a fancy forest?!

No shock!
Here an early preview of an engine-generated forest, as you can see, red is too aggressive, and colors are very experimental, we need to test quite a lot.
In my opinion is early to speak about forests

[jerrycheng]

Hi kovarex,

I am wondering how to get the overall amount of variations as 5120.

So, in my calculation: 8 (tree families) * 8 (colors) *10 (variations) =640

What is missing?

[Drury]

It works when you consider 64 colors rather than 8.

[jerrycheng]

It works when you consider 64 colors rather than 8.

Thanks

[Tankh]

Oh nice, finally some VRAM reduction. I think I had some problem with that before, but I never really figured out if that was the actual cause of my lag or not, because sometimes it would work just fine.

[jeroon]

can we please have one of these too, to tow behind the car (or the tank ):

https://youtu.be/lnK9S80pwwk?t=2m24s

[Drury]

I've been toying with the idea of bulk material handling, such as cement or molten material. I think it'd be neat if that stuff had it's own means of production and transport. Fistbump for considering cement machines!

[kovarex]

Hi kovarex,

I am wondering how to get the overall amount of variations as 5120.

So, in my calculation: 8 (tree families) * 8 (colors) *10 (variations) =640

What is missing?

8 (tree families) * 16 (colors) * (10 variations) * (4 progress of leaves) = 5120

[kovarex]

Nice update about the trees...

About the concrete tiles:

Do we really need a new specialized machine just for concrete?
It would make more sense if that kind of machine would be used for more than just one item/product otherwise it wouldn't be utilized very often because I guess one machine to produce concrete tiles would pretty much be it for most players. Don't know if it would be worth the additional work if it just ends up being something that is placed only once at the edge of the factory with nothing more to it.

Using it only for floors would be silly, I agree. But we plan to use the concrete also in recipes of other things, heavy machines that need base like rocket silo, concrete walls or chemical plant.

I also don't know about using iron ore in the recipe... because I'm Construction Engineer and I pretty much know the chemistry of Cement and Concrete and there's a lot of stuff inside mostly Calcium Carbonate (aka Limestone). There are a lot of other components like Silicates (SiO2) and other Oxides (Al2O3 for example) in there too, depending on what wants to achieve (mostly the stuff changes behavior like the speed at which Concrete hardens or if it hardens under water or not). There are some cements using Fe2O3 too but it's like 1-5% of the overall chemistry and it's mostly coming from inserting slag which is a by-product of smelting iron ore and which would have otherwise no use and would have to be dumped. So most of the cements use CaO (20-60%), SiO2 (>20-30%) and Al2O3 (~15-20%) to a huge extend.

So if at all it would be better to actually have Sand and Aluminum deposits in the game and use them in combination with stone instead of iron for creating cement. Both Sand and Aluminum would be actually good to see in the game anyways because there are like a ton of recipes that would make much more sense if Sand and Aluminium would be available rather than trying to do everything with Iron or Copper. And I don't think that it should be something left for mods because both Sand and Aluminium are actually quite common components.

Iron or better yet Steel would make more sense in combination with Concrete when creating reinforced concrete structures, which would be nice to see in the future as an upgrade to walls for example. At least don't use iron ore inside cement because that's not how the few negligible percent of iron gets into cement at all, neither is it a requirement to get cement in the first place.

Thanks for the analysis, to be honest I know nothing about chemistry behind most of the stuff. I'm quite sure we need to simplify things in Factorio, but I agree that over-simplification (most of the things from iron + copper) is too much, this is the reason I wanted to make the concrete one of the additional basic ingredients. Sand might be useful, as it can be also used to make glass, which is used in many places (lights, solar panels, lasers etc)

[jerrycheng]

Hi kovarex,

I am wondering how to get the overall amount of variations as 5120.

So, in my calculation: 8 (tree families) * 8 (colors) *10 (variations) =640

What is missing?

8 (tree families) * 16 (colors) * (10 variations) * (4 progress of leaves) = 5120

Thanks, kovarex.

[KrzysD]

Those trees look to beautiful to cut down!

Maybe you should change how construction bots cut them down, so we can see the transition to a stump.

[Rseding91]

... Sand might be useful, as it can be also used to make glass, which is used in many places (lights, solar panels, lasers etc)

Sand could be an interesting mechanic: vacuum/mine up deserts converting the tile type(s) into something else as you collect the sand

[MeduSalem]

Using it only for floors would be silly, I agree. But we plan to use the concrete also in recipes of other things, heavy machines that need base like rocket silo, concrete walls or chemical plant.

Well sounds promising. But it would also be nice to see the new machine being used for intermixing other stuff besides concrete too so it really pays off to have the additional machine.

Thanks for the analysis, to be honest I know nothing about chemistry behind most of the stuff. I'm quite sure we need to simplify things in Factorio, but I agree that over-simplification (most of the things from iron + copper) is too much, this is the reason I wanted to make the concrete one of the additional basic ingredients. Sand might be useful, as it can be also used to make glass, which is used in many places (lights, solar panels, lasers etc)

No problem, that's what a playerbase is for: Feedback.

I'm also sure that some things need to be simplified for Factorio, otherwise it might become a monstrous/unfun game. So while I think Aluminium might be a little too much, adding Sand as a basic mine-able resource might not be too far fetched.

And as you already mentioned, it would also offer potential in making glass and creating a tech tree around that or overall as a resource for semiconducting material in the circuits industry (maybe in Processing Units or Modules)... which might or might not be welcomed by some players as a rebalancing aspect since using iron there also seems quite strange.

So coming back to cement it could be pretty much this:

Creating Cement (in a hot grinder, maybe furnace or whatever):

Stone (Limestone) (CaO) + Sand (SiO2) + Optionally Aluminum (Al2O3) = Cement pulver

Normally the Limestone has to be burned at high temperature to get CaCO3 to split into CaO + CO2 but this step could be all be involved in the step above to simplify things. Also normally one would use Clay because it has SiO2 as well as AlO3 and maybe even Fe2O3 (depending on regional location) inside, otherwise one would use slag as additional component since slag contains also SiO2 as well as AlO3. But since we don't have all that stuff I think using pure Sand and maybe optionally pure Aluminium would pretty suffice. At least the mixing/grinding of those into the pulver has to be done at high temperature to get all the CO out of the Limestone and also to get all the water out of the Clay.

Mixing water is NO good idea at this point because that would trigger the reaction of cement and it would get rock hard and that is NOT what we want to happen with the cement yet. So whatever the recipe for cement pulver will look like in the end: NO WATER YET, because water triggers the Crystallization process.

Creating Concrete (in a mixer):

Cement pulver + Stone + Sand + Water = Concrete

As said before, water triggers the Crystallization process and that's why Concrete eventually gets rock hard. The cement is only like a glue between the Stone and Sand corns. The actual strength of concrete comes through the right mixture of Stone and Sand. Pure cement is actually quite weak, it's just there to glue the aggregate together.


That would be a good approach to how Cement and how Concrete is made.

[quinor]

About making cement... The new machine would be (for me) kiln, like different type of furnace and main machine to process stone. Also, maybye smelting coal into coke, wood into carbon fibre etc? Something like advanced furnace...