Friday Facts #442 - Flip, Flow, and Fresh Paint

[royce3]

What makes you think that a low-quality fusion reactor produces more energy and takes up less space than a high-quality one? You just need fusion generators that match the reactor's quality. The efficiency also stays the same if you limit the fluoroketone supply properly.
You can use the same blueprint regardless of the quality. With higher quality, you generate more energy in the same amount of space. Thats all.

To be clear, I'm talking about multi-reactor setups. You need to run the reactor at 100% capacity to get the most fuel efficiency. You need more infrastructure (tons of accumulators and logic to switch the reactors on/off) to capture the higher output of the quality reactors to preserve the fuel efficiency. Two quality reactors will produce less electricity at a worse fuel efficiency than 3 non-quality reactors. Fluoroketone levels have nothing to do with fuel efficiency.

For any given target output, there is a non-quality reactor setup that will have better fuel efficiency and take up the same or less space than a quality setup. The only use case for a quality reactor is when you don't have enough space for multiple reactors, forgoing any efficiency bonus, and need more than 100 MW and less than the max output of whatever quality you have available.

In this context, talking about efficiency only makes sense in a multi-reactor setup, since efficiency can only be increased through the neighbor bonus.

I guess you haven't figured out yet how to design a fusion reactor that takes full advantage of the neighbor bonus at partial load. With a nuclear reactor, you do this by limiting the fuel supply. With fusion reactors, you have to limit the fluoroketone in the reactors. This ensures that all the fluoroketone can be converted into plasma, but the generators shouldn’t run dry. No accumulators are needed for this.
Hint: Using Pumps for this is a trap. Barreling is the key to precisely limiting the fluoroketone feed rate.

I'm running into a similar problem with nuclear reactors. 4 legendary ones hit 999 before they finish consuming the fuel and I haven't figured out how to get it to draw the energy out faster so its not wasted. Then I look at how much uramium ore I have laying around and realized it's a problem that doesn't need to be solved. Fusion fuel cells seem much more expensive to produce, but I haven't really done the analysis.

[evandy]

if a change was really needed, then it should have been the other way round. keep space casino, and nerf lds shuffle.

Yes, this exactly. Lds shuffle is much more “broken” than asteroids as it creates infinite legendary copper. The asteroids are a much more interesting mechanic and drive production in space, thus leading to new problem solving.

I don’t understand why LDS stayed, this is backwards. Should i go to vulcanis with some recyclers for infinite iron steel and copper for even less work than asteroids now?

Or is the real problem the only good solution to get legendary stone and coal? Can we at least have a replacement for that?

EDIT: Here's my quick thoughts on what replaces Space casinos:
- Iron: Upcycler with iron chests. Just another boring upcycler blueprint. Which you still have to make for holmium anyways
- Calcite: raw recycling with quality in the miners. There is SO MUCH calcite on volcanis it might as well be infinite. Blueprint + Bots
- Coal: Likely raw recycling too - since the only way to make coal is with fluids. This one on Nauvis, I suppose.

So we're to understand that trading a NEW problem to solve, with new mechanics, in new ways, is overpowered compared to brainless spamming down the same blueprints a million times? I generally never fundamentally disagree with game devs - it's their game, and their universe, and their choice. But can someone actually explain, specifically, why asteroid recycling is "so overpowered?" All resources are effectively infinite in factorio, so the fact that it comes from asteroids doesn't make it different from the entire planet of Vulcanis. Or the fact that a few levels of productivity research and your ore patches may as well be infinite anyways.

If you want to re-balance it by changing the 80% return rate down, I would 100% have no arguments. Or replace it with something equally interesting - quality seeds to quality trees, to quality bioflux on Gleeba, leading to quality spoilage and quality carbon, as well as quality sulphur. But simply removing an interesting mechanic from the game in favor of blueprint-copies of other solutions we have to build /anyways/? I really wish someone could explain to me why this is a beneficial trade, because I just don't understand. At all.

[thedoh]

I hope the "fresh paint" will improve the visibility of Gleba. In my opinion it is very difficult to identify the tiles: What is water, what will have the planters work, what tiles can use special soil to grow, which tiles can use the fancy soil to grow (but not the normal kind).

[LongShot338]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442

I created an account just to comment on how much I dislike getting rid of the space casino (refinery). There's already a lot of items that require the tedious unfun "intended" way of doing quality. Quality is only worth doing once you've already beaten the game (unlocked legendary). I want to work for the good stuff to help me beat the game and it is currently a post game mega base booster. Pasting a wasteful upcycle blueprint is NOT more fun or satisfying than designing a space Roomba that refines astroids into quality ore.

I play because I love efficiency and waste is the opposite of efficiency. Upcycling is wasteful, you're destroying something youve already made in exchange for another roll of the dice. It's such a shame the mechanic that feels like refining got dubbed the casino. I guess space refinery isn't as catchy for a youtube title. The LDS shuffle is the exploit, not reprocessing.

Please rework quality to make it less tedious and let players work for legendary right from the start. Leave the space casino alone and nerf the lds shuffle if you're hell bent on nerfing something. Who cares what people are doing to have fun late game. I wouldve ended my playthrough and moved on to the next factory game if upcycling was the only option, it's boring. Pursuing quality with reprocessing so I can chase the shattered planet is what has kept me playing.

I really appreciate giving me the option to play older versions on steam. I'll stick with 2.0 if you have to destroy reprocessing. It's sad factorio will be out of active development. "all good things" I suppose. Thanks for making such a great game.

[coffee-factorio]

It's a tricky thing with quality. I think the lack of direction is functioning as intended. And it's not that stuff is invalid, it's that I'm running into approaches that are conditionally valid. The condition is generally scale. And usually people are going bonkers about a strategy that only works from [x to y] hours. There's maybe four systems that I think are useless because their time to live is less than the time it takes to make a system to replace them and one of them should be fixed.

That would be most of the power logistics that aren't substations. And artillery. Because artillery is way, way, way weak. That's a way for logistics, way for damage, and way for upcycle benefit. Nothing about it conforms to any real life expectation for the systems its trying to model and it has a real chance of breaking suspension of disbelief if someone has a relationship to the second degree to a military.

[motmontheinternet]

Or, a balance issue was considered and a decision was made that asteroid reprocessing had too high of an output for too simple a setup.

Or the dev (and the players weirdly wanting to govern someone else's play) can leave a released game alone. These ships aren't overpowered and belong in the game.

[Leex2k]

Yes, 25% of my 3500 hours in the game were spent in editor worlds, theory-crafting designs and testing ideas. It’s a significant source of fun for me. Another significant source of fun for me is having tools to “break the game” at the endgame. This whole attitude reeks to me of “I’m better than you, and my way of having fun is more valid than yours.” It’s gross, and baffling. How other people play a single-player game ought not have anything to do with you. It strikes me as seriously insecure, this seemingly compulsive need to punish other players for enjoying something that you don’t.

To have the devs endorse it is just insulting, frankly, to the vast bulk of the player base. Kinda feels like a “we don’t like you, you’re not playing the game the way we want, so we’re taking our ball and going home.” No one likes that kid.

OK, if this is the point you're at and that is the kind of image you have to project on other players to cope, you should probably take a step back and re-evaluate if you can actually even engage fairly with the discussion being had. You're placing yourself as a shield in front of, apparently, the "vast bulk" of punished players, while you've put the opposition in the camp of malicious, insecure bullies on the basis of arguments that, as far as I can tell, you're only projecting and don't actually exist in this thread. I don't know what distribution of players are "for" or "against" this change, and frankly I don't know how you would have any idea either. Nor does it matter, since anyone on either side is welcome to let themselves be heard, I hope at least.

I know at this point it's completely futile to state: but, as long as you're in a state of catastrophizing, you will only be grasping at any straw that you feel will get you closer to "winning the argument" against the hordes of destructive bullies, instead of actually arguing towards a constructive conclusion.

Or the dev (and the players weirdly wanting to govern someone else's play) can leave a released game alone. These ships aren't overpowered and belong in the game.

You literally have the option to play whichever version of the game that you want. If you don't want the devs to tamper with your experience, you don't have to let them. The choice is yours alone.

[quineotio]

You literally have the option to play whichever version of the game that you want. If you don't want the devs to tamper with your experience, you don't have to let them. The choice is yours alone.

This argument isn't valid because if you stick to 2.0 you miss out on everything else in 2.1.

[bobucles]

Let's be honest here. Who actually uses the asteroid reroll recipe in a serious, non quality way? Every single corner of space has an abundance of all 3 rocks, and if you have too many of one type the reroll only has a 20% chance of getting the type you need. There is very little practical need for the recipe in the first place.

Look at this guy:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Oxide_asteroid_chunk
- 40% chance to do nothing
- 20% chance to get what you want
- 20% chance to get what you don't want
- 20% chance to catastrophically fail

Like, show me a single platform that actually benefits from this. You can't. By the time it produces useful output, you've already picked up the correct asteroid from space. It's a trash tech, just like a recycler is for shredding trash.

[Hurkyl]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442

I created an account just to comment on how much I dislike getting rid of the space casino (refinery). There's already a lot of items that require the tedious unfun "intended" way of doing quality. Quality is only worth doing once you've already beaten the game (unlocked legendary). I want to work for the good stuff to help me beat the game and it is currently a post game mega base booster.

You're missing a lot, IMO. Two easy things you can do are:

• Put quality modules in your assemblers making productivity 1 modules. Use a splitter to filter out the quality results, and now you have better modules to use in places where productivity is very useful. You're going to get quite a few of them when you start doing purple science. Set up a skimming operation on red and blue circuits you can use to upgrade them to tier 2 modules later on.
• Start your quality loops for quality modules as soon as you get Fulgora running. You can let that cook for half the game and then you don't have to wait for them when you want to set up a quality operation post-game. And if you already have them, you might see opportunities to actually use them to help you beat the game.

[quineotio]

Let's be honest here. Who actually uses the asteroid reroll recipe in a serious, non quality way?

The one place I use it is on my calcite making platform to turn all the chunks into oxide.

[Eulenberg]

The question you have to ask about the removal of quality for casions is not about challenge or that is was too op, its about viability.

Quality is only useful for 2 things, effect of buildable and SPM.

In the attached screenshot you see the new way of getting 1 iron ore/s with recycling asteroid at 300% asteroid prod, instead of rolling them up, its even less challenging and more boring than the casino was. and in the end it does not matter if iron chest upcycling will end up being the new meta.

For buildable throughput does not matter you can just buffer a large amount of beacons, modules and assemblers, that very slowly get replaced. Also ratios dont matter, since you can just void any unwanted stuff that ends up in some chest.

For SPM, both is very important because you consuming it non-stop, and one science not keeping up, stops the whole thing. And Quality SPM is barely viable in 2.0 with casinos, only red, green and space science are done with quality. The only thing that the remove of the casinos does, it kills quality SPM entirely. Since quality science packs are so bad scaling wise, uncommon is worth 2x common and legendary is only worth 6x common, but its 1000 times harder to get bootstrapped.

You will never need more than a couple thousand or in some cases ten thousands of a single buildable, that has a meaningful quality effect, to build the even biggest of bases (2-10m eSPM), and you can still do that with the trace amounts you get from the method i posted, or what ever will be the new meta to get what ever you need. but unless we get some new quality mechanics, it will not be able to compete with common science by a mile, since even casinos only were useful for the arguably 3 easiest of science packs. And i know cyro is worth making uncommon and some other can work uncommon or rare too. but it is only marginal better than common for these.

The devs had to ether overhaul the existing quality system as a whole, of buff other methods to the same or even above casino levels of power, to make it work.
They did nether, unless we get some more quality changes in the next FFF.

I hope all the casino cryers out there got what they wanted, and even more boring, less challenging and more time consuming way to get your quality buildable, and removing quality science from the game.

Greetings Eulenberg

06-13-2026, 19-04-39.png (289.69 KiB) Viewed 456 times

[Leex2k]

You literally have the option to play whichever version of the game that you want. If you don't want the devs to tamper with your experience, you don't have to let them. The choice is yours alone.

This argument isn't valid because if you stick to 2.0 you miss out on everything else in 2.1.

Now you're just being dishonest. Funny how you specifically cut out what I responded to:

Or, a balance issue was considered and a decision was made that asteroid reprocessing had too high of an output for too simple a setup.

Or the dev (and the players weirdly wanting to govern someone else's play) can leave a released game alone. These ships aren't overpowered and belong in the game.

You're arguing in bad faith at this point. No point in engaging past this.

[LongShot338]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442

I created an account just to comment on how much I dislike getting rid of the space casino (refinery). There's already a lot of items that require the tedious unfun "intended" way of doing quality. Quality is only worth doing once you've already beaten the game (unlocked legendary). I want to work for the good stuff to help me beat the game and it is currently a post game mega base booster.

You're missing a lot, IMO. Two easy things you can do are:

I put a lot of thought it quality. I weighed skimming off normal production, brute forcing on vulcanus, or brute forcing on fulgora (easiest since it gives me completed items). None of that seemed fun or worth it. What did seem fun enough to try was building a unique ship that switches my late game resource extraction to space. I was right, it is fun. I'm actually rebuilding it now to tweak my design. I can see reducing the number of modules for reprocessing to one so other options will be more viable but removing it completely takes away designing a unique ship. Does it not make sense to have a late game mechanic that gives you the option to switch your resources extraction to space for better items?

[fbsr]

Nice updates but there will be anything at all related to spoilage on circuit network? The ability to read spoilage data..

[Panzerknacker]

Regarding quality, im wondering why cant we have quality of product depend on quality of ingredients instead of hard-setting it in assembling machine? Would seem much more dynamic and interesting that way.

[Eulenberg]

Regarding quality, im wondering why cant we have quality of product depend on quality of ingredients instead of hard-setting it in assembling machine? Would seem much more dynamic and interesting that way.

this is due to how quality works on engine level, quality was not developed along side SA or with it in mind, it was a side project of kovarex that he over many years even before 1.0 if im right. he never was able to make it fit right. but they decided to polish what he made so far at some point during SA development, and because kovarex wanted to finish the project, they pushed it with SA.

[PharonReichter]

Quality is tedious to start. That's all, once you get it going it becomes simpler and simpler. Space casinos were doing just that - jumpstart your quality.

I'm against changing that. The game works well as it is now. Want to make some tryhards happy? add an achievement - reached x whatever planet or whatever SPM, without putting a quality module in an asteroid repocesser. There, done, boom you oneshotted the whole crying group and left the rest of the players happy.

[PharonReichter]

Yes, 25% of my 3500 hours in the game were spent in editor worlds, theory-crafting designs and testing ideas. It’s a significant source of fun for me. Another significant source of fun for me is having tools to “break the game” at the endgame. This whole attitude reeks to me of “I’m better than you, and my way of having fun is more valid than yours.” It’s gross, and baffling. How other people play a single-player game ought not have anything to do with you. It strikes me as seriously insecure, this seemingly compulsive need to punish other players for enjoying something that you don’t.

To have the devs endorse it is just insulting, frankly, to the vast bulk of the player base. Kinda feels like a “we don’t like you, you’re not playing the game the way we want, so we’re taking our ball and going home.” No one likes that kid.

OK, if this is the point you're at and that is the kind of image you have to project on other players to cope, you should probably take a step back and re-evaluate if you can actually even engage fairly with the discussion being had. You're placing yourself as a shield in front of, apparently, the "vast bulk" of punished players, while you've put the opposition in the camp of malicious, insecure bullies on the basis of arguments that, as far as I can tell, you're only projecting and don't actually exist in this thread. I don't know what distribution of players are "for" or "against" this change, and frankly I don't know how you would have any idea either. Nor does it matter, since anyone on either side is welcome to let themselves be heard, I hope at least.

I know at this point it's completely futile to state: but, as long as you're in a state of catastrophizing, you will only be grasping at any straw that you feel will get you closer to "winning the argument" against the hordes of destructive bullies, instead of actually arguing towards a constructive conclusion.

Or the dev (and the players weirdly wanting to govern someone else's play) can leave a released game alone. These ships aren't overpowered and belong in the game.

You literally have the option to play whichever version of the game that you want. If you don't want the devs to tamper with your experience, you don't have to let them. The choice is yours alone.

"You literally have the option to play" without using space casinos. "The choice is yours alone."

When you want to impose your version of the experience upon other players you are in the "in the camp of malicious, insecure bullies".

[bobucles]

The "20% chunk back" thing in basic processing recipes are also affected by productivity. It's easily overlooked due to lack of documentation and difficulty to verify. At level 30 productivity, it gives you 80% chunks back just like reprocessing. It's better than reprocessing at around productivity 26 because it always gives you the same chunk back, with byproducts you can upcycle or use.

Ooh, that's pretty interesting. At 0 productivity an ore chunk gives 20 ore plus a recursive 20% chance for more, with a math Expectation of 5 more ore for 25 per chunk. At 300% productivity the ore chunk gives 20+60 ore and 0.2+0.6 chunk with an Expectation of using the leftover chunk 4 more times. One chunk would output an average of 400 iron ore, a 16x increase from 0 prod.

It's clear that the casino owes a great deal of its success due to the recursive nature of leftover asteroid chunks. Very small changes to these recipes would cascade into massive changes on the efficiency of the casino. For example, if the chunk reprocessing recipe were changed to:
10% Stay as A
30% change to B
30% change to C
30% vanish

This would count as a buff to reprocessing (outputting more of what you want), yet the increased vanish rate would cut the casino efficiency nearly in half. Similarly, changing the 0.2 basic chunk output (or removing it from prod entirely) would dramatically change high tech casino yield without breaking any early uses.