Factorio Forums

EustaceCS wrote: Fri Nov 01, 2024 7:18 pm Option 4: overproduce Gleba packs and make some room for spoilage discarding at non-Gleba research destination. Will need few platforms working as express deliveries. In this case you might need a source of spoilage on Navius anyway due to one Research related endgame tech...
Option 5: relocate your main research hub to Gleba.
Option 6: blitz through mandatory Gleba tech, forget until post-Aquilo, do Gleba-related (spoilers: there aint many) repeatables until satisfied, forget until next urge to do Gleba-related repeatables.

These options don't fix the problem. Option 4 just means you experience the problem for less time. Option 5 doesn't fix the problem at all, you're just left with being forced to switch your labs constantly on Gleba, instead of being forced to switch your labs constantly on Nauvis. Option 6 is even more explicitly trying to solve a gameplay problem by not playing the game.

The issue occurs wherever you do Gleba researches, however you transport them, and however long you take to do so. You can't take advantage of science production on Gleba and science production on other planets at the same time without some excessive manual micromanagement.

EustaceCS wrote: Fri Nov 01, 2024 7:18 pm

MeduSalem wrote: Fri Nov 01, 2024 5:51 pmAlbeit in Factorio it is definitely worse,

Goodness gracious, Factorio is worse than the game which is excellent for UI shittiness benchmarking.
I probably once again ended up at the wrong side of the mirror.
Let's return to this comparison once/if HoI IV would get queue'able researches, OK?
While decades pass, I suggest pondering if it's appropriate to try to make a very specific trick giving very little for a lot of effort pass for a commonly used practice.

On-topic, what problem are we trying to discuss, anyway?

Feather wrote: Fri Oct 18, 2024 1:42 am They can choose between 3 things
NEVER researching gleba tech so they don't need gleba science packs
ALWAYS researching gleba tech so they don't need to keep track of the shipments
OR keep track of the shipments which just sounds like a huge hassle and will force them to drop whatever they were doing to prioritise gleba research and deprioritise it after all of the science packs have been used

Option 4: overproduce Gleba packs and make some room for spoilage discarding at non-Gleba research destination. Will need few platforms working as express deliveries. In this case you might need a source of spoilage on Navius anyway due to one Research related endgame tech...
Option 5: relocate your main research hub to Gleba.
Option 6: blitz through mandatory Gleba tech, forget until post-Aquilo, do Gleba-related (spoilers: there aint many) repeatables until satisfied, forget until next urge to do Gleba-related repeatables.

Depending on how hard would you like to commit, different options are differently viable.
I didn't made it to Gleba yet, but I as filthy casual am considering variant 5: keep research (and ONLY research) on Gleba.

Upd.
Option 7 exists. Crazy enough. But I'm really tempted to try it in my current playthrough.

You see, nothing prevents you from building research labs on space platforms.
As all generic (read: space + Nauvis) packs can be created from widely available omnipresent swarm of asteroids, and since you need to do something to transfer planet specific packs between planets for combo researches anyway...
Why not making your main research hub interplanetary?
Space platform en route still can do researches (among other things).
So fill your platform's cargo with 1h worth of Gleba packs and go visit other planets while labs do lab things!
And if you'll be ready to expand your science-per-minute - just build one more.
And one more.
And one more...

Comes with a benefit of letting you dedicate more planetary space for actual crafting. Ergo, less Demolishers wrangling, less icebergs heating... less dying to that dastardly pixel of terrain which none of three neighbouring lightning attractors covered all of a sudden...

my brother in christ, you missed the point so hard you started talking about hoi4, I shouldn't've mentioed gleba in the original post and the only reason I did was to highlight the issue of having to requeue research every time an imported science pack arrives, christ, this is not a gleba issue, this is a 'I don't want to sit in the research ui this much/babysit the science packs' issue

one word, hyperbole

a different idea I had was to replace the research queue with a blacklist/whitelist/priority system (this would also require making labs able to research stuff independently)
blacklist - never research
whitelist - reserach cheapest whitelisted
priority - research regardless of cost

but this sounds way less reasonable than making labs able to skip through the queue based on available pots, so obviously I went with the other one

+1

A post-endgame game I play in has the emergent behavior of "research 'research productivity' if we have enough promethium packs, then research anything that takes agricultural packs to minimize spoilage, then research whatever else". This leads to having to essentially micro-manage the research queue to keep it flowing. I know this behavior is a direct result of promethium and agricultural being produced slower than everything else, which has the easy solution of "just build more of those", but we don't need as many of those packs, since we're researching most of the infinite techs evenly based on their costs. Letting the research queue be a priority list instead of halting research progress when the current tech runs out of a pack would alleviate this micro-management quite a bit.

+1 i ve seen friends doing it and even if i dont do it its a lot of chat spam when somebody changes the queue order
must be even more annoying for the people doing the clicks themselves

I, too, would like to see an automated solution for this automation game . I had to resort to a global alarm to let me know when to reorder techs, manually. Ugh, I feel dirty.

Like probably a lot of folks I find myself swapping between techs requiring Agricultural Science, and those that do not. Feels necessary to not waste time whenever I'm waiting for more Agricultural science to be shipped. I know I should probably just increase throughput, but it would be great if there were a checkbox somewhere (default off to not confuse people) to dynamically swap to research the earliest queued tech that packs are available in labs to research.

Expected behavior would be something like if you have Plastic Bar Productivity queued first and Processing Unit Productivity queued second, when you have Agricultural Science available it would research Plastic Bar Productivity, and when you don't (assuming you have Electromagnetic Science Packs) it would automatically start researching Processing Unit Productivity until Agricultural Science packs are loaded into labs.

Extra bonus would be to give some sort of visual warning (only when this option is selected maybe, to not change default behavior and cause unnecessary distraction early game) but none of the queued technologies can be researched.

I honestly hate being pulled away from whatever I'm doing every 4 minutes. Makes it pretty much impossible to ever properly focus on a task when mixed with ADHD - I completely lose my train of thought every time

Been dealing with this mess now that I've gotten to post game, so I'm gonna add my voice to this as well.

My Gleba science production is high enough that by the time a new shipment arrives, I haven't fully consumed the old shipment (the number of my labs running has gone down by a lot though - something like, 10-20% or so of my labs are still running.). This makes it very difficult for me to ever research anything other than Gleba techs. I can't stop exports, because then the Gleba base will back up, all the eggs will hatch, and then I'll need to manually go back and start it up again (or have bots pick up big stomper remains and hope that I get at least 1 egg to remotely reboot it). So I just ignore the shipments, do my other researches, and spoilage builds up.

For me, I don't mind if the Gleba packs spoil, it makes them unique and is very fitting with the design of Gleba as a whole.

For me, the bigger issue is the lack of ability to deal with spoilage in the labs.

Once spoilage builds up to a full stack in the trash slot, the Gleba pack slot fills up with spoilage, thereby not allowing new Gleba packs to be inserted into the lab. I'd use a filter inserter to pull out the spoilage, and sure, that works, but it doesn't work with daisy-chained labs. So now my labs are restricted to either being at most in columns of 2, or I have to leave space in between the labs so I have space to always be able to remove the spoilage. This is not a needed challenge. It's not a challenge at all. It just makes the lab setup look less aesthetically pleasing (granted, not a big issue, and can be fixed with a change in design, but it's an issue nonetheless.)

I can think of a few ways to fix this:

1. Logi bots automatically take out spoilage from lab trash slots (ONLY LAB trash slots, not the trash slots of other machines). Issue with this solution: it demands logi bots, which not everyone wants to use everywhere, and which should not be needed.
2. Spoilage in labs can be daisy chained (this would be an ideal solution to me. It would fit in neatly with existing lab set ups).
3. I want a way to detect what the current active research is so I can tell my inserters whether or not they should insert Gleba packs into the labs. (this is an alternate ideal solution to me. It would grant us a way to use circuits to interact with the research queue. This would also allow for a different kind of science sushi setup)
4. Building off of the last idea, a way to detect the research queue and check what science bottles each research in each the queue required. And also, a way to set the queue with circuits. This is only reordering the queue, and not adding new researches to the queue (going with that approach because I don't know how complex it would be to add new stuff with circuits. The signaling would be tough without a new signal for every single tech in the game, or maybe a tech ID, and that sounds like a pain) (I'd be OK with this solution, but even at first glance, it leans very heavily into circuitry, which not everyone is good at, and we need a more general solution that even those who are not combinator wizards should be able to implement).

As another note, spoilage in the trash slot doesn't even show up in the lab tooltip, which makes manually removing the spoilage a pain as well (harder to find which labs have some spoilage in the trash slots)

TL;DR

Research Queue items later in Queue if current research missing a Sci

What?

Given Current Research `A` needs Space Science and the labs have none. Then the research queue should skip along until it can find one it can do and should progress that in the meantime. This should be an easily toggleable option in the research UI

Why?

Because now in SA it can take a while for a shipment of Science to get to your chosen lab location it means time isn't wasted waiting to do research and the player's time isn't wasted constantly changing queue in order to minimise wasted time This would also make multi-planet lab setups more viable

kythlyn wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2024 4:16 am

Feather wrote: Fri Oct 18, 2024 1:42 am

TL;DR

Labs being able to target research AFTER the first one in the queue IF they are missing science packs

OP's suggestion seems reasonable and simple enough to at least ease the pain of Gleba's science. But this whole situation brings to mind other ideas, such as assigning research in the labs themselves like a recipe rather than through the current interface. The current interface is functional but pauses the game and takes the player out of the factory (which could very well be by design to give players time to read, but I digress). On topic, this would allow players to set up a dedicated factory to deal with gleba science and spoilage, while simultaneously doing research elsewhere that does not require agricultural science packs. Off topic, the player could also set up a variety of science factories for multiple infinite sciences, which I think could be a very significant feature for endgame builds and megabases.

This idea honestly seems like it fits the theme of factorio really well, sounds like a good solution to gleba science spoilage without removing the spoilage/forcing research to the next in queue, and kind of intriguing to think about with the amount of infinite researches available.

Please, let the labs research other enqueued technologies if there are packs missing for the first one in the queue. Make it a priority queue instead of a waiting queue. For a game that's all about automation, forcing the user to micromanage the science queue seems really weird.

Does anyone know the status of this feature-request? Is is recognized or not, prioritized or not, nearing completion or not, etc. Any info is appreciated!

I must admit that the current mechanism drives me insane from the constant need for micromanagement. There is literally no way to smoothly and precisely automate this. Every single approach involves some kind of alerts to notify me of switching to/from tech involving Gleba science packs. It sucks the enjoyment of the end game out of me. I have only endless research items left, and while I appreciate the fact that different technologies require different science packs, I totally hate the combo of one of them spoiling and literally no way to fully automate the issue at hand.

Today it is not possible to read the content of the labs nor the current selected tech. If I had those, I could at least make the alerts smarter and not trigger on false positives more times than not.

Please address it, one way or another.

PS: I'd prefer the feature where the labs pick the first tech in the queue it actually has science packs for. As long as at least one lab can research it, the tech should be chosen. I'm fine with the remaining labs missing one or more science packs going idle(like today). It prompts a challenge on the user to properly distribute available science packs as evenly as possible.

We need more juicy uses for late game science besides repeatables. Disabling Gleba pack spoilage with a Promethian-tier research feels appropriate.

To an extent though this is a consistent problem regardless of spoilage. You have to rotate through the various planet researches or you'll get stuck with 50,000 Vulcanus packs and 0 Fulgara packs or something.

Since the research queue probably isn't really implemented to let each lab research something different, another option might be setting recipe to the lab via circuit. I'd be happy to automate the version which researches an agricultural science when I have it, and otherwise selects whatever other prod I'm working on. This would also be nice for my Aquilo/Fulgora researches, which cannot keep up with my labs, but I also don't want to have to stockpile 100k science bottles before kicking off the next level of rocket or processing unit prod. Letting the system automatically switch via a circuit control lets me as the user have fun writing that circuit, and still maximize factory efficiency.

So, any news about this?

I've recently started producing Gleba science and now realized this problem. This is an obvious oversight and should be fixed.

Holy-Fire wrote: Tue Dec 24, 2024 1:22 am So, any news about this?

I've recently started producing Gleba science and now realized this problem. This is an obvious oversight and should be fixed.

Don't know about any updates but people already took matters in their own hands

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Research_ ... Combinator
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/concurrent-research

It would help if science labs could 'read ingredients' to circuit yielding the ingredient of the current research - ie which packs are required, perhaps remaining amounts or even just a simple 1 if the pack is currently required. Then those who wish to apply some automation to the process could do so.

All production machines really should have at least read recipe and read content available - labs, spawners etc - ie make it a standard production circuit interface.

Feather wrote: Fri Dec 27, 2024 1:38 pm Don't know about any updates but people already took matters in their own hands

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Research_ ... Combinator
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/concurrent-research

Very nice! It's cool that things like this can be done with modding.

But I currently play vanilla and do care about Steam achievements. It's pretty lame that I'd have to give that up for what should be a standard feature.

Not wanting to lose Steam achievements just yet, I set up a circuit that sounds an alaram every 10 minutes, at which point I switch between a research that requires agricultural packs and one that doesn't.

And that's... surprisingly bearable. Maybe even a weird kind of fun. And I'm so used to it that it doesn't really distract me from what I'm doing.

I still think that this is stupid and should be fixed in vanilla one way or another.