SerhiiS wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2026 8:10 am
mmmPI wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2026 5:48 am
have you thought of molten platic instead of solid plastic in the LDS casting receipe ? Cuz to me it doesn't appear that you need to rewrite the whole engine just to change the ingredient of the one receipe.
This is clearly a question for the developers, not me. You should also reread the FFF statement.
No it is a question for you, you wrote that statement :
SerhiiS wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2026 1:29 pm
This may not be obvious to some. But as a programmer with 15 years of experience, it's clear to me that the "LDS shuffle" hasn't been removed from the game only because the developers have no idea how to remove it without completely rewriting the game engine to ban a specific recipe so that legendary plastic can't be used.
The obvious here is that YOU have no idea how to fix it . Now requiring molten plastic in the LDS casting receipe is one of several solutions that the devs are aware of, another one would be to increase the amount of plastic required in the foundry receipe for LDS as recycling is based on the "solid receipe", you'd be "loosing plastic" even with max productivity. That is a less harsh take on the problem depending on the ratio. There are several methods that exists that definitly do not need any engine rewrite.
As you correctly pointed out in the FFF it doesn't say "we have no idea how to fix it" instead that it's a decision they took to leave them in there.
SerhiiS wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2026 1:29 pm
They wanted to remove this recipe, but something kept it.
I think the previous claim of it being obvious that it require an engine rewrite was wrong but this more moderate version is still impervious to what is literally written in the FFF that devs decided to keep it !!
Now if you want to speculate on what is actually difficult and requires working on the engine and not just changing prototypes, that's the fluid voider, the fluid simulation IS a very hard problem in general, and here the specifics are that fluid are free flowing , unless you use pumps, you can't just prevent the foundry receipe to be changed if there is fluid inside, because you couldn't prevent fluid from entering in, if you try with a pump, then the pump when stopped may contain a wrong fluid that moves the problem around and would make any system much more complicated than what would be balanced for the game.
Now to get back on the actual topic of the space casino you said what appears to me contradicting statement :
SerhiiS wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2026 7:43 am
The "space casino" doesn't affect the average player in any way. It's neither good nor bad. Because the average player hasn't completed Space Age. Check your Steam achievements and see how many players have earned the "Second star to the right and straight on till morning" achievement and how many have earned the "My modules are legendary" achievement.
SerhiiS wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2026 8:10 am
After all, judging by the Steam achievements and the features the developers have planned, they've focused on their core audience—newcomers.
To me it's contradicting because you appear to say at the same time that the balance was done for the newcomer, and there i understand the removal of the space casino. But you just said that it didn't affect average player in any way. So are you saying it only affect newcomers and not average player ? That seem illogical to me.
What seems more logical is that the balance was done for "every player" not necessarily new comers, even though they are many , but also veterans, that would explain why they would remove a "cheesy" too rewarding methods, that at most only 2% of players have experienced. It affects both new players that wonder about "what is the late game of this factorio game i may be buying", if they see an "unbalanced game" where veterans uses exploit it's not the best i feel. ( here i feel it's not perfect because now fluid voider is made more visible as it's one of the "tricks" that unless you fiddle with circuits you don't discover for youself. Like space casino.)
Here i agree new-comers, like playtesters are never going to reach such understanding of the game , that requires spreadsheets, or something called "perspective" instead of "perception", where the latter is one's subjective experience, whereas the first one "perspective" requires to put one-self in the shoes of others, to go beyond what is a personnal experience, but understand the broader picture. When considering a "perspective" it tries to encompass from "newcomers that create multiplayer games entitled "plz help"" to various achievers in speedruns, entertainment, megabase, optimisation, aesthetic, difficulty, and what nots, to your regular average players, and those that have too much time on their life and those that preprare for 15 hours before playing 1 hour, or those that have not much time for video games.
Considering a broader perspective, what every different playstyle usually do, i believe the space casino added some value to the game more than the opposite, even if it wasn't originally in the devs intent. I'm thinking the fluid voider on the other hand, is the worst, and the LDS shuffle sits in the middle. LDS shuffle require players more "smart" than fluid voider, and space casino was the more interesting thing to build. That's "my" perspective be it for newcomers to give them like a carrot for quality, an horizon, something they want to build , they know it's hard but it's a jack of all trade for quality, or for veterans, that can spend countless hours optimizing that, instead of mostly promethium ships. In my mind the problem was the reward of the puzzle, and the decision was to remove the puzzle, when the puzzle was interesting, and fun, i would have prefered only the reward to be less severely removed, in a way that doesn't leaves LDS shuffle and fluid voiders so much reprentative of the game "meta".
meganothing wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2026 1:55 pm
It would not have ruined my experience anyway, but I might have gotten less fun out of experimenting with the quality mechanisms if I for example had heard the ultimate bestest way to get quality stuff is doing it with asteroids on a space ship. Instead I now made lots of different quality production setups, some horribly inefficient, distributed all over the planets.
Imagine you go in a restaurant with spicy food. And you never tried any of the dishes, you only heard the name of some and read the receipe of couple others. I understand you can have an opinion , according to you , what would be the spiciest food out there, but it would be quite limited to judge what is the actual spicyness of the food. It would be wiser to take advice on people who actually know the dishes. Not necessarily to tell you if they find the dish spicy as it wouldn't translate for your own taste, but to tell you which one is spicier than another for sure they would have a more reasonnable "opinion".
Now, the spiciest dish is removed from the restaurant menu, but you never ordered it yourself, i don't buy the argument that it made your eating of the other dishes a more enjoyable experience. x) I get it if the devs, i mean, the chefs don't want to poison people with too spicy food and take responsability for burnt players , brain tongue computers or whatever, but then serve it with milk, in small portion and with a disclaimer, keep the recipe, keep the space casino, but make it eatable , or edible , the best one.
You prefer the medley of hors d'oeuvres than the spicy food ? all good this is unchanged !!! x)
meganothing wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2026 1:55 pm
But we also have listed a very possible reason why fluid voider escaped the axe. And that reason can't apply to casino. So I don't think there is any mystery at all, the probable answer to your question seems rather obvious.
The fluid voider yes, this one unlike the LDS shuffle it sounds a bit tricky engine side. But that's like saying there is still a dish i'm not ordering on the menu that i'd pefer removed. That's not convincing me it was a good idea to remove the first one. Nor wether the removal or a change in the yield would have imo served more players.
I feel going forward there may be changes to those particular points, maybe intentionnaly , maybe around an unrelated debugging when making a choice for how something resolve, it opens up opportunities, who knows... ^^ I'm not convinced by the alternatives speculatives hypothesis on why devs did this, they said in FFF that's fine , but now that the changed is made, and players starts to get more familiar with it, maybe more players will miss the space casino when doing LDS shuffle, a no byproduct stuff for iron and a couple fluid voider, they will regret having this opportunity to make some platform play with asteroids and quality at the same time.
Maybe it wouldn't be something you "miss" but players would suggest in the future, "please make a way to make quality from asteroid on space platform", and other player will explain "there was a space casino but it was removed" . x)