Factorio Forums

I honestly quite like the idea of biters probing defenses and bots taking more time to build thing.

Both opinions stem from the same source really: Factorio takes a fair bit of inspiration from the tower defense and RTS genres, and I think it could be well served by pilfering even more. I had a fair amount of fun with biters in the new campaign when it first came out and I enjoyed the added challenge they brought. Adding more of that kind of challenge to freeplay sounds worthwhile.

RE: Items should have volume and mass

Honestly, what I'd like to see here is less changes to player inventory, (Which is game-y sure, but there's a lot to be said for an immediately available inventory even at the cost of verisimilitude.) and more to containers. I've often wondered how much it would change if train containers were the most efficient from of non-player storage, and could be on- and offloaded.

Admittedly, a lot of that is because I like the idea of bridge cranes and shipping container yards. While it can be said that all the parts of Factorio are simple and elegant, there's definitely part of me that would like to see more varied and interesting structures in the game, both in design constraints and in visual distinction.

posila in FFF wrote: I think if we changed our attitude towards default keybindings we could go nuts with adding new shortcuts and there would be little bit for everyone. I mean, how many people use hotkeys for connecting or disconnecting trains, and how many people would use a shortcut for toggling manual driving in trains.

I am 100% in favour of anything that gets more power-user hotkeys into the game. I loved it when you added the hotkeys for getting a new BP, DP and UP, and Toggle Personal Roboport (like you said, I've not yet used the Toggle Exoskeleton key.)

I would absolutely use a hotkey for toggle manual driving in trains (and installed a mod, Picker Vehicles, primarily for that feature). I use the G and V hotkeys for connect/disconnect trains quite often

I can think of quite a few more hotkeys that I would love to see added. Examples:

• Toggle Entity Tooltip on Side (so valuable to me I made a feature request suggestion specifically for it )
• Toggle Map Editor
• Deconstruction Planner:
  • Add/remove highlighted entity to filter on currently held Deconstruction Planner. If no DP is held, marks highlighted entity for deconstruction.
  • Toggle DP Entity Blacklist/Whitelist
  • Summon Trees/Rocks only DP
  • All of these are added by Picker Blueprinter mod and I love them - I use the first one in particular very regularly.
• Toggle Rail Signal Visualisation
• The ability to attach hotkeys to specific Debug Mode options, eg: show-tile-grid; show-active-state; show-logistic-robot-targets; show-logistic-robots-on-map; show-train-braking-distance
• Increase/Decrease Number of Active quickbars
• Toggle Minimap visibility
• Toggle Inventory auto-sort
• Get Circuit Wire (press once for red, twice for green) - added by Picker Extended mod.
• Select Weapon Slot 1, 2, 3 (rather than only being able to cycle).

Some are already available as mods, or could be added by mods, but I'm not sure if all could currently be made available with mods, for example Number of Active Quickbars.

As far as I am concerned, the more hotkeys the better! Hotkeys for EVERYTHING! Just as posila says, if they are default unbound then they won't affect anyone except those who go looking for them.

Only thing is maybe more hotkeys might require a small cleanup of the Controls UI. Like maybe a checkbox "Hide unbound", defauling to On, so power-user keys don't make the list very long for users who don't want them, but such that it only takes one quick click to show all for those who do want to bind them.

I've had a few thoughts about a lot of these for a lot of years now:

Electricity

I'd personally prefer if electricity had only a maximum amount it could transfer on a given energynet, say, 1MW or 10MW or whatever for the lowest tier, however you could have different 'tiers' of energynets, such as the small/medium power poles are one, the long distance power poles are another (probably a third somewhere), and they don't connect. Buildings would only connect to a single tier of energynet to draw electricity, so low level things would connect to small/medium poles, higher tier the larger poles, etc...

To connect the tiers you'd use transformers. This way you'd have, say, tier 2 poles branching through a base with little tier 1 poles via transformers on those to go out to the various branches. Tier 3 would be for running huge amounts of power, might even need to run multiple energynets from excessively large nuclear reactors.

Nothing like poles catching fire with too much electricity or so, just like when you don't have enough power to supply the machines then the machines slow down as normal. This would be cheap to calculate and add an interesting thing to deal with in the game, plus it would help keep the individual energynets small if that's useful in any way (easier to distribute and average the electricity to the entities perhaps?).

Water

Water could work the same way, low 'flowrate' pipes as tier 1, it's still instant transport, just only a small amount per tick, they can connect via pumps or valves or something to higher pressured larger pipes that have higher 'flowrates' and so forth, essentially working the same way as electricity above. Offshore Pumps really shouldn't be magical water-generating things, should take electricity or mechanical energy of some form.

Heat

This seems expensive to calculate, so wonder how this could be helped with that style as well...

Mechanical

Perhaps for a Factorio 2 or something, but a mechanical system, rotation or so, essentially transferred like the above styles, gears and all to buildings that need it. Electricity is not the most efficient form of storing energy, in real life there is often mechanical energy transferred around via axles/gears/etc... to various machines that just use it straight, no electricity involved or needed. I still find this odd that it's missing honestly. Even transferring steam pressure around is not uncommon in the single-building scale in real life.

Item Transport

I like that belts are low tier, but they are 'too' low and take no electricity/mechanical_power to run (like 'enough' mechanical energy should be able to turn a whole 'touching' set of belt for example). A lower tier could be little wheeled drones perhaps, slow, move along paths , etc... Should be fairly efficient to calculate with hardcoded path objects to move along.

A medium/high tier item transport to replace bots I'd think should pneumatic tubes, powered via a pressurized system, and with that constant energy drain they can move items (transporting essentially) inside the enclosed tube 'network' to filtered areas. Think of them like using the logistics chests, but connect pneumatic tubes to them instead, they request certain items that are fullfilled elsewhere on the network. Could of course have tiers and throughput of this as well so for high-load items it would not be able to sustain the throughput needed as well. Perhaps make it so you have to load up canisters with a few dozens stacks before loading 'that' into the network and use tags for matching where things should go. Pressurization could only work on smaller scales so no long distance. Should be much cheaper to calculate than lines of belts and so forth (would be interesting if could run into buildings via a filter or so as well?)

Inserters I don't think should 'chase' items, rather they should just move back to the belt and 'wait' for an item to cross them on either path, then pick that up. That gets rid of the chasing, simplifies the code a lot, doesn't "transport" an item that has already passed it into it, etc... Might be useful to add an end-belt though that stops halfway down the tile perhaps, though meh on that, can just run the belt 'into' the inserter if its at the end then, the inserter could grab from that end part then instead of the middle.

Bots I still think should exist as they are, useful for the extreme high throughput needed for some setups that pneumatic tubes don't have the throughput for.

Enemies

I like that clearing the pollution cloud makes you safe for a bit, though I definitely think that biters should expand nests a *LOT* faster when there is a lot of them. I currently play with biter expansion set at near the minimum. Rampant also works very well for testing where a base is weak. It looks like it works by having the bugs go from chunk to chunk, testing what's safe, and if a chunk is safe they run along it fast, probing around my walls until they find a weak spot where they die the slowest, always probing and updating. I really like that mod a lot.

Miners

Yeah Miners shouldn't output to a belt, should just hold an inventory until full, inserters should pull out.

Although I do really like the thoughts of belts going into/out-of buildings, inserters are a lot more flexible though.

Boilers

Boilers I like having a 'pass-through' for the water, unsure how it could be made more explicit. Honestly I liked the old style ones a bit more, could heat up a whole line of water to pass into a whole line of engines, it was very logical. Though if water could still turn into steam when it reaches 100C and pass through then that would be very nice. Engines taking in water should eat the water but make a pittance for energy, barely scaled with the temp. The current style of 2 engines per boiler off to the side is pleasing to look at it, but the old way made more 'sense'.

Items & Construction

Should definitely have mass and size. Carrying an entire base in my inventory just seems so so very wrong.

Even producing a building, say an Assembler, seems odd, rather you should put down a kind of 'blueprint' for a building somewhere, then fill it up with the parts it needs, once filled up then 'build' it akin to how repairing works (and all of this could be done by construction bots) until it is complete. Graphically the building could be an empty marked off area for when first placed, has some generic 'things' inside that area when filling it up but not full, and a full area when filled (3 states), then 'building' it could go through a few graphical states as well until the building is completed.

As a Mod for now someone could even make it so when someone/something places a building then it starts at 1hp and disabled, and has to be repaired back up to full health before it becomes enabled and works. On the whole Total Annihilation vein of things, one of the most popular mods (Balanced Annihilation, among others) there is a building/repairing tower that can help construct with the builders in a large radius, they were very useful especially as they could help buildings construct other things, like vehicles.

On the things of vehicles, they could be just like building a building (except on the 'pad' next to a building perhaps, initiated by the building itself) that then has to be filled with things (either by the building's inventory like a recipe, or by manually placing things in it), then constructed, of which such construction turrets could help with as well.

Hotkeys

I quite like the whole variety of hotkeys you can place, though I don't think many should have hotkeys set by default. The hotkey for a 'tool' should also show on its popup, and should also be settable on it as well without needing to open the hotkey screen.

Controversial opinion 1: Building is a pain till bots

What I expect when I make a small blueprint would be to be able to use it to build super quickly.
Instead, you have to go to the point where you want to build something, lay it down, and continue. If you want to do a simple furnace belt layout, this quickly becomes incredibly repetitive, especially because you have layouts like:

b (belt)
i (inserter)
ff furnace
ff
il (inserter for ore, long inserter for coal)
oo (ore)
cc (coal)

And then add some electrical lines.

It's super fast to lay the belts, and the furnaces. It can be fast to lay down the lines, unless you want 100% tile coverage. But laying down the inserters require precise, multiple and repetitive clicks. That's just boring.

You've got to do it like that, all till you get a late game technology with bots that are expensive to build.

Some mods offer solutions:
- Have it that hovering above a ghost in reach fill it with the building from your inventory. I do not see why this can't be default.
- Give you at the start some bots and a weak reactor.
- Advance you in tech age

Controversial opinion 2: technology should start with electricy (boilers and electric miners)

When you start a game in Factorio, you've got to collect enough resources to be able to kickstart your economy into the coal age, then switch from the coal age to the thermic age (boilers fueled by coal or wood, generating electricity). Some do that quicker than others. But is there really a point from starting with coal furnaces and coal inserters ? If the goal is to give us a "you start from nothing and at the end you launch a rocket" kind of vibe, the same vibe would be still achieved by starting with the thermic age. There is after all still an enormous gap between your first boilers and your first rocket.

Some mods offer solutions:
- Either gives you enough electricity items to quickly skip the coal age
- Or advance you in electricity to whatever level you want.

Please don't make miners require an inserter to unload. I just had to re-do all of my rocket fuel setups by adding light fuel piped to the assemblers, having to go to all of my mining sites and re map them would not be enjoyable. Also, it would make it hard to tightly pack in the miners on some of the smaller ore plots, what's the solution for that? Make the ore more dense everywhere so we can maintain the same output from the mining sites?

I like the adventure mode idea. My favorite scenario in the old introductory campaign was the one where you arrive with your car at the wrecked base and have to figure out how it worked and try to get it running again by replacing inserters, belts, tracks, smelters, etc.

OMG this is gonna be a long thread ^^
my five cents:
Power-user hotkeys posila:
I have used all those hotkeys you mentioned. Especially the enable exos one i use with a mod from at least 0.15. Late game with a lot of legs it gets difficult to position the character correctly. Now i use Progressive Running. cough...maybe as vanilla option? pretty please? cough...
Ah and miners are fine as they are IMHO

Boilers shouldn't have a water output

During our in-house testing, one of the things we did was invite people who had never played the game before into the office to try the new introduction campaign, while we observed them. One stumbling block that almost every person hit, was connecting their steam engine to the water output of their boiler, instead of the steam output. I understand that the current setup allows for some interesting layouts, but IMO it is not worth the usability cost.

How about initially having just 1 water input on the boiler.
Then have an upgrade to add the water output, and lock it behind logistic science packs.
That eases the issue for new players. They won't have so much trouble connecting their first boiler with only 1 water input (we hope).
This also means that all the cool Steam blueprints we have now will still work once the upgrade is researched.

To me it seems like this would solve both issues... what do you guys think?

-mountains seem nice. Caves would be unnecessary in vanilla, IMHO.
- line of sight mechanics seem nice. Prefer it for map exploration rather than fog of war, but if there was this mechanic for fog of war I would build more radar...
- Bridges please! Omg train Bridges would be the best. I hate that I have to landfill for a bridge over water. Belt Bridges would be neat, too.
- Rivers would be a neat feature as well.
- miners direct to belt is important only in that it allows the miner to mine under the belt. If the mine area is enlarged then requiring an inserter is fine. Having to rebuild the entire mining site to get all the minerals would make it less fun. Constantly rebuilding mining sites is already a bit of a bore at end game.
- blueprint library is very important for replay value. I don't think it's terrible to make importing other people's blueprints harder, but you should be able to easily manage your own blueprints between games. You could make blueprint importing an unlockable feature after the first playthrough. Generally I only import blueprints for very specific cases. (Train intersections and optimized power plants)
- having said that, I import optimized power plants only because it's been historically very difficult to calculate ratios, what with converting joules, Watts, calculating time, pipe flow, etc. I believe FFF changes from a few weeks ago are great to make this a little more straightforward, thus that I would be less inclined to import pre-built power stations.
-I've also imported blueprints to understand the circuit network. This could be corrected with a circuit network tutorial.
- honestly I think bots just need to have a queue at pickup and drop off and an insertion time. Make the insertion time similar to fast inserters (.5 seconds) and make them drop parts in arrival order. No location mapping needed. This would break bot factories, but keep the other benefits of bots for late game enjoyment (planning factories without all the rote tasks of placing thousands of assemblers, miners, and inserters by hand.
-instant drop off at the player maybe should be maintained to avoid bottlenecking when running around building stuff. It would suck to just have to stand still for a minute waiting for bots to drop stuff at the player.
- biters. I think they could be smarter and this might add to the game.
- auto aim should stay. This isn't a fighting game, and I second the notion that having to aim doesn't offer much. You still can change it to one button though, just aim at whatever the cursor if hovering over, and if there's no object, auto aim at the nearest biter.
- I literally never use the rolling stock hotkey on purpose. I have ~400 of hours of play time, so experienced, maybe not "power" user. I support default null assignment.
- the fact that you can carry around a train in your backpack is fun and funny. I like it. I just say I have a Magic bag of holding and call it a day. Just change the quantity to 1 per square if you want to even it out a little bit. I think these quantities per slot are wrong anyways. At least in .16 (finishing up a map before moving on to .17, but I think it's silly that some of the massive objects aren't limited to lower numbers per slot. I was surprised the nuclear reactor wasn't limited to 5, and actually shut down my auto reactor build station because it was over building. I guess I could have circuit networked it, but I just picked up the inserter since I'm not building new power plants very often.

You prolly should put a survey, with questions and typical answers.

Inserters should not chase items
Miners shouldn't output directly to belts
Leave them as is.
I love the idea that miners can output to wagons directly, and that gives me a goal to chase!

Boilers shouldn't have a water output
Then how will you connect them one to another?

Pipes should work like electricity
That will be, maybe, cool, but too overpowerfull, and less fun.
We want just pipes with a new fluid physics, or pipes with better throughput.

Robots should take up space and time
Too complicated, and likely kills bot's megabase.

Items should have volume and mass
In typical RPG it's often too annoying. Pick one of two please - ether volume or mass.

Power-user hotkeys
Yes, you can cut that list, I use mouse only, shift, ctrl, alt, R, and enter for trains. I have no idea about other shortcuts existence, and a little annoyed when I press them by mistake.

Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe
Too easy. If you destroyed something accidentally ether build new, or load autosave.

Bitters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses

I wholeheartedly agree with this, and it's the most important issue to me personally of those listed in the FFF.

Right now, the bitters are incredibly weak and foolish! When a sufficiently large group of them arrives at the wall, they suddenly all stop and go into a sort of frenzy like a mosh pit at a rock concert. A few of the moshers occasionally trickle out of the fray and die alone and foolishly to a row of laser turrets.
If they just all charged at the same time, the way you'd expect, they would be way more challenging. I crave this. :>

I also definitely think bitters should continue to become deadlier as ultra late game progresses. Once you can survive Behemoths, that's basically the last challenge you'll face. Bitters after 100 hours of play are usually not that different after 500 hours of play.

to quote: 'oh boy, where do I start'

Inserters should not chase items

[...]

So we decided this wont be done.

And it is good it won't be done. Seriously.

Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature

The blueprint library has always been a controversial topic. [...] [it] could easily make a 100-hour game into an 10-hour game.

So here we are again, making a feature, then stripping it from the agme, because it's deemed to powerfull. So why add it in the first place? The blueprints have been around for some while and while I agree with you that thet simple plopdown of a BP is to easy of an task, the libary of my own creations shouldnt be affected by this. if I created the BP, i want to use it in my play throughs. coming up with the thinsg again and again reduces the replayabillity of the game greatly. I'm not tinkering away for hours and can reap the fruit of my work because some obscure 'you could share it with x people' bevents me from having them in my local copy.

the BPL should remain as it is - maybe add a few options (like mirroring ) and, imho, it would make an even more versatile tool in the game.
there will always be some dofus that dont want to play the game, but you try to make the game easier for them anyways. so why are you now going the opposide direction?

Weapons shouldn't lock on

Weapon lock on and the distinction between shooting with spacebar and C is a constant source of confusion for new players.

Factorio is neighter an top down shoot nor an FPS. One Button combat sounds better than the switch between C ans Spacebar but heck, no. I'd rather have my auto aim then lose that again for the sake of 'new players', wich you could easily replace with: players who cant and wont play the game as it was originally intented because theys want streamlined, no brainer games that you can pick from the shelves like bread.

Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses

This runs opposite to what "most new players" [citation needed] would expect. For example, I always started off by walling and turreting my entire base, presuming that if the biters noticed a part of my perimeter that was uncovered, they would just go through there.

[...] I think you should have to defend your railway lines, power poles, etc.

I too wall off my entire base, as that is the only solution that should work. so I agree that they should prove the defense grid. where i highly disagree is the 'new players' part. Even older players expect them to do that and we even have mods for better enemy AI.

railroads are not percived as man-made, even power poles are just trees - some studies proved that animales are more concerned with wall or houses than a parthway where one roaring long serpent (and thus deadly) roams.

Alternatively, the whole pollution cloud mechanic could be removed, and replaced with a worldwide pollution count.

That is not how polution works and i would refrain from even thinking about changing this. biter expansion is already an option, so why are you bring up... oh I see, we will get the alternative because, why not.

Miners shouldn't output directly to belts

Disagree. In our world miners do exaclty this: they scoop onto a conveyerbelt. don't believe me? Bagger 288 or longwall mining, both 'automated' ways of mining put thier mined up materials on a belt.

Boilers shouldn't have a water output

If players struggle this early with the game, sorry to say, but then they clearly are from a generation of 'it just has to work'-kids. Who says that the Boiler has no passthrough pipe, that doesn't even toches the heating chamber? smh

Pipes should work like electricity

Now we are going into reverse. Electricity works like water. it is fast, yes,but not instant. in our 3-phase (european) Network we have 50 Hz, with a phaseshift of 120° per phase, roughly giving one 'pulse' of electicity every 5ms. Every 'Wave' pushes to about 380V and decreales to -380V wich leads to a root mean square of 230V ( meassuring between phase and neutral.) or 400V if you meassure between two phases

to apply this to a waterpipe system, the 'pump' pushes every 5ms new fluid into it and the little pressure wave migrates through the system. and it should be that same way in factorio. intant delivery is a simple, yes, but it just shows lazyness.

Adventure mode

uh, i'd love to build myself tunnels and bridges to get my rail lines up and down these mountains - would even be such a gread addition to have trains mitigate terain high differencies with cliffs... that would add another level to the oterhwise pretty useless feature of cliffs (other than being an anoyance)

Robots should take up space and time

Space yes, time... not so much.
Also: Belt vs. Bot War, 3rd times the charm.

Power-user hotkeys

Let me define them myself, thank you. I absolutly hate it when there are hotkeys that are not mentioned anywhere. I rather asign them in the game myself when the exoskelleton technology comes around than suddenly have a hotkey that works, because bazinga.

Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe

I can just agree with giving the items back. Stuff just dont magically vanishes.

[...] and maybe we will change our mind based on the feedback.

FFF wrote: with the release of WoW Classic, it might get slowed down a bit.

I took this to mean that the release might be slowed by devs playing WoW Classic? But that made me think: is perhaps the release of WoW Classic a reason in itself to delay 0.17 stable a little longer?

WoW Classic launches on Aug 27, Tuesday. There's been a lot of hype and press coverage, and talk of "long queues for popular realms", so I assume it's going to be very popular. Might it therefore be a good idea to delay 0.17 until a week or two after, even if it's ready before that? Until WoW Classic is no longer brand new and dominating gaming headlines?

I'm just thinking that it would be a shame if the full launch of the biggest ever Factorio update got obscured in the community's consciousness because it came the same week as a hugely popular AAA release. And in the press, as well; I don't know if Factorio normally gets any press articles related to the release of a new stable (I wasn't yet a player when 0.16 went stable), but I would hope there will be some. The site I read most often is Rock Paper Shotgun, and I see they didn't announce the launch of 0.17.0, so I really hope they will announce it coming to stable; they do announce significant updates to other EA games from time to time (eg Satisfactory.)

It just seems to me that given 0.17 has taken so long and involved so much hard work, another week or two wouldn't matter - and if a delay could improve the chances of a new record for simultaneous player count, and/or result in more press coverage, it might be worth it?

Perhaps I'm overstating the significance of the stable release, given that you estimated last week that 2/3 of players are already on it. But it feels to me like it should be a big milestone, deserving of not being buried under an unrelated release.

My vote (are we counting?)

Inserters should not chase items - Maybe, really depends on the implementation
Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature - No
Weapons shouldn't lock on - No
Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses - Yes
Clearing bases should not leave you safe - No
Miners shouldn't output directly to belts - No
Boilers shouldn't have a water output - Depends on the alternative design
Pipes should work like electricity - Yes
Adventure mode - Yes, sounds fun
Robots should take up space and time - No
Items should have volume and mass - Yes
Power-user hotkeys - Yes
Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe - Yes

fff wrote: Robots should take up space and time TOGoS

Bots taking up space (so that they have to queue up to pick up and drop off items) ...would need to spread out the pickup and load boxes to give the many robots space to work.

I like that. Factorio magic is, it behave as it would realy work. So any proposal to speed up things by replace float system by a teleport fluid system is heresy. For same reason, I like any propsal which makes things behave closer to real. (or at least somewhat interesting, playful or phyisical based) Queue of robots by a pickup chest yes please. There is queue for recharge already so go for it.

Lets Add a time for landing/take-off to fine tune max thruthput of robots.

fff wrote: - Weapons shouldn't lock on

I am using a custom key mapping. Both shoot keys map the Space key.
If mouse over something it aims, if not it shoot that direction. Press and hold space then go for it, 10 of 10 dead bitters can reccomend.

fff wrote: Power-user hotkeys posila

I think if we changed our attitude towards default keybindings we could go nuts with adding new shortcuts and there would be little bit for everyone. I mean, how many people use hotkeys for connecting or disconnecting trains,

I do. It would be great to allow automate couple/de-coupling. So train can come to station. Loco decouple, then move/shunt to another track, couple another set of wagons then depart. Make it please, you would be the first game in the history which made it work.

fff wrote: and how many people would use a shortcut for toggling manual driving in trains.

a LOT. Its sooo anoying to make it in UI.




The most controversial opinion I miss:
Give the original oil back!

Something else about bots to add to my prior reply, it was suggested to me that a roboport should only control a limited amount of bots, perhaps in a limited area (only that roboport), which I quite like the idea of to keep their 'limited range throughput' part and lower their overall power.

No, you don't want items to have mass or volume!
Build a production line for artillery shells (only item wich already has mass/volume in vanilla), let it fill the output belt and then move the entire thing one tile to the right without bots.
That is how the game would feel with items having mass/volume.

In a previous version of the game it would just give back everything it had consumed when the recipe started. However, because of a possible incredibly tiny exploit related to productivity modules and being able to get an extra % of items back if you time it correctly this was removed (bug report).

...and I thought somewhere between Bob's and Angel's a mod screwed over my game...

You should really consider what you said about default shortcuts and stuff. I manually toggle my trains constantly. Give everyone a choice and all the functionality you awesome Factorians can muster!

Inserters should not chase items - approve
Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature - indifferent
Combat/Biters - approve all 3
Miners shouldn't output directly to belts - strongly disagree
Boilers shouldn't have a water output - disagree
Pipes should work like electricity - 100% approve
Adventure mode - love to try this new gameplay mode
Robots should take up space and time, Items should have volume and mass - just NO
Power-user hotkeys - indifferent
Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe - approve.

Boilers shouldn't have a water output
...
One stumbling block that almost every person hit, was connecting their steam engine to the water output of their boiler, instead of the steam output

This is again part of a worrying tendency to remove every single one of those stumbling blocks for new people. It's one thing to help people to figure things out. It's another to simplify the whole game for the sake of easy accessibility. Why is there such a resistance to complexity? Separating water and steam was a great thing and shouldn't be hard to figure out. I'm tempted to compare Factorio to a certain other game again that has production and power setups that are much, much more complicated and doesn't hold your hand.

How about just activating Alt-view by default? It seems a lot of new people have that off. There was another thread earlier where someone showed an assembly machine line, but you couldn't tell what is what. With Alt-view you immediately see that there is steam and water and what goes where.

FutureSpec wrote: Fri Aug 23, 2019 3:03 pm Clearing bases should not leave you safe:
Agree completely; naively I had thought they would re-expand with enough pollution; TIL

They do expand again if you clear an area. The default expansion rate is also pretty aggressive with a minimum of four minutes. Clearing your pollution cloud just prevents direct attacks.

I fully agree with more interesting and intelligent biters though. It's boring how they always go from their base to you in a straight line. Biters are interesting enough at the beginning, but their dumbness makes them more of an annoyance to your progress than a really engaging gameplay element. Changing that wouldn't turn Factorio into more of a combat game. Just make the existing combat more engaging. There would still be a limit to their tricks.