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

[Necronium]

The Space Casino nerf is extremely disappointing. It was one of the few places where you could apply a creative solution to quality.

We don't want to be fun killers, but it just makes any other approach to quality obsolete.

Yes, because there is one [0] other approach to quality. Is the intended gameplay loop for quality really copying the same old recycling blueprint over and over again with a few tweaks? Awful.

[0] There's the LDS/Blue Circuit loop, but realistically you already need to have high quality buildings before you can make use of it.

There are actually two other approaches to quality - trickle and filter from regular production lines and then the dedicated upcycling. One is extremely boring and the other does not scale well at all. Yes, the space casino was OP, but the core reason why so many people use it is because the whole quality feels half baked and at least the space casino allows you to skip the boring "grind".

I wish they would revisit the quality as a whole, for regular play through the trickle method is interesting challenge, but when you get to mid/late game or megabases you really want to be able to scale and currently the only method is copy-paste upcycling loops or making the casino. Mod allowing the casinos to continue will be my first download after the 2.1 patch.

People use space casino cause exactly was boring solution to logistic problem and it is easy to setup and bypass biggest points of quality. People want easy rewards without putting any work to getting them.

Factorio is easy to mod so they can bring it back with mods but it always baffled my. If you use sapce casino why not just mod in everything legendary.

[coffee-factorio]

@Hurkyl: Asteroid productivity doesn't buff the reprocessing, but the crushing, yes. The central point for this is the reprocessing recipe because you lose only a much smaller part of the asteroid in comparison to recyclers.

That doesn't math though. Yes you only lose 20% rather than 75%, but you lose it every step, and only get two quality modules per step. It's been a while since I calculated it out, but IIRC (with legendary tier 3 modules) the rate of return was comparable to craft-recycle loops with 4 module slots, better than having 0% productivity, but worse than having 50% productivity. And that's before counting the loss due to having to reprocess asteroids of the wrong type.

Every reprocessed to legendary asteroid gives more legendary ores with higher amount of productivity, but the productivity is only from the crushing recipe.
You also get 20% of the asteroids back from the (basic) crushing recipe - but with max productivity you get four times the amount back, which means you five times the amount of ore that you would have got from without productivity.

It's 16 times, isn't it? Without productivity, you consume 0.8 asteroids (on average) for one batch of ore, and with 300% productivity you consume 0.2 asteroids for 4 batches of ore.

This is, incidentally, the step I think there is a balance problem on, similar to (pre-productivity research) LDS: your loop spits out endless quantities of ore in addition to the quality loop.

EDIT: I always understood the problem with quality in reprocessing was about the fact you make base materials, which lets you trivialize the logistics by doing all of your upcycling in one central loop. But with the FFF talking about productivity, it doesn't sound like that's the aspect they care about. And with talk about productivity affecting reprocessing, I'm just left with being confused about what they actually plan to implement and why.

I noticed that too. It's in a context where I can get good enough sooner. Where it bothers me is that I still have simple asteroid reprocessing available as a recycler with a 400% bonus and a 1 in 5 chance of returning an asteroid. That loophole creates a very powerful recycler on an object which can then be rerolled into the desired material. And the 400% bonus applies to any other materials I work with.

I'm not the only one that noticed this, Abucmcnasty definitely knows it too. He's using it to make 600% space science.

In comparison to a big mining drill, there's a any% chance of a bonus that caps out at "whatever I can pull out of a rocket silo" in theory. In practice there's not a 1/5 chance of, what is essentially a package of ores getting upgraded as I run the drill. And that's as true for the drill as for methods like chaining together recycling on Gleba or Fulgora.

The only reason to not use this recycler is overburden of ores, but that can be solved in a couple of ways because of how fast an asteroid recycles.

[erkki772]

"visualize pipeline". This is must have to spaghetti pipes. My Pyanodon base is screaming with different fluids running all around base. Very nice QOL work.

[Biometrix]

Thank you for these changes, especially the Quality nerfs, the flipping inserter output lane, and the minor fix to inserters inserting on input side of Splitters. Always found that annoying. Great work, devs!

[canbg]

Now that space casino is gone I think we might consider quality seeds and quality bacteria for mass quality production and it would give more end game purpose to gleba

[FutureSpec]

Great changes!

I'm hoping for visible planets in space... I want to run vanilla/mod-less and Visible Planets in Space is the only mod I feel compelled to have to install

[xcape]

Also, Diagonal ramps for elevated rails when???

Probably never, IIRC they had scrapped the idea because the locomotives and wagons would then need another hundred renders for each different angle they could be in. Tho it might have been something else similar, but the same logic applies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaOjgIA66fs

Technology is exist at lest in demo-mode (video of D.O.R.F RTS currently in development)

DORF uses a different and a more complex solution to the rendering, parallax mapping and breaking one entity into multiple different sprites. And from what I can see, the sprite count is much lower at any time due to zoom constraints. I believe it's achievable in DORF due the simplicity of the game and the world itself.

Factorio needs to be a lot more resourceful due how complex and detailed the game already is, I don't think it can afford this solution.

[Leex2k]

Holy... last week's FF was already an answer to so many wants. And this week it just keeps going
Inserter output lanes. Always placed at splitter input side. 45° flamethrowers. Trains! Pipe throughput fix. All GREAT!
And of course, the art updates are amazing as always. I wish they weren't pictured though, I really enjoy how those things can be such a positive surprise when discovered in the moment.

Also good decision on the no quality asteroid reprocessing. It completely diminished impact and point of any other rarity than legendary...

But the most interesting change to me at the moment is actually the "hidden" ability to select output circuit.
Any chance that there are more QOL coming to circuit logic?
Last week announced that space platforms would be able to both have 'Set Requests' and 'Read Contents'. Wouldn't this be possible to add to requester/buffer chests as well? I think it is also already a feature with 'Set Recipe' machines not counting their own contents.
I thought of something similar with 'Set Filter' inserters.
Would it be possible to add the circuit selection feature here as well? So basically you could have an inserter that reads its contents without it affecting its filter logic. Something like:

InserterFilterCircuit.jpg (21.45 KiB) Viewed 532 times

I know something like that is already possible by making sure that all contents in the inserter's circuit are in the negatives (except those that should be added to filter), but I feel that this too often turns very... inelegant.

In any case, I'm super amazed so far with how much every announced improvement have aligned with my own wanted Qol features! I'm going to have to revise so many blueprints

[CHAOSGamerBC]

On the topic of Quality Trains:

Can train stops please have a circuit field for reading the filled percentage of wagon capacity? Often I've seen train outposts with circuit conditions for whether the train stop is enabled, and they are based on item count and wagon capacity. Now that capacity can increase with quality, it would be useful to avoid updating train stop logic when a train's capacity changes and instead define the logic in terms of percentages.

I suggest percentage be described per item slot in the inventory, not just number of slots. So an inventory with 10 slots would not be 100% full if any of those slots had fewer than the maximum stack size of the item in the slot.

Fluids are easier of course because a fluid wagon has a single "slot". But, percentage-based logic can be useful here too for those situations where the wagon is filling at a slow rate and you don't want the train to wait for those last few pressure-based drops to fill the wagon.

Thanks Wube for making my favorite game!

[CHAOSGamerBC]

Does anyone noticed the selection in the last image whether to output signal to red or green cable? I like it much!

Yes! I have been hoping for this forever! I really hope they make it per circuit field and not per-entity, but still amazing!

[ESUESU]

Hello. This is my first post on the forum. I'd like to provide feedback on my experience with version 2.0.

Quality
Quality is an element that allows for long-term gameplay as end-game content, but it's not very necessary for normal gameplay.
Firstly, there aren't any finished products where you'd want to specifically raise the quality. In the small factories you build to complete the game, I found the rocket launcher to be clearly useful, but I didn't feel the need for anything else. Whether it's machines or chests, it's easier to place many of them than to raise the quality. Since quantity covers the difference, there's no need to worry about quality. Even if you're placing them in a spaceship, increasing one machine to two isn't a big problem. The resource saving of the large excavator was a motivation to care about quality, but the high difficulty of crafting it meant I used normal quality.
Also, high-quality recipes can only accept high-quality materials, making management difficult. It's common to have a shortage of normal blue chips while having an excess of uncommon blue chips. Carelessly raising the quality of intermediate products can result in them becoming useless if you can't produce the necessary materials to combine them with.

Fluids
I disagree with the fluid distance limit added in version 2.0.
I believe the intention was to make tank cars stronger in exchange for making long-distance pipes inconvenient, but extending pipes is still overwhelmingly more convenient. Compared to version 1.1, it just feels like an added hassle, requiring more effort to place pumps and utility poles.
While many different fluids are handled in mods, I think few creators have a clear design philosophy for this fluid system. There are mods that remove fluid limitations, but it would be convenient if it could be officially adjusted.

[LizardOfOz]

Can train stops please have a circuit field for reading the filled percentage of wagon capacity?

While we're at it, would be great to have a filled percentage read for chests in general.

[CHAOSGamerBC]

Would it be possible to add the circuit selection feature here as well? So basically you could have an inserter that reads its contents without it affecting its filter logic. Something like:
InserterFilterCircuit.jpg

Yes, please! I am begging for this for those more complicated circuit builds. The tick delays introduced by having to add multiple comparators from separate machines could be nullified by each circuit signal from a machine having a check box for each channel.

On a similar note, I've always wished we could add more channels (colored wires) through mods. Obviously there is a graphical hurdle there for showing the wires in world. But more importantly, there is also the GUI hurdle of showing many more selections than just "R" and "G" if there are more options.

Also, also. As a final note, red and green is the worst combination for colorblind people

[nafira]

Flipping buildings !!! A dream comes true !
I'm back in the game waiting for the official update. I'm taking care of my save and main issue is quality on Fulgora. Everything works fine except this...

You need Nauvis place to properly craft things, it's quite a nightmare.

[coffee-factorio]

I'm really happy about the quality trains one.
Because it's legitimately frustrating to have to say "well, you need a 64 car train to make this work". Dividing that by 5 makes it a lot more easy for a new player get into that system in Space Age. What I'm seeing is a 10 car train that can hit input scales I'd have for it on ores. The current system where you make a torpedo car of fluids that was relatively large and then have a relatively small calcite train felt like it missed the mark. Because worst case scenario I always could just make an extra station, place a replacement on the track and then remove the old train.

The flipping mechanic will be interesting to play with, I look forward to it.

[bombcar]

Every single one of these seems so simple in retrospect, so necessary once seen, and could itself be foe a minor update.

The amount of polish on this game is so amazing.

[FerMod]

I must write only to say: Thank you for all your improvements and the care you take of the game. You should be the example for other developers, of how to do things right.

[Bergzwerg]

not happy about the space casino change, was planning on playing again but ill pass.. 5k hrs is enough
seems like a typical 'dont like it dont use it' but everyone is a toddler nowadays so i have to mod my game

[wizcreations]

Capture.JPG (78.36 KiB) Viewed 201 times

Since you're changing the arrows, why do the inserters dropping on perpendicular belts not show the arrow on the far lane? You left the arrow adjacent to the close lane when the inserters always drop to the far lane.

[chewythecat9]

I have a suggestion: Can guns get more of a buff from quality? A rare submachine gun gets 3 extra tiles of range, which while better, is the only stat that changes. Could a better quality gun/rocket launcher fire faster? Overall good changes though (if this is in the wrong place sorry)