Factorio Forums

Dear developement team,

you might have missed it, but with the introduction of the landing pad in combination with the restriction to one per planet you destroyed a big part of the vanilla gameplay.
The current situation forces the player to one central research facility. It is no longer feasible to organize the factory in many small independent cells that produce all the science packs that are needed and use them up to contribute to the research progress.
Now, even if you had lots of satalite factories, you would have to take all the science packs, that they produce to one central point in order for them to be usefull at all. They will never be able to receive the space science packs they need in order to use up all the other packs they produce, as there is only one landing pad on the entire planet.
I have a singleplayer planet with over 300 realtime hours put into it where I have organized my whole factory with independent factory cells, that produce and use up all goots completely autonomous, including space science up to now. I have total radar and robo port coverage and can manage all the factories remote. The independent cells are so far apart, that a train takes 5-10 minutes to go from one factory cell to another.
The new update invaidates all but one factory cell, as all the others can only sent rockets to space, never receive the space science packs ans thus can never use up all the other science packs they produce until the system is clogged with all the goods they now dont use up anymore.

There are two ways to solve the Problem:
1. Move just the science packs back to the rocket silo, so that every rocket puts out the space science packs right where it was launched.
2. Allow for multiple landing pads, to be build. You could solve it by letting every rocket silo choose a landing pad as a destination, yust like trains use train stops.
You said, that you chose to limit the landing pads to one in order to avoid cheesy transportation methods. I personally think, that it is not cheesy at all to transport goods via rocket from pad A to pad B. As you would have to construct a rocket for every transport I think its not like its is an exploit to use them to cover vast distances in a short time.

I beg you to deliver a quick change for this problem. I couldn't wait for the update to launch, now i wish it was never published in the first place.

Even Elon Musk said, that some years later, it will be cheaper and faster to do good transfer across Earth, using low orbit freight.
So several landing pads on a planet in Factorio, is totally okay, from my point of view.

This looks like something that was changed for Space Age, without really thinking about Vanilla.

I agree they should go back to this for space science gotten from rockets, but keep the "space science in space" how it is now.

With the change to sending satellites into space and landing pads, the amount of science returned depends on the amount of cargo pods the landing pad can accept, which is a limited number per time.

In Space Age, this is alleviated by adding cargo extension bays which can accept cargo pods.

In base 2.0, they do not exist and therefore the rate is capped by one landing pad.

Attached save shows the issue.

Soul-Burn wrote: Wed Oct 23, 2024 6:35 am With the change to sending satellites into space and landing pads, the amount of science returned depends on the amount of cargo pods the landing pad can accept, which is a limited number per time.

In Space Age, this is alleviated by adding cargo extension bays which can accept cargo pods.

In base 2.0, they do not exist and therefore the rate is capped by one landing pad.

Attached save shows the issue.

The save settles in at about 18k Science per minute,
If this starts showing as a problem in a real save games we can deal with it, for now it is a minor issue

Greetings, i made an account just for this. I was hyped to play it again (vanilla) and just discovered it broke my save as posted by Michel, i cant have multiple small factories anymore as of this is update the game is forcing a centralized gameplay sadly.

I would like to politely ask the developers for a alternative to keep this style of gameplay playable.

I'm honestly not sure why this change was brought back to the base game at all. Even if it didn't fundamentally break entire classes of factory design (which it does), it adds literally nothing. The base game doesn't have any of the space mechanics, it doesn't need the landing pad.