Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Help people figure out how SA works.

What?

Maybe this is just bias because I'm spending a lot of time on the Discord where people who want help go to get it, but I'm also receiving similar feedback from other sources- people don't know how to use the features in Space Age. Here's a quick list of the features I've frequently seen people not figure out and my suggestions for resolving them:

• How to send items up to space platforms
• How to automate construction requests on space platforms
• How to use the remote view
• How to automate items down from space platforms
• How to bring startup items to new planets
• Gleba soils
• You need to mine Calcite for Foundries even though it is not in the recipe.
• You can handcraft scrap recycling on Fulgora
• Exactly what can and cannot freeze on Aquilo
• Properties of space routes/rocks
• Thruster efficiency

A lot of this information is in the game, but only if you look carefully or make a few leaps that just not everybody makes, or already knew exactly how 1.1 worked. In particular, Factoriopedia is nice, but this is not a resource people just browse. It is something they check for answers to specific questions or for more detail on something they already know exists. It's good for in-depth analysis but bad for discovering new things. So I think that virtually everything the player needs to know should not be primarily displayed there.

I'd suggest a few changes, which are largely quite cheap, to improve things.

• Add a "space briefing", similar to the planet briefing, with a few lines of extra text about platform mechanics.
• Add 1 calcite to the recipe for Foundries. This means to make the Foundry the player must mine Calcite and get the trigger tech. 1 Calcite is a very negligible change to the recipe cost.
• The planet briefings are 90% "picture of the planet" and 10% "what is going on". Additionally when you queue the researches it's easy to miss the briefing notification. I suggest that the planet briefing should pop up to the player immediately on the research completing rather than leaving a link in chat like normal. I also suggest that the subheaders (e.g. Agriculture for Gleba) should have a clear next button on the main briefing to access so the player can't miss it. Also the explanatory text should take priority over the picture, not the other way around.
• The agriculture tower should show the seed or fruit type available on that soil- having the red fruit go in the green/yellow soil and the green fruit go in the pink soil is super confusing. Additionally the tower needs to distinguish overgrowth from artificial soil- having yellow for both just means the player puts down the tower but then can't use it. I'd suggest that the overlay should show a lock icon for squares where the player hasn't unlocked the necessary soil type. Finally, I'd suggest that the Gleba soils should just be more visually distinguishable. Just looking at it in the areas where they are often interleaved, it's super hard to see under all the trees, decoratives, similar colours what type of soil you're even looking at where. The agriculture planet briefing should maybe discuss the soils in a lot more detail.
• Thruster efficiency- I think thruster efficiency may be listed on the tooltip, but the problem is that in remote view, the tooltip occurs under the minimap, and combined, they are too fat and often go off the bottom of the screen where the player can't see it. Even trying to check whether or not it's listed, I don't know if the entity tooltip tells you the efficiency or not. Additionally it feels a bit "buried" in the tooltips. I think this can be improved by just adding the words "variable efficiency" to the primary description. This at least tells the player they might want to look more closely.
• The Aquilo briefing misses some entities which I believe also can't freeze, like the heating towers themselves, nuclear reactors, and the landing pad as well as vehicles, although for sure the #1 reason is because people don't read the briefing subheader.
• Handcrafting scrap on Fulgora- I'm not sure exactly why this is an issue. But I might have suggested making it something you can do in an assembler with some penalty. This should mean that even if people don't realise you can do it by hand, they can at least make some progress.
• Properties of space routes and rocks- Factoriopedia contains some of this information, if you look hard. The spacemap should be the place to display this, but the tooltips for the routes don't mention it. I'd suggest expanding the tooltips to include the rock types which at least clues the player in that maybe they should care about this. Clicking them does give you the desired information, but uh, the routes just don't... feel clickable. I'm not a UI expert but like there's not any affordance there to tell the user to click on it. The planet orbits though are more problematic because they are not clickable; clicking planets takes you to the planet view, rather than looking at the properties of the orbit. I'd suggest making the orbits separately clickable/tooltip-able (?) to view the orbital properties. Finally, the properties of the different asteroids isn't super obvious. By that, I mean that the big/huge asteroids are hard gated behind the rocket/railgun, but the player doesn't really notice this immediately because it's buried in the details of their resistances which does not follow a logical progression. You only find out after your ships get blown to pieces. I might have recommended adding a little text to the railgun or rocket turret technologies specifically mentioning this, like "Great against big asteroids".

Why?

I've seen a lot of people get very frustrated when playing SA. This is not a good kind of "hmmmm.." puzzle solving but just a frustrating "what the hell is even going on" situation. It's not that the player gets stuck solving the puzzle, it's that they don't even understand what the puzzle is or what options they have. You can argue they should be able to figure it out for themselves, but this is tangental. What matters is that they aren't figuring it out and having a really bad experience as a result.