What to do in the Space Age post game?

[Tertius]

I'm again at the end of a map: every tech unlocked, every planet has a decent and fully automated base, some levels of promethium science researched, interplanetary logistics established and stable.

The only thing not even started is quality. It's because it is the only thing in Factorio that's not fun for me. Every base, every platform is with normal quality, and I'm satisfied with them because they work, and they work efficiently. About scale: it's a 714 SPM (6.7K eSPM) system. Not small, but not big either. But it's all running like clockwork. (in case you're interested in the scale: https://factorio.com/galaxy/Sulfur%20IV:%20Zeta3-4.C4T4)

I developed a legendary quality module and production building factory in earlier maps, and I can stamp it down and build legendary beacons, and every kind of module as well as most production buildings as well in zero time. But what will I gain from that by updating my bases with them? Nothing. It's like cheating, just more stuff out of the same resources. That's not a challenge. Just higher numbers. Progress without meaning and without goal. I stopped developing for quality at the time. Just to research the infinite technologies 5 steps further? I can design a new legendary base layout for every plant and produce 714 KSPM instead of 714 SPM. But what for? It's the same result as without quality, just factor 1000 bigger. Slightly different scaling with resource mining, but not fundamentally different. That's in contrast to Factorio 1.1 with a 1K SPM base versus a 10K SPM base. That was a fundamental difference in logistics. But with quality, it's no challenge because the factories in essence stay the same, they just produce 1000 times more. Play against the throughput limit with the 1 cargo landing pad on Nauvis? No, that's artificial.

I could perfect all of my bases and update them with all the advanced production buildings (Vulcanus and Nauvis still don't have any electromagnetic plant and cryogenic plant), but what for?

What else can I do? As far as I see, this map is finished, and Factorio stops here for me with this map with this progress. I even planted huge forests all around my Nauvis base to remove all the pollution.

I didn't exploit every feature and every task to the end. The Nauvis base could be bigger - all the trains are underutilized, just 4 wagons and it's not even necessary to use all the shiny elevated rails. But there's no incentive to build bigger. More SPM? No, it's all dwarfed by all the quality-based million-SPM things. I cannot and don't want to compete with that.

This is a bit unsatisfying, because I didn't really use some of the advanced buildings and features I unlocked last. There is some generic, unique task missing, something to accomplish with all the nice shiny tech without unlocking more tech. Use the existing tech and build something that's only possible with everything unlocked. Not just that promethium farming platform. That's the final part of the initial Factorio experience, but after that it stops rather abruptly. Beyond that I would like to have some thing to accomplish that wasn't possible before. Some kind of jigsaw puzzle that manifests at the end and that can be solved now that make one whole thing from the pieces we got and that's more than the separate pieces.

Is there any mod that accomplishes that? I don't want more recipes, not more tech, not more buildings, I want to build something meaningful with the existing stuff.

[coffee-factorio]

What I'm most personally interested in is a good business logic for harvesting promethium on a schedule.

I'm not interested in how fast someone gets it or what volume. My personal opinion on quality is that it generates paradoxes. So uh... I mean, if I have an opinion on a paradox I'm probably just reframing the paradox. If I tell you not to do it I'm telling you to not go after a volume of production. If I tell you to do it I'm sending you to deal with paradoxes.

What are the options for big ships or small ships? I know it's a debate to choose between cargo volume and redundancy.
As for speed, a layman like myself is not impressed by a multi-thruster stack when they see rocks bouncing off the front of their 5 engine model
when it flies at 50kms due to a lack of railgun upgrades.

My interest in quality is mainly in describing paradoxes. If you can make a combo of work stations, beacons and tech upgrades which justifies removing
foundation from or deleting a space platform. I'd be happy to hear it.

[Bömmeli]

There is some generic, unique task missing, something to accomplish with all the nice shiny tech without unlocking more tech. Use the existing tech and build something that's only possible with everything unlocked.

My vanilla with some topping map has just reached 4k (ingame) hours, and I'll need at least 2k more just to finish the projects I've started or intended to do. And even then, I won't have reached was I defined for me as endgame.

Factorio is a game like Rimworld and Minecraft - they have an end, but no goal. There are a million trillion gazillion ways to play vanilla and space age, and with mods and mods combinations there are even more ways to play the game. Define your own goals, and have fun to reach them.

[Amarula]

It would be very satisfying to have a new entity unlocked by promethium. Vulcanus unlocks big miners and foundries, Fulgora unlocks the EM plant and recycler, Gleba unlocks biochambers and biolabs, Aquilo unlocks the cryo chamber. Some entity for space platforms or planetary logistics seems like a logical reward for promethium.

[mmmPI]

Is there any mod that accomplishes that? I don't want more recipes, not more tech, not more buildings, I want to build something meaningful with the existing stuff.

I suppose the definition of meaningful allow very different mod to fit your request. It's been 2 weeks i'm trying to build a giant spaceship shaped like a guitar that also plays the guitar with speakers, as a mean to illustrate the higher purpose of existence after you've dealt with all the contingencies of the every day life. But i can totally get how meaningful may be interpreted differently and another adjective used in that particular case. Some players tries to actually reach the shattered planet with a space platform, that's not my thing, but it's similar to me in that it is the "post-game", if there was anything "meaningful" else to do it wouldn't be "post-game"

This is a bit unsatisfying, because I didn't really use some of the advanced buildings and features I unlocked last. There is some generic, unique task missing, something to accomplish with all the nice shiny tech without unlocking more tech. Use the existing tech and build something that's only possible with everything unlocked. Not just that promethium farming platform. That's the final part of the initial Factorio experience, but after that it stops rather abruptly. Beyond that I would like to have some thing to accomplish that wasn't possible before. Some kind of jigsaw puzzle that manifests at the end and that can be solved now that make one whole thing from the pieces we got and that's more than the separate pieces.

I understand that feel and that my previous answer was a bit a provocative, but in a way for some players in 1.0 factorio most of the game was "post 1rst rocket launch" too , there was also no "big reward" for using all the fancy tech of the tree. There were and are still mods that delay that point of the game where you've "done everything" like death world or marathon but that doesn't seem to be the kind of thing you're looking for. I think on the contrary your description match mods that were adding content "after the rocket" in 1.0, with space Age, to me that would be mods that adds "planets", maybe specifically planets designed to be unlocked "after aquilo". I know it sound like "more recipes and more tech and more buildings", but that's not necessarily in overwhelming amount and/or the main "selling point" of the mod, and there's a lot of different design intention for those "planets" mod.

When reading your description, particularly the jigsaw puzzle idea, that manifests at the end, requiring combining tools aquired along the way, it made me think of https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Cerys-Moon-of-Fulgora, you can typically add it to your game as an additionnal challenge, albeit you cannot supply yourself with your existing infrastructure, which is part of the perks of the planet, the jigsaw part to me, you benefit from the research, and is "vanilla firendly". Does that sound appealing / meaningful to you ? or does it sound like "more recipes, more tech, more building" ? like some planets mroe changnig everything could feel like ?

I could perfect all of my bases and update them with all the advanced production buildings (Vulcanus and Nauvis still don't have any electromagnetic plant and cryogenic plant), but what for?

I feel otherwise the "post game" in factorio is "endless optimization" or "bigger number", that's also why i suggested a planet mod, it represent the goal itself, escaping the planet, but then a planet mod that introduce no new building no new recipe, and no new tech, may be seen as shallow, or just not made, and sometimes planets mods try to integrate in space age by altering the tech tree, and may not be suitable to add "post game" in a save. Cerys i found "light" on new buildings, instead putting to good use the space age additions, and easy to add to an end game save and there's even a "hard cerys" version, which i haven't tried but i believe qualify as "tough challenge" , the normal version being quite the puzzle already It gives a purpose where you're required to those optionnal fancy tech building worth trying at least once imo

[GrumpyJoe]

More SPM? No, it's all dwarfed by all the quality-based million-SPM things. I cannot and don't want to compete with that.

Why compete?
If you don't like quality, don't use it.

I'm kind of at the same spot as you, and for the first time in like forever I wanna play on.

Production tec ~T8, bot speed 11, mining 17.

The only quality yet is blue asteroid grabbers. And since technically (at least at the stage I am) anything under legendary is simply not worth scaling up to, I'm moving to something you haven't set up yet: furnaces on Nauvis, then maybe cryo plants, then who knows...
Gleba is still a mess. Fulgora needs a few more islands.

Again: why compete?
If you play for someone else, you are doing it wrong anyway.

[coffee-factorio]

Again: why compete?
If you play for someone else, you are doing it wrong anyway.

It's hard to have a society without rankings.

There shouldn't be a right way to do a hobby.

But if you're isolating yourself doing a hobby it implies more issues than having a negative opinion about it.

[mmmPI]

There exist a wide range of interaction people can have that are not competing, nor isolating themselves, it's very simplistic to imply differently imo. And there's no ranking for SPM or megabase, it's more people who cooperate with each other. But even if you're isolating yourself to play your hobby, it's fine, it's better to be alone than associated with toxic people suggesting anything different is an issue x)

[h.q.droid]

The only thing not even started is quality. It's because it is the only thing in Factorio that's not fun for me. Every base, every platform is with normal quality, and I'm satisfied with them because they work, and they work efficiently. About scale: it's a 714 SPM (6.7K eSPM) system. Not small, but not big either. But it's all running like clockwork. (in case you're interested in the scale: https://factorio.com/galaxy/Sulfur%20IV:%20Zeta3-4.C4T4)

Well, you can try quality seriously, as a goal in itself, not means to an end. A legendary spidertron will be a good start as it requires many intermediates that will take forever to produce from a naive approach.

[Tertius]

Quality as goal in itself is what I feel is lacking, tedious and no fun. I tried and started to build. It looks interesting at first, but if you look deeper, many interesting to get quality items have regular ingredients except one. That one cannot be just upcycled as intermediate, it has to be crafted by washing or by whatever special and inefficient procedure is required. Often you cannot upcycle it on its own with some efficient means (productivity included). Instead you have to upcycle it along with the item you want, and that item cannot be efficiently upcycled (without productivity). And all the other ingredients you can also create easily are created by that upcycling as well, so you just don't need any easy upcycling for all the other ingredients. For what is all that efficient upcycling for all the trivial intermediates? There is hardly any use for it. Seems a red herring.

All this isn't a solid and balanced game mechanic for what Factorio is well known.

About that legendary spidertron. This is exactly what I mean with boring and tedious. Let's discuss this. It's all quite easy, even the legendary fish is interesting because it's slightly bizarre and because of its special crafting (in the end it's just washing fish) - except the portable fission reactor. It has to be built by upcycling in an assembler, without productivity. The most wasteful procedure after washing. Or do you want me to wash legendary fuel cells? Or upcycle U-235 by upcycling atomic bombs? Or with nuclear fuel, which is an intermediate but can only be crafted extremely slowly in a centrifuge which only has 2 module slots? No, that's not sufficient, I also need U-238, which cannot be upcycled as ingredient. Only as end products like green ammo. All the items involved with U-238 have some trivial ingredients and U-238, but their trivial production cannot be used, because they're being created along with the inefficient upcycling process of U-238. In the end it's probably the easiest thing to just upcycle the reactor and just give up any idea of efficiency.

And this tree of almost-efficient production is an example of all quality. You can do it for all ingredients, except one. Planning that one is so tedious I lose interest while attempting to build this tree of dependent upcycling production lines. And it's just for this item. For all the other quality end products, it's a different dependency tree I have to build. Given how tedious it is for these uranium products, I don't feel like starting any other similar-but-not-the-same production line at all.

I don't even need a legendary spidertron. Not at all. In the early game I need one, but then I don't have quality. When I have quality, I don't have a need for that spidertron any more.

ps.
what was the most fun for me in Space Age is Gleba. The challenge to build and iterate a working and failsafe production, and to establish a logistic connection between Nauvis and Gleba for agriculture science, bioflux and biter eggs was exquisite. And the reward on Gleba is also most satisfying for me: free production for everything that doesn't need stone, and all this without high infinite research of some kind. Synergy between Gleba and Vulcanus (for example foundry and providing landfill from infinite stone) is one of the things I mean when I say the whole is more than the pieces separately.

[mmmPI]

It's tough to propose a mod that adds no new recipe, no new buildings, no new tech, but yet propose something meaningful to do for "post-game". It sound like quality already does exactly that, but then it's "no fun and tedious".

When I have quality, I don't have a need for that spidertron any more.

Maybe, you're doing it wrong to keep quality for the post game, maybe you haven't found yet a way to incorporate scaling up in quality alongside a regular progression so it doesn't feel like you get the goodies when you don't need them anymore. Maybe as was mentionned quality is not the thing that you'd find fun and not tedious, but it's difficult to know what could be an appropriate answer to your question, because it sound like you're asking for something by describing it, then you got something that match the description and you're still not happy with it

[GrumpyJoe]

About that legendary spidertron.

This is exactly why i dont go into quality beside a few very nice to have items, like better grabbers and green power poles/substations

quality upscaling for better production is one side of the whole quality debate, the other is personal equipment.
I´d like to have better armor and spidertrons as builders (doesnt have to be legendary), with grid room for inventory expansion equipment, but it feels like exactly as you said, it all has one ingredient that has to be brute forced

This is why i dont care about it any more, beside the few described buildings.

Would a factory with only legendary foundries be a good idea?
Yeah, sure!
But ONLY if you build like Abucnasty

If you search my post history, there should be a suggestion for lowering research price of T1 quality, because the scaling compared to the other modules and even the T2 tech is way off (found out in x1000 map), but i guess its intended.
The whole expansion seems to be a bit too strict of a path beside the sequence of the inner planets. Play it like its intended, or lose the fun that was vanilla.

Thats why i dont care any more.
I found fun in new stuff i didn´t like in the first few months.
like i didn´t like space ships and their build/start time, so i slopped them down just to get it done. Once my spaceship building planet was scaled a tiny bit, I had fun tinkering around.

A quality grind (even if its toward a LDS shuffle build it will be a grind til you reach the point its easy to get even more) is NOT what i settled on to have fun.

So i just have an army of 20 normal Spider builders. this is easy enough to achive. At this point, even green/blue ones would be easily achievable.

I even found it fun to set up iron/copper on Gleba, to provide for the spidertron´s rockets on the planet.
This quickly became a thrive towards building a completely self sufficient Gleba i could conquer the universe from on its own.

I´d say you should put the whole Quality issue aside and DONT look at bases like Abucnasty´s or AVADII´s 1M SPM with lots of infinity promethium reserch.
Its just inflated numbers i too don´t find satisfying.

I dont want to take away anything from anyone who builds like that. I even like the technical side of it. It´s just not how i play it myself or with friends.

[coffee-factorio]

ps.
what was the most fun for me in Space Age is Gleba. The challenge to build and iterate a working and failsafe production, and to establish a logistic connection between Nauvis and Gleba for agriculture science, bioflux and biter eggs was exquisite. And the reward on Gleba is also most satisfying for me: free production for everything that doesn't need stone, and all this without high infinite research of some kind. Synergy between Gleba and Vulcanus (for example foundry) is one of the things I mean when I say the whole is more than the pieces separately.

I have a harder time picking a mod than saying which one. Because most mods won't have Space Age's game loop. And even then, since quality is optional, you have mods like Warp Drive machine that present it but don't need it; while forcing you to think about multi-surface logistics tactically rather than strategically.

Beyond things where it's a default choice because it is good in general, so it automatically suggests itself (Krastorio 2). Space Exploration features systems that you should think critically about and benefit from redundancy. I'm always entertained by the umbrella's. I have some critical words about robot attrition. My overall opinion is that it's positive and inspirational.

If you want to beat me to one, I have no information on Ultra Cube. But that one's tricky since if you're being burned out by an optimization paradox. Optimization puzzles might be a bridge too far.

[mmmPI]

It says in the description of the warp drive mod : https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Warp-Drive-Machine that : " You need to to start a new game to play this mod. Do NOT add it to saved games." It's obviously not a good recommendation for a mod to add to a late game, on the contrary , because it's a mod that changes how the game plays from the first few seconds of it. Maybe it was mistaken for another mod that would make more sense in this context ?

[meganothing]

More SPM? No, it's all dwarfed by all the quality-based million-SPM things. I cannot and don't want to compete with that.

Why compete?
If you don't like quality, don't use it.

I'm kind of at the same spot as you, and for the first time in like forever I wanna play on.

Production tec ~T8, bot speed 11, mining 17.

The only quality yet is blue asteroid grabbers. And since technically (at least at the stage I am) anything under legendary is simply not worth scaling up to, I'm moving to something you haven't set up yet: furnaces on Nauvis, then maybe cryo plants, then who knows...
Gleba is still a mess. Fulgora needs a few more islands.

Again: why compete?
If you play for someone else, you are doing it wrong anyway.

A different question comes to mind: Why not compete among non-quality-based SPM factories? There must be others who don't want to use quality. Even if not, by mentioning one is doing it or has done it and reached x SPM he might prod others to compete as well in this "new" challenge.

[TheFrizz]

Quality as goal in itself is what I feel is lacking, tedious and no fun. I tried and started to build. It looks interesting at first, but if you look deeper, many interesting to get quality items have regular ingredients except one. That one cannot be just upcycled as intermediate...

This feeling has got me as well. Essentially, I really want to interact with the quality mechanic in a very Factorio way by being borderline too clever and enjoying every minute of it. But inevitably there's some speed bump that kills the joy. Ultimately the end conclusion of all these "how about this way" thought experiments ends up being that essentially the blueprint shown in https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-376 for crafting legendary assemblers using parameterized blueprints is essentially the only viable option for so many items that you might as well just stamp it out for everything. Of course this blueprint isn't totally compact, can be optimized with "Set Recipe" and a few combinators, and a few other improvements but it feels like for such an expansive game mechanic that should have a large area of exploration, but instead, more or less the frontier of it all was known a year before Space Age even released.