Factorio Forums

TL;DR

The spoilage mechanics would be a lot more fun if the game had more levers to fiddle with spoiling items.

What?

Allow the player to interact with the spoiling mechanic more than just keeping it fresh by burning everything at the end of the moving production line.
This proposes to allow reading the spoilage percentage with a recycler. See attached image.

Why?

I am on my 2nd play through of Space Age (a 100x Science run). The first play through was fun as "I am a Nauvis engineer for 10 years, and I can tackle this planet, too".
However on this 2nd play through I start feeling like the game is too Nauvis-centric in the sense that "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

To address this, there needs to be a bit more planet specific optimizations that are possible as that brings more planet specific fun. There are tons of discussions on how to get spoilage/freshness info on Gleba and use it in the circuit networks. However all these discussions also have the Navis way of thinking ("If it's still fresh enough, I can stop the belts")

If the belts need to be flowing (which seems to be the Gleba mantra), some destructive quality control might be an option, i.e. destroy an item (one or a full stack?) to know more about its freshness.

This would allow to give more control to the player as the circuit signal allows for rerouting of the items, e.g. nearly spoiled bioflux could be routed to nutritions instead of AG science packs.

Also by using the recycler it adds game depth for the Fulgora/Gleba decision ("If you don't go to Fulgora, you cannot read the spoiling percentage on Gleba"), pulling away from the Nauvis centric world view.

How?

The easiest to implement IMHO would be recyclers outputting the spoilage percentage as that doesn't need new buildings.

But maybe the recycler as we know it doesn't cut it and we need a special processor that can examine items for freshness (made out of a recycler, a lamp and an egg and a processing unit).