Factorio Forums

As in title. This is not strictly a criticism of Space Age but more of a personal preference and observation. I think Space Age is well designed within the constraints it imposed upon itself. The new challenges are fun and the playtime is reasonable (unlike Space Exploration) so it doesn't overstay its welcome too much.

There are two points to it:

Game design consistency

I think what saps my joy a little when playing Space Age are design constraints on certain mechanics, e.g. one landing pad per planet, empty your inventory before space travel, no inserters with cargo bays, seemingly arbitrary limits on rocket capacity etc. Just hard limitations that don't make too much sense from the perspective of a fresh player.

I know these restrictions are necessary and I know the reason behind them. They prevent certain overpowered techniques that undermine the main challenge of the game - logistics. But they still feel a bit out of place, maybe even a bit immersion breaking.

I'd say there are two types of limitations in general - ones that make sense and ones that don't. A limitation that makes sense is, for example, a limited size of your inventory. This is intuitive because you would not expect anyone to carry an infinite amount of items. It also enables progression through armor tiers so there is something to work for. And yes, your engineer can carry a stack of locomotives and a nuclear reactor but that's more of a video games lingua franca.

Limitations in Space Age, on the other hand, don't make sense. They feel like necessary fixes to problems that originate from the design of the DLC. The first time I realized I can't take items out of cargo bays I was a little puzzled. The game teaches you this intuition that you can interact with pretty much everything using inserters, even vehicles. Suddenly, it's forbidden. There's a good game design reason for it but it's not really intuitive.

Vanilla feels much more coherent in this regard. All the systems blend together really well and you rarely feel you're limited in some artificial way. There is a really clear set of rules. It's possible that's just a bias coming from thousands of hours of Factorio so counterpoints are welcome.

The feeling of scale

I think that scaling is not as satisfying in Space Age as it is in vanilla. There are two reasons.

First, the Space Age focuses much more on vertical scaling. Better belts, items stacking on belts, machines with built-in productivity bonuses, quality. All of that makes building big not strictly necessary because you can just upgrade your existing builds more often than you do in vanilla.

Second, your factory is split across many surfaces - planets and space platforms. In vanilla, your entire factory is placed on a single surface and you can really easily see it grow in size over time. In Space Age, your industry is split into smaller factories on each planet so it's not as easy to appreciate the scale of it. This is of course just a personal feeling.



I think the conclusion is that vanilla is a full-blown sandbox - there's an end goal, now achieve it. Space Age feels more like a directed experience where the progression is longer and developers don't want you to inadvertently skip any of it. It's more on rails than vanilla but still leaves a plenty of choice in how you approach unique challenges. I think that sandboxiness of vanilla just appeals to me more.

Anyone having similar thoughts?

I agree for the most part, except when you said those are necessary fixes. Space age could be an even bigger sandbox than vanilla, and I'm not sure why it's not.
A few restrictions absolutely make sense to prevent manual, tedious processes to be strictly better than the automated ones, like requiring an empty inventory to launch yourself into orbit. But most restrictions feel arbitrary and not fun. And that's what this game is supposed to be about, not SPM or even number of puzzles solved. Fun per hour is what everyone actually wants. People will make their own fun if you let them, instead the game tries to shove everyone into the same hole and I simply don't get the mindset behind that.
One landing pad per surface, cargo bays not interactable, weird weights on certain no-no items, up to 2.1 the limitation of space platforms not being able to interact with each other. Most of these and others could be lifted and the game would improve, because the design space for solving interesting problems increases. Suddenly new, interesting problems arise that didn't even exist to be solved while the restrictions were in place.
After Kovarex apparently has gone hands-off on development, the devs seemingly go in the direction of lifting those restrictions. Except for the space casino of course, but that's a different topic, overall I like the way 2.1 is going. Maybe space age will become the sandbox it was always meant to be at some point.

I see it maybe a bit differently. Some fixes are necessary to keep the logistics as the main focus of the game, true. No inserters on cargo bays prevents you from building a long line of pad+bays and basically teleporting items across long distances. One landing pad per planet prevents you from doing the same but with space platforms as a middleman instead. All of those limitations just stem from the design of having multiple completely separate surfaces, connecting then somehow and having a fairly cheap way of transporting resources in bulk (rockets). You either lift those limitations and make some house rules to avoid overpowered and boring designs or enforce those limitations to keep the game more balanced. Perhaps there's some middle ground here or most of this is just a non-issue, idk.

But I agree, some limitations are enforced to nudge you in the specific direction. Biolabs being restricted to Nauvis only is one of those. Devs want you to treat your starting planet as a main science hub eventually, the idea being that other planets are just contributors and spoiling Gleba science packs remain a logistic challenge. But this just limits creativity in the end. You could have a favorite planet and set up your research station there. You could even put labs on space platforms and have a flying laboratory picking science packs from each planet. This would work well especially with platform-to-platform logistics and open many possibilities.

SirVitoMonkeone wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2026 8:00 am No inserters on cargo bays prevents you from building a long line of pad+bays and basically teleporting items across long distances.

A similar size limit as pipelines have right now would do the same job and be much more intuitive. No one expects to be able to build a trans-continental cargo-bay monstrosity, but most people would expect to be able to interact with cargo bays in general.

SirVitoMonkeone wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2026 8:00 am One landing pad per planet prevents you from doing the same but with space platforms as a middleman instead.

I don't see how this limitation improves the game. I remember the FFFs talking about it that way, but I believe that problem was just an imagination, right next to the 'problem' of people doing space platforms 'wrong' by not producing ammo on the platforms and just sending it from planets or using lasers. If someone wants to spend rocket parts transporting items, what's the issue with that?

SirVitoMonkeone wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2026 8:00 am Biolabs being restricted to Nauvis only is one of those. Devs want you to treat your starting planet as a main science hub eventually, the idea being that other planets are just contributors and spoiling Gleba science packs remain a logistic challenge. But this just limits creativity in the end.

Interestingly, I disagree. That's the kind of limitation that I think makes for fun gameplay. It's not a hard limitation like research labs only being buildable on Nauvis. Just the more efficient biolabs, with a plausible in-world explanation for why that's the case that everyone immediately understands. Biters live on nauvis, biolabs are made from biters, so biolabs go on nauvis. It's still possible to research on any other planet, and it's also possible to build a relatively small nauvis research outpost taking in finished science only, with the main base being somewhere else.

I guess a lot of those things are hard to judge unless you actually playtest them and decide how you feel about them, especially that cargo pad and bay limitations are kind of intertwined. I'm not sure if mods can lift all of those limitations so we can at least test it ourselves.

The relevant FFF quote:

The limitation of only one per planet might sound weird, but we just find it fitting, because otherwise (we tried that) it is too convenient to put them all over the place to have the imported items right where you need them, and in the late game, it is nice to have this one very busy logistic junction in your base

I was thinking about cargo bays being limited like pipelines but then you have a limited number of hatches and potentially throughput on that single landing pad. You would need to allow more landing pads. This is a thing I'm just not completely sold on and would need to see it in practice. On-planet logistics are meant to be the main challenge - part of it is that things are spread out and you need to take distance into consideration. More landing pads mean more connection points on the surface which means more opportunities to circumvent those limitations completely. I think it more than anything boils down to details and balancing but it was probably just much simpler to ban it altogether.

There is a mod for biolabs that does what I said: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/biolabs-in-space I might need to try it out in the future and see how it changes the game but I can't see how this limitation specifically makes gameplay more fun. I guess to each their own.

SirVitoMonkeone wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2026 10:01 am On-planet logistics are meant to be the main challenge - part of it is that things are spread out and you need to take distance into consideration. More landing pads mean more connection points on the surface which means more opportunities to circumvent those limitations completely.

By now we have access to a huge dataset of people who finished the game, and what their save looked like. Most of them look visually similar when zoomed out:
- good ol' Nauvis base, not much changed for that planet in space age
- Vulcanus with one central base on the ashlands and a train or belt going to one or two tungsten patches
- Fulgora with a central sorting base on a big island and a couple of smaller islands connected to it by train
- Gleba with a central highlands base and the two closest farming spots connected to it by belt
- Aquilo with basically a starter base, further resources untouched
I don't see where multiple landing pads would disrupt that in a big way. Maybe Fulgora would look different for those daring enough to do logistics by rocket.
What it would change is give people more interesting base layouts in the end game, in fact landing pad logistics as a tech would be perfect as a second promethium science research. Or maybe do it like some of the infinite techs, get a couple of levels here and there from finishing planets during midgame, and then the infinite tech is behind promethium.
I think Wube prematurely optimized some of the fun out of space age, a sad consequence of developing it behind closed doors.

in fact landing pad logistics as a tech would be perfect as a second promethium science research. Or maybe do it like some of the infinite techs, get a couple of levels here and there from finishing planets during midgame, and then the infinite tech is behind promethium.

Not a bad idea, making it an end game utility when you're already done with challenges of the expansion seems like a good compromise.

I think Wube prematurely optimized some of the fun out of space age, a sad consequence of developing it behind closed doors.

Same, vanilla had years of early access and tweaking based on people's experiences. Space Age sometimes feels like yet another overhaul mod for vanilla except they had the entire team behind it and the possibility to modify the game engine to go far beyond the scope of what mods can do. In the end, I think it's not as replayable as vanilla.

I have said this before and I will repeat for this topic that indeed, I really like Vanilla Factorio, especially the 1.1 version of the game.

If you are also a enjoyer of Vanilla I highly recommend to give 1.1 a(nother) shot. The artificial limits the OP is speaking about are also somewhat present in 2.0 Vanilla and not in 1.1. (1 landing pad for example).

Other main reasons why 1.1 is better:
- Simulated fluid system which adds to the immersion
- Expensive recipes for Marathon and Dead world marathon modes which add to the challenge massively
- No trigger technologies (I liked the idea but found the implementation lacking)
- No strange double buffers in electricity or fluid connections
- Rocket control units and Sattelite research add to the challenge massively

Good point, I actually should have noted that my experience with 2.0 is Space Age only. I completely forgot that they also made some changes to vanilla. 2.0 has too many QoL changes though that I already got used to but luckily at least some of those things can be brought back to 2.0:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/no-more-trigger-techs
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/classic-rocket-silo

I recommend you to simply download the .zip version of 1.1.110 from the Factorio website, you can run it straight from the directory without installing. Then give it a try, I think u won't be dissapointed.

I've been playing Factorio since 0.16 if I remember correctly. Indeed, I wasn't disappointed

I know but just try it once again, 1.1 that is.

2.0 was a huge improvement for fluids, trains and combinators. Personally I wouldn't want to ever go back because of those.
Fluids could be even better by removing the hard limit on pipeline extent, instead making fluid I/O go down exponentially as it increases, same with the number of inputs/outputs that pipeline network has. But it's still way, way better than the weirdness we had before. Building pipelines made entirely out of pumps and tanks for high throughput was never fun for me.