Add some simple starting blueprints for beginers

[voddan]

What?

Add some simple starting blueprints (smelting column, red science, balancer) to the player's collection of blueprints to help beginners learn about blueprints.
Also incorporate using blueprints into one of the starting campaigns.

What problem does it solve?

Usually new players (me included) don't learn blueprints until they get construction bots. But blueprints are so much more useful than that! In singleplayer they help planning the factory, and in the multiplayer blueprints are the most efficient way of communicating with teammates.

Blueprints are hard to grasp and to understand their value people need starting examples because:

a) blueprint are unique to Factorio. A new player has now external reference for them

b) blueprints are camouflaged. First time they are mentioned is in the bots description, and it is a late-game item

c) blueprint UI is controiwtuitive and confusing unless there is a couple of blueprints in the library. New players open the blueprint menu, wonder what the heck it is and close it. Few press the "+" button. That's just human nature

d) blueprints don't provide obvious value without construction bots. When I started Factorio I knew about blueprints but never attempted to use them in the early game. Much later I realized that they solved a ton of my problems by helping planning out the factory

Additional benefits

With improvements like Quality of Life Blueprint Building blueprints will become much more useful in the early game and will ease much of the tediousness which were believed to be inescapable. Promoting blueprints in the early game will work hand-in-hand with it.

[bobucles]

Giving players a good starting point to learn from is always a good thing. Incidentally this is basically what a game campaign is for.

I don't agree on giving great blueprints. Small but functional bases will be fine. A lot of fun is discovering and optimizing things on your own.

[voddan]

Giving players a good starting point to learn from is always a good thing. Incidentally this is basically what a game campaign is for.

In its current form the campaigns do nothing to make players use blueprints. They could teach about them like in a tutorial, but without any pre-existing blueprints the whole concept has too little perceived value to a new player to pay attention to.

I don't agree on giving great blueprints. Small but functional bases will be fine. A lot of fun is discovering and optimizing things on your own.

Ye, sure. Starting blueprints shouldn't be "great". But some simple and common constructions, like 4-to-4 balancers , are commonly used with no variations and thus make sense to be given to the player as a basic piece of knowledge in the beginning of the game.

[Rseding91]

We're not likely to ever do this. Players should play the game for themselves first instead of just copying others. That, or decide on their own they don't want to play it themselves and use other peoples blueprints.

If we put anything like that into the game then that's one less thing that players will learn to do on their own and instead they'll just use the pre-built blueprints effectively removing a portion of the game for them to experience.

[voddan]

If we put anything like that into the game then that's one less thing that players will learn to do on their own and instead they'll just use the pre-built blueprints effectively removing a portion of the game for them to experience.

Rseding91, thanks for input.

I do want to clarify that I am talking about 2 or 3, max 5 simple starting blueprint accompanied with an explanation on how to create new ones. I honestly can't imagine a player going "hoh, nice blueprints, I am NOT gonna modify any of them or add new". If it may be compared to programming, I have never seen a student who would use functions from stdlib and not try to create their own.

[voddan]

For all the great Factorio players who don't like an idea of giving a blueprint for free - please add into your considerations that
a) blueprint are unique to Factorio. A new player has now external reference for them
b) blueprints are camouflaged. First time they are mentioned is in the bots description, and it is a late-game item
c) blueprint UI is controiwtuitive and confusing unless there is a couple of blueprints in the library. New players open the blueprint menu, wonder what the heck it is and close it. Few press the "+" button. That's just human nature
d) blueprints don't provide obvious value without construction bots. When I started Factorio I knew about blueprints but never attempted to use them in the early game. Much later I realized that they solved a ton of my problems by helping planning out the factory

[bobucles]

If we put anything like that into the game then that's one less thing that players will learn to do on their own and instead they'll just use the pre-built blueprints effectively removing a portion of the game for them to experience.

I disagree. Factorio introduces plenty of concepts that simply don't exist in other games. Chances are that a Factorio virgin won't understand these systems if they've never seen them before. It's incredibly easy for a veteran to forget the growing pains they had when learning a game and you'll probably never hear about anything a veteran once struggled to learn way back when.

For example in minecraft, your first objective is to literally punch a tree and arrange the wood items on your inventory screen. There is no intuitive reason to do this in the game world. Why the heck would anyone go punch a tree? If someone never told you to go punch trees and drop items on a grid in an arbitrary order, you'd probably never figure it out and never unlock the game's 3x3 crafting table, which Minecraft doesn't tell you how to use either. Without crafting, Minecraft is little more than a dumb game about walking around an ugly block world.

Similarly there are some growing pains for Factorio that are essentially "do this for REASONS or you will NEVER get anywhere". Mining. Electricity. Inserters. Belts. Players might have some inuit about mines and belts, and they will easily stumble upon hand crafting just by clicking things. But chances are a new player has never had to use an inserter or set up a multi stage energy generator in any other type of game world. Without power you're just as stuck as a Minecraft noob not punching trees. If you can't use inserters you are essentially playing minecraft without a crafting table. What's the point.

Similarly the whole concept of trains and functional stations is not something a player can intuit from looking at a collection of train parts. Train networks are very complex! At least 8 different unique pieces have to be working in harmony or train logistics flat out don't work. Tutorials don't always help and a real world example always works best. Players absolutely have to be exposed to a working train system (or at least most of one) before the pieces start falling into place.

Finally the power screen. I dare you to grab a stranger off the street and ask him what those two green bars mean and what happens if one bar changes color vs. the other bar changing color. Damn.

[Ghoulish]

I would like to ask how you learned to use blueprints?

The answer is simple, we tried them out to see what they did! It's great to make the game more new-player friendly, but blueprints really are not an overly complicated concept, if you want to talk complicated let's change the topic to combinators.. Every game I play I find myself learning more as time passes.. How weird is that?! I wish I knew today what I knew when I first started <insert any game>. It's part of the course. Also, if a smelting setup was freely given as part of the blueprint system, I'm going to lay my head on the line and say that will just lead to beginners using that blueprint all the time rather than figure it out for themselves or perhaps even consider that blueprint to be the best way of doing things.

[voddan]

... that will just lead to beginners using that blueprint all the time rather than figure it out for themselves or perhaps even consider that blueprint to be the best way of doing things.

One way to prevent that is to make the starting blueprint imperfect. For example a smelting line blueprint can contain twice as many power poles as necessary. That will push people to modify their starting blueprint and eventually to create their own.

[Zavian]

I think if the devs did decide to give new player blueprints, they should probably do it by making it part of the tutorial campaign. eg a campaign object to create a blueprint of an existing layout, then use bots to construct it, plus a observation that blueprints can be saved in your library if you want.

Additionally those blueprints shouldn't be polished finished things like most of us have in our library, but rather raw unpolished blueprints that gives a new player a starting place. eg here is a starting smelting setup that might get a new player started, but shouldn't prevent them from needing to build something bigger/better. (Experienced players might also use something similar at the start of a new game, before transitioning to something bigger).

starting.Smelting.jpg (255.07 KiB) Viewed 9586 times

Edit:voddan's suggestion of too many power poles is also a good one.

[Koub]

I would like to ask how you learned to use blueprints?

The answer is simple, we tried them out to see what they did! It's great to make the game more new-player friendly, but blueprints really are not an overly complicated concept

Actually the blueprint system grew organically from first limited abilities, and step by step, became the "thing" it is now. For someone who has used the blueprints from the start, each step was a small additional thing to learn, so it was OK. I dare a true beginner to use the whole blueprint system, with books, blueprints, and so on without having a hard time figuring how it works. The blueprint concept is really simple, but the GUI, controls, and overall behaviour are extremely cumbersome.

I really hope with 0.17 and new GUI, the blueprint system will be reworked to become more natural to use. I agree Factorio has a strong puzzle aspect, but figuring the interface should not be part of the puzzle.

This being said, I think that instead of "giving" blueprints to the beginners, there should be a tutorial that takes them by the hand and explain how to create their own blueprints, and how to manage them via the blueprint library.

[voddan]

This being said, I think that instead of "giving" blueprints to the beginners, there should be a tutorial that takes them by the hand and explain how to create their own blueprints, and how to manage them via the blueprint library.

You can explain blueprints

in a tutorial, but it is meaningless unless the player sees their value. With bot BP's value is controlling the bots. With starting BP their value is the given knowledge. What other objective value of BP can you interest a new player with? That BP help plan out the factory is not an obvious value and can't be explained until much later in the game.

Copy blueprint

[Zavian]

there should be a tutorial that takes them by the hand and explain how to create their own blueprints, and how to manage them via the blueprint library.

Well in that tutorial, the player would be basically guided through the process of creating blueprints, so a simple extension would be letting the player save the blueprints to their library, which would be effectively the same as giving them some blueprints. (Ok marginally different, because the player would create them themselves, as part of the tutorial, but it would still have the effect of the player ending the tutorial with some blueprints).

[Hedning1390]

I am not too familiar with the tutorials, but I believe one of the rail ones already teach players the value of planning things out with ghosts.

[Deadlock989]

There's literally entire websites filled with hundreds and hundreds of downloadable blueprints.

[Aeternus]

What the OP is actually saying is that blueprints need a tutorial. That I can get behind, they are an important game mechanic.

[Deadlock989]

If we put anything like that into the game then that's one less thing that players will learn to do on their own and instead they'll just use the pre-built blueprints effectively removing a portion of the game for them to experience.

I disagree. Factorio introduces plenty of concepts that simply don't exist in other games. Chances are that a Factorio virgin won't understand these systems if they've never seen them before. It's incredibly easy for a veteran to forget the growing pains they had when learning a game and you'll probably never hear about anything a veteran once struggled to learn way back when.

Not understanding them at first is the entire point. If there's nothing to learn, and a silver spoon is thrust into your mouth, there would be substantially less game. For me, understanding things I didn't understand before is sheer pleasure. Why are we even talking about removing that pleasure?

Been playing this for, what, getting on three years now, and I'm still learning. Which is why it's the only PC game in the history of PC games I've ever pinned to my Windows task bar.

A resounding no vote from me for dumbing the game down.

Tutorials, sure. Haven't it been said many times they're still developing those, as well as the campaign which is basically an extended tutorial?

[QGamer]

I respectfully disagree.

We do need a tutorial to teach new players to use blueprints. There's a little section on that in the Construction Robots tutorial (have you played all of the tutorials?) but you are right that we need something at the very beginning of the game for new players to learn blueprints.

But I don't think that the game should come with any blueprints. The entire point of the blueprint library (in my opinion) is for the player to try out different designs and pick the best ones. A huge part of Factorio is to let the player tinker, experiment, and ultimately try to come up with the best design possible and alto to have fun while doing so. Giving the player blueprints at the beginning would take away from that experience. Even if the blueprint was flawed, beginners might not notice it and get fooled into thinking the blueprint was perfect.

We do need to teach new players how to use blueprints. We do not need to give them hints. Let the player figure out good builds on their own. That's what makes it fun.

[bobucles]

Not understanding them at first is the entire point. If there's nothing to learn, and a silver spoon is thrust into your mouth, there would be substantially less game. For me, understanding things I didn't understand before is sheer pleasure. Why are we even talking about removing that pleasure?

You're still assuming a position where the player already knows several core concepts about the game before they even begin. If a player doesn't know how to play the game then they don't know why it should be fun. Giving players SOME kind of initial direction for those first steps is not a bad thing.

I don't open a book with completely alien symbols for fun. I open a book that's made with letters and words I already understand and know.

[Koub]

there should be a tutorial that takes them by the hand and explain how to create their own blueprints, and how to manage them via the blueprint library.

Well in that tutorial, the player would be basically guided through the process of creating blueprints, so a simple extension would be letting the player save the blueprints to their library, which would be effectively the same as giving them some blueprints. (Ok marginally different, because the player would create them themselves, as part of the tutorial, but it would still have the effect of the player ending the tutorial with some blueprints).

Yers that was the idea : not "provide" pre-made blueprint, but provide blueprints they have been guided to create themselves, and they can keep at the end. Very basic ones, like for example just one element of a smelting array (two furnaces, one belt line for mixed ore/coal input, one for the output, four inserters, and two power poles.

First guiding to discover this basic design every player should have used one day, then showing how to save this design in a blueprint, and letting him keep it afterwards.