Factorio Forums

TL;DR: The tooltip for the Frequency slider states that it changes 'The number of resource patches', but it also has an effect on the Size of a resource patch in the starting area.

What did I do: I wanted a good start area for the No Spoon Achievement, so I increased all ore patch Size and Richness settings to the maximum, so that I could rely on the ores generated in the starting area for the whole game.

What happened: Some of the ore sizes were not very large, so I started tinkering with all the settings and discovered that increasing the Frequency setting also increased the ore patch size in the starting area. It did not change the ore patch size outside the starting area, just the frequency of the number of ore patches, which is expected behaviour.

What did you expect to happen: I expected the Frequency slider to only change the Frequency of ore patches. I did not expect the Frequency slider to change the Size of an ore patch in the Starting Area - that is what the Size slider is for.

Steps to reproduce the bug: Start a new game using default settings, then increase the Frequency slider for one of the main ores - the Size of the starting area ore patch will increase (decrease the Frequency slider will decrease the Size of the ore patch).

Does it always happen: Yes.

Initial Starting Area with Iron Ore Frequency and Size set to 100%
Starting Area with Iron Ore Frequency set to 400%, Size set to 100%

This is intended behavior so there is precise control over the amount of ore in the starting area.

The starting area is too small to add a new patch for every notch of the frequency slider. Also if a frequency of 100% is one ore patch, how many patches would you get at 50% frequency?

For this reason we decided to make the starting are size be influenced by frequency. The alternative would be that the frequency slider would do almost nothing for the ores in the starting area.

But you already have precise control over the ores in the starting area just using the Size slider to change the size of the ore patch, and Richness slider to change the richness. As the Size slider works as advertised then I don't see any need for the Frequency slider to do the same thing.

The Frequency slider is there to change 'The number of resource patches' - as per the tooltip. The starting area is guaranteed to have a minimum of 1 patch of each of the main ores, so I do not expect that reducing the Frequency would have any effect on the starting area, as it already has it's complement of one of each of the ores. I only expect Frequency to affect how many ore patches are generated over the rest of the map.

Also, if I'm looking for a railworld then I would like to reduce the frequency of ores outside the starting area, but I do not want to reduce the size (and therefore reduce the quantity) of ores within the starting area - not only are you penalising yourself by making ores further away, but you are also reducing the ores available at the start. So if I reduce Frequency to 17%, I then have to increase Size to compensate for the lack of ore in the starting area, which then means that ore patches all over the map are increased in size.

I do not really expect the Frequency slider to have very much effect over the ores in the starting area - increasing it may introduce some more ore patches, but reducing it will not remove any because they are guaranteed to have at least 1, and I think it adds confusion to allow the player to set the Size of ore patches to their requirement but then the game will change those sizes in the starting area when changing the Frequency setting.

So all I am asking is that all 3 sliders do as they are advertised to do:
The Frequency slider will increase/decrease the number of patches all over the map, but with a minimum of 1 patch of each in the starting area.
The Size slider will increase/decrease the size of each ore patch all over the map.
The Richness slider will increase/decrease the richness of each ore patch all over the map.