Factorio Forums

Hello,

I'm a long-time Factorio fan, and have been reading the FFFs for more than 2 years now.
Big applause and cheers to the devs for an awesome game!

I have a few ideas/suggestions which I think would improve the game a lot:

1. Add limits to how much power can be transferred between electric poles (e.g. Small Pole: 10 MW, Medium Pole: 25 MW, Large Pole: 100 MW, Substations have no limit). If these limits are exceeded, then the respective poles receive some damage over time, which varies by how much electricity actually flows through (e.g. a 10% overcurrent may cause a tiny bit of damage every few minutes, while a 100% overcurrent would lead to the destruction of the pole in a couple of seconds).

2. Add fluid temperature requirements to recipes (not only water/steam). Then we could have methods of heating up the fluids or cooling them down (e.g. big radiators or radiant pipes which could be 2 tiles - one for the fluid and one for the attached radiator unit). We could have active and passive cooling, with a given world temperature (e.g. 20 C).

3. Add recyclers. They could receive other items as inputs (via inserters) and output a percentage of the raw materials used for that item, all mixed up on a single output which needs to be sorted with the help of a circuit network. This percentage could be improved by upgrades in the tech tree, e.g. starting with 40% and going up by 10% for each upgrade level, to a maximum of 90%. Recyclers would need electricity to operate and fuel in order to burn off any un-recyclable remains. The more raw materials went into producing an item, the longer it takes for the item to be recycled.

4. Add fluid burners, which need fuel to operate and output huge amounts of pollution.

5. Add incinerators. Similar to fluid burners, but for items. The more raw materials went into producing an item, the longer it takes for the item to be incinerated.

6. Add non-agressive critters, which have their own nests. Pollution could actually aid to their development / population increase. They may react when being attacked (by the player or biters), or be completely harmless.

7. Energy stored in accumulators should decrease ever so slowly (e.g. by a few percent per "day").

Hopefully these suggestions would make sense for sometime in the future, after 1.0 is released.

All the best,
Icarus86

Some of these ideas already exist in mods. For others, you might want to post something explaining what's fun about the idea; not everything here strikes me as fun. Here are a few thoughts...

1. Add limits to how much power can be transferred between electric poles (e.g. Small Pole: 10 MW, Medium Pole: 25 MW, Large Pole: 100 MW, Substations have no limit). If these limits are exceeded, then the respective poles receive some damage over time, which varies by how much electricity actually flows through (e.g. a 10% overcurrent may cause a tiny bit of damage every few minutes, while a 100% overcurrent would lead to the destruction of the pole in a couple of seconds).

To be honest, this sounds unpleasant. Who wants to micromanage electric poles? How would you figure out how much power is being transferred between two poles? I don't think Factorio works like this, where you can see the power being transferred for individual wires. Plus, once you had robots, couldn't you ignore this aspect completely and just let them repair the damage? (I guess not in the 100% overcurrent case, but I don't understand how this idea would work out in practice. Would you have to have step-down transformers?)

2. Add fluid temperature requirements to recipes (not only water/steam). Then we could have methods of heating up the fluids or cooling them down (e.g. big radiators or radiant pipes which could be 2 tiles - one for the fluid and one for the attached radiator unit). We could have active and passive cooling, with a given world temperature (e.g. 20 C).

For Steam turbines this exists: They require 500° steam and don't function at a lower temperature. If the temperature was really fiddly and hard to get precisely where it needs to be, though, this could be annoying. The steam turbines work at any temperature of 500° and above.

3. Add recyclers. They could receive other items as inputs (via inserters) and output a percentage of the raw materials used for that item, all mixed up on a single output which needs to be sorted with the help of a circuit network. This percentage could be improved by upgrades in the tech tree, e.g. starting with 40% and going up by 10% for each upgrade level, to a maximum of 90%. Recyclers would need electricity to operate and fuel in order to burn off any un-recyclable remains. The more raw materials went into producing an item, the longer it takes for the item to be recycled.

Mods such as Industrial Revolution already have this. IR lets you scrap items and get back tin/copper/iron/steel/gold scrap (and a few other things) which you can smelt back into ingots.

4. Add fluid burners, which need fuel to operate and output huge amounts of pollution.

IR has this too, where I guess you can burn off excess fluids, but I never use it because there are already recipes to turn heavy oil into light oil or light oil into petroleum. What would one need this for otherwise?

5. Add incinerators. Similar to fluid burners, but for items. The more raw materials went into producing an item, the longer it takes for the item to be incinerated.

And IR has this too, if you for some odd reason prefer to destroy items instead of scrapping them and getting something back.

You might want to try out Industrial Revolution and see how many of these itches it scratches. (It's 0.17 only. If you don't want to downgrade your "regular" installation, you can download the .zip file of Factorio 0.17 and install to some other folder.)

6. Add non-agressive critters, which have their own nests. Pollution could actually aid to their development / population increase. They may react when being attacked (by the player or biters), or be completely harmless.

What for?

7. Energy stored in accumulators should decrease ever so slowly (e.g. by a few percent per "day").

This doesn't seem too bad, but as with the previous one: What for? If it decreases by enough to make a difference in power generation, then what makes it fun? If it doesn't, then why bother?

icarus86 wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 10:16 am 7. Energy stored in accumulators should decrease ever so slowly (e.g. by a few percent per "day").

I'm not sure how this would be accomplished since accumulators are typically always connected to the sources that would charge them, and as soon as there is no power they start discharging. So the only way I could see your suggestion happening is if the accumulators decrease in efficiency over time until they can no longer hold a charge. But then how would you reset them?

If we think of this like damage (i.e. biter attack where it's not completely destroyed); this means the game will start needing to track individual accumulators which will add to the work the game engine has to do, which could have detrimental impacts to UPS? Has game performance been considered for any of these suggestions?

Oh but what if we think solely about the idea of decreasing the efficiency of accumulators over time? I'm not sure what the challenge is. If there is a way to reset the efficiency then yeah it may be an angle some people might... enjoy? I can't get there, even if we discount any impact to game performance.

This along with the power pole idea leads me to believe you are looking to complicate the power system a bit. I've often thought about how this game does not track resistance (i.e. the loss of efficiency transmitting power via wires over long distances), and there are quirky limitations around the automatic connecting of wires between power poles and substations. It is a simple system, is there significant value adding these complications at the cost of making power management its own mini-game?

Personally I'd love to see power (and circuit network) connectivity accomplished over rail, and the addition of electric locomotives. But for all I know, it is a mod that already exists.

Thank you for the comments!

The ideas around the increased power complexity are meant to contribute to the realism factor. I hate seeing that the whole (mega-)base receives its power from a few small poles, especially if we have medium and large ones too! Yes, these bigger poles increase the distance and area a bit, but I feel that the flow of power should need to be taken care of (volume / amount / whatever you may want to call it), just as we do with the other resources. Belts and pipes have a maximum throughput. I feel that power connections should too. It would be perhaps interesting if the maximum amounts are "hard" limits, meaning that these poles cannot transfer more than this amount of voltage (instead of the damage version)!
The battery drain is also meant to address the idea of efficiency . If I "feed" my factory directly from the power sources (steam, solar, nuclear), then the power flow is direct. If I have batteries for intermediate storage (mainly to accommodate for the day/night cycle) then I'd like to see that some of the power is lost by pushing it to a battery, then getting it back later on. So a small amount lost every "day" would suit this concept.

I'm well aware of the fact that the ideas around recycling and incinerating stuff are included in mods. My hope is that the devs would re-consider adding this to the main game, if enough players (or forum members...) find these interesting / useful / good to have in all their games.

The (semi-)peaceful critters are meant to add a bit of life / movement to the environment, without adding more danger or sense of urgency. You would still need to clear their bases in order to make room for your factory, or you may try building around them, if you wish to "preserve nature". I think it would add more immersion to the world of Factorio.

Last about fluid temperature, I'm considering heat to be something which is not yet fully modeled in Factorio. Yes, we have heat pipes and the water/steam cycle, but I think that by adding heating and cooling to the factory requirements would be an extra dimension which contributes to realism. Heaters and radiators would need to be managed / monitored by a circuit network perhaps.

Thanks again for reading. Hopefully the devs will have a look too...

icarus86 wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 2:49 pm I'm well aware of the fact that the ideas around recycling and incinerating stuff are included in mods. My hope is that the devs would re-consider adding this to the main game, if enough players (or forum members...) find these interesting / useful / good to have in all their games.

What would be the benefit of wasted development-time for a feature that u can already add with a few clicks? I get the idea of recycling, but I dont think thats a feature the game really really need in vanilla. IMHO the devs should use the available time either for bugfixing or for integrate "bigger" ideas - like the electro-train-stuff f.E. - much more worth imho (but sure - every1 has his own opinion on this) Also I guess its after all those years balanced-like what amounts of ores etc. on which settings appear - and if u add recycling, wouldn't that need an overhaul of all ressource-patch-ratio's since suddenly you can re-use some percentage of the raw-ressources?

doppelEben wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:35 pm Also I guess its after all those years balanced-like what amounts of ores etc. on which settings appear - and if u add recycling, wouldn't that need an overhaul of all ressource-patch-ratio's since suddenly you can re-use some percentage of the raw-ressources?

I dare say that this is a bit of an exaggeration here:
1. The percentage of raw materials gained back is the same across all resources, so you always get the same proportion back compared to what you've spent (except for energy production - but I'll get to that in a bit)
2. It would be... less than ideal, to put it mildly... to produce items and then recycle them in order to "gain" resources. Why would you spend 100% of the raw resources, and then the energy needed to produce them, in order to get a fraction of that back, while spending some more in the recycling process?
The idea with recycling, incineration and fuel burning is driven by real-life. Now when I think about it, I think that some energy should be gained back based on the raw materials which are being incinerated / recycled, but it depends which ones are involved...

With regards to mods:
While some mods are clearly "love or hate" and other are QoL improvements or simply "hacks", I think that there are also elements which would genuinely make the game "better" and a more well-rounded experience.
Perhaps some of the ideas added with mods were simply overlooked by the devs (hey, they did an awesome job implementing the current game as it is!), others may have been considered but have then been assigned a lower priority in the development backlog.

I think that ideas such as electric or HO- and/or LO-powered trains are definitely some prime examples of items which should make their way into the main game.