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Friday Facts #421 - Optimizations 2.0

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Hello,
We all love building bigger and bigger, but hitting the UPS ceiling really puts a damper on the mood.
Thats why we must continue our endless quest to optimize the game.

Roboports OptimizationRseding

I've profiled many save files over the years of working on Factorio and frequently see saves where logistics and or construction robots are taking a lot of update time. That's nothing new, but along with robots come Roboports - in large numbers.

A typical factory with lots of roboports.

Roboports have never been "slow" but they're always present and people are encouraged to build a lot of them - even more in the upcoming Space Age where you want to do a lot remotely. After the most recent play-testing session, the resulting save once again showed them taking some small, but non-zero amount of time, and it got...

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19 Jul

Friday Facts #420 - Fusion Reactor

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Friday Facts #420 - Fusion Reactor

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Hello,
I'm sure you're familiar with the good old Nuclear reactor. It's a fission reactor that makes a lot of power in conjunction with its steam turbines. The nuclear energy system is unlocked on Nauvis, and in the context of Space Age, that makes it an early-to-mid game unlock.

For the planet Nauvis, nuclear power is great for the whole game. Water is endless, and uranium is plentiful. For space platforms it's not ideal because it takes a lot of water and a fair amount of space. Solar panels are so good in space, especially near the sun, that it's harder to justify a reactor on a small platform. If you're mainly going around Fulgora then nuclear becomes more competitive because Fulgora has more ice from asteroids and less solar energy.

Later, when you head to the 4th new planet, nuclear becomes a much better option because the solar power is so low and ice is more abundant. At that point, you've had nuclear as an option for all the 5 ...

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12 Jul

Friday Facts #419 - Display Panel & Inserter pickup fixes

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Friday Facts #419 - Display Panel & Inserter pickup fixes

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Hello,
Welcome to our facts for the week.

Sign posts or bulletin boards are a common sight in videos games, probably not far behind the ubiquitous wooden crate or explosive barrel. They are a nice clean understandable way to communicate with the player, and it was something we wanted to see in Factorio for a long time...

Display Panel - DesignEarendel

The full functionality of the new display entity will be fully explained further below. For the design, all we need to know is that it is an entity that can display any icon of your choice (item, recipe, virtual signal).

The first version I saw was a signpost added by Klonan. It was a nice placeholder, and the general concept of the display entity as a signpost was something to consider. In theory a signpost could work, but there are a few detracting factors:

  1. A signpost is primarily a 2D structure, and by that I mean it is tall and flat but doesn't...
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05 Jul

Friday Facts #418 - Space Age release date

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Originally posted by [deleted]

[deleted]

yes

Friday Facts #418 - Space Age release date

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Why do productivity modules only work on intermediates?

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Originally posted by scarhoof

Since you have capped Productivity to 300% and implemented all the other restrictions, have you ever considered allowing them back in beacons in certain scenarios? Maybe set a cap on how much you get from them if they are broadcast? Could be interesting as it would allow for more variety in builds.

Not really. The 300% productivity is only achiavable in the very late end game with limited number of recipes. The overall boost from all of the bonuses available combined is enough. We don't need to break the game by semi-forcing productivity beacons everywhere.

Friday Facts #418 - Space Age release date

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Hello,
Today we want to share some exciting news!

Factorio: Space Age - Release date

We plan to release Factorio: Space Age expansion on October 21st 2024. The reasoning for this date is that it will give us enough time after summer vacations to polish the release, while also leaving enough time afterwards if we need to do bugfix patches before the Christmas holidays.

The price of the Space age expansion will be $35.00, the same price as the current base game.

You can wishlist the game now over on ...

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04 Jul

I have a fear that the expansion will not be for me

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You might be right. Because you are generally expected to build bigger in the expansion. But definetly not so much bigger, if you just want to progress.

I tried to steer the game design into a direction where if you compare the end state you had (all (nauvis) research finished), things should be ok because:

1) You finish all nauvis only research faster compared to vanilla

2) The rocket is cheaper and simplier compared to vanilla

3) The planets are effectivelly an alternative to progress compared to the infinite research, which should be more fun.

4) You can build "relatively" small if you want to just finish the game, there is one tester who finished in 37 hours by trying to go as minimalistic as possible (some semi/exploits were used, which we want to patch, so it will be more), but it still wouldn't be crazily more. We finished our MP playtrhough with very seldom use of quality, so we kind of proved it is far from necessary.

Obvious...

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01 Jul

What 1 million spm is.

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Originally posted by Lizzymandias

Yeah I agree. Quality is useful for things that will be built and exist permanently, not for things that get consumed for science.

quality science packs doesn't make sense indeed (one if the reason is, that there still will be normal production all these quality ingredients are supposed to support). But quality ammo or fuel has bonuses. I didn't try it with ammo, but quality fuel allows train acceleration and max speed to be increased a bit. And since trains generally don't eat that much, and fuel isn't that expensive, it is a reasonable thing to do in the end game stage of the game.


28 Jun

Friday Facts #417 - Space Age development

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Originally posted by korneev123123

Could you please describe how landing pads work? Orbital platform inventory is instantly available for extraction from landing pad? Or some kind of delivery cannon required?

What if there are multiple platforms in orbit? How to select which one is "connected"?

Is it possible to transfer items between platforms?

It works similarly as with logistic network. Landing pack has logistic requets which can be satisfied by the set of platforms (working as passive provider chests) currently on orbit. It is not teleported, but transported by a capsule with a delay

Just made a mod that makes all buildings you place have 1 health.

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Originally posted by zantax_holyshield

Can you also disable building function if it is not on full health? If yes then you could emulate how it is in many RTS games, where buildings are low health when you plop them down and you have to actually build them before they start to function (or wait untill they are built).

There is a mod for that: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Building_Time

Friday Facts #417 - Space Age development

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Originally posted by jDomantas

100% productivity bonus does wonderful things. For example - 5spm needs 1 belt of iron and copper ore. If you add 100% productivity to everything, you get 200spm out of the same amount of resources.

Productivity boost calculated with warptorio2 modules, as the mod adds that while barely changing existing recipes. Of course the comparison does not match what will happen in the expansion (warp modules apply productivity to every recipe, but also we don't take into account buildings with builtin prod bonus or prod researches, we don't know recipes for the new science packs, etc...). But you can see what could happen if you take just base game + quality mod, without space age.

Don't forget about the productivity researches (only available for specific set of items, but still important)

Friday Facts #417 - Space Age development

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Originally posted by Humble-Hawk-7450

we have just one expandable landing pad per planet.

It's nice to know that throughput isn't capped by the landing pad. When they first announced there could only be one, a lot of people had concerns about max SPM.

It kind of is capped by it, but the cap is huge, nothing to worry about.

Friday Facts #417 - Space Age development

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Friday Facts #417 - Space Age development

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Hello,
we usually show finished stuff in Friday facts these days, but I personally always liked to have a peek behind the curtains and see the (temporary) mess there. This motivated me to do some kind of overview of how the overall expansion development felt from my perspective. If you are like me, you might appreciate it.

Our story starts in February 2021 with ...

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22 Jun

Today is a sad day... Just found out Factorios current rating :(

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Originally posted by narrill

Except that corporate profit margins surged during the pandemic, not nominal profits. That means profits became larger than they should have been proportional to revenue, which doesn't happen with inflation caused purely by an increase in the supply of money.

The articles I linked, which you clearly didn't read, explain this.

Also, no, that has nothing to do with anything I'm saying. You're the only one with a vested interest in pushing a "capitalists did nothing wrong, it was all the government's fault" narrative. You're the one that brought this up.

Edit: I can't anymore with this, this is such a waste of time.

Yes, I know the articles stated that profits went higher, and if the wages didn't go up appropriatelly, than yes, people working for these corporations had wages effectivelly shrinked. But it is a different subject, which doesn't actually explain that corporate greed would cause inflation. It would just affect that these corporations take advantage of it to improve margins.

Getting tired, that is a good sign. We are revealing the errors in the assimuptions you have. These assumptions are creating your worldview, and you are getting tired, because your brain defensive mechanism is kicking on, trying to avoid changing the worldview as much as possible.

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

So, if I demanipulate a single person it would be worth it.

Today is a sad day... Just found out Factorios current rating :(

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Originally posted by narrill

Are you trolling? I would say we are more consumer friendly than about 99.9% of other companies.

But your pricing model isn't. The entire rest of the industry allows their games to depreciate with inflation, and you're saying you won't do that. That is a less consumer-friendly pricing strategy.

And you're deluding yourself if you think you're the only consumer friendly studio out there, especially among projects of this caliber. I can think of several other projects off the top of my head that have no microtransactions, have put out years of large, free updates, and have never increased their prices. Two of which are your largest competitors, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program.

After we put more than year of work working 14 hours a day 7 days a week for free.

It wasn't "for free," it was for the product you were planning to sell, which you did end up selling many year...

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Let me focus on the most fact based thing to debunk, because somehow I smell this motivates you towards all of this:

Just search "money printing in the us during pandemic". So they apparently printed 27% extra money. And soon after that, there was a surge inflation, what a conicidence.

Yes, I understand there is a big motivation to blame the corporations, and coin terms like greedflation, to somehow achieve that so many people get confused and blame anyone but the real villain.


21 Jun

Today is a sad day... Just found out Factorios current rating :(

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Originally posted by narrill

I have no idea how you can say "greedy" is a subjective term, acknowledge that you're adopting a less consumer-friendly pricing strategy than everyone else for no other reason than that you feel you can, and then turn around and say people are "generally incorrect" for seeing that pricing strategy as greedy.

Beyond that, a lot of what you're saying is simply wrong.

You have the investment cost, the risk of the investment (the bigger risk the bigger rewards often)

Factorio was crowdfunded, and you sold early access through almost the entire development process. Compared to the vast majority of game projects your investment and risk were both extremely low.

The labor wasn't done, the game is being worked on.

The vast majority of your work since 1.1 (which as I've pointed out was two full years before the price increase) has gone toward Space Age, which is a new product you plan to sell. So n...

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"Acknowledge that you're adopting a less consumer-friendly pricing strategy than everyone else"

Are you trolling? I would say we are more consumer friendly than about 99.9% of other companies.

"Factorio was crowdfunded, and you sold early access through almost the entire development process. Compared to the vast majority of game projects your investment and risk were both extremely low."

Wrong. After we put more than year of work working 14 hours a day 7 days a week for free. This, lets say a million dollars worth invested. It is many times more than the money we got in the campaign and could go all into nothing. So the risk was already there. And after the campaign, we invested all of the money to keep going while barely getting along for another year at least, so even more risk, extremly big risk, when you think about how many games are released, and how many don't make anything.

"The vast majority of your work since 1.1 (which as I've pointed out ...

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