There is one key thing which is probably miscommunicated: The "speed module quality penalty" does not mean that if you put Uncommon ingredients in an assembling machine, you will get Normal outputs.
What it means is, if there's an assembling machine with quality modules, you Really don't want it to be influenced by any speed beacons as it will reduce the chance of uptick.
No! :)
... and as you've read in the FFF I'm sure, higher quality mining drills drain less resource which effectively multiplies with mining productivity,
I feel like a lot of people who are saying they don't like this are forgetting that it's completely optional. Not only do you not have to engage with quality, it sounds like you can just avoid researching it altogether (unless quality modules are required in some unrevealed space age crafts). There are some valid criticisms to be made (the quality names especially), but I think converting this system into modules was the correct way to handle it
Yes, no quality related research is required to complete the game in space age.
Haven't seen anyone share my question/concern here yet.
If quality doesn't affect science production, then this is just about malls. You'll have your normal prod/speed setup for science, but you'll need to create a whole new thing for malls. You can't just leech ingredients from science anymore.
Creating malls is already an unpopular part of Factorio, so I wonder how this will pan out. I'm waiting to try it out before forming a stronger opinion.
You can still import normal quality circuits etc into the mall, and just recycle the final products in the mall, that making the whole quality problems stay in the mall.
Three questions for the developers:
- Does the recycling machine have a fluid output, or will recycling something like batteries simply fail to recover the sulfuric acid?
- How does the quality system interact with train scheduling? If I have a locomotive set to depart when the inventory is full, but a high-quality gear somehow sneaks onto the wagon, will that train be stuck waiting at the station until enough high-quality gears arrive to fill that one stack?
- Will the mod API provide a way for recipes to weight quality output besides influence of modules? Say, a more expensive version of the green circuit recipe that provides a higher chance to output a better quality green circuit?
All fluids get lost on recycling, furthermore no smelting or chemical recipes can get reversed.
Quality items behave completely as separate items, so a full train with having a single quality gear in some slot will prevent the train from completing inventory full condition.
Recipes with a specific quality, I don't know.
Two questions regarding mixed quality production and separate stacks.
Does an assembler accept mixed quality items as input for its recipe - Like, 2 perfect/legendary copper cable and 1 normal/basic iron plate and one normal/basic copper cable to make a green circuit?
If yes, how is the product quality calculated?
There is a specific mode "Any quality" that you have to explicitly choose to allow mixing ingredients of different qualities. The lowest ingredient will be considered only, higher quality on the others is excessive and will have no beneficial effect.
do higher quality train fuel increase top speed and acceleration?
Not at the moment but that may still change
Is quality moddable? Can you add more quality types with modding?
Yes, they are prototypes like everything else, you can change their bonuses, "hardness" (the probability to get the next tier), names and count of them.
One question, can train locomotives have higher quality too? I would love a acceleration bonus on them too
No, primarily because we don't have an automatic way of upgrading locomotives.
Read moreHmm. Interested feature. I'm mixed on it.
Pro: From the sounds of things, you do not get "Quality" Items until you use the Quality Module. So your miners won't be spitting out "Quality" Ore until you put the modules into them. This means that you can beat the game and ignore this system if you don't like it, like the circuit network.
Con: Once you start using Quality Modules, it might be VERY VERY PAINFUL. Not only will they start to take up space in Trains or other inventory locations, they will also end up in places you might not expect, due to the nature of Factorio factories being... intertwined after a while.
Pro: Higher quality items might help alleviate beacon spamming as a strategy in the early late-game.
Con: It might make the end-late-game way, WAY worse as q5 beacons with q5 modules are now so much more effective.
Pro: This does mean your starter base will likely not produce these items, and instead they will be the focus of mega b...
There's a lot more interesting details about this. Generally there's 2 main approaches:
More complicated approach:
- Put quality modules in every steps you can
- Means a lot of complications with where you route which items.
- It's possible to mix qualities, but the result will be of the lowest quality. This way you can make use of all items.
This is generally really complicated and I don't think you'd typically want to do this. Maybe at the early stages of the game you just shove quality modules in various machines so that you could get quality ingredients for a 1-off thing (like armor, equipment or tank) - then you're not really relying on RNG and just on your strategic decision of putting those modules in machines early so they build up the quality parts.
Simpler approach:
- Put productivity modules everywhere on for example circuit production
- Put quality modules only on the final product (Productivity module)
... Read moreI don't think the random element fits factorio well. Surely the quality module should charge a bar like the productivity module does?
I feel like a predictable system would allow for more depth of design, such as integrating well with the circuit network
I actually think that random element fits factorio. As others pointed out, the kovarex process and the uranium processing also has random in it and it shows how nicely it breaks the design monotony.
There is another random element on the space platform, where you can catch different kind of asteroids, process them, and deal with the fact, that it is not the perfect ratio you want.
The point is, that perfect ratio setups might be fun, and still will be in the game (although I almost never do perfect ratios personally, I just put things down and look for bottlenecks). But it is boring to have everything the same and exact, having a system which fluctuates and you have to deal with all the possible ways it can break is just additonal design challenge.
Having these changes in the way you build and think about the game, to avoid doing the typical belt->inserter->assembler->inserter->belt template everywhere was one of the goals in the expansions, and there will...
Read moreTo be honest it sounds like it would be quite tedious feature, knowing me (and I'm probably not alone on this) I would just recycle everything that isn't the best quality so entire factory only uses the top quality components and products.
The problem with this is, that the costs are quite significant so it's very much worth it to not ignore steps. Also, the last two quality tiers are unlocked later on planets so you'd have to skip it entirely at the first half of the game, and it's quite worth it to have just a handful of better machines on the space platform for example, or a few higher quality productivity modules in the most resource expensive recipes.
Does the endgame become gambling on high rarity parts that otherwise get recycled into another chance of becoming high quality because rng?
I don't like it, and I play gacha games. Hopefully this can be turned off. The module is fine, no need to change it for the sake of change.
I get how the whole "RNG" feels strange at first, but in practice you're mostly not producing single units of anything, rather mass quantities. So in the end it's really just a statistic rather than hoping for something to drop individually.
To make things clear, the quality content is exclusively part of the expansion. The non-expansion binary works the same internally, it just doesn't allow any mod to define anything other than the normal quality.
This feels a bit icky to me. I get why, they want to encourage more people to get the expansion, but it also means fragmenting mods more since they now have to deal with supporting both vanilla or expansion. Many might just opt to default require expansion. I know it wont impact many, me included, as we will just get the expansion. But it feels like the wrong decision.
Only comparison I can make is something like StarCraft II, where each DLC added new things, but all engine features were still fully available to modders. The only limitation was the use of assets new assets and obviously mods that just replicated the expansion would be removed.
It is actually the opposite, using the same binary means mods don't need separate versions and or need to support 2 different APIs.
The names in particular feel rather out of place. "Epic" and "Legendary" are evocative of your usual fantasy setting which is very much at odds with Factorio's smoggy quasi-dieselpunk aesthetic.
I just found it amusing to have legendary iron plate.
I'm a bit torn on quality. On one hand it could be a fun way to design around absurdly powerful items, on the other it doesn't feel like Factorio. The quality indicator seems out of place too, but maybe it's just a place holder.
How do stacks work now? One stack for each quality?
Yes, quality stacks are independent.
Hello,
Today we are going to talk a little bit about a big feature in the expansion, Quality!
Quality is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
What truth?
That you are a noob, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into normal quality. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your factory.
You take the blue module, the story ends, you wake up in your factory and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the white module, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Since I just got used to plan and execute these kind of changes. I learned to imagine any ideas like that and think about how it would work etc. So far so good, but the problem is, that something you learn to do almost automatically can't be so easily turned off. So whenever I use any software (or system), I can't stop thinking of ways how to improve it, how greatly it would work and the approach to just not accept the state in which things are kicks in. And then I get more and more annoyed by the lack of that feature anytime I use the software which I can't simply change. I'm sure it is not that uncommon, but still, it can get pretty annoying.
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