Factorio Dev Tracker

Oh, yes indeed. I forgot about these completely! :D But I did use them actually.

I didn't realize you could create water ice yourself, I just mined it on an asteroid field. I thought the cryonite slush is only for the hypercooling with slush, which seemed less resource efficient so I didn't bother.

I even shipped Methane ice to Nauvis Orbit but never bothered to actually do the oil processing from it, I just kept using barrels for petroleum gas.

At the end yes, but my computer is really bad at running Factorio.

If you can still log in to your Steam account, then it is possible to restore access to your Factorio account.

If you can't login to Steam, you have bigger problems, as eventually Steam will log you out.

I really miss the jetpack now. Without making it super fast, being able to jump over things is just so convenient. But since we have spidertron this isn't nearly as much of a problem.

The beacon mechanics are something I'd consider too, but not sure. I really enjoyed playing with them here as designing things was different, but whether one or the other is better as a whole for vanilla, is much more difficult to evaluate.

The downside if the navigation uplink is that you can't zoom out nearly as much, and to move anywhere you still have to WASD around, while on map view you can zoom out, move your mouse, and zoom in. Which is a significant benefit in covering large areas.

I'd say in a different dimension of harder, but I'm mostly guessing. The amount of effort I put in it is already much more than building the victory spaceship. If I add the science that I needed for the spaceship, I guess it's about equal.

Don't worry too much, once you arrive to a problem it will be quite clear how to solve it. Just remember to be in a thruster suit and have lifesupport equipment when you go to space ;)

Oh yeah, that's one thing cannons are incredibly useful for. One of my problems was that I didn't want to create special logic override for the cargo rockets, but it sometimes happened that they weren't full yet to send, but the target planet ran out of fuel cells to power itself.

I just didn't deal with them. I just set up cargo rocket delivery for all the important items, and set up construction robot networks that would repair all the damage.

There's the spaceship victory that's clearly visible in the tech tree, and then there is a "secret" ending that has to do with the alien stuff.

I say "secret" not because it's clear, I say "secret" because from what I've heard, the solution is almost borderline impossible to find. There are people who completed it, but it's not many, and they are REALLY hardcore into SE.

The community around SE holds it as a serious secret so don't expect to get much stray information, though if you ask nicely they will spoil it for you in personal messages. :)

In my opinion the secrecy is actually way too much, to the degree it's really unclear how to even start with the ending.

One thing I believe is that it should be made clear that you can mine the artifacts, in fact you have to. I was afraid I would not be able to put them back if I deconstructed them, but it's quite the opposite.

And no, I didn't just spoil it for you. There is a LONG journey ahead of ...

Best 3:

1. Controlling cargo rockets
2. Arcospheres
3. Spaceships

Worst 3:

1. Ending grind of insane amount of Naquium and Deep science packs necessary to allow building large enough ship. Once you research the victory condition, it should already be possible to reasonably build the winning ship. Maybe I'm missing something significant and it's possible?
2. Tiers 3 and 4 of the four space science packs felt mostly like "just another level", while I feel like the interesting complexity could be fit just all into tier 2. With the momentum from some significant unlocks that I was looking to, this was not too terrible, but it still felt like especially tier 4 is there just because 4 is a nice number. However, SE isn't declared complete so maybe there will be some more unlocks that make this part feel better.
3. Setting up the first tier of each colour of space science packs was quite a bit of work, but mainly once it was all ...

Not in terms of seriously considering it, by quite far, no.

Honestly I haven't played Bob's mods for years, last time I did it was just "and now go get the next tiers of machines" which wasn't really interesting for me.

I haven't played Angel's either, but I guess the processing chains are even more complicated/unreadable in Angel's.

The real meat of Space eploration for me was the completely different things, not just "the new recipes", though those were really nice as well. Not too over the top retard complex, but there are some loops that are pretty cool.

Thank you for the long yet valid and constructive reply!

Some of your points I agree with, although the pluses still massively outweight them for me.

In general I'say K2 and SE are the polar opposites in many things. I did enjoy K2, but I find SE a lot better in design.

- AAI industries I'm not terribly attached to, and I agree that it's just extending the early game, moving you further away from the real stuff. I enjoyed having at least a couple things different from the start so I didn't mind much.

- Beacon overload I adore. Being able to retrofit beacons into existing spaghet is something I always wanted, and the wide area beacons allow for basically any build, which is fun as you design each thing differently, not the same 10 or 12 beacons around every machine.

- On some recipes the pipe connection is quite interesting, like the hypercoolers. That Factorio pipes treat the output-output connections of neighbouring buildings as same fluid s...

On Nauvis I generally just ride trains for long distances because that's fastest.

Whenever there's no rails and I just want to get somewhere without mashing WASD, I ride a spidertron.

However, SE adds Jetpack equipment that lets you fly. The more of those you have in your armor, the faster you can fly.

In the late game the jetpacks become seriously quick.

I'm no circuitry wizard myself, but just with simple logic you can do pretty much everything. It's IMO more about telling what the conditions for some action should be rather than understanding combinators in and out, though of course that helps.

I wanted to have a clean experience so I added an absolute minimum. I only added the Mandatory dependencies, not the optional ones (except high resolution SE graphics).

I added things to allow the Navigation uplink insert modules https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ModuleInserter

and to mess with circuit wires ...

This is quite obviously something that crossed my mind many times.

Going to space is probably the most obvious idea that we're indeed considering.

Overall it definitely feels like it's trying to be an expansion, and in concept it succeeds quite well. Though of course if we were to get inspired by this, the results would still be quite different. Overall I'd say much, much, muuuch less technologies and recipes for sure, a part of having Factorio well moddable is by not adding excessive amount of things, so mods have the opportunity to add things on top. If mods have to replace or remove things, conflicts between mods are more likely.

In general the pacing is really hardcore, often times in SE there are segments that simply take completely mental amount of brute force production throughput, which is a good thing as it makes steps meaningful, and expanding production is IMO the most enjoyable thing to do in Factorio (part of why we don't need 666 recipes). But ...

Thank you Earendel, this has been an absolutely unimaginable experience.

I was consistently and repeatedly surprised, very positively, throughout.

The fact that the mod adds much more than "just another 300 recipes", it adds actual meaningful and super interesting mechanics that really stretched my brain many times, and I enjoyed the hell out of that.

I am thoroughly impressed at the quality of the game design decisions that go into Space exploration.

I absolutely cannot overstate how much I appreciate that such a big mod doesn't attempt to do "all the mandatory things". Like adding the "obvious must haves" like loaders, inserter source/drop target customization, extending lengths of underground belts/pipes, adding overpowered weaponry or just adding more machines of the same type with tiers, "Machine Mk++". Instead it adds only meaningful, interesting things. Upgrades mostly aren't just straight forward, and introduce new and different problems.

I think there was a bug in 0.18/1.0, where it would not correctly trigger the nests, it should be fixed in 1.1, as well as the win condition being more strict