I work at a semi conductor company. That company produces so many silicon wafers. The silicon wafers are checked for quality and those of lesser quality are reprocessed. I view this feature in factorio the same.
Thanks.
There are too many people out there, who think that automation in the real world is infinitelly precise and there are no better or worst products. Therefore, they assume that it doesn't factorio, but the reality is just the opposite.
From my own experience, you can even build a 16k spm megabase without a single reactor. However, I definitely needed uranium to get the necessary train acceleration/speed. The trains are consuming about 10 nuclear fuel per minute.
Since all the multiplicative factors of quality stuff on production, speed and solar panels. The ratio between production and power generation tends to be way less extreme (less power generation) in megabases compared to vanilla, which is also a wanted effect.
“I hate this mechanic” is perfectly fine as feedback. Not the most useful form but it’s still worth knowing that a lot of people dislike an idea.
If people really understand the mechanics and their implications and hate it, its valid stance. But this post was mainly addressed to people which hated it for all the wrong reasons.
To put a price to that - according to the screenshot the 2nd level needs 2250 science packs. I think it's safe to assume the same exponential progression as with e.g. artillery range.
Then, if I put it into my spreadsheet correctly, the total needed to get to level 30, is 1,207,959,550,875.
Assuming that all the quality improvements allow us to reach 50k spm, that's just over 1100 years of playtime; and we would have to get to 1M spm to be able to live to see level 30. And then it takes just as long as all previous levels together, to research level 31...
Not all exponentials have 2 as a base :)
Basically, the lower the base is, the more likely it is, that it have a meaning to choose between the recipes strategically, instead of making everything at the same level.
Most of these seem like low output volume recipes, is that on purpose? It makes sense to me, you are unlikely to fill a full belt of steel, so the extra productivity won't cause any issues in most cases. (and it's not a big deal to design these factories with some extra output belt capacity in mind)
Plastic seems like the odd one out in that aspect tho. I like the inclusion of an oil product, but I feel like a combined oil processing/liquefaction or just rocket fuel would make more sense.
Yea, low output volume recipes are the good choise because of the reasons you provided.
Also I like that we have one infinite research that doesn't even need space science, so you have more choises of what you want to do at each stage of the game.
If the cost is exponential like the current ones, even very large factories won’t be touching level 30. Two to the power of 30 is a lot.
It depends on the base of exponent. There are interesting differences when the exponent is for example 2 versus 1.8 or 1.5 etc.
Do technologies that require a trigger work even if you trigger it while the technology is locked behind other technologies? Like does it "remember" that you triggered it in the past, so you would instantly research it once it becomes available?
That is a good question. I think that it currently unlocks no matter what, but I can imagine it being configurable. Or maybe there should be another state of the technology which would mean something like "triggered, but waiting for prerequisities to be unlocked", basically what you suggest.
It would probably make the most sense.
I would like to have the option to show a message in chat when a research is completed, like in the "Improved Resarch Queue" mod by sonaxaton. With the queue like it is now it is easy to miss what research was completed.
We somehow forgot to include it in the FFF, even when I implemented it yesterday just to make the topic a whole. (Implemented sounds little bit too much for the 6 lines of changes, including the localisation and changelog entry)
Triggered research sounds great! Perhaps they should be color coded differently in the research tree so that you can identify what needs manual action.
Will research always be unlocked by either science packs or trigger, or can a research require both?
You can distinquish them by not having science pack icons in the bottom. If both trigger and research is desired, it can be easily just two technologies one depending on another.
1 - if quality probability isn't a problem because with a big factory it will turn into ratios why not have it as a ratio from the start, instead of having 25% probability to make a better tier why not have every fourth item better (still dislike it tho, it will make blueprints worse and
putting same recycler loop for every building in mall seems boring) 2 - productivity research will make ratios impossible
:(
We actually spent some time in the office discussing the alternative, to change the quality to work as progress bar, basically, you would have to go through, lets say, 4 cycles of production, to produce one result, but of higher quality. It has some pros and cons.
The main con is, that some of the more intricate theory-crafting setups wouldn't exist anymore. Also as it was mentioned, it would probably mean loosing the progress towards legendary when you relocate the building or just change a recipe, which could be quite a huge loss with some of the legendary stuff.
I don't like gating refineries and chemplant research behind setting up an oil pumpjack.
Currently, I automate tens of pumpjacks, refineries, and chemplants, along with necessary railway, then set up a refinery outpost somewhere with oil + coal + water in one go.
The new system would require going there once to set up pumpjacks to unlock the research, going back to your main base to automate refineries/chemplants, and then finally going back to set up the rest of the outpost.
We are aware of this. The gameplay changes, so you have to first acquire oil before being able to even start researching the infrastructure to eventually craft and build it. The concesus was, that it basically just adds a new constraint on the way you progress through the middle game, which can be part of the strategy.
For example, if you want to be efficient, you need to prepare a time when your factory can build what you need, while you find the oil in advance.
What happens to the infinity research when your base prod bonus is 300%? It wouldn't provide any more bonuses right? So what's the point of continuing to research it?
30 levels will probably be too expensive to make it reachable in a normal way. Or we can just change from unlimited to 30 levels, but virtually infinite anyway.
What was the determining factor for which recipes have been chosen? From the post it seems like high cost intermediates.
We chose several important/influental recipes. There are things like steel (Something you can do before you go to space), blue chips, plastic, low density structure and few other things. But these things can change easily, so the list might change on a whim.
Infinite crafting productivity research will make it impossible to have lasting perfect assembler ratios for endgame items, which sounds pretty exciting. Transporting materials by train to a dedicated production site will probably be a lot more effective, and you might even oversaturate your output belts eventually. Interesting stuff to think about during the most monotonous part of the game.
Also love the changes to early game research, I felt overwhelmed when I started even in the tutorial. They won't make a difference to someone who already knows what they're doing, but they'll help get new players used to all their starting tools.
Keep in mind that just few selected recipes have this research, not all.
For modding, are Quality tiers basically a new prototype definition, or is there only a specific set of attributes that can be varied by Quality? So if somebody wants high Quality beacons to be OP, that could be a mod?
Quality tiers are a new prototype definitions and their names, power, probabilities and tiers are part of the moddable definition.
But their effect on different entity types isn't moddable currently.
I have the impression that only a few items are going to be worth upgrading. Probably the devs decided that if quality is a property of any item, they might as well have fun and set the bonuses to whatever would make sense in-universe. From a cost/benefit perspective, I expect that just the personal items and the spaceship components (since it'll have space and energy constraints) would be worth it.
When it comes to priority, this is how I played it:
The first priority is the quality modules, as you want to improve the efficiency in which you make more quality modules, and other quality stuff.
Second most impactful are the productivity modules, as they greatly improve the production of everything.
Right after that we have the speed modules and assemblers (this includes any producing machine), as they improve the return of investment of the quality productivity modules.
Big priority is also inserters, since they are quite cheap, so making them in higher quality isn't that expensive, and with the beaconed super fast productions, inserters could become the bottleneck otherwise. This is generally very important factor, as quality is a multiplier on price, so making high quality labs, which are very cheap, might be much more sensible to do sooner compared to power armor 2, which is quite expensive on its own for example.
The personal armor/eq...
Read moreIs it not pretty common to have a remote factory that build something like plastic and bring them to another part of your factory via trains? If you add some quality modules to your plastic factory, you have to deal with the factory producing multiple quality types of plastic that have to get loaded into trains.
You could use quality modules in these specialised remote Factories, but in practice people (including me) just use the improved productivity modules in these to avoid having to deal with quality items on a big scale.
And if we need a plastic locally in higher quality, it is usually a smaller scale, and we do it locally, or just avoid it at all.
The point is, that using quality on a big scale remote setups is a probably a super late game strategy, which is hard to manage, and the motivation to do so is to squeeze the extra quality output for the sake of complications which could be a wanted challenge at this point.
Oh ok. I thought quality would come regardless, in which case managing malls would be a nightmare because you might limit a chest to one stack and then you get two different qualities and the assembler output is jammed even though you potentially only have one item in the stack.
If quality probabilities would be automatically applied everywhere it would be a horrible pain indeed.
Existing factories will work as before, the only change happens when you insert quality module somewhere, and then, you need to deal with the outcome.
I'm afraid that more people got confused about it.
Does that mean that until quality is researched, you only get normal quality items? Otherwise it sounds like stacks would break.
The start of quality is slightly unclear in the article.
"Not all of the quality tiers will be available from the beginning" sounds like some quality tiers are available (but invisible) from the beginning of the game. Even though the next phrase suggests that's the beginning of quality research.
You cant normally (without usage of cheats or editor) get the quality modules before activating the research, but yes, theoretically if you cheated the quality modules in before the technology would be researched, the modules wouldn't really do anything useful, as they couldn't go higher then normal quality.
Here, by the beginning, we mean the research of the first tier of quality modules.
I'm more worried about my trains. I know they've said there will be some updates to trains but right now everything would instantly break. The current (and common) way of handling trains is just a "wait until full" -> "wait until empty" but this doesn't work if you never get a full stack of whatever quality was inserted into the train.
I never saw a base where people would transport quality stuff by trains. It is something you rarely want or need.
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