Factorio

I've been playing Factorio for ages - at least since August 14. I tend to get burnt out on it, though, and bounce back to Minecraft for my "industry from wilderness" fix. There are a some good mods out there already, for those who want even more complexity. I really like the DyTech mods.

I'll probably swing back later in the year.

I'm glad that this made it to Steam, mostly because it reminded me that I wanted to get this game for several months.

Mods tend to be terrible at describing themselves. This seems to go for DyTech as well. See the completely empty since 2014 beginner's guide/manual.

Can you describe what it is in a nutshell Moggy? Any idea if its even compatible with the current version?

[b]

polypusher wrote:

Can you describe what it is in a nutshell Moggy? Any idea if its even compatible with the current version?

It adds a ton more techs, adds more depth to the power creation options (adding secondary and tertiary power streams) and gives the aliens a lot more variety and toughness. It does make the game harder in so far as the aliens are a LOT more aggressive and the tech expansion pathways are much deeper. It adds a bunch more inserters as well. Highly recommended. sort of a "DyP" for Factorio.

I've not played Factorio for about 5 months, so not sure what the current state is. Back then the mod maker kept it pretty current.

Interesting stuff. I've decided that the stock aliens are pretty worthless. After a couple of near-full playthroughs with aliens, I just turn them to 'very small' and peaceful and ignore them until I need those pink things. When I was playing with them enabled, the threat they added just wasn't adding to the gameplay. I'd just go repair something every once in a while (until I got construction robots) and kept a handful of turrets supplied.

This weekend I started a new map with a different idea. I like building train routes and stations but the basic settings don't really give you any need to do that. So I started a new map with Very Large, Very Rare, and Poor resource pools with a very small starting area. Rather than getting to work automating everything like I usually do, and filling up my space, I focused on resource processing and just using chests and inserters to automate production of things like circuit boards and red/green bottles. This is bootstrapping me up to railroads and now I'll get to go explore and find prime spots for some bigger train stations.

Should be fun.

Is there any way to play without biters without interrupting the normal tech tree? How do you get artifacts without them?

Not in the base game i think, but i did see a mod that added the ability to craft them using rare mining outputs (it was a few days ago, soz, but it would have been near the top of the mod listings).

MightyMooquack wrote:

I've played this game for a pretty long time at this point, so I have red/green science production pretty much down to a T. I've got a screenshot of my current setup over here, if you want to take a look. Given sufficient iron and copper supplies, that setup should produce each of them at a rate of 30 items/minute.

How on earth does that splitter/combiner on the left side work? You're inputting single lines of two components, and ending up with two belts of mixed components outbound. Is that just two splitters, side by side?

You mean the conveyer/placer splitter? The items on the left get split and appear on the left of the outputs, and ditto for the right.

I must be misremembering how those work. I thought they had only one input, splitting to two outputs.

Tamren wrote:

Is there any way to play without biters without interrupting the normal tech tree? How do you get artifacts without them?

Playing with them on Peaceful with Very Small and Very Rare bases is just as good. By the time you need their pink sphere things you can just roll over them with a tank. (literally, don't bother with the gun)

Malor wrote:

How on earth does that splitter/combiner on the left side work? You're inputting single lines of two components, and ending up with two belts of mixed components outbound. Is that just two splitters, side by side?

Look closer, the belts and inserters converge onto a tile of belt from both sides, this fills half of the belt with belts and the other half with inserters. This is then fed into one side of a splitter which evenly divides this combined belt into two outputs. A lot of the complexity of the game is figuring out conveyor belt tricks like this, it's like learning to tie knots.

Malor wrote:

I must be misremembering how those work. I thought they had only one input, splitting to two outputs.

Splitters actually have two inputs, so they can act as splitters, mergers, or both at the same time (balancers). But that's not what's happening here.

If you look closely at the belt that actually leads into the splitter, the two lines leading into it are loading the separate lanes of that belt. That combined belt is then the thing that is being split. Control over the individual lanes of your belts is key to a lot of compact belt design.

Curiously, the same effect would have been achieved if I had directed each item into its own input on the splitter. The splitter maintains lanes, and each item is already in its own lane, so it would have split them between the outputs separately.

I'm starting to get the impression that the Factorio community (or at least the loudest portion) is a bunch of stodgy old traditionalists who don't like newfangled ideas and prefer to do things their grandpappy did. Case in point the loader idea, it's a 2x1 device that unloads a container onto a belt, or a belt onto a container with full throughput. This is needed because you can't physically fit enough robot arms around the same container to unload it's contents at maximum speed. Trains partially avoid this problem because they have more surface area to pull items from. But a typical train station is still a clusterf*ck of robot arms unloading onto belts, that combine with other belts that converge onto more belts that eventually feed into one single belt with no wasted space. The new loader device would replace all of that busywork with a conveyor belt that simply pipes stuff out of the train car at full speed.

But the forums are full of people just tripping over themselves arguing that these items would somehow ruin the game. There are so many of them that they have almost started forming into tribes. Some don't like the idea because it somehow obsoletes all of the designs they already have. Some don't like it because they say they would be "forced" to use them. Some refuse to support anything that would usurp their robot overlords. Some don't like them just because they take up 2 tiles instead of one. And the most the shrill seem to be complaining that it would just be too EASY.

Personally I agree with some of the moderate voices that:

1. Some of the things in this game are stupidly ridiculously ludicrously overcomplicated. There are many tasks in this game that require 10, 20 or even more separate objects to do something that in real life would take one. It's as if the faucet on your kitchen sink was actually a dozen robots with cups that dip into a barrel of water and pour in sequence to make an (almost) unbroken stream of water.
2. It's currently too hard to set up a train station. It's tediously time consuming until you get construction robots and they sprawl all over the place.
3. Belts are quite frankly obsoleted by robots. No belt setup could ever hope to compete with a swarm of a thousand robots carrying 5 items at a time. Barring charging stations there is nothing stopping players from just brute forcing by sheer numbers alone.
4. Designs that use hundreds of robot arms to do simple jobs also eat up precious CPU cycles on trivial repetitive tasks. Megafactories are more than capable of bringing i7 computers to their knees and this would go a long way to fixing the lag problems.

I went on a bender for this last night, need to take a break or clowns will at me.

Seriously though this is the only game that I find myself restarting just to try and get the perfect layout at the start.

Flintheart Glomgold wrote:

Seriously though this is the only game that I find myself restarting just to try and get the perfect layout at the start.

I do this with Minecraft. I'm playing FTB's Infinity and adding the Ex Nihilo and Ex Astris mods and go wild with the auto-sieves. Creating a set up with enough power to feed the pulverizers and sieve rows and making sure all the ducts go to the right places can get pretty complicated.

A new update is just downloading, so a restart will be happening (again) tonight

I hate to ask again Moggy, but after 20 minutes of research I can't tell wtf any of those Minecraft mods are. It might be inappropriate for a Factorio thread, but you've suggested there's some similar automation building goodness?

Tamren wrote:

1. Some of the things in this game are stupidly ridiculously ludicrously overcomplicated. There are many tasks in this game that require 10, 20 or even more separate objects to do something that in real life would take one. It's as if the faucet on your kitchen sink was actually a dozen robots with cups that dip into a barrel of water and pour in sequence to make an (almost) unbroken stream of water.

This is where I'm at with this game.

It really scratches the "optimize the sh*t out of it" itch, but it's getting extremely close to being tedious.

I started the 2nd/3rd New Hope mission (the one where you need to clear out the biters), and I was so pissed off at the car controls and combat in general I almost chucked it in. It was only when I realized I had a sh*t-ton of towers and ammo did I actually get anywhere.

AP Erebus wrote:

It really scratches the "optimize the sh*t out of it" itch, but it's getting extremely close to being tedious.

It's already tedious for me. The early hump when you have just a pickaxe to your name and nothing else followed by the even bigger red/green science hump followed by the even bigger blue science hump before you finally get to construction robots and blueprints... Well it's rather painful. I really wish there was a way to play in true sandbox mode with unlimited resources and items where I could just build things with a wave of my hand.

It's surprising to see how some of the "elite" players think about the state of the game. I was watching a stream by one guy who went on a little tangent about planned changes for the upcoming patch. One of the changes was to double train car cargo size from 30 slots to 60. Now when I heard about that the first thing that crossed my mind was "awesome!". I can move more items with the same amount of train cars and it was kind of silly that a train car could only have 30 slots while a crate on the ground can contain twice that. But to hear this guy talk about it, it's the end of the world! He started complaining that "now all of my trains will be half as long" and "what if I like having long trains?" and "this invalidates all of my train station designs". And then not 5 minutes later he opened up a website based calculator to ensure that his new factory stack had it's inputs balanced to the nearest .1 resources per minute.

The entire time I was listening to him all I could think was "...if you want a longer train, can't you just build a longer train"? A lot of these experienced player seem to have an obsessive compulsion to use the most efficient design possible, no more, no less. This isn't unusual, I've seen the same kind of sentiment in multiple places. If you added something to the game that is better than what already exists it's like they have a gun to their head that would force them to use it. And seeing as they are comfortable in their own pillow fort clusterf*ck of complexity they strenuously resist any changes or additions to the formula.

My worry is that this will affect the direction of the game's development, and the developers already seem to be of a similar mind. They announced the loader item and in the same breath worried that it would be overpowered. No goddamit! Give me the damn tools that make my life easier! It's a story I've seen played out countless times in the forums. Someone suggests an item that would reduce the stupid complexity and people either shout it down or respond with some variation of "that's a really cool idea! too bad it will never happen because the developers think it would simplify the game too much".

One case I could point to is the idea of device that swaps the items on each side of a belt so that they reverse "polarity" when fed in from one side and out the other. I would love to have this device, it would make my life a lot easier and open up all sorts of design possibilities. But to hear the forum say it, there is already a stupid belt trick that accomplishes the same thing ergo it would be a waste of time. Said belt trick goes something like this:

1. You have a belt moving south with iron in the right lane and coal in the left lane.
2. You feed this mixed belt into a splitter
3. you put two underground belt entrances in front of the splitter at a perpendicular angle, facing away from each other. Since underground belt openings only occupy a "half" tile, belts feeding onto them from the side can only do so from one lane.
4. You place two underground belt exits beside the entrances, each exit now contains half of the previous lane.
5. You then curve both belts back towards the centre, feed them onto both sides of a single belt moving in the same direction as the original belt.

Presto, you have reversed the position of objects on each lane of a belt! It *only* took THIRTEEN different devices sprawling over a 3x6 area.

But to hear this guy talk about it, it's the end of the world! He started complaining that "now all of my trains will be half as long" and "what if I like having long trains?" and "this invalidates all of my train station designs".

The only difference would be that a train would spend twice as long getting loaded or unloaded.

It strikes me that preserving existing factory designs in an alpha should absolutely not be a priority, anyway. When a new version comes out, you might have to tweak things, maybe build some buffering in or whatever.

And seeing as they are comfortable in their own pillow fort clusterf*ck of complexity they strenuously resist any changes or additions to the formula.

"I had to work hard to understand this, so everyone else should also have to" is an extremely selfish perspective.

"But my factory designs might change!" is weak sauce. That will be true of basically any change at all to the game mechanics, and I have no sympathy at all for it as a reason to not change the game.

As for the proposed train change: Whatever. It's a mere change in game balance. They already bumped it from 20 to 30 slots not all that long ago. It may have some implications for efficient layouts, but so what. Players can deal. Playing this game isn't about memorizing some set of efficient layouts, it's about knowing how to design efficient layouts, given the tools at your disposal.

And it's not like the change will invalidate any existing designs. You might have some unused space on your train cars, oh no.

The proposal for the fast loader/unloader is interesting. After thinking about it some, I have no objections to it. Its main effect will be to make train stations simpler to implement, and I don't have a problem with that. It will also have the effect of making it easier to implement the pattern of sticking a chest in the middle of a long belt in order to increase the size of the buffer. I'm fine with that, because that is usually a counter-productive thing to do. Most buffers are bad! In general, you want to minimize buffers, except when you need to paper over uneven, bursty supplies, such as you get from trains.

Tamren, do you remember which calculator that stream was using, or (failing that) what the stream was, so I can look it up myself? I'm curious if it was the one I wrote, or a different one.

polypusher wrote:

I hate to ask again Moggy, but after 20 minutes of research I can't tell wtf any of those Minecraft mods are. It might be inappropriate for a Factorio thread, but you've suggested there's some similar automation building goodness?

They are both designed for "sky block" mods that start you in a MInecraft world with limited resources. Ex Nihilo is the main one and it provides three main things:

Hammer - which allows you to turn cobblestone into gravel into sand into dust and also works on other materials like dirt, netherrack and the like.

Sieve - which provides a percentage chance to create ore from gravel, sand, dust.

Crucible - which makes lava out of cobblestone.

Ex Astris provides better hooks for Ex Nigilo with some of the other mods and adds a very crucial block:

Automatic sieve - which takes RF power and sieves automatically.

Combine these with some of the other mods in FTB Infinity (Minefactory Reloaded, Thermal Expansion) and you're making a factory!

A typical factory would have a bunch of machines joined by the various ducts from Thermal Dynamics.

Igneous Extruder --> Pulverizer --> Automatic Sieve --> Automatic Workbenches (turns gravels into ores) --> Smelters (turns ores into blocks - double production) --> storage.

All powered by RF generated using Crucible lave --> Magmatic Dynamos or tree farm --> redstone furnace --> steam dynamo.

Once that gets going, I create an Applied Energistics ME system and convert over. At which point I have a massive industrial complex. I've never got to the point of being done

As much as I enjoy this game I burned out on it fast. The tediousness of the later techs wasn't fun and also I didn't ever need to use half the techs like trains. I didn't realize starting a game on all normal settings meant having all the resources I need and not being close enough to attract bugs until endgame (at which time it was trivial to repel them).

Isn't this an Early Access game?

I think they're abusing the Early Access label. They have a relatively well polished game with no huge plans to expand it. I don't think they'll get much out of that abuse either. Stats are showing for games like Kerbal Space Program that going from Early Access to Full Release doesn't reproduce the initial burst of sales the way some thought it would, despite additional media coverage that gains them.

Tamren wrote:

It's surprising to see how some of the "elite" players think about the state of the game.

This is why I do not care what they think and just play the game I have. They can always Mod it back to whatever game they want to play.

polypusher wrote:

I think they're abusing the Early Access label. They have a relatively well polished game with no huge plans to expand it. I don't think they'll get much out of that abuse either. Stats are showing for games like Kerbal Space Program that going from Early Access to Full Release doesn't reproduce the initial burst of sales the way some thought it would, despite additional media coverage that gains them.

Well it is one of the most stable and mechanically (if not content) complete Early Access games ever released in the history of Steam, as the positive reviews show. That counts for something right? They definitely have plans, but they're going to be in the works for a long time. The game is getting huge infrastructure updates like train controls that aren't crap and a major graphical overhaul from the top down.

The next biggest milestone is going to be space platforms so you can build factories IN SPESS. I'm honestly not sure how that's going to work because rockets require a metric asston of resources to build and have limited payloads. Since you can't find copper and coal ore in space short of a space elevator it's a mystery as to how you can get stuff up there to build with.

Personally I would like to see more resources like lead, bronze, titanium, silver and gold in the base game. Not quite Bob's mod levels of complexity, but you can't make EVERYTHING in the history of technology with copper and iron alone.

Flintheart Glomgold wrote:

This is why I do not care what they think and just play the game I have. They can always Mod it back to whatever game they want to play.

Oh I could care less about what they think when designing my own factory. I'm just worried at how ingrained this culture of optimization is and how drowned the developers are in feedback of this type. If they are really smart they'll ignore a large part of it and design a game with broad appeal. If not we could end up with another Darkest Dungeon.

MightyMooquack wrote:

Tamren, do you remember which calculator that stream was using, or (failing that) what the stream was, so I can look it up myself? I'm curious if it was the one I wrote, or a different one.

I had to squint really hard at the URL but I eventually found it.

https://synopia.github.io/factoratio/

It's graphically polished compared to yours and has one handy feature. But overall it's more limited because you can only measure units per minute from 1-120. Your calculator can handle unlimited UPMs and can calculate opposing ratios based on number of factories instead of a target throughput.

I'm not saying it's not a good game. I quite enjoy it. I'm saying they're abusing Early Access. What they launched is legitimately a 1.0 version. Retooling trains is a patch and going to space should be an expansion or DLC (if they don't care to charge for it, they sure don't have to)

Their 'Why Early Access' supports my point, I think.

Factorio peeps wrote:

“We have been working on Factorio for over 4 years. The game is very stable and is highly optimised for prolonged gameplay and creating huge factories. We have sold over 110,000 copies on our website, and we feel now is the right time to release to a wider audience.”

This says nothing about why they need Early Access instead of a full launch. Steam should have rejected it.

Factorio peeps wrote:

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“In the full version we hope to have a polished GUI, a multiplayer matching server, integration of mods for players and servers, and a number of other finishing touches and additions to the core gameplay.”

It's a little better. It's promising features and why it needs time to get there. If they just needed money, that's fine, they could have absolutely launched the game as is in a 1.0 version. But they also wanted the smoke screen of Early Access to wave off bugs and other complaints. CptDomano's comment above is just what having that 'Early Access' section below the buy button gets you.

I think it's less that Factorio is "abusing" the Early Access system as much as Factorio is possibly the only game that is properly using the EA system in the history of the service. When there's nothing to compare it to besides a million trainwrecks it kind of skews things.

But besides all that, it's definitely not complete. The current endgame (launch a sattelite) is really just a placeholder objective. It's certainly mountain to climb from a gameplay standpoint but when you get to the end all the game does is pat you on the back. That's why "hardcore" players turn to mods and arbitrary objectives to extend the gameplay further. It's just not done yet, and while it is entirely playable it's far from polished either.

Prison Architect and Kerbal Space Program both did it great. They had tech demos to start with, expanded with more features, expanded with more content and had 1.0 releases without drawing things out TOO long. It's a small set of successes but it's a fantastic set of models to follow. KSP also followed a similar pre-steam path that only came to Steam later, but that first Steam version was still extremely limited and not much of a game.