Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release
factorio.com
factorio.com
To give just one point of evidence in support of the idea that Factorio is a well-balanced game, there is a guy who goes by "The Spiffing Brit", whose Youtube channel is all about breaking games by finding an exploit, or a bit of unbalanced interaction between two different game mechanics, and abusing that exploit or unbalanced interaction to the maximum extent possible. Armies with a million archers in Heroes of Might and Magic, that sort of thing.
When he did a video on Factorio, I wondered what exploit he had found in the game. Then I watched it. It was about how quickly you could win the game if you got 50 people to play multiplayer with you. That's it. No exploit, no broken game mechanics, just a game mechanic working as intended (yes, any job can get done faster if you can divide it between 50 people who can work on it more or less in parallel). I'm pretty sure that if there had been an exploit to be found, he would have shown it off in his video.
That doesn't prove there are NO software bugs in Factorio. But it's pretty good evidence that any remaining bugs are quite hard to run across.
He exploits the game in a different way - entertaining if you know a bit about the tooling. It’s great watching him bring out minor side effects that don’t normally matter - until you’re on a 1,000x science run.
You can mega Nauvis with molten foundries, but that requires importing Calcite.
You can mega Gleba for just-in-time and resource generating blades, but how do you handle stone?
Vulcanus offers limitless resources- yet other planets may actually offer more.
Fulgora offers much if you learn modular design.
How do you handle quality? Dedicated factories, or integrated with production? How much footprint reduction do you want, and how much input efficiency via production modules. But that requires circling back to Nauvis…
Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.
I did a 1m eSPM base though, and I don’t think the totality of all of that would bring me back to trains. Belts are extremely reliable, and I have never managed to make trains so.
Also my late game experience is probably not representative of the phase just after victory where trains may have a slight edge - there could be a sweet spot there where the decoupling is worth it because you can horizontally scale through bottlenecks.
By the end I was using dedicated patches for each science so trains just get in the way.
I feel like a lot of the challenge in early Pyanodons is place-and-route and belt congestion. Unlocking trains feels amazing. They're definitely optimal for a lot of recipes in that mod I think
As a longtime fan of trains in games like OpenTTD, it always felt like there wasn't enough of a focus on trains. Arguably this is something that Satisfactory did slightly better, there was more reason to use them there (that game certainly has other weaknesses though, and overall I prefer Factorio).
I found that the way the resources are spread out in the games and the amount needed for various recipes and the amount of scale you needed to beat the game lead to more trains in Satisfactory. In particular it made it such that spread out smaller factories near resources that then transported intermediate products to big central factories made more sense. In addition, since resource nodes are infinite you don't need to keep moving the mines all the time like in Factorio, so building additional local infrastructure is more viable than in Factorio.
Because the world is hand crafted and more rugged it also means running belts all over the map is less viable, building one long difficult rail that can be used by a bunch of separate transports makes even more sense than in Factorio.
So in summary, I think it is a bunch of small things that all nudge me more towards trains in Satisfactory than in Factorio.
This had never ocurred to me. Starting to develop a picture in my head that looks a lot like train-served dropshipping. Continuous vs demand signals like top-up and running out? The space savings seem extreme.
Guess I have to do a train play through :-/
And a track is two spaces, thus two belts can fit. Even just blue belts gives 1440/s for the same space.
Your first item delivers a lot faster with trains, and when you're dealing with stuff that spoils the faster transit is a big benefit, but for the most part I find trains underwhelming other than on Fulgora where you don't really have a choice.
Eg you don’t need city blocks making circuits, just pipe in molten metal and make them with foundries and EM plants. And then you also get steel, copper wire, gears, whatever else you might need.
There are a few exceptions of course, like lubricant for electric engines, but it’s not nearly as complicated as it was pre Space Age.
edit: It does seem to be 240/s: https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_belt_capacity_(research)
And then I discovered Mindustry. Which is crack-squared, for me at least.
It was really tricky before 2.0 (LTN mod solved most issues but was not very elegant).
Since 2.0 it's quite straightforward using interrupts:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-389
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1gauzdz/factorio_...
> Since 2.0 it's quite straightforward using interrupts
So this time the crack is even better?!
You mean without using schedules at all? Crazy. I believe there is an in-game tutorial on basic train automation.
1) I've installed -> played -> struggled with trains -> gave up and uninstalled the game about four times now.
2) The last time I tried every setup and combination I could think of, and also every tutorial, forum post, and Youtube video I could find, to no avail.
I plan to have a slow but wide platform with lots of storage that just loops around between Nauvis and to hoover up as many metallic asteroids it can find, then turns them into space platforms. When it loops around to Nauvis, it ships off the platforms to any spaceship under construction that might need them.
Avadii made a great guide about good ways to farm legendaries in 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuwBnOsULkc
It’s inefficient but has a very low cognitive load.
You can improve the efficiency a little by increasing the quality floor each level, eg rare iron ore, epic iron plate, legendary steel. But in my post endgame playthrough I was drowning in so much legendary ore with this method I didn’t bother.
With that said, you can play without quality just fun and playing SE without quality is great too.
I feel like the game could be taken in many directions. True multiprocess support, parallel execution, multi-level buildings and so much more.
Seeya sometime next decade.
Be still, my heart.
ruh roh.
It all works but feels wrong and dumb.
I'd love to see splitter filtering by freshness (e.g. nutrients at >=80% freshness) but I don't think that's in the cards.
> keep everything flowing and accept spoilage Yeah, I still have to do this too though.
Yes, you have figured out Gleba! Once you build with this mindset, you will achieve enlightenment.
That makes production more interesting: On other planets (or Factorio 1.x), a belt can generally get backed up and that's no big deal. In fact, it's a useful game mechanic: Decreased demand is followed up (eventually) by decreased production. With this feedback, things tend to balance themselves well-enough that the game doesn't stall.
On Gleba, though? A backed up belt means more spoilage, which I liken to trash. That trash needs to be dealt with somehow -- whether burned or converted to nutrients or whatever, it's a problem that accumulates unless it is dealt with.
So it ultimately becomes necessary to find new (for the player) ways to limit production so that there's less trash and fresher ingredients for the stuff made on Gleba. That's is a new mechanic that I'm sure that some people find fun, but some folks just don't seem to like very much at all.
I don't mind playing on Gleba, per se, but those parts are annoying to me.
So I'm pretty lazy about it: My waste management system is centered around purple chests and a continuous flurry of bots. My production limits sometimes don't exist. I make up for this lazy play style with artillery, which Vulcanus is profoundly excellent at producing.
(Vulcanus, in turn, is often oil-starved so exporting with rockets might sound expensive. But I have tankers that bring in oil from the bottomless seas of Fulgora, which themselves become efficient with a small amount of productivity research. Dealing with the thousands of empty barrels that this requires has its own challenges, but that's just Factorio things and I enjoy working on this part more than I do finding tidy ways to sort garbage on Gleba.)
I do that. It's annoying to me. I don't like being feeling annoyed by computer games; being annoyed is not one of my kinks.
> And to never, ever have the factory stop at any point in time.
So burn more stuff -> bigger spore clouds -> even more enemies -> more violence?
eg, always produce fruit as fast as the swamp can muster, and just always burn all excess as soon as it is possible to do so?
I limit fruit production based on the number of fruit on the belt, to avoid creating a huge buffer. But after that the factory just runs continuously at the same speed. And if I have too much of a final product, it gets destroyed or burned for heat and electricity.
One benefit, especially in the beginning, is that by processing more fruit you get more seeds. And you need the seeds to expand your fruit production later.
The enemies are probably one of the not ideally designed parts of Gleba. It's trivial to handle them if you know how, and can be very frustrating if you try to approach it the "wrong" way. If you have been to Vulcanus and Fulgora you can trivialize their threat.
Somehow I've already internalized and expanded it as building on Gleba in a long, straight line -- with branches for input and output. Like a main bus, sorta... but probably much wider to leave space for stuff, and an emphasis on being straight.
Belts of fruits get fed in where they're harvestable. Processing nodes branch off, and the processing only happens where it must (for whatever reason it must). Inventory glut is handled by the logistics network's stats, perhaps finally finding something useful to do with buffer chests. Nothing spoilable loops, ever. All excess spoilables are burned at the end of the line. The excess is a thing of unbridled glory.
That, plus a cut-and-paste do-all bot automall for assembling building materials, and... hmm.
Why do I hear birds singing?
The main thing I took away from it, was to not be afraid to burn anything that can be burned if things got overproduced, otherwise they would get stuck on the belts and become spoiled. My end setup had lots of looping belts and sorters to dispose of excess production of spoilable products
Gleba is different, but I think that is good in a game that is as long as Factorio. There's a bit of a bumpy difficulty curve here if you approach Gleba in certain ways. But it is very different mechanically than the base game or the other planets in a way that is interesting, at least to me.
It took me two or three iterations when I first landed on Gleba. But afterwards my factories there were more robust than on the other planets and almost never stalled or broke down. And solving that was quite satisfying.
I hated Gleba at first. I have come to love it, and it might be my favorite part of space age. Embrace its organic nature, stop trying to centralize an focus on "flow"...
Nauvis is a monolith, then gleba is micro services...
Well, that'll make Rocket Rush a bit more fun to play. It was taking forever to get up to 40 U235s.
[Edit] Nope.... it doesn't change the requirements from 40 U235, just makes it so a centrifuge will fit on a rocket. 8(
Am I the only one who likes rocket rush?
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-441
BTW in one playthrough (in DSP) I tried to avoid destroying any native vegetation at all, so obviously no blueprints, just lots of fun figuring out factory placement and routing belts around all the bushes.