Factorio Forums

Hi, relatively new player.

Given how complex the logistics in the game get, it would be good to have some kind of planning mode, where you can experiment with laying out structures before committing to them. Maybe with the game paused...

Is there such a mode now and I am missing it? Or, if not, how do more experienced players go about designing layouts while in the game?

There is 'ghost build' mode, where you don't use your own items but place a 'ghost' of the item that can be used to plan. Also, construction bots will place real items in these places if they're available.

I remove roboport coverage and use this mode to plan stuff out. Then I place back the roboport and everything gets filled in, pretty nifty. There is a time limit on how long ghosts remain though.

sxlwa wrote:Or, if not, how do more experienced players go about designing layouts while in the game?

Wing it

Given that you can immediately and for no penalty pick up anything you have built, I don't see a purpose for designing before building.

Planning tool mod, allows you to 'paint' the world in different colors. This has been incredibly valuable so far, especially to lay out oil processing factory. Each fluid gets a color and as well as belts, and the whole thing can be laid out before a single piece is crafted.

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =14&t=4022

starxplor wrote:Planning tool mod, allows you to 'paint' the world in different colors. This has been incredibly valuable so far, especially to lay out oil processing factory. Each fluid gets a color and as well as belts, and the whole thing can be laid out before a single piece is crafted.

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =14&t=4022

Oooo, useful! Thanks!

Jythier wrote:Given that you can immediately and for no penalty pick up anything you have built, I don't see a purpose for designing before building.

It would be useful if you need to plan out a design that includes things you don't have unlocked yet in your tech tree -- those are things that you can't just plop down ad remove at will if you can't even build them yet.

Kelderek wrote:

Jythier wrote:Given that you can immediately and for no penalty pick up anything you have built, I don't see a purpose for designing before building.

It would be useful if you need to plan out a design that includes things you don't have unlocked yet in your tech tree -- those are things that you can't just plop down ad remove at will if you can't even build them yet.

So you want to plan with technology you haven't even discovered yet?

Interesting.

Jythier wrote: So you want to plan with technology you haven't even discovered yet?

Interesting.

I call it "being optimistic".

To plan, all you would really need to know are the footprint sizes, 2x2, 3x3, etc. There are a few unusual items (refineries for example), but most things are simple blocks. The planning mod mentioned before sounds like it would do the job nicely.

Jythier wrote:So you want to plan with technology you haven't even discovered yet?
Interesting.

Does that seem strange? Is that your point? I'm not sure why. For instance, you set up labs pretty early in the game, but don't start feeding blue and alien research until far along. but if you don't leave space or plan for it, you can easily end up having to move everything around later. Which ranges from simply time consuming to nightmarish depending on the setup. In a game about logistics, it seems to me that good planning is critical.

sxlwa wrote:

Jythier wrote:So you want to plan with technology you haven't even discovered yet?
Interesting.

Does that seem strange? Is that your point? I'm not sure why. For instance, you set up labs pretty early in the game, but don't start feeding blue and alien research until far along. but if you don't leave space or plan for it, you can easily end up having to move everything around later. Which ranges from simply time consuming to nightmarish depending on the setup. In a game about logistics, it seems to me that good planning is critical.

There are two main 'fun' parts of this game. One is designing factories. The other is watching the factories run and tinkering.

My main objection to sharable blueprints and this sort of outside planning mode is that you're sanitizing the game and taking away the on-the-fly design that the players enjoy so much. Building a building in a specific location isn't 'fun', really. Picking that location, including planning for the future, is the fun part... and you seem to want to take the fun out and plan with everything from the beginning and then... drop them in? Dropping them in is not going to be fulfilling the same way it is now where you don't have a plan, but you do have a plan. IE, until it's put down in the game, it's not really a plan... but if you can mock it up in game, then it's done. All that's left is to get the components and build it. Might as well have the robots do it.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Jythier wrote:

sxlwa wrote:

Jythier wrote:So you want to plan with technology you haven't even discovered yet?
Interesting.

Does that seem strange? Is that your point? I'm not sure why. For instance, you set up labs pretty early in the game, but don't start feeding blue and alien research until far along. but if you don't leave space or plan for it, you can easily end up having to move everything around later. Which ranges from simply time consuming to nightmarish depending on the setup. In a game about logistics, it seems to me that good planning is critical.

There are two main 'fun' parts of this game. One is designing factories. The other is watching the factories run and tinkering.

My main objection to sharable blueprints and this sort of outside planning mode is that you're sanitizing the game and taking away the on-the-fly design that the players enjoy so much. Building a building in a specific location isn't 'fun', really. Picking that location, including planning for the future, is the fun part... and you seem to want to take the fun out and plan with everything from the beginning and then... drop them in? Dropping them in is not going to be fulfilling the same way it is now where you don't have a plan, but you do have a plan. IE, until it's put down in the game, it's not really a plan... but if you can mock it up in game, then it's done. All that's left is to get the components and build it. Might as well have the robots do it.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Gah. This really irks me. I see the same kind of thing in other free-form games like Kerbal Space Program. The thing you are missing is this: people have different ways of having "fun".

I am one of those people who enjoy outside planning. I go to bed at night dreaming of how I'm going to assemble my armies at Damascus before marching south on the Ptolemic empire, I run calculations of efficient escape trajectories and times to get to Duna so I can have enough fuel to get back home, I jot down the required materials for items I want to produce and sketch out a rough schematic of the resource flow. None of these things happen "in-game".

Outside planning *IS* one of the things that "the players enjoy so much".

Picking that location, including planning for the future, is the fun part (...) Dropping them in is not going to be fulfilling

That is quite presumptuous of you. But I realize its because you are missing the point that different people have different ways of having fun. I can understand telling people not to do things in a multiplayer game, eg. in Zero-K I get supremely frustrated when players just want to sit back in their base building turrets and turtling up until they can build Nukes or space lasers or rainbow cannons. But... what you have to remember is: they are having fun! (while I'm struggling to hold off two foes by myself). But Factorio is a single player game -- people doing dumb things doesn't hurt you, they can't spend the resources you would have spent making laser turrets to fend off the biters and spitters. So complaining about how other people play really grates my nerves.

Anyway, you said yourself that there are two parts to the game: designing factories and tinkering with them while they run. Why does it matter whether someone designs them outside the game or inside?

I might add, that there's a lot of other things going on in this game besides the physical arrangement of objects - things like the flow rate of everything, defense against enemies, progress through the tech tree, etc.

Even when I can plan the placement of objects in advance, this doesn't come close to making the game a formality. Which doesn't mean it['s not an essential component, but I think not one that needs to be so manual.

For instance, the many topics in this forum around optimal design are about flow design first (eg, all the threads about electric system design, the ratio accumulators and solar panels, how much buffer to have for things that draw intermittent power, etc.) They don't focus primarily on where to put stuff. Even if I know exactly where to put things, there's a lot of depth to these considerations.

In fact part of the reason I would love to have something built into the game that would allow me to do something like the planning mode mod while the game was paused is to take the hassle out of it so I can enjoy the deeper game. To me it actually becomes a hassle to have to be so manual because to me there's a deeper game it's blocking my access to.