Friday Facts #382 - Logistic groups

[Chard]

maybe a filter combinator ? Maybe something like a sensor for the planet that would tell gravity or pressure or day-cycle ?

My first thought was some kind of sorting combinator; select minimum/maximum (non-zero) input. Lots of interesting possibilities. If it was a sensor would it require a separate input and output side? Filter would be very useful though, every time I create one of those filter circuits that starts by adding a billion to everything I want to keep it feels very wrong.

[Losparkeros]

I was always wondering why there is no such thing as "logistic group" for mod selection. I mean I was never modding own gameplay heavily and "sync mods with save" works fine but it always seemed like a sound step (especially with dependent mod groups).

[Philip017]

Using the 'trash unrequested' in personal logistic can have a few unexpected consequences at times, and it takes a while to become conscious about it. It happened to me many times that I crafted this new item into my inventory, it immediately disappeared into the trash slots, and before I realized what is going on, the robots were happily carrying it away from my reach... But once I got used to it, and turned it on or off based on what I was doing, it became one of the things I couldn't play without anymore.

I would like to recommend that IF I craft something that is not in the request slots,
instead of it getting automatically trashed, that instead
the 'trash unrequested' is automatically unticked,
and an alert is placed in the console alerting the player that they have crafted something that is not requested and the trash unrequested has been deselected.
Thus this issue does not happen to everyone else as well, as this would cause a lot of frustration to anyone that has to diagnose the issue before realizing what they have done.

[Ghulmeister]

bro i want that building-construction animation everywhere, not just on the platform! its so good looking, feels like im playing old time rts again!!

[gGeorg]

So the logistic groups are sort of world wide transmitted shared data.
UI of the Constant combinator (the last screenshot of the FFF) shows user custom description - that is LONG asked feature of any combinator's addict ! And you even didnt highlight that.

[Dragomina]

Some interesting stuff.

I would prefer having a "safety range" of like 10k tiles or maybe even more that prevents you from having dense landing pads for rockets, instead of a single one per planet. So if you have a landing pad, no other landing pad can be placed within that safety range. And the range is big enough that you probably prefer 1 landing pad because otherwise you are forced to transport things by train for several minutes to combine the items. And it would make faster-than-train intra-planet logistics by rocket possible for small volume of items. And it's kind of weird to have a limit of 1 for the entire planet. I think you would get the same encouragement to have a singular logistics hub around one landing pad for the most part with the "safety distance" limit feature instead. And I think that the times when people go out of their way to have multiple separate landing pads on the same surface much further apart than a train world, that the delays and distances would introduce other equally rewarding problems to play around as having a singular landing pad. But you get an alternate option and a slightly less weird restriction that you can engineer different kinds of solutions to.

I like your idea. Having multiple landing pads would be nice for large, (mostly) separated factories on the same planet. The limit not being hard-coded to one would definitively allow for flexibility and, as you said, a big safety range would still inhibit landing pad spam.

I also like the logistic groups! I hope there will be a way to store them across games, similar to blueprints.

[FutureSpec]

The limitation of only one per planet might sound weird, but we just find it fitting, because otherwise (we tried that) it is too convenient to put them all over the place

This feels really off. So we can build gigantic bases, spanning a solar system of planets ...but only one landing pad?

I don't know, maybe it feels different to actually play it. But it sounds like a major bottleneck and too-puzzley.

I get that the devs want parts of the game to feel like mini logistics puzzle. But I can't square being able to do things like build a sprawling, complex train network, yet somehow my player character can't figure out how to do two landing pads on a planet!?

[Treviisolion]

Hmm, on the weight system, I presume that the automated stuff does something like
1 iron ore (2kg) -> 1 iron plate thus also 2 kg
1 copper plate 2 kg -> 2 copper cables each 1 kg
If so, then ignoring the exceptions where some late product materials might be far more weight efficient because of the balancing adjustments made (like science for example), isn’t there a strong incentive to ship over raw ore specifically? Because with productivity modules if I use the above calculations
1 iron ore 2 kg smelted in an electric furnace with 2 productivity modules -> 1.2 iron plates and thus 2.4 kg of material.
1 copper plate 2 kg turned to copped cables in an AM3 with 4 productivity modules -> 2.8 copper cables and thus 2.8 kg worth of materials.
If we add in the quality mod, this becomes even more apparent an effect as a tier 4 productivity module gives a 25 percent bonus not a 10 percent bonus making
1 iron ore 2 kg -> 1.5 iron plates 3 kg
1 copper plate 2 kg -> 4 copper cables 4 kg
Thus outside exceptions, ore is the most efficient to transport as you get the most weight per kg which feels weird and gamey as ore is the last thing you normally want to transport in space as it’s heavy and has tons of impurities that reduce the final mass compared to the starting mass.

Alternatively if
1 iron ore 2kg -> 1.5 iron plates 2 kg (4/3 kg per iron plate)
1 copper cable 2 kg -> 4 copper cables 2 kg (0.5 kg/cable)
Then there is a problem for new players in the intermediate stage where the weight of most items is not immediately obvious unless they look up info on the wiki. Plus this adds the question of what happens when mods that add higher tier productivity modules are played.

Either way, it seems like we’re going to be strongly pushed towards either building small outposts on other planets, just enough infrastructure to support mining, building rockets and shipping the desired material into space with all the new ores transported to your central hub (usually Nauvis). Alternatively if most new science are going to be just at most only a few new materials to produce, increasing the infrastructure to build a singular science pack that is then shipped to Nauvis. Perhaps some mini-hub planets that accept materials from several other planets to combine into a single science pack to ship back to Nauvis. Presumably players will pick the lowest gravity worlds with one of the materials present to produce a given science pack as they’ll be able to send the most science back to Nauvis. Am I understanding the design choices correctly?

[adam_bise]

Yes, I don't like being limited to one landing pad.

Also, restricting inventory weight when sending the player through space seems like a bit much. Who's going to implement manually travelling back and forth to carry more cargo as part of their main transport process? It might work a few times, but players would get tired of it quickly.

Unless the same changes are going to be made elsewhere. Like the player cannot carry more than x weight, and so could never carry a locomotive.

The addition of weight in this FFF raises many questions.

[TheRaph]

Some questions:

Will rockets from space platform being the same size as rocket from planet?
In reality they are not, because in space you don't need to escape the gravity.
Especially in current space exploration (e.g. to ISS) typically every rocket has its return capsule on board.
So it would be fair if every rocket which arrives on a platform could be used to travel back to at least the planet it is orbiting around. So only if you like to reach a planet your platform isn't orbiting around (means every planet if platform is in interplanetary space) you need to start a rocket.
Are need for rocket fuel differ from planet to planet in respect to their gravity?

What about the second line of numbers in request-tab?
Are there any hysteresis between request and trash?
In current version 1.1 you have two numbers: Minimum for starting logistic request if inventory count is below. Maximum for trashing if inventory count is above.
On Your Screenshot I can only see one number ...

Screenshot 2023-10-27 185518.png (102.52 KiB) Viewed 3611 times

[mcmase]

Much like every week, love to read about the upcoming content. Every time I open a FFF I realize just how much is going into the update and why it seemed to be taking so long... now I'm surprised you are getting everything done in only a few short years!

I'm increasingly hyped to play more Factorio but also its making the current version feel old and outdated hahaha... exciting to see how much of this content is being released for free (almost like you are rolling 3 years of QoL updates into one) for the base version, really only new "content" is restricted to the expansion players. Its amazing to see a game developer treat players this way.

Addition of weight system raises many questions, I know that's already been said, but Factorio NEVER followed these rules, so it does seem strange to me to have them implemented in only one place. If a train can carry a rocket silo, a player can carry one, even a little flying bot can carry one... why can't a huge frikin' rocket? Items were ALWAYS separate than the actual constructed buildings, idk what logic there was, maybe the items are just a kind of blueprint, a kind of representation of the work that was to be done for the building, it just didn't decide where until you placed it, because Factorio isn't a hyper-realistic "place every bolt and girder in proper order" kind of game, in fact, no game is that kind of game, because that's plain no-fun.

Not that this restriction makes the game un-fun, just that its... strange. But as with a lot of things, I doubt we will really care once we get in the game, and there may be more details that we haven't learned about yet that change our opinion of this new weight system...

I actually love most of the restrictions (read: challenges) you've named so far, though that stance may be controversial. But I've loved quality from the start, I think the platform restrictions on space, no holes, no bots will bring back belt spaghetti to even late game worlds, the central landing hub for each planet being a massive delivery location for late game shipments and the factory spreads out from there... it all sounds awesome.

Keep it up and can't wait for next Friday!

[XT-248]

Something feels off about the space platform construction's animation, and I am not into it. I can't put my finger on what it is exactly. Perhaps it feels too derivative from other works outside of Factorio? Instead of being its own thing inside of the Factorio universe.

I read from Reddit posts that we may get scaffolding to show up for builds' construction. I wouldn't say I like that idea either.


I say this from a place of passion and love for WUBE, and I know you, as a studio, can do better than this.

[bman212121]

Just tossing in the 2 cents as well that the weight system adds a bunch of overhead for little gain. So now every entity has an additional property that players need to learn about, but it only matters in one place.

I find it funny that a rocket can't carry a rocket silo, but I can pack 500 nuclear reactors into the trunk of a car. If anything a rocket could be more likely to carry a silo, because after you dismantle the pieces it's not really that big. A silo is just a big tube and is mostly hollow, so cut it into quarter sized pieces and they'll just stack in a pile. Looking on the net I can find pictures of silos being moved both by trucks and sitting on single wagon train cars, so in reality it's one of the easier items to transport.

That said the actual problem I'd agree that if you want to do item limits, it would be equally bad if there was no way to limit it.


My solution to the "weight" system would be to simply copy the modular armor system. The modular armor seems to be an identical use case you're trying to solve for the rocket silo, which is to limit how many of each item a player can use. Define an item size such that when laid out on a grid each item takes a certain square area. You can basically do the same thing you're doing now, but since item size changes drastically between placement and being stored in inventory, it's not really a stretch for it to work a bit differently in a silo.

If you used a "grid" that's say 16 x 16, that's 256 squares. Make a rocket silo and a nuclear reactor the full 16 x 16. The game could auto place the items on the grid, and maybe there would be times where the full grid might not be usable because the items would overlap and not fit. But it could easily be visualized just like it is for modular armor. I'd have to imagine it would be simple enough for an auto placement system to make intelligent enough decisions around how to fit all of the items. If anything the system for modular armor already allows this, and could stand to make more intelligent placements to better squeeze items into it. So it would provide a win-win in that the same system would be reused for another entity, and improvements for one would be done for both.


TL;DR: Rather than reinvent the wheel with adding a oddball "weight" system, just adapt the system in place for modular armor to cover all entities and use that system for the rocket silo storage instead.




EDIT: To maybe add some more details to how I would think about adding the grid system, I would probably just take the isometric view of the items as they would be placed on the map. I don't remember exactly but it appears that the rocket silo is about 9x9 on a grid. So if you really wanted to prevent the rocket silo from being added then you could just make the grid size 8x8 and then all of the other items in the game would fit into the rocket still. (And you could easily visualize the silo over the grid and that it's too big) Then for the smaller items, what I would do is use a dotted line to cut a 1 x 1 tile into 4 squares which would allow parts like gears to fit 4 of them into a square. (Just like they do on belts already, and I think also the spilled on the ground size as well) You could pick certain items to fit their place-able or unplaced sizes. (Pipes comes to mind allowing them to be 4 in a 1 x 1 square unplaced versus using the full square per pipe.) That still gives you the 256 square grid, but it removes the need to know anything else about an entity for size requirements. The sizes appear exactly as they already do on the map.

[SIGSTKFLT]

While you're reworking logistics, could you add the ability to re-order the rows? I often decide that I want to insert a row, but I can only append.
thanks <3

[Ranakastrasz]

No holes in the ship make sense.
The big question is if underneathies can go through like they can underwater, if the underground portion is visible, and whether or not people will start building vaguely jellyfish-like space platforms, with tiny gaps used to allow technically not holes in the middle of the platform.

[Qon]

While you're reworking logistics, could you add the ability to re-order the rows? I often decide that I want to insert a row, but I can only append.
thanks <3

Look at the lines next to the trash can icons. Those are the drag-and-drop markings, showing that they are already possible to re-order.

[Svip]

In current version 1.1 you have two numbers: Minimum for starting logistic request if inventory count is below. Maximum for trashing if inventory count is above.
On Your Screenshot I can only see one number ...

Since trash unrequested is ticked, there is no need for the second number, since everything not requested is automatically trashed, so min and max for every item is the same.

[Yinan]

"The idea of transferring a whole rocket silo inside a rocket is too much even for Factorio."

I couldn't disagree more with this statement.
A Cargo Wagon has 40 Slots. A Rocket Silo has a stack size of 1. Meaning you can transport 40 Rocket Silos inside a single Cargo Wagon.

And now you tell me that a single Rocket Silo can't be transported by a Rocket? That's a joke, right?
Because no, that's exactly what you expect from Factorio, because it's just an item after all. Just look at belts where you can transport 45 Rocket Silos per second per Belt to anywhere!
Yet a rocket can only transport a miniscule amount of items (looking at the screenshot here with that really REALLY low amount of items that fills the rocket nearly completely already) and a Rocket Silo is already to much for it?

Also, so far, weight has never played any role whatsoever in Factorio, and suddenly it matters for arbitrary reasons?

Yeah, I think that whole idea is misguided. That's one of the things you really could have taken more from the Space Exploration mod (where you can just transport whole trains into space using the space elevator) instead of making... this...

[fusionfan]

Oh this is great, the groups are great and the combinator stuff is great too! Good QoL stuff. Rockets seem a little small, but if they are much cheaper, then I guess whatever.

[Tertius]

So now every entity has an additional property that players need to learn about, but it only matters in one place.

We don't know, if it only matters in one place. One place was presented, but there might be more.

One way or the other, I don't feel weight is a useless addition. It's adding a genuine new challenge by combining and stacking items for space travel.
We all know the current mechanism to simulate bigger and heavier items is the stack size, and we also all know this is actually cheating. With whole trains in your pocket, or nuclear reactors. The player can carry 1000 nuclear reactors, but he can carry only 100 artillery shells. So this is an incomplete game mechanics, it's actually just intended to control how many items can be moved from one place to the other to achieve some kind of balancing.

And it was really said in the FFF that this mechanic isn't working for space travel. Not because of the rocket, but because some stuff must not travel in quantities the stack size would allow. So the weight mechanic was invented, which is also intuitively the right way to fill different stuff into containers for humans, and you as player have to figure out a new interesting way to balance the rocket loading.

Look at real world logistics. Shipping items depends on multiple item properties. There is bulk material (ore), and almost everything else in today's logistics is transported in containers. One container is the smallest unit that will travel in a container ship in the real world. A container doesn't need to be full. One container is a stack in Factorio, and our rocket seems to be able to carry up to 20 containers at most. However, if a container becomes too heavy, it cannot be lifted, so you need to leave it half empty. And that's all the whole new mechanics.