Friday Facts #388 - Smaller things for 2.0

[spiral_power]

>Billions of years' worth of Factorio
I have been waiting for this for a long time!
By the way, can 1.1 saves be migrated to 2.0?

[mrmelon54]

Loving the last modified time, it reminds me when I'm on my laptop and I didn't wait for Steam to sync my game before shutting down my desktop PC.

[GregoriusT]

Pretty sure a previous FFF did state you can have your old Saves, was the Rails one as far as I know.

Would be pretty useless to add backwards compat for old Rails if Savegame compat wasn't a given. XD

[aka13]

The e-mail link is broken, leads to wrong fff, 387 instead of 388.

Yep you're part of todays lucky 5000 which got the wrong link.

Funnily enough, it's the second time already.
I guess the sequence is alphabetical?

[Kyralessa]

I feel like cliff removal should be super force building only, and no longer in regular force building. It is quite annoying to have to unmark cliffs from decon when building defenses that incorporate cliffs. Not to mention you need to be mindful enough to disable your roboport or remove Cliff Explosives from your Inventory BEFORE building, or the Cliffs are gone forever.

I agree. I find this an issue in every game. At least it would be nice to have the option to move cliff destruction to super force building, even if it isn't the default.

[mmmPI]

things i'm not going to use : most of the 9 billions years on a single game but i welcome the news because it's always baffling to see what people can do in so many ticks
The cliff explosive decon planner, i always have one in shortcut to destroy only rocks and trees because i never want to accidentaly delete a cliff

things i'm going to use : all the others

in order : moving the tag on the map that's the #1 time gained in future game,

then typing (2^31)-12 on constant combinator to trigger overflow when i need 12 of something without alt-tabbing

then the smarter smart belt, which i like for pipes, because i don't use smart belt i always do little spagetthi and side loading

then the tick box for logistic request, there are still situations where it will annoy me though, it's not only when you recover your body but also maybe when you land on a new planet , playing space exploration and forgetting one thing caused me lot of annoyance with that box, when one empty its inventory to go on the rocket/space platform, and then you land on a planet you need to activate it again, and when you want to use the space platform you need to untick it, empty your inventory to not be too heavy, and re-tick it upon arrival on the planet ? all the time ? Am i not aware of the hotkey for that ? Appreciating the effort to alleviate this !

I just sorted my saves game when i realized i had save too old to even open because i never actually used the folders, it took me so long and now you're just telling me if i had been lazy a bit longer i would have spared myself the trouble of making them in chronological folder ? great feature but terrible timing to learn about it

About the lamp coloring and the personnal robot map view color customization, i'm afraid those are not going to spare any time on my future game all the contrary because i will have to play with those First thought : it is possible to make lamp dynamically change cholor instead of choosing threshold for displays, will look so good !

Pleasant read as usual !

[Drury]

It's funny how in your comparison between the old and new underground building, the annotation proclaims you have to take a step back with the old system, and then you also have to take a step back in the new pipe example

Wouldn't it be better if it showed the full possible length of the underground at all times? That way you'd actually know without having to ratchet it up one by one. Kinda like how Transport Tycoon does it with tunnels.

[againey]

Wouldn't it be better if it showed the full possible length of the underground at all times? That way you'd actually know without having to ratchet it up one by one. Kinda like how Transport Tycoon does it with tunnels.

Sort of like in the Show Max Underground Distance mod? I love that mod, so simple, but it helps so much.

[Justderpingalong]

Ah yes, the classical 'its working' save. Also... hairspray? Diagnola... diagonal? MHM.

But, for the lamps: How hard would it be to allow us to set a lamp's colour based on the integer value of the red/green/blue squares? To aleviate conflicts, lamps could have 2 modes: Either they take the colour with the highest value, or it mixes them to create a new colour. Would be cool!

[Episode922]

Often times you want to set some constant number, like "I want 7.5 stacks here", and doing the calculation MANUALLY is of course unacceptable.

It is your first time playing Factorio, you have just unlocked a new item, let's say cliff explosives. You want to create five stacks of them to play around with. How many cliff explosives is that?

Great idea. A constant like S would be great.

[Drury]

Wouldn't it be better if it showed the full possible length of the underground at all times? That way you'd actually know without having to ratchet it up one by one. Kinda like how Transport Tycoon does it with tunnels.

Sort of like in the Show Max Underground Distance mod? I love that mod, so simple, but it helps so much.

Yeah exactly! I've somehow never come across this one at the mod portal, thanks.

[BrainlessTeddy]

That pistol just lying around bugs me.

Where you showed off the "reassuring green."

[thedoh]

Cliff explosives are not unlocked from the start of the game, and with the expansion they are even more delayed. To avoid nonsensical marking of cliffs for deconstruction when you force build on top of them, we changed it so that the cliffs are only marked for deconstruction once the cliff explosives have been researched.

I don't think this is a QOL improvement (same for the landfill change). Hear me out: I want to blueprint stuff and have construction bots blow up cliffs and paste landfill when those cliff explosives and landfill become available to construction bots. Force blueprinting should mean force blueprinting; get that crap outta the way and let me put down what I want to put down and let me worry about the cliff explosives and landfill later.

[PolakPL2002]

The e-mail link is broken, leads to wrong fff, 387 instead of 388.

Yep you're part of todays lucky 5000 which got the wrong link.

Funnily enough, it's the second time already.
I guess the sequence is alphabetical?

I don't think so, as I also got the wrong one today. Unless only ~5000 people subscribe to fff.

[deer_buster]

Being able to set lamp intensity manually would also be nice, and perhaps effects (such as pulsing/blinking, et.al.) as well

[adam_bise]

So we made it that you can type mathematical expressions directly in the textfields.

Nice

[Potatoman967]

Cliff explosives are not unlocked from the start of the game, and with the expansion they are even more delayed. To avoid nonsensical marking of cliffs for deconstruction when you force build on top of them, we changed it so that the cliffs are only marked for deconstruction once the cliff explosives have been researched.

I don't think this is a QOL improvement (same for the landfill change). Hear me out: I want to blueprint stuff and have construction bots blow up cliffs and paste landfill when those cliff explosives and landfill become available to construction bots. Force blueprinting should mean force blueprinting; get that crap outta the way and let me put down what I want to put down and let me worry about the cliff explosives and landfill later.

Same, as soon as I get cliff explosives bots should run around blowing up those cliffs I had to maneuver around. Maybe moving cliff explosives to the new force build would help with what the devs are trying to solve.

[DrakeyC]

Loving all these QoL additions.

One I'd like to see, since undergrounds were brought up, is allow the option to lay pipes like power lines. That is, when a powerline is dragged to its maximum range, it places and keeps going, and if there's something in the way it'll build a space short to avoid it. I'd like to be able to lay pipes like that too, so I can run and drag my pipelines along without being broken when one is placed in front of a tree or whatever.

[MEOWMI]

As usual, the attention to detail is simply beautiful.

[Camusensei]

Lots of good ideas in these comments!
s as a constant for stacks
rgb mode for lamps
don't prevent deconstructing cliffs (!!!) add an option disabled if you want
pipes added like undergrounds and power poles

and one from me:
option to disable minimap terrain style (color)