Friday Facts #414 - Spoils of Agriculture

[TheFrizz]

I was not expecting the spoilage mechanic. It looks great to me and I look forward to designing assembly lines to optimize for Throughput divided by Latency. I'd have to play it a bit first, but it does seem like the visual clutter of the white bars might be a bit much. But then again, spoilable items will only really be inside certain areas of your base until stable resources are created and so you will only really see them when you are in zones processing spoilable intermediates.

I'm curious if players will ever really have to interact with spoilage more than a few introductory times as it seems on first consideration that since spoiling rates are deterministic, you simply shorten your ingredient paths to the point where nothing is spoiled at the end. There's of course a risk that some external intermediate is halted (train deadlock or other reason) which causes your spoilable intermediates to halt. But it seems like you can always buffer the non spoilable intermediate inputs and use circuit network to halt spoilable production if those buffers drop below a certain threshold. I am super confident that Wube will make great choices here so that this new mechanic is something we get to interact with and overcome without becoming a chore.

I am a little surprised how many people want to refrigerate items to avoid "loss" of what seems more or less the product of renewable resources. Why is this loss felt so much more acutely than the loss of every resource that goes into making a rocket launch? Or the loss of resources that go into making train fuel. Factorio 1.0 is already filled with loss. Your factory produces valuable assets (Speed module 3, Assembler 3, Science packs) but also several items that are more or less overhead necessary to be sacrificed so that the items of value can continue to be produced such as ammo, artillery shells, walls, train fuel and powerplant fuels (I'm sure I am forgetting more). I fail to see the tragedy of desiring 100 science packs a minute, but because they arrive at half spoiled, needing to set the target manufacturing to 200. Maybe they arrived at 20% and you need to multiply the production by 5 up to 500 per minute! Does it matter? Only if somehow that multiplication of production somehow makes building the factory on Gleba painful and not-fun which is an outcome I imagine Wube will skillfully avoid.

I feel like Gleba is only really half introduced at this point. The map, while hand made, is supposed to be representative and the lack of significant iron and copper patches tells me that there is a yet-to-be-introduced mechanic to get them in serious quantities unless you expect me to believe that somehow the bio reactor is going to be manufacturing everything needed for rocket parts. It looks more to me that the small patches exist only to bootstrap your creation of whatever harvesting system you can use on only Gleba to get iron and copper in quantities required to support as large a launch system as you could on Fulgora or Vulcanus.

[V38]

I created an account just to come out of the woodwork and say that I would enjoy the spoilage mechanic. I would find the issue of getting time-sensitive materials transported and processed as rapidly as possible to be an interesting challenge.
I have a small suggestion that may satisfy those that do not, perhaps the rotten waste could be reused to make the planet's necessary parts but at a much less efficient rate. I.e. some chain that turns rot back into science exists for those that do not or cannot build an effective enough throughput. Of course I think that would be a small disappointment as it subtracts from the challenge but it looks like it recycles back into one of the prerequisites already so I don't think that would be a major change and could satisfy both camps. I suppose you're already well enough aware that those who don't like certain parts of the update are going to mod it out though, so hopefully the minor hiccup in feedback doesn't scare you off from making interesting design choices!
Best of luck with the update, I really have loved everything I've seen and I'm looking forward to it greatly!

[epr]

Spoilage, oh my.
What's next? Hunger and thirst?

[aka13]

Spoilage, oh my.
What's next? Hunger and thirst?

Seeing this whole shift on enviroment bein more harsh, I could easily see a "life-support" something appearing.
Lets hope it does not, though.

[adam_bise]

LOL How unexpected! I love it! I can already tell this will add valuable complexity to the expansion.

[Drury]

Spoilage, oh my.
What's next? Hunger and thirst?

Hmm, imagine biological assemblers that have to be fed to work... That'd be interesting.

[Redrune75]

Spoilage, oh my.
What's next? Hunger and thirst?

Hmm, imagine biological assemblers that have to be fed to work... That'd be interesting.

That seems to be exactly what the Biochamber is. And I quote: "The quirk of the Biochamber is that it needs to be fed Nutrients to operate."
Although I think it's worth noting that, mechanically, there is very little difference between "feeding" a machine like a burner assembler with coal, and feeding a machine like the Biochamber with Nutrients.

[revanar]

I feel bad about all of the people in this forum thread who are so upset about this mechanic! I hope it doesn't dissuade you from still giving the expansion a try, because I have a feeling that the production challenges introduced by a spoilage mechanic will be much less frustrating to deal with than you're all imagining it will be!

Practically speaking, I think that given that the source is renewable, it's only really introducing 2 new twists to a factory:
1) needing to minimize buffering / use lean manufacturing principles
2) needing to add in systems to get rid of anything that reaches the end of a line without being consumed

I really think that practically, Factorio is a game about solving a problem once through automation. I really don't think this mechanic is going to end up feeling at all like needing to constantly eat in Don't Starve, or having your food spoil over time in Ark---it's just a new twist to the established rules for automation, in the same way as working backwards from advanced parts on Fulgora or needing to needing to build in small spaces / without robots on the space platforms.

Given that so many of us build factories that feature a lot of buffering, it feels like an intimidating change, but I suspect when we actually play it, it will actually feel more like a fun minigame---and once the two production challenges are solved, I imagine that goods will arrive where they need to at a very consistent rate of decay, and will therefore be very easy to count on in your overall factory design!

In an earlier FFF, the developers mentioned wanting to launch this expansion without an Early Access period because they wanted to be able to fully polish gameplay elements without players getting too attached to the intermediate steps; I feel like similarly, this is a case where a mechanic looks daunting in a forum post but will feel really reasonable in the game, and maybe the issue is just that we've been allowed to see it before we get a chance to experience it and see that it's not as stressful as we think it is!

Something that I'm really excited about by this expansion is the extent to which it feels like each planet has a ton of personality, and forces us to rethink how we do production (at least in the context of that planet)! This expansion would be a lot less exciting if we weren't expected to change up our formula in a new way each time!

[Tertius]

I don't see the spoilage mechanic so bad. It doesn't change the basic Factorio principle: gather/deliver ingredients, then use them to build a new ingredient and automate this. Now, some part of the production line has to be completed within a given time frame. So automation of certain products has to make sure delivery and production of all steps of the production line has to be within that time frame. This isn't arbitrary, we have plenty items in the real world with limited durability: food. There's a big industry and logistics dealing with spoiling products in the real world. It's good Factorio starts simulating those as well. Just in time production is a core real world principle as well. Today, the buffers are the trucks and transport in general. Not some warehouse any more. Warehouses contain dead weight, their contents don't earn money by laying around.

The presence or absence of freezers is just a minor detail. In the end you have to build a reasonably fast production line and consume your products in time. If there are freezers, the whole spoilage mechanic must take that into account and make them meaningful, so they don't trivialize the spoiling, so the spoiling has to be so fast you are required to use freezers with transport. Or if there are no freezers at all, then the spoiling has just to be reasonably long so the common engineer is able to use the item before it spoils. To avoid tedium, and to avoid steps that don't really do anything meaningful but just bloat a production line, I feel it's ok if there are no freezers. What would a freezer look like? A chest, additionally with some kind of portable energy supply or a specialized wagon with energy buffer. This isn't anything new, just an additional type of transport that doesn't do anything fundamentally different and interesting than the existing ones. So we don't need this.

[scooter010]

We do need some cooling entity onboard our ships to keep the stuff fresh!

[bobucles]

Non interactive preservation like coolers wouldn't be that exciting. Preserved storage is storage, and decaying items aren't meant to sit in storage. But what about active preserving?

Consider a loaded concrete truck. It very clearly is a time limited product, but the truck has a spinning drum to keep refreshing it. What if the factory had similar options? For example a sorting option could take input ingredients and separate fresh from rot. Some product is lost, but the remaining items have more time. Recipes might naturally restore a bit of time on an item, in the same way that fresh milk gets pasteurized to reset its doom clock. Factory designs get to lean away from an instant production meta, and individual steps have more time to cook. As long as the product keeps advancing, it keeps getting more timer to help push to the end. Modules can help a ton here, offering setups that restore more or less time depending on how spicy players want their builds.

Things would get very spicy if decaying items also had item quality to worry about. Would the main item quality be determined by the farm? Might be cool. Having both quality AND a doom timer would create more difficulty tiers to processing. Low quality items would be easy to refresh and maintain, if you pull 10% rot off your casual items it's not a big deal. Refreshing the timer could very easily degrade the quality of good stuff, so it would demand immediate processing. It offers some good gameplay potential for the factory.

[adam_bise]

They stated already that the spoil time can't be delayed, but that is kind of a rigid approach. It would be nice to use modules as others have said to get more time out of the deal.

[mcdjfp]

I just want to make it clear that while I am worried about the side effects of spoiling science packs, I really like the spoilage concept in general.

[Tricorius]

So…please enlighten me as to which version of this seems more “Factorio”…

- I research Refrigeration tchnology, construct an Ice Chest, Ice Wagon, and Ice Compartment for my agricultural science to sit in the agricultural base, train yard, and space platform.
- I use the various subsystems in the game to build a better version of the agricultural science beaker, better faster stronger trains, better faster stronger space platforms to send waves of the freshest items I can (while leaving the nearly spoiled stuff on planet to divert to better soil or a larger production plant or whatever); then I build an “enrichment facility” with BioFlux on Nauvis to boost and compact the waves of the freshest science packs into...”condensed agricultural science” (or whatever) that can be fed into BioFlux enhanced science facilities surrounded by efficiency beacons (or whatever) which multiply the freshness of consumed science packs and reduce the spoilage waste

Huh. Wait. You mean maybe an efficiency beacon and enhanced recyclers would actually be USEFUL? Who’da think it.

Also, they could have a dozen cool items, structures, recipies, mechanics, subsystems, or other as-yet unrevealed ways (which, by the way they DIRECTLY STATED in the FFF) ways to make this mechanic even more interesting that it already seems.

P.S. We don't know what BioFlux is. What if it is a fluid that coats a spoilable item to reduce its spoiling time. Now, you have a refrigerator that you have to use more strategically…which one could easily argue is way more fun for a logistical / engineering mind than just “stuff everything into the blue wagon until its spilling out”…

[CyberCider]

I mean more in terms of permanent benefits. What I consider a permanent benefit is for example, Vulcanus' infinite supply of stone, iron ore and copper ore. The utility of that is that if you were to run out of iron, copper, or stone on Nauvis, and somehow couldn't get to a nearby patch right now, you could use Vulcanus as a permanent supply of the stuff.
Same for Fulgora having an infinite source of oil. Oil is already technically infinite in Factorio, but not at a steady rate. While I presume Fulgora's supply wont be "as good" as the supply on Nauvis (as in, transport logistics from planet to planet is gonna be painful), but you could theorically use it to supply Nauvis.

And you could also supply to other planets. Imagine Gleba has no iron, copper, and stone deposits. I don't think they'd do that because I'm fairly certain they intend for you to not get softlocked should something bad happen on a planet and you probably can't transport ressources until you reach rockets again, but imagine they did something like that. But already Vulcanus to Fulgora basic ressource transportation is a good idea given Fulgora works by recyling trash. Having a space platform do trips from Vulcanus to Fulgora with infinite ressources would eventually solve most of Fulgora's problems so you can keep farming the rest of the stuff in peace.

Anyway, my point remains, asside from expanding your ressources, I do wonder if Gleba will bring something else than just the bioflux and carbon fiber (Which are going to be this planet's main export, just like Vulcanus gets Tungsten, and Fulgora gets Holmium) in the same sense that the other two planets get a bonus addition of a ressource being farmable to infinity.

I feel like you may be getting things slightly backwards with this “permanent benefit” stuff. The expansion will be pretty different from Space Exploration, in that you will be largely discouraged from transporting raw resources between planets. Making all those rockets to deliver something you don’t really *need* to deliver would be quite a waste of the local resources. Imagine how much scrap you would need to assmble a rocket to Nauvis, all to deliver some oil that Nauvis already has plenty of. Every planet has “infinite” resources of its own if you continue to expand a little, the rockets are for delivering special, exclusive things that only those planets can provide. The real “permanent benefits” will be the new buildings and technologies unlocked on the planets. The big drill to extend the life of your ore patches, the foundry to give you more smelting productivity, the electromagnetic plant to give you more circuit productivity…

Also, I think you may have missed a detail in the Vulcanus fff. Vulcanus doesn’t give you infinite iron, copper and stone. Lava may be infinite, but to process it into useful materials you need calcite, and calcite is a finite ore like everything else. Also, like you said, Nauvis already has infinite oil. But Nauvis has crude oil while Fulgora has heavy oil, and crude is a lot “denser” than heavy.

Regarding Gleba, believe it or not, we have a surprising amount of information on its ore situation. Kovarex revealed a lot in a reddit comment:
1) Gleba has patches of iron, copper and stone
2) They are small in size, but extremely rich. You won’t worry about depleting them, you will worry about their low total output.
3) Except you won’t, really, none of the Gleba-exclusive processing uses any minable resources whatsoever, only renewables. The ores will be going into rocket launches and infrastructure only.

[Anima117]

Spoilage without refrigeration? Curious. Haven't the devs heard of salt, or one of the countless chemical preservatives/anti oxidants/inert gases/raw radiation that serve to stifle bacteria and organic decay?

That would mean spoilage is just a problem with a straight forward solution, having item travel time as a new logistic challenge to optimize sounds way more fun.

Maybe? It seems like a system that won't play well with trains...

I could imagine the exact opposite: A factory that produces exactly enough for one single wagon train in a burst and then halts production until the next train arrives. Bots will still be faster for short distances, but for any span bots can't do without recharge trains will be very attractive.

With spoilage involved in gameplay, fun will go bad faster than unrefrigerated hummus left to rot in the hot sun, and the game will begin to stink more putridly than rotten fish left out on a hot summer's day.

Sorry to pop in unannounced, but the thing that I think everyone is missing is that products have different shelf time, and transporting the product is not going to be a big issue.
The reason why is simple. Some items spoil faster than others. It is to be estimated that the further you go in the production line, the slower they spoil.
Long story short, you make your initial production processsing right after you harvest the fruits.
The processed good has a higher spoil time, meaning it can travel a bit further. You process it into further product.

AND EVENTUALLY, you'll get a final product, that either isn't perishable (Like carbon fiber is probably not perishable) which you can send wherever whenever.
And for the ones who are perishable? If it is 2 hours of in game time... You got plenty of time to move the item from point A to point B.

If you end up with rot, then either it means you are not processing your item early enough in the line, in which case, move your factory, or your ressource node closer (They are trees, you can plant them on special soil that you can place yourself... So you are not bound by the location you get the plant at unlike iron, copper, stone, etc), or you are just buffering, in which case, up your production just like you would normally do and things will go smoothly.
And if you do get some rot, you filter it out. Remember, they have added filtering to all inserters. Just either make some inserters take out the rot, or about to rot items in your line, and/or use splitters to send the rot away to get disposed of. Again, that ressource is infinite, so all you have to do is improve your production's treatment speed which also comes with the faster belts etc...

You are directly imagining "OMG how do I put this in trains" when you don't have to. You can just create new farms in other parts of your factory, you don't have to bring the fruits everywhere from a central hub. Make mutliple fruit farms where you need the fruits to be.
And only transport the longer shelf time items over some distances. If there is stone, iron, copper etc on Gleba, that is what you will bring by train. But the plants themselves, you just plant them where you need them to be, and that solves your logistic issue.

It isn't as bad as you think it is going to be. You just need to optimise the factory for a quick treatment of the product rather than stockpile stuff. It is no different to smelting a huge load of iron ore without buffering, you just need the appropriate production line for it. The only idea i dislike is sending perishable items to another planet, but even that is most likely not an actual issue, otherwise they wouldn't add it to the game.

[Saphira123456]

I did fudge the numbers a bit to increase chances of getting my point across. However, there's other factors that may significantly reduce the fudge factor in the end, such as people who think they like it right now but will end up hating it in the final release.

I thought it was some trolling like when you posted your factory with only 1 of every single building and said you beat a space exploration game with that x).

Space Exploration is a bad benchmark for this because the majority of its Machines most people only build one of anyways. Only the Ore Processing people build quite a bit of.

Thanks for the backup, sir.

And thanks AGAIN for the help in DMs! I keep coming back to your aid whenever I need help in Factorio.

"This guy knows what he's talking about."

You're welcome, always happy to help you improve your gameplay, sorry if my previous answer was moderated, it was not saying anything more really that what you quoted again here.

I was talking to GregoriusT. Not you mmmPI.

[Saphira123456]

Green and especially blue science takes a god-awful amount of time to produce, especially at a small scale. And modules don't help much.

Then increase the scale. That's the core challenge of this game

Also judging by the screenshots (fix:) purple and yellow science (as we know them today) are gone.

Also excuse me, green science is really easy even at small scales? You can get 40 SPM with 13 first level assemblers working from iron and copper plates?

That's not small-scale. That's optimum-scale. It's also ridiculous-scale.

When I say "small-scale" I mean the bare minumum to get one first-level assembler working constantly on green science. One entire week - 72 hours straight - to do all green science.

And by the way, GregoriusT recommended 24 to 48 assemblers on green science.

I never did much purple or yellow science on any of my playthroughs, even my mostly-vanilla one. Nor are they mandatory, minus the rocket silo.

[Saphira123456]

As a casual player who doesn't find much interest in off-screen, out-of-game math,

Same, yet I don't really have an issue with it as is. A part of me would like a fridge mechanic, sure, but I don't think I'm not going to enjoy it without.

As such, I find your numbers a wee bit more than a little biased.

Biased, yes - but a lot of that bias is coming from in-game experience of how long certain things take to make in 1.1, like science packs.

Green and especially blue science takes a god-awful amount of time to produce, especially at a small scale. And modules don't help much.

What does that have anything to do with the percentage of people that won't like the mechanic?

I was merely explaining why I am biased, and what that bias is based on.

You did clearly notice the bias in your comment, after all.

[Anima117]

The spoilable science packs actually make me wonder whether building labs is going to only be possible on Nauvis in the expansion - otherwise it doesn't seem like it would be viable to build them anywhere other than Gleba to minimize spoilage. It would also give your Nauvis base a reason to still exist once you unlock the other planets - from what we've seen so far it seems like everything you can build on Nauvis can be built on the other planets so Nauvis will be the only planet without a unique exportable so it needs some reason to be used in the mid to late game.

For the "spoilage will make the game literally unplayable and also killed my family" people I'd suggest relaxing a little, given that we already have the option to turn off major features like biters and pollution I've no doubt they'll also add the option to completely disable spoilage so you can be as unchallenged as you like by it while the rest of us are off having fun.

I mean more in terms of permanent benefits. What I consider a permanent benefit is for example, Vulcanus' infinite supply of stone, iron ore and copper ore. The utility of that is that if you were to run out of iron, copper, or stone on Nauvis, and somehow couldn't get to a nearby patch right now, you could use Vulcanus as a permanent supply of the stuff.
Same for Fulgora having an infinite source of oil. Oil is already technically infinite in Factorio, but not at a steady rate. While I presume Fulgora's supply wont be "as good" as the supply on Nauvis (as in, transport logistics from planet to planet is gonna be painful), but you could theorically use it to supply Nauvis.

And you could also supply to other planets. Imagine Gleba has no iron, copper, and stone deposits. I don't think they'd do that because I'm fairly certain they intend for you to not get softlocked should something bad happen on a planet and you probably can't transport ressources until you reach rockets again, but imagine they did something like that. But already Vulcanus to Fulgora basic ressource transportation is a good idea given Fulgora works by recyling trash. Having a space platform do trips from Vulcanus to Fulgora with infinite resources would eventually solve most of Fulgora's problems so you can keep farming the rest of the stuff in peace.

Anyway, my point remains, aside from expanding your resources, I do wonder if Gleba will bring something else than just the bioflux and carbon fiber (Which are going to be this planet's main export, just like Vulcanus gets Tungsten, and Fulgora gets Holmium) in the same sense that the other two planets get a bonus addition of a resource being farmable to infinity.

Actually given that they mention that the agriculture stuff will be used to replace oil processing I wonder whether Gleba will end up being the best place to scale oil products (plastic in particular) rather than Fulgora due to the limited processing space on Fulgora's islands and the fact that we don't actually know how extraction and processing will work on Fulgora (I'd bet it's not going to be as simple as an offshore pump giving you pure crude). I'd expect Fulgora to actually be mostly exporting red and blue circuits (or their downstream products) as the ability to get them in one step from something you dig up seems pretty powerful...

I wonder if the first step should be so uniform. If a tree is sits there with big juicy fruit, it's eventually going to rot, right? Instead of getting fresh perfect fruit off the vine every time, start with a mix of over ripe, under ripe, and nearly decayed fruit. The trees have been sitting there for a while, so rot management becomes part of the factory design from the very start. As players build bigger and faster they get rewarded, by cycling through their tree farms faster. Fresh trees end up with healthier and higher quality fruit, but the factory was already hardened against the worst.

The more I think about it, the more I keep coming back to this. If spoilage is fully deterministic from start to finish then the optimal design will just have no spoilage (and therefore no need to deal with spoilage) unless/until something goes wrong. I think I'd actually prefer there to always be a possibility of an item fully spoiling before it gets through the processing chain so that the player is "taught" to deal with spoilage while things are actually working rather than leaving and coming back to a deadlocked planet with spoilage everywhere once something backs up.

For the first part, I am conflicted. I see 3 possibilities.
1) All research are on Nauvis. I like the idea, but that also means the new science packs can't unlock any new recipe while you are stuck on the new planet, which would mean you can't tie the new recipes to said tech, and so the planet specific tech can't be locked to the new science packs, only post-content can.
2) It is available on all planets, but some research are required to be done on specific planets. Nothing prevents you from making basic science packs on other planets as far as we know. And you definetely got the ressources. But I do agree that Nauvis would lose that one thing that makes it special.
3) The one that kinda combines both, and I think the more likely but also at the cost of a risk of softlock so I am not sure about it. Since your factory is running on Nauvis, you could launch research that you discover from landing on the new planet from affar, and wait for the research to be done on Nauvis. This solves the issue of not making research on the other planets, but if somehow your factory would get whiped by biters or your coal production ran out, or power got cut off or something, you would be stranded on the new planet, unless of course you would be able to get to the rocket stage without new recipes then. (which would also mean you planned your factory badly but still, I'm pretty sure Wube intends for every planet to be self-sufficient and allow you to get out of a softlock should that happen)

Also space science will be made on space platforms and sent back to Nauvis, so that would make sense that Nauvis does the research. Maybe a combination of 2 and 3? A few recipes to be learned on the planet and the rest all on Nauvis?

I also agree that people need to chill out. It is kinda like the quality system, everyone immediately assumes it will be awful because it will change how they design factories, when literally it doesn't have as much of an impact on regular play, it is just a slight different way of playing, and requires you to solve a puzzle. It is more interesting than copy-pasting what you did on Nauvis onto another planet and calling it is a day.


For the veggie oil vs Fulgora's oil, they mentioned off-shore pumps for Fulgora. What I wonder is, maybe the veggie oil has some different qualities to craft other things that the regular oil already does. Or maybe it is not as good quality (Not talking about the quality system itself) and would require more of it to equal regular oil? Because if the veggie oil gives you the exact same benefits as crude oil, and isn't particularly harder to get, then yes, Fulgora's oil supply would be pointless. We will have to wait and see I guess.


For the last bit, I think the way it will work is, every time an item is processed further, the spoilage will slow down. THey said a few minutes to a few hours. Probably the start of your line will rot extremely fast. After being processed into a secondary product, they'll maybe take 15 minutes to rot. Then maybe 45 minutes, then 1h30, etc etc? If you process the short shelf items fast, without delay or buffering, the rest is probably smooth sailing. I saw a lot of people wonder about transportation by train, but they seem to not take into consideration that the plants can be planted anywhere you like with soil. So you wont even need to worry about transporting the fruits by train, just make a new ressource node where you need it instead.