Friday Facts #304 - Small bugs; Big changes

[Light]

At this point I'm glad the modding community provides content that gives this game some depth, since vanilla keeps losing what initially brought me to it in the first place. I'm trying to recall when the last time something meaningful was added and not removed since it certainly feels like it was a while ago. (Nuclear perhaps?)

It's not like they are going to remove Advanced Oil processing...

What kind of response is that? They could remove nuclear tomorrow and you could say "Well at least boilers are still here...", which is still a terrible deflection of the main concern at hand. This isn't just about them changing one recipe, it's the design decision this change is based on.

I'm not joking when I say I don't really remember when they last added content to expand the game after nuclear power. As Reika has shown, they've been going down the path of simplification for a while which alienates the very niche this game had going for it. Overcoming logistical problems is the whole reason to play the game, but if the game doesn't have puzzles to solve then it's just like any other simple logistics style game.

The question then becomes what else is on the chopping block, rather than what other cool systems are they adding to expand the game. That's how I've felt about FFF for a nice while, just this feeling of doubt that we'll get anything new and interesting instead of further degrading the experience.

There are many things this game could expand on, but it certainly feels like mods have to pick up the ball that Wube has been dropping. We don't need to go to the extreme end of Bob's+Angel's of course, but one must admit the game feels pretty bare after seeing all that could be done with it.

[Adamo]

I feel like I need to say something else. Forgot my old suggestion. I really made it to sort of show the ridiculousness of this new approach.

I had to rewrite the nuclear system in this game to be anything reasonably approaching real world nuclear physics. The other nuclear mods in the portal didn't get it right, either. I am not annoyed by this. You all are not physicists, and nuclear physics is hard. So I made my own mod and I use that and it's understandable because only a few thousand people in the world really understand how nuclear physics works.

This excuse does not fly with oil. Chemical engineering around oil is very clear and easy to look up on wikipedia. You have at least dozens of chemists who play this game, any of which you could consult to check things. The old version wasn't perfect, but at least it made some sense: you have light oil products, heavy oil products, and petroleum products. You needed a refinery to break this down, and it came at the right time in the game: the player needs to learn to handle the complexity to move on to this part of the game, and as it should be, because chemical engineering IS complex! This change to oil makes the process less realistic while also reducing the complexity to the point of even questioning why the refinery exists. A refinery has no reason to exist if it's not distilling out multiple products. Using the refinery at this stage is pointless, especially in light of any chemical engineering realism.

My point is that if you go through with the change in question, it's too stupid to not mod away into something closer to either my suggestion or to the original way the game worked. If that happens, Adamo Server Cluster, which is small, but we do have players, will now have branched off both in terms of nuclear and chemical engineering. Nuclear, again, is understandable: very few are going to be able to design a system like a trained physicist can. But I think now branching off on the basic oil setup spells the beginning of the end for the game, at least as it was when you started development.

I'm not trying to be rude. I love your game and have put thousands of hours into it, and written many mods (most of them unpublished outside our core group). Up until this point, as a scientist and engineer, I could live with the oil setup, because it had a good balance between realism and game mechanics. Changing it with the proposed simplification, in my mind, will mark a descent of the game philosophy away from any attempts at that balance, toward a simple-minded approach that doesn't embody what we (I mean the players on my network) have enjoyed about this game all of this time.

It's a bad move. I tried to suggest that by following it to its logical conclusion with my proposal. My proposal was so "bad" that it got removed from the ideas board with no explanation, but it is the logical conclusion both from a gameplay and realism standpoint. Please, guys, think this one through, and use this moment as a lesson about where the game mechanics development should go from here.

[ske]

But I think now branching off on the basic oil setup spells the beginning of the end for the game, at least as it was when you started development.

Relax, it's just a game

Wise people say: Love it, Change it, Leave it.

You are now at stage 2.

[Mike5000]

At this point I'm glad the modding community provides content that gives this game some depth, since vanilla keeps losing what initially brought me to it in the first place. I'm trying to recall when the last time something meaningful was added and not removed since it certainly feels like it was a while ago. (Nuclear perhaps?)

Priority splitters!

0.16 was peak Factorio.

Since then Factorio has been repeatedly dumbed down, science messed up, campaign replaced by something which is not Factorio, and graphics bloated. Yube should revert to 0.16, backport some bug fixes, fix the thundering train herds, and then ship before they're tempted to break it again.

[BlueTemplar]

I am in great agreement with many of your sentiments, here. In fact, many of the game mechanics that exist aren't even being used, when they should be, because it would actually make the game numbers more sensible if they were . For example, steam engines can have efficiencies under the prototype, but they're just set at 100%, and because of this the steam temperatures are a bit weird (too low) to provide the amount of energy they do. When I put some reasonable numbers into the steam engine and boiler efficiencies, I found that the steam temperature had to be brought up to much closer to the steam temperature from real fossil fuel boilers: ~350 degrees. It didn't even change the numbers for designs: still have 1 boiler to 2 steam engines, perfectly balanced. But my point is, why are we building all this complication into the game if we're just going to provide recipes and design possibilities that don't use them? Again I ask, what is even the point of using a refinery if it just takes in crude oil and outputs petroleum gas?

Going from 0.16 to 0.17, all power efficiencies (except nuclear bonus) were set to 100%.
That mechanic was kept in the game though, because a lot of mods use(d) it (like Bob's boilers, and even his steam engines at some point).

At this point I'm glad the modding community provides content that gives this game some depth, since vanilla keeps losing what initially brought me to it in the first place. I'm trying to recall when the last time something meaningful was added and not removed since it certainly feels like it was a while ago. (Nuclear perhaps?)

It's not like they are going to remove Advanced Oil processing...

What kind of response is that? They could remove nuclear tomorrow and you could say "Well at least boilers are still here...", which is still a terrible deflection of the main concern at hand. This isn't just about them changing one recipe, it's the design decision this change is based on.

How does that even compares ? There's hardly any mechanical differences between current Basic and Advanced oil processing !

I'm not joking when I say I don't really remember when they last added content to expand the game after nuclear power. As Reika has shown, they've been going down the path of simplification for a while which alienates the very niche this game had going for it. Overcoming logistical problems is the whole reason to play the game, but if the game doesn't have puzzles to solve then it's just like any other simple logistics style game.

The question then becomes what else is on the chopping block, rather than what other cool systems are they adding to expand the game. That's how I've felt about FFF for a nice while, just this feeling of doubt that we'll get anything new and interesting instead of further degrading the experience.

There are many things this game could expand on, but it certainly feels like mods have to pick up the ball that Wube has been dropping. We don't need to go to the extreme end of Bob's+Angel's of course, but one must admit the game feels pretty bare after seeing all that could be done with it.

I'm not sure what you were expecting, they can't afford to experiment with new features forever, they need to get to 1.0 at some point !
(And IMHO, the sooner we get there, the more likely that they won't be so tired of Factorio that they won't consider an expansion pack...)

And it's not like I'm not sad that we didn't get nuclear meltdowns due to reactor overheat and cooling towers, and not like I'm exactly thrilled about the proposal to remove temperature altogether...
But as long as the game keeps getting closer to release, more accessible to new players, and the potential of mods keeps expanding (pickaxe durability & strength... ), I'm happy !

My proposal was so "bad" that it got removed from the ideas board with no explanation, but it is the logical conclusion both from a gameplay and realism standpoint. Please, guys, think this one through, and use this moment as a lesson about where the game mechanics development should go from here.

I'm pretty sure that I saw it under "Duplicates", and it was then removed, because there was no point of merging it in this thread since it was just a copy-paste of the post?
(And yours wasn't the only one...)

[Silfir]

As a player who learned to play somewhat recently (I still haven't touched circuit networks), there are two concerns I have about the chance to basic oil processing.

1) I hate the thought of having to turn any amount of petroleum gas into solid fuel in future playthroughs. Light oil is what you use for solid fuel. I've absorbed that bit of knowledge now and I want to apply it. Now all I have is perfectly good petroleum gas that I'm being forced to waste? Not to mention the loss of verisimilitude. Oil processing should return a variety of products, shouldn't it? If basic oil processing can "waste" oil products out of existence in favor of petroleum gas, why can't I apply the same principle to "waste" any oil product except light oil, or heavy oil?

Ultimately it really boils down to the fact that I want to be able to make solid fuel for blue science without thinking "I really miss when you used to be able to get light oil". I see no good reason why I should have to research specialized oil processing techniques to get light oil. "It'll make the game simpler" isn't enough for me.

2) It won't make the game simpler. The can gets kicked down the road - in the end you will have the same setups. But I'm also a fairly new player, and like most fairly new players, I despise refactoring. Yes, it took a bit of knuckling down to set up my first oil refineries, with all the piping of the outputs and occasionally adding storage tanks while I'm figuring out how to keep things flowing without any actual understanding of ratios (I've always got belts full of any given material, often plastic, backing up because I'm making more than I need, or not enough of something else). But researching advanced oil processing was always a joyful moment, since I had to do a minimal amount of refactoring - just add water. Everything else goes to the same place it used to go.

With the change, it would be completely possible, even expected, to have to rebuild oil processing from scratch, because all the space required to wrangle the three different oil liquids is more likely than not blocked. Not by the experienced players, mind you - because they learned oil processing properly in the olden days and will account for the inevitable refactoring - but the new players you're trying to help. I know I would have hated that.



So into actual suggestions. The one about turning basic oil refining into heavy-oil-only, and asking players to set up cracking to get all the other oils, is superior simply because it lets me actually turn light oil into solid fuel, like I know I'm supposed to long term. But in my eyes the answer is simple: Keep the old basic processing. Your issue is that new players don't immediately catch on about how blocked outputs are making everything not work. That's a UI problem. Put something in the refinery's window that says "There is currently no room for [product]. Consider adding a storage tank while you plan long-term solutions" or something to that effect. A singular storage tank keeps production going ("whew, I fixed it for now"), and then players start thinking about how to solve the problem long-term, which is exactly what this game is supposed to be about.



In closing, if this change gets implemented and forces me to turn a single dollop of petroleum gas into solid fuel, I'm ... going to wag my finger threateningly in your direction. Probably install a mod, more likely. Which I hate doing - I've installed so many very popular conversion mods over time that left me thinking "You know what, the original developers knew better". I suspect in this case the Factorio development team from however long ago when oil was added in its current form knew better, too.

Of the changes that I've seen and many players complained about - like, apparently, pickaxe removal (that actually bothered people?) - this is the only one that's inspired me to create a forum account - make of that what you will.

[Adamo]

Of the changes that I've seen and many players complained about - like, apparently, pickaxe removal (that actually bothered people?) - this is the only one that's inspired me to create a forum account - make of that what you will.

I agree with much of what you are saying in your post, Silfir, and I want to second the bit that I quoted from you. In my long-winded way, this is what I was trying to say with my last post. There's a reason we're coming out of the wood-work on this one. Most changes fall down to "OK, we can try something new", but this change is not a good choice.

[FuryoftheStars]

It's a bad move. I tried to suggest that by following it to its logical conclusion with my proposal. My proposal was so "bad" that it got removed from the ideas board with no explanation, but it is the logical conclusion both from a gameplay and realism standpoint. Please, guys, think this one through, and use this moment as a lesson about where the game mechanics development should go from here.

I'm pretty sure that I saw it under "Duplicates", and it was then removed, because there was no point of merging it in this thread since it was just a copy-paste of the post?
(And yours wasn't the only one...)

It was merged into this thread by Koub. If you check your post history, you'll find it. They're merging all idea & suggestions on this into this thread for now, I guess.

But I think now branching off on the basic oil setup spells the beginning of the end for the game, at least as it was when you started development.

Relax, it's just a game

Wise people say: Love it, Change it, Leave it.

You are now at stage 2.

I'm with Adamo in feelings on this. Frankly, I'm getting tired of finding a game worth playing, having the devs change and destroy what I found interesting about it, and then having to look for something else. It gets old and frustrating after a while.

[Adamo]

It was merged into this thread by Koub. If you check your post history, you'll find it. They're merging all idea & suggestions on this into this thread for now, I guess.

Ahh, OK, thanks! I tried looking in the history, but didn't think to look inside threads that were already part of my history.

[StansTheMan]

Also unhappy with Oil changes. But I don't agree with Heavy Oil + Cracking from the start either!


If they exactly and precisely want to help pure beginners, just add even simpler processing recipes for refinery on its first research: 1 Input → any 1 Output.

Just break up Basic Oil Processing!
Recipe A: 100 Crude → 30 Heavy
Recipe B: 100 Crude → 30 Light
Recipe C: 100 Crude → 40 Petrol

It just means burning the excess away for convenience. Literally using the waste flare on the building. New fancy large flame grafixx, problem solved.

[AideenFb]

What really needs to happen (and quite frankly should have happened months ago) before this simplistic and foolish change to Oil Processing is given serious consideration is to add another chapter/scenario to the New Player Experience campaign which focuses on Oil Processing and Fluid Handling.

That glaring hole in the NPE makes the jump in complexity to Oil even bigger.

[Rainboy]

Ultimately it really boils down to the fact that I want to be able to make solid fuel for blue science without thinking "I really miss when you used to be able to get light oil". I see no good reason why I should have to research specialized oil processing techniques to get light oil. "It'll make the game simpler" isn't enough for me.

...

So into actual suggestions. The one about turning basic oil refining into heavy-oil-only, and asking players to set up cracking to get all the other oils, is superior simply because it lets me actually turn light oil into solid fuel, like I know I'm supposed to long term. But in my eyes the answer is simple: Keep the old basic processing. Your issue is that new players don't immediately catch on about how blocked outputs are making everything not work. That's a UI problem.

Couldn't agree with this more. Pushing excess oil out to solid fuel is an easy and effective solution to early oil woes, and I don't at all think that newer players are beyond implementing it. I'd bet anything that, in general, the issue is not that the problem is too difficult to solve, but rather that it is too difficult to figure out what's wrong. This seems like a heavy-handed mechanics fix for a user interface problem.

If this change gets implemented, I will happily join the ranks of others in this thread who plan to install whatever mod shows up to revert the change.

[5thHorseman]

What have assemblers and miners been teaching people all this time when their outputs back up?

That nothing backs up without being full. When your iron mines back up, your copper mines keep churning out copper ore. The first time you (or at least I) stared at a refinery with 0 petrol output and a full line of crude, you (or at least I) were confused. It goes against everything you've learned and it's compounded by the fact that you can't see chunks of crude being placed in the refinery and chunks of light, heavy, and petrol being removed.

If there was the equivalent of belts for pipes (and I'm sorry the little windows aren't in your face enough) maybe it'd be obvious the first time. Maybe if some recipe had 2 outputs before oil processing that would teach the lesson as well. But giving people multiple liquids to deal with for the first time AND multiple outputs from a recipe is too much.

I can show my initial thoughts on this in a simple diagram...

[bobingabout]

Nope, don't like the oil changes.

Light oil is useless basically, this won't really teach new players how to manage multiple products any better, and it doesn't encourage changing to AOP once you have it, just encourages making two setups. Check the Reddit discussion, I saw a number of good alternatives there.

Light oil isn't (wasn't) useless, it was there for 2 reasons. Flamethrower fuel and making solid fuel. if you look at all the cracking and solid fuel recipes closely, you'd see that not only does it cost less light oil to make the solid fuel than other oil products, but you actually end up with more fuel blocks by cracking heavy oil to light oil and making the fuel blocks from light oil than you would by making them from heavy oil.

I'm not sure how this is going to work with PG only.

[Haxxibal]

The oil processing changes are not just bad, they are terrible. Let me give you a few reasons:

The difficulty spike for newer players comes from the unintuitive system for pipe connections and fluid mechanics, which both are already somewhat remedied by your newly introduced parental control system AND permanently marked pipes. Right now it introduces new players to the concept of byproducts, which can conveniently be turned into something useful and disposable. It has never been a huge problem for newer players to figure out the "What am I going to do with light oil, oh, there is only one recipe anyways" line of thinking. All it takes is some minor trial and error with single refineries and chemical plants and they know exactly what to do. From there on they are just one step away from creating an effective fluid sink in the form of chemical plants+chests/boilers. If you think your players are unable to think that far you might as well remove all fluids and pipes. That's because setting up steam engines is almost as complicated to newer players and happens so much earlier. The real problem is that players have to figure out how pipes, tanks and fluids work. And then they also have to deal with getting stuck in their pipe layouts because to this day you still can't move below pipes. When I watch newer players approach oil they mostly struggle with walling themselves in and fidgeting with the connections until someone tells them to heavily use underground pipes instead. Figuring out what goes where is not an issue. Blaming the difficulty spike on the recipe instead of the pipes/fluid system is just wrong. Make it so people can run through pipes and have underground pipes only require iron plates. Reintroduce oil processing in the tutorial with the "show info" option turned on. Incentivice usage of underground pipes. This is how you ease the learning curve for newer players without gutting your content for veterans.

While it would become easier for newer players to reach blue science, advanced oil processing is sure to have them start all over with their layouts. Their experience with the new basic processing will not be of any help here, all you did was delay the task of figuring out real oil processing.

Speaking of byproducts, vanilla only has oil processing, barreling, uranium and mixed ore drills. That already feels dumbed down. More byproducts would be nice, not less, but that's my opinion.

With your new recipe the refinery will be a simple liquid converter. One input, one output, one recipe. Neither does this warrant a 5x5 footprint nor does it resemble how actual oil refineries work. You should rather move the building to the advanced oil processing tech and let the chemical plant handle early refining.

If you have to transport your first oil over large distances, refining on site will become a viable option. Just think about that for a moment to realize how unintuitive such playstyle sounds for oil.

For seasoned players it takes away an interesting alternative to burning coal in boilers. Before 0.17 players had no need to produce any solid fuel before rocket fuel, but it helped a lot when you had to expand power production. But now it competes with plastic and sulfuric acid, and you will get so much less due to its inefficient recipe. The boost in power production was my favourite part of rushing early oil, it gave oil and identity, similar to the other resources. Iron ore --> automated mining. Stone --> automated smelting+pavement. Copper --> electricity+science. Oil --> red chips+power. But now it loses most of that identity, all it does is being converted to plastic. Mine oil, smelt oil, use oil plates to get plastic. Might as well call the oil patches "Plastic ore 388%". And light oil will finally become "liquid rocket fuel"

Also, light and heavy oil have been a staple for late green science for a while now. A few modded items and most larger mods assume the availability/abundance of these intermediates, especially lubricant. With them gone, modders will either have to replace them or change the recipes to accept petroleum instead. Neither of these substances feel more advanced or hitech-y than petroleum. And blue science is full of futuristic gadgets and buildings. Accessing light and heavy oil alongside lubricant in blue science feels out of place. You could move advanced oil to green science instead and make it cost like 200 packs. That would get around this problem. If you're so afraid of green science bots, then move them to blue science, but keep the oil products.

Given enough crude oil available, many players will opt to skip cracking and get most of their petroleum from basic refineries. The only need to advanced refining comes when you want to launch your first rocket. This can't be healthy for the game.

[Solinya]

The oil changes are...interesting. I like that there's some simplification happening, as any time I need to set up oil and blue science the game grinds to a halt for 60-90 minutes while I fiddle with all the pipe and chemical plant layouts, before even hooking up the plastic -> red circuits -> blue science production chain.

I am a little worried about basic oil going to petroleum only because of the consequences that might have later in the game. Other people have mentioned the impact this would have on solid fuel (having to set up solid fuel off of PG for blue science only to switch it away later).

I liked the suggestion some other people have had where basic oil produces light and PG, so it's a bit simpler than today where you juggle three fluids, but still gives you a setup for solid fuel off of light (which isn't too bad), and you still get to spend most of your time on the PG products to get red circuits running. It also may make the transition to advanced oil easier as you'd only need to add heavy oil to your chain instead of both heavy and light. And by having two fluids off of basic you're subtly encouraged to leave enough space that it's easier to retrofit in the third fluid, as opposed to the PG-only basic oil setup where you can have everything all compact until you suddenly discover "oh, now I need to add two more fluid exports in here...somehow".

[FuryoftheStars]

What have assemblers and miners been teaching people all this time when their outputs back up?

That nothing backs up without being full. When your iron mines back up, your copper mines keep churning out copper ore. The first time you (or at least I) stared at a refinery with 0 petrol output and a full line of crude, you (or at least I) were confused. It goes against everything you've learned and it's compounded by the fact that you can't see chunks of crude being placed in the refinery and chunks of light, heavy, and petrol being removed.

I don't think that's a good analogy. Copper and iron are both being mined separately and then sent off to the assemblers to be crafted into something.

It also isn't the lesson I was referring to. The point was that if the output doesn't have anywhere to go, then the assembler is going to shutdown until you make room. Considering these are machines following set instructions, in the case of multiple outputs, it seems logical that if one backs up, the whole machine needs to shutdown until you've cleared room. It can't continue to make the other outputs because they're all linked. It's a machine following a single recipe... not multiple.

[Adamo]

The point was that if the output doesn't have anywhere to go, then the assembler is going to shutdown until you make room.

I agree, but from my observations, some players aren't getting the memo. They are totally stuck on the refinery and really have no clue what to do. Their experience with assemblers and inserters hasn't prepared them for this moment, even though you and I think it could have through a certain abstraction. But this is also why I'm falling on "just explain it in a tutorial". I thought there was an oil processing tutorial, in fact? I've never actually played the tutorial, since I already know how to play the game, but some of the comments in the thread seem to suggest that how to setup a refinery is not taught to players.

[zebediah49]

First off, a THANK YOU for returning obstacle avoidance to the rail planner. It's way more awkward than it used to be (Still requires holding down shift the entire time, thus preventing clockwise rotation), but at least I can go back to playing my "rails through a forest" world again.

Second WRT Oil: I'll also put myself down as "against". I think the problem with the oil difficulty jump comes from two sources:

1) There is no clear indicator that production has stopped due to backup.
2) There is no clear thing to do with not-immediately-needed oil products.

IMO they should be fixed independently:

1) Some type of graphical indication would be nice. I'm not enough of a UI guy to give a better solution than a red flag that pops up or something, but it should be clear to the player that the building is not running due to output-blocking.
2) Flare. If the player wants just-petrol, they can just burn off the excess light and heavy oil. Not appreciably more complex, and allows the player to ease their way into oil processing.

That said, two additional supporting notes:

- Many recipes output a single thing to both outputs of a chem plant. This is convenient, but misleading in that you can ignore outputs "sometimes".
- In the game that's currently running in the background, I have a field of basic-processing set up, because I'm low on Lubricant. There's no way to produce more heavy out of light or petrol...

[PhasmaNL]

I don't like the oil recipe change. It's a huge change, and that's not necessarily bad, but then it should provide huge benefits as well and that's not the case in my opinion.