Add Extra Despawn Timer to Higher Armour Tiers?

[GiftGruen]

Losing power armour etc. sucks a lot for beginners in mid-game. Afaik, the reason you are no longer required to stick a satellite into your rocket is because it was a beginners' trap you could fall into easily, and was way too high a punishment for one sloppy mistake. Similarly, getting a lovely hug from one biter too many when you're far from your starting point and worse, respawning with nothing but a pistol and yellow mags 5-10 mins of car travel time away from your death spot makes recovery of your hard-earned armour modules an unnecessarily difficult challenge.

I think extending your corpse timeout depending on what armour you dropped would be a good compromise, as it gives a bit more security to the currently highest-possible long-term punishment for a short-term mistake. Also, it fits thematically and makes the recovery of your losses a doable challenge rather than a reload opportunity.

Alternatively, maybe some item that lets you refresh the timer if you're in the area, but still fighting off the biters that killed you? It could be something rather expensive or unusual, something like a grenade that you can lob in there and GTFO, since mining your corpse would slow you down just a tad too much?

[kitters]

I don't think there is such a problem in this game.
First of all, i can't understand, what can player do 10 MIN OF CAR travel far FROM HIS BASE. This game isn't about exploration at all. Deposits can easily be found with perimeter radars. Within a base a player should have transport system to quickly reach any point.
Secondly, a player SHOULD have another set of armor around respawn. From my experience making a set takes negligible amount of resources compared with throughtput of base. Getting another one set is just a couple minutes of working already existing assembler complex.
So, this situation is either an very rare isolated case or a consequence of a wrong playstyle, but never a regular punishment for a short-term mistake.
And thirdly, in that very rare case a lot of players just load 3-5min earlier saves and don't give a shit.

So, I don't even think there is anything to discuss here.

[GiftGruen]

This is exactly the kind of comment I tried to pre-empt by comparing it with no satellites in rockets. The latter clearly got changed because the devs did NOT think "this case should never occur in good play, therefore any punishment you suffer from deviating from said good play (because you're new or distracted or just plain bad) is fair."

Now, clearly the stakes aren't as high here, you can come back from this far more easily since it costs a lot less total. Also, by car travel time I meant that it takes 5 minutes to build a new car, supply it, navigate to the nearest gate, drive to the spot you died at (which in my case was within range of lots of worms) and unless you prepared for this exact situation, you basically have 5 mins to turret-creep the worms to death.

This game is not Dark Souls which punishes you for not focussing on a combat encounter because focussing on said combat encounters is the meat of DS's gameplay. Neither is it Minecraft which drops all your stuff upon death and starts despawning it because journeying into unknown territory is very exciting and (materially) rewarding, so if you faced no repercussions for running somewhere, looting everything and getting killed, everyone would play that way and death would just become a shortcut back to base. There are clear positives to the inclusion of a despawn mechanic in Minecraft. And in Dark Souls, it is specifically NOT timer-based because the game encourages you to take your time in defeating the things in your way in order to safely extract your souls at whatever pace is possible for you, instead punishing you only for being sloppy and/or careless twice in a row.

So, I guess my gripe with the game boils down to the following questions. If you can give a meaningful answer to them, I will concede the point I am trying to make here (and I will try my best to look at it in an unbiased way and to be open to changing my mind). The questions are:

In what way would the game experience be poorer if there were no despawn mechanic at all? Does its existence provide an interesting incentive for the player (other than obviously incentivizing them to move somewhere within 10 minutes), fix some exploit or help opimization, or is it merely there because it has always been there in multiplayer?
And lastly, if there is any merit to keeping it around at all, would there still be the same negative impact on player incentives/game balance/performance if the despawn timer would simply be, say, twice as long?

[BlueTemplar]

I agree. Makes sense that higher tier armors would "take more time to rot".

And set it to be pretty low for corpses with no armor at all so that a careless "respawn free ammo cheese" is a bit less powerful, and so that new players hopefully might think about it a bit more instead of LEEROY-JENKINSING! their way into the closest spawner ?

And IMHO there needs to be a way to move your spawn point around.
- Maybe just set it to the closest rocket silo ? Or is this still too end-game ?
- The closest science lab ? (Might make for some weird exploits, but you never know before gameplay-testing it... we need a mod !)

[eradicator]

Afaik, the reason you are no longer required to stick a satellite into your rocket is because it was a beginners' trap you could fall into easily, and was way too high a punishment for one sloppy mistake.

If you base your whole argument on this maybe you should explain it. Because as the sattelite is (and always has been) required to produce space science and there is nothing stopping you from "wasting" a rocket by launching it empty you must clearly either a) be mistaken or b) mean something different?

In what way would the game experience be poorer if there were no despawn mechanic at all?

From a rather technical perspective: yes. Corpses all around the place are not nice. Not every corpse is valuable enough to recover it. And sometimes you just can't find it even if you're looking for it (forests etc). So there needs to be *some* mechanic that makes it disappear. Though for that purpose it wouldn't really matter if the timeout was 60 minutes.

An IMHO there needs to be a way to move your spawn point around.

THIS. The player is essentially discouraged from building his main base anywhere outside the starting area. Some people still do it. Because there are huge benefits to it - if you build a base very far from the origin then rich resources are right around the corner and shipping ore becomes much easier. Not providing *some* sort of spawn-moving mechanic is the anti-thesis of a sandbox. There even *is* a building that allows changing it, it's just never been given a recipe or graphic.

Thus the real question is: How expensive should changing your spawn point be?
As a player not interested in loosing progress i'm totally ok with "free", the same as i always disable losing my inventory on death in minecraft - loosing my "walking there & where the hell was i even?" progress is enough penalty for me. Btw, most MC modpacks include non-degrading graves, so item loss isn't really part of the mod-space metagame anymore. Not suprising given that in MC items esentially represent technologies and losing your inventory could mean loosing *all* progress. Also "getting the player back into the action asap" is very "modern" and almost every FPS/RPG does it now.

But because the "hardcore" is still strong in so many players (*sigh*) a more "acceptable" approach would be to have some sort of semi-expensive "outpost" building, and when you die you spawn either at the nearest outpost (like in first-person-shooters), or the last one you "activated" (like in role-play-games). As cost of infrastructure in factory is generally negligible compared to running costs it might be ok to just gate it behind some mid-game tech like red/blue circuits.

[GiftGruen]

Afaik, the reason you are no longer required to stick a satellite into your rocket is because it was a beginners' trap you could fall into easily, and was way too high a punishment for one sloppy mistake.

If you base your whole argument on this maybe you should explain it. Because as the sattelite is (and always has been) required to produce space science and there is nothing stopping you from "wasting" a rocket by launching it empty you must clearly either a) be mistaken or b) mean something different?

My bad. In earlier patches, you did not get a victory screen for launching an empty rocket. Now you do. I know to Factorio veterans the victory screen is basically meaningless and launching an empty rocket is wasteful without having any benefit. But to new players, the victory provides a much needed goal to get you to learn the game before you're able to set your own goals as well as giving you the chance to start with a new factory where you can experiment with different designs without having to tear everything up (something new players seem to be reluctant to do according to the campaign testing FFF). So they allowed you to win with an empty rocket even if it was your fault that you forgot to put a satellite in.

[Deadlock989]

People respawn? In single player?

Seriously?

[Bilka]

People respawn? In single player?

Seriously?

What else are you gonna do, reload your latest save which was made 5 hours ago? Quit the map forever?

[Deadlock989]

Default autosave interval is 10 minutes, isn't it? I upped it to a whopping 15 minutes.

And yeah, not sure I've ever needed to make a 10 minute car journey.

[5thHorseman]

People respawn? In single player?

Seriously?

What else are you gonna do, reload your latest save which was made 5 hours ago? Quit the map forever?

Save before you walk into a massive biter nest 10 minutes' drive from your base?

[Bilka]

Save before you walk into a massive biter nest 10 minutes' drive from your base?

More like saving before crossing any rail.

Enough offtopic half-bullshittery, personal opinion incoming: I like that it is possible to lose your corpse, it gives a penalty to death. I think that being able to move the spawnpoint would be great. I never end up wanting to respawn at exactly 0,0; it's either in the middle of my factory with too much clutter, or it is far away from my factory. However, I personally am not bothered so much by this as to even go and make a mod/use a mod that allows me to move the spawnpoint, much less propose it to be implemented in vanilla. Building a train line is just easier.

[5thHorseman]

Save before you walk into a massive biter nest 10 minutes' drive from your base?

More like saving before crossing any rail.

I've never had a base where I was 10 minutes of train riding away from any rail. But I also don't disable auto saving no matter how annoying it gets so on those rare occasions where I die by any means, I can choose to either revert to some time in the past 10 minutes, or do the corpse run.

I also zoom out when crossing rails to make sure trains aren't coming I've been hit by trains maybe a half dozen times and several of those were on purpose to get the achievement.

However considering the OP is talking about newbie traps, I can see a new player wandering out too far and getting killed. I can't see one building such an extensive train network that they literally can't make it back to their body in time, outside of intentionally buying a new game with that exact goal in mind.

Enough offtopic half-bullshittery, personal opinion incoming: I like that it is possible to lose your corpse, it gives a penalty to death. I think that being able to move the spawnpoint would be great. I never end up wanting to respawn at exactly 0,0; it's either in the middle of my factory with too much clutter, or it is far away from my factory. However, I personally am not bothered so much by this as to even go and make a mod/use a mod that allows me to move the spawnpoint, much less propose it to be implemented in vanilla. Building a train line is just easier.

Agreed on all points, including how while it'd be nice to move the spawn I don't really see the need for it.

[BlueTemplar]

As already mentioned - multiplayer ?

I have usually 99 autosaves spaced by 1 minute, and I *still* respawn sometimes :
- Most often during a fight where I consider to have done much better than my average.
- Sometimes as a self-punishment when I feel that I fucked up too badly.

Also, if you're annoyed by autosaves, you should probably look into moving them in the background (though this seems to be still a somewhat experimental feature, and you might need to run a server instance if you want to do it on Windows ?)

[Koub]

Also, if you're annoyed by autosaves, you should probably look into moving them in the background (though this seems to be still a somewhat experimental feature

A somewhat linux only experimental feature if I remember correctly.

[BlueTemplar]

Why do I have it as an option in MP hosting on Windows then ?

(And I seem to remember a config option line for MacOS too ?)

[eradicator]

Why do I have it as an option in MP hosting on Windows then ?

(Off topic?) Because "there's only one gui for everyone", as far as i know on Windows the setting is simply ignored.
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it gives a penalty to death.

In Factorio the game makes a large effort to not punish the player for experimenting

After reading that FFF i happily assumed that "don't be evil punish the player" was one of the core design principles of factorio. Which i really liked because i never understood what supposedly is so much fun about loosing several hours of progress for a split-second mistake like so many other people seem to enjoy [Edit: As it seems to be popular in *other*, i.e. "Dark-Souls-like" games, MMOs etc.]. It's one of the reasons i'm still here after all these years - games don't usually last longer than a month for me. Not sure if that principle has changed since, or if it was never meant for combat or whatever, but i'd like to belive it still stands.
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However, I personally am not bothered so much by this as to even go and make a mod/use a mod that allows me to move the spawnpoint, much less propose it to be implemented in vanilla. Building a train line is just easier.

I once had an outpost that was a 10 minute straight(!) line train ride away from the main base at {0,0}. That *did* cause me to make a mod for it. Albeit it's a teleporter-network-mod, not a spawn-point-moving-mod. And after that i never wanted to go back to bothering with personal trains. :p. I think i also have a POC minecraft-style "home command" mod somewhere - ye know, the kind where you just type "/home" and that's your spawnpoint from there on. I guess i could dig that up if there was any interest. For an "outpost" style mod i don't have any good graphics.

[Freddie Chopin]

Which i really liked because i never understood what supposedly is so much fun about loosing several hours of progress for a split-second mistake like so many other people seem to enjoy.

Why not just enable auto-save then? Why did you actually disable it anyway? Why not save before a fight (I do it before approaching any nest, even if equipped with 10 nukes and dealing with just 10 spawners)? How can you loose several hours of progress? Are you going through biter-nests equipped with 10000 each of 3rd tier productivity & speed modules or maybe 200000 space science packs or what? You are going for a fight, it's understandable that you may "die", otherwise it wouldn't be a fight. There has to be something you loose when you "die". The game doesn't "punish you" if you want to rebuild your whole base from scratch, however it will NOT be a pleasant, quick and easy experience, but a lot of work. In neither case game doesn't punish you by making any of this harder than necessary. You can always switch to editor and instantly create yourself what you've "lost". Or teleport yourself to the place you died. The end effect will be identical to what you expect (corpse laying there forever with all your precious items).

[BlueTemplar]

Again, you *have* to take multiplayer into account even if only a tiny fraction of player time is spent on it...

[eradicator]

There has to be something you loose when you "die".

Like i said above, i lose time for walking back, that's enough for me. If you want to lose more you're part of the "enjoys loosing progress" group that i don't understand. "Loosing several hours of progress" was meant as a description of that kind of game ("Death penalty" in MMOs, "Hardcore" games etc.). I edited the original post to be more clear on that.

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In the meantime i bothered to make a rudimentary respawning mod: Eradicator's Respawn Tweaks

[Freddie Chopin]

Like i said above, i lose time for walking back, that's enough for me.

But seriously - what possibly can you have on yourself which you cannot craft back in ~15 minutes? I'm assuming "post-game" (; , where intermediates (say blue chips or engines and stuff like that) are virtually unlimited. And I'm assuming we're talking about a reasonable behaviour, so going for a fight with mostly/only fight-related equipment, not - say - 200000 space science packs.

If you want to lose more you're part of the "enjoys loosing progress" group that i don't understand.

We seem to agree that we disagree (; I cannot understand what type of "game" would that be if you would loose absolutely nothing when doing something wrong. Items are not "progress" - you don't loose visibility of the map, resources in your chests, technology you already researched and so on.