Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[Elocutiona]

Mechanically, I like it a lot. My favourite recipe in the entire game is the Kovarex enrichment process, enabling lots of creative approaches to make it feed back into itself. This has a similar vibe to me, except now it can be applied to the whole game.
The complaints about added complexity and mess are largely redundant to me because of the mechanic being entire optional. I personally enjoy having to navigate messy and unique situations, instead of simply whipping out blueprints for everything. The glory of trains to me is that there is no universal best system; everybody does their own thing with different benefits and trade-offs.

[Akronymus]

I don't expect it to, but it'd be great if that also enables modules changing the output of a recipe to a different item, not just different rarity.

Also, can mods set a minimum rarity for certain inputs?

[j_matya]

There is actually a new achievement for having best legendary armor full of legendary equipment.

Hah, poor speedrunners. It will be interesting if 100% is still something that is achievable in a sane way in the expansion, like, what other achievement there will be
Also, can't wait for the blueprint design phase when speedrunning starts to kick off

[Aquillyne]

Overall, I love this! But I also hate the names! I expect you will make them moddable though, right? I'd name them something like Crude/Low (and you only realize the quality wasn't even good before you unlock quality modules and see it), Normal/Nominal, High/Great, Exceptional/Superior and Pristine/Perfect.

Exactly. The names aren’t correct for items that are manufactured; they’re appropriate for items that are found. Your suggestions are ideal.

[toman]

I agree with the names being a horrible fit for Factorio's theme.
Crude -> Normal -> Pristine -> Exceptional or similar feels much more in-tune with the setting.
I also hope the colors will be easily configurable without mods, or at least able to be turned off, the orange text on yellow background looks like a contrast nightmare.

In general I'm not a big fan of adding the random chance element right off the gate, but I'll trust the playtesters until I can get my own hands on it and judge it.
Hoping it's better than it sounds to me right now ^^;

[IForgotMyName]

It is also notable that we created a quality penalty on speed modules, because haste makes waste, and we wanted to reduce the number of places where beacons full of speed modules is the best way to go.

Are there other factors that degrade Quality, or are speed modules an exception?

[MaexxDesign]

I don't know what to make of this new feature yet.
But:
Can we please have a train that can carry more than a steel chest ?
A train that is 20 times bigger than a steel chest but has the same capacity is strange.

[Jan5366x]

I like this feature If the standard quality is not worse than the current state. This way it is fully optional and I love the gameplay addition alot.

But I also agree that the naming should be changed

[wodzu93]

My first reaction was "What the actual fuck is this!?". After reading through it, I'll reserve judgement until we actually get our hands on this and see how it plays. That said, this being a totally optional system (like combinators are in base game) is a great plus - don't touch it if you don't like it.

I can see why WUBE implement this - it allows for scaling vertically without technically adding any recipes or items, and without the need to do any extra graphics or adding any prototypes at all - it's all automatic. This system will make it possible to scale factories up without any UPS overhead, as higher tier machinery will produce more while still taking same CPU time.

On the other hand, sorting all the stuff might be a problem, as well as all the different mix of items. I assume items of differing quality don't stack (ie common gear can't stack with rare gear), and we can filter for quality everywhere where its relevant. Still ,this could potentially get annoying with placing power poles - like creating unwanted power connections because power poles vary in quality. Again, will have to wait and see how it plays.

One thing though, please change the tier names to something industrial sounding, and not generic RPG terms, it just feels silly for an intermediate product to be "epic" or "legendary".

Recycler though is definetly a great addition, even without all the quality stuff. Finally a way to properly dispose those burner buildings and pistols.

[toman]

I like this feature If the standard quality is not worse than the current state. This way it is fully optional and I love the gameplay addition alot.

But I also agree that the naming should be changed

Without the expansion, every item will be normal quality, which is the lowest, so everything would stay the same.

[vmainen]

I look forward to this. It seems like a nice addition, as long as it's locked behind a specific research or some setting that can be used to opt out. But please change the names.


I have a question about the recycler though. I see it disassembles items. But do I see it correctly: It disassembles "normal" items and that results in "uncommon" and "rare" plates/copper cables. How does that make any sense?

It should be like this: Recycling should produce UP TO the quality of the item, with certain percentage, and then a relatively big percentage would be lower quality items. Even putting "realism" aside in a scifi-game, it still seems like illogical thing, such as the old productivity modules in oil barreling. If I recycle something, so with a perfect recycler I should get "almost everything back" and with bad recycler I should get worse quality items back. I can see that this would make getting the better items way more difficult and might not be as fun. Unless the recycler gives _less_ items back, but would be able to "merge" the "lower quality" items back into "higher quality" parts.

[Hares]

At first, I double checked this isn't April's Fools. No, it's Sep 08.

[Suslik]

Does this mean that items with different quality won't stack into the same item stack? This will break lots of builds like malls and train recipe filters.

[Darloth]

I like the feature, but I agree the tier names need to change please.

For a start, if we can mass produce Rare items they're by definition no longer rare!

[Eode]

Science isn't affected by quality, right? Seems to be just the mall thing. I like it. In a normal playthrough, you quickly reach the point where you have the best of everything in unlimited amounts. I like this approach more than having MK I to MK VI assembling machines etc., like some mods do.

[zergologist]

There's a lot of feedback that will come between now and the final release of SA, but I can agree that the quality names and regaining quality from the recyclers just feels off. My take on this is that it feels a bit inelegant at the moment. Quality seems like kovarex enrichment for people who haven't yet made hundreds of cycles of purple science (and seems like later modules will require purple science), it feels just all a bit strange at the moment. There looks to be less reason that you wouldn't want lower quality items, but u-238 still has use outside of being enriched into u-235. It feels like it could lead into a vicious cycle of chasing the next tier of quality and improving your factory that way while deprioritizing regular operation.

If quality's main gimmick is to be a resource sink, then at least have that be a bit more apparent with a bit more to do with it. Quality feels out of place just being a way to distill your factory down to a machine. Doing that over and over again to convert entire megabases into monsters of output and cost (or outposts with a mere fraction of the productivity) almost feels like a new-game+ in a way if done the outpost route.

Quality, by what it looks like now, feels like it could be done a bit better. Quality feels like it should be something you should be able to prioritize in a factory better than with what mere modules can provide. Being able to hand-craft at a better quality for the cost of speed feels less random than this—that's the problem!

My issue with quality currently is that it's both named and feels like a dungeon crawler/RPG kind of mechanic, there's too much randomness involved, and it just feels wrong to have the same type of machines to produce bulk gears and quality gears. Even modern factories and laboratories that prioritize quality over quantity don't stuff their machines with the real life equivalent of a quality module; instead they custom order and have specialty machines built for quality. Quality on intermediates and other kinds of products would feel better if there were new machines that helped reduce the randomness that's inherent in building a quality system like this; machines specialized for a smaller selection of products with either more module slots or a module multiplier seem like the way to better fold quality into the expansion than sticking to the same small selection of assembly machines (save for quality!) that we've had for over a decade at this point.

This is just my two cents on the quality.

[StormTAG]

Y'all all complaining about the names, which is fair I guess. However, they'd need to be translatable, so it would be extremely weird if it couldn't be changed even if they do leave the "uncommon, rare, epic, legendary" in the base EN translation.

I, for one, am extremely curious to see what elements can and cannot be modded about quality as well as if its possible to add new tiers or require a certain minimum quality in modded recipes.

[Drury]

finally

the gacha update

[landmine752]

The idea of adding something like quality sounds like a good one. But, I have concerns about the whole random chance. Then again, have yet to play with the mechanic, but pure RNG isn't fun.

-Pure RNG is annoying. It's basically a wait mechanic that you can't math around. Will you get the right one? Well, you certainly have a chance. But, if you're unlucky, then there's nothing you can do but increase that chance. But there's no guarantee.
- It's hard to plan around RNG. It's too extreme on maybe giving you 3 legendary items in a row or none for hours. You can have 2 wildly different returns over a set period of time across 5 quality levels of different chances.
- It's not fun. I've already called it an arbitrary way mechanic, and someone else already noted how people immediately skip the RNG nuclear level. Because waiting for a chance of a thing isn't fun, unless you're invested in a gambling like scenario. Which isn't healthy.

Again, haven't experienced the mechanic firsthand, and while it sounds like a good solution for a need I do not agree with pure RNG. My vote would be go with samples of 100 or 1000. Every 1000 plates from a machine you will get 100 legendary quality (10%, if you met the requirements). When you get them in that 1000 plates, RNG. But, now at least you can have an expectation and math things out.

[aus564]

TLDR: I hope that this is togglable before the game starts...

It's very nice that items in the game get the ability to have extra data associated with them. imagine a legendary piece of u-235! this looks promising for modders potentially if there is any access to adding more data to items aside from the quality system. perhaps if a given item is laced with radiation... perhaps contaminated with another substance? would be cool for other modders to take advantage of those kinds of features, if there at all doable.

There's a handful of problems I have here with this quality system and it comes from not getting the harder details... Also when any item is made with legendary parts does the item in question remember what items were legendary when crafting it? does the crafted item gain legendary by default if its components are all legendary? It would only make sense that it would come out as legendary seeing as how all of its components are of the highest grade... ah yes, this solar panel will be made of components that are only of the most exceptionally rarest components. *gets a tier 0 solar panel* Will we get the ability to add the different tiers of buildings to blueprints/upgrade-deconstruction planners? to make replacement of older bases with more up-to-date ones?

I am personally not a fan of recrafting an item over and over again... perhaps add a new building or rescipe that can "improve" a crafted item... just spitballing here but have it be a long craft and take in extra materials from the same craft used for that item. and upgrade it... with a starting failure chance that improves with quality modules in tandem with the current things shown here... I can only imagine the logistical nightmare that is going to be trying to get a higher-prefix nuclear reactor or any similar craft that takes in loads of components.

personally, I want to be able to experience the different features of the expansions separately from one another. I hope that the planet associated with quality can provide something more than just quality to venture down. some new ores... perhaps different biters... a bunch of things on each rock would be nice so if I do decide to remove quality from the game or choose to never interact with it. then an entire planet won't be sitting there wasted.