Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[Stochasticity]

Adding to the chorus to please change the tier names. I happily play a ton of games that use these exact titles, but for whatever reasons I felt visceral nausea when I saw it in this FF.

After getting over that initial bump though and carefully reading everything, I am now super duper excited. QA/QC is a huge part of production management and after dealing with so many tolerance, defect, and other quality control issues in real life, Factorio would sometimes feel weirdly surreal, if not almost shallow, that every item was always produced within specs. The tier names made me strangely scared at first for this FF, but now I'm awfully excited to start filtering, recycling, and overall agonizing over this aspect of my factory too!

[fiery_salmon]

This names are terrible and remind me about lootboxes and gacha games.

And I hate, hate both of them.

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Overall I am very sceptical about entire feature but naming is definitely absolutely terrible.

[littlejohnii]

I like this feature. I like this feature a lot. I see the clear intent to expand progression and streamline it without adding MK2 and MK3 versions of everything. I also like that the quality feature is optional.

If I may, I'd like to suggest two more achievement ideas:
1, Complete the game without creating anything of quality higher than normal.
2, Have more items produced by buildings of legendary quality than buildings of any other quality.

If there's one thing that I would like to see that hasn't been mentioned in the FFF (and I don't know if it's currently possible) it would be to allow mods to create higher quality items by specifying extra input items. For example, instead of a legendary gun turret being created from 10 legendary iron plates, let mods set the requirements to 10 legendary iron plates + 5 titanium plates.

And also... will fish have quality?

[Nosferatu]

This is part of the DLC only or it will be integrated in the whole game? I hope you could turn this stupid RNG off. If this is activated by DLC I really starting to considered to not buy it righ now Because it is so HUGE game changing thing that you would have to change absolutely whole facotry from scratch in order to nosence RNG.
I was so exited about the DLC but now im not at all and really worried!

Expansion only
To make things clear, the quality content is exclusively part of the expansion. The non-expansion binary works the same internally, it just doesn't allow any mod to define anything other than the normal quality.

We have made it so that quality is 'invisible' in the game until quality modules are unlocked, so you won't see anything related to quality if you haven't researched quality module or are playing the base game. This includes all the GUIs and interactions as mentioned earlier.

[morsk]

Names & colors are a direct copy from World of Warcraft. I am not seeing people notice this. I prefer this to changing them for no reason. Baldurs Gate 3 changes Epic to Very Rare but otherwise uses them exactly.

I don't mind changing them to something more "manufacturing quality" themed if people are having a reaction of visceral disgust to "loot box" quality, but I think it's sad this is happening at all. The feature encourages loops, decentralization, and having parts of the factory that aren't 12-beaconed, and all people see is loot-box parallels. :/ But it is art, and if it makes people see it that way, it's bad.

[Farzag]

I think the idea is good. Two thoughts:
* Since haste makes waste, could you simply allow players to take a big speed penalty on a machine to get better quality items? That feels very thematic and could complement quality modules.
* I don’t like the names of the quality levels. Something like “Normal, Refined, Hardened, Exceptional, Perfect” would be more in line with Factorio imo.

[MrGuffels]

As long as it can be disabled, I don't see a problem. Make sure the Mod API is really good for this feature because I don't need RNG quality in my factory sim. It's either deterministic or it's not making it into my production line.

[Miroro]

Sorry, but I don't like te quality idea at all. This will lead to some randomness which should not be a part of a factory. Withe the same setup you will newer have a guarantee to have the same output. In some cases the layout is optimised in a way that this randomnes can cause blockages.

The recycler on the other hand is something I like.

The naming is just a tiny thing to add to whole quality idea to make it a bad idea.

[IForgotMyName]

In my opinion, the main problem with the Quality mechanic is that it is essentially a "crutch".
Of course, this is an unusual and quite universal solution for vertical growth of a factory, instead of adding a ton of bland items and assemblers. Also it adds a variety of new challenges, some of which are suitable for beginners, while others will make even veterans scratch their heads.
On the other hand, this mechanic does not fit into the game at all. As if this is not an official addition, but the creation of modders who wanted to experiment. Changing the quality doesn't even change the sprite of the items and machines; although this makes no sense, because only a crazy person would want to edit thousands of sprites for the sake of one mechanic.
At least the liquids won't get this new mechanic. Maybe

[Drury]

Names & colors are a direct copy from World of Warcraft. I am not seeing people notice this. I prefer this to changing them for no reason. Baldurs Gate 3 changes Epic to Very Rare but otherwise uses them exactly.

It's hard to notice because there's a million other games that also use this exact same naming scheme.

Also neither of the games you mentioned are anywhere near the logistical puzzle sandbox genre. I'd hazard a guess most factorio players aren't really drawn to games that use this naming scheme at all (I know I'm not).

Factorio is a sci-fi factory game, there's no reason why a solar panel should be "legendary". What legends are told about these solar panels?

[Fish-Face]

For the RNG side of things I think you could improve the situation by a cheaper/more satisfying mitigation sub-system than the recycler with its big cost penalty, basically tuned so that if you want to reliably achieve a certain tier of quality you can do so with a hefty but manageable up front cost rather than a large ongoing cost. (Some of the content of the post makes it sound like they wanted to avoid this possibility by making higher quality very expensive to ensure)

I didn't even think before about the issue of sorting everything out - how complicated is a mall going to be which aims for a certain level of quality?

[Daxo]

I really like this idea.

To the people saying that it's not how real factories work... I wonder if you've ever worked on/in a real factory? I mean, neither have I, but I've watched How It's Made, and I have common sense: Every automated system ever works within a certain tolerance. Any large manufacturing process is going to have some sort of system to sort out the "acceptable" from the "unacceptable" products. This could be a scale, some sort of 3d imaging, or manual QA testing by humans. Expecting that a manufacturer always produce 100% duplicate items every time is frankly unreasonable.

To take it even further, the concept of quality as described in the blog post seems to be inspired by or perhaps even a direct implementation of the process of "binning" used by any chip fab in real life: https://www.howtogeek.com/705101/what-i ... components. Basically for any given "line" of CPU's on the market, the lowest tier one was actually produced potentially in the same batch as the highest tier, but due to flaws in the process just can't hit peak performance like its brothers. They still sell the lower tier products because it cost just as much to make them as the "legendary" results, and they're still useful... just maybe for different applications.

Random chance very much has a place in video gaming, just like it does in reality. The chance adds a whole new element of probabilities and statistics to building an efficient factory, and I very much look forward to optimizing it.

[Valdemar_FIN]

I'm was bit on a fence about the feature when I started reading since randomized mechanics don't feel like (vanilla) Factorio to me, but after reading it I think it's a good enough optional mechanic and time/resource sink for players who willingly want to implement product binning mechanics to their factories.

But the names really got to change. The heck is a Legendary Iron Gear? Did it go out on an epic adventure and slay a dragon? Nah, I'm not buying it.
Something like Precision or Perfect Iron Gear makes sense though, and also in a sense that you need Precision components to make Precision machines.

And the Recycler is a welcome, even if long overdue (wooden crates full of pistols anyone?) addition to the game.

[hanli427]

I am divided on this.
On one hand I don't like the randomness, and much less so in the likeness to lootboxes.
On the other, once you got things going you can consistently make your higher quality items, just at greater expense and a larger setup. And in a far more interesting way than just having new recipes.
In the intermediate time frame, before you got your setup for legendary quality done, you just use the higher quality items where you think they are most needed. But still, you are dependent on the quality drop rate, which can be frustrating, and is a reason to dislike it.

And another thing. Instead of just having one large facility for making all your electric circuits, or iron gears for instance, you can end up having different facilities for making low quality and high quality components. Since some items, such as belts, only have improved health from quality, which is to say no relevant impact. Bullets also probably aren't worth it. Just use more turrets firing more bullets. It would probably end up cheaper due to increased costs based on quality. Also, I noticed they don't mention anything related to science packs, an oversight? Or is science unaffected by quality. If so, just ignore quality for science. This probably leads to more distributed manufacture, bottom up.

But I fear what it would do to storage and inventory management. Different quality tiers won't stack, it creates more stacks in inventory. Full cargo wagon? Do I have to filter quality for it, or I end up with a few half-filled stacks that just won't finish? Could be very messy.

But from what I can gather, you could just ignore it. Some items and buildings end up with higher quality, leading to some GUI and inventory clutter. It could be managed, but it is no big deal. If you don't want to care about it you don't have to. But I think it could be worth having a toggle that completely turns it off, not just renders it invisible. The clutter could be annoying none-the-less, if you don't want to think about it.

[OdinEidolon]

It's awful, this is factorio, not some shooter with equipment rarity. If I cannot disable this """""""feature""""""" entirely, I will not buy the expansion.

[Radjack]

It's awful, this is factorio, not some shooter with equipment rarity. If I cannot disable this """""""feature""""""" entirely, I will not buy the expansion.

You appear to have missed the fact that Quality is entirely optional and there is no need to ever make a higher Quality item. They even state in the FFF that they've played entire games to completion without using any thing to do with Quality.

[aka13]

in real life

Yeah, just like carrying locomotives in stacks of 5, in my pocket. Do so regularly, about twice a day.
Or just how circuits are made, from iron and copper. /s

Realism should not be a target factor for a game, if it is not pretending to be a simulation.

You appear to have missed the fact that Quality is entirely optional and there is no need to ever make a higher Quality item. They even state in the FFF that they've played entire games to completion without using any thing to do with Quality.

Yeah, and you can play without building a single locomotive, or a single bot.
It's just not fun, and obviously differen mechanics are tied one to the other, so skipping one makes others cumbersome.

[jury_rigger]

As an ex factory technician to me this mechanic looks fine except for a random chance to create higher quality product. There is nothing random about producing quality product IRL, there is only constant regulation, tinkering and maintenance of machines.

Maybe if machine produced something for a really long time it could start producing higher quality products instead? For example after 10000 solar panels produced in single assembler its quality tier would go up. Maybe progress for this should be also logarithmic with some additional minimal player interaction, not sure.

If you don't do this I could see myself making mod for this after expansion release

[Nosferatu]

Withe the same setup you will newer have a guarantee to have the same output. In some cases the layout is optimised in a way that this randomnes can cause blockages.

As far as I understand the quantity of the item output only changes if you build higher quality assemblers.
That's something you choose to do and not random.
If your blueprint includes only normal quality assemblers then only they will be built. It's not different from choosing which modules are in the assembler.

[capcap]

Super cool stuff devs. Very excited to see what kinds of layouts will be good with the recyclers. I'm especially happy to see another shape of building in the game. If it were another 3x3 box it wouldn't be bad per se, but a new shape always creates new layout challenges.


I have two questions though, seeing the green circuit build there seem to be recipes specific for the qualities? As in Q2 wire + Q2 iron => Q2 circuit (or better).
Or is this dynamically done based on the quality of the items coming in, similar to how furnaces work now?

How will these qualities handle stacking? Especially wrt inserter hands. Will an inserter be slower, on average, if the quality levels are mixed?

In the green circuit you can see an arm on the bottom right and it does not pickup items if they are of a different quality than the one currently in the arm. so the rate is definitely slowed