Friday Facts #382 - Logistic groups

[XelSelenius]

On to rocket size and Cargo, have you considered providing Cargo Rockets? Or such with an expanded inventory.

[FuryoftheStars]

Suggestion 2:
Please give at least one more rocket upgrade (preferably 2) that carries more cargo (given that you are intentionally going to limit the launch pad per plant to just 1).
Like falcon9 (1 Ton capacity) --> falcon heavy (2Ton capacity) --> starship (5 Ton capacity)
either increase capacity of rocket or increase the launch pads, right ??

The limit is on landing pads, not the launch pads. You can have as many launch pads as you want firing rockets up into space. The limit is one landing pad for bringing items back down, though they don't go into more details on how that'll work.

corrected it

What I'm trying to point out is that the devs do not mention the use of rockets with the landing pads, thus it's preemptive and potentially irrelevant to ask for different tier rockets for use with them.

[Asutorou]

I wonder about a smaller alternative to rockets like electromagnetic cannons from a certain mod, I also wonder if having a huge power spike from these would offset the benefit and balance it out a bit. It might be a interesting engineering challenge to design a grid that can handle a huge amount of power for a short time c:

[Super Mikal]

My questions, apologies if already asked:

Can I build two platform arms next to each other, and throw items over the gap with inserters?

And will the growable terrain mechanic be available for mods? I can imagine how awesome it would be to make creep actually grow!

[DDRJake]

Weight is a solution for the rocket launches, but an uncomfortable one from what I see here. A whole mechanic for one action but otherwise ignored? It rips away at immersion because we accept that Factorio engineer is doing unfeasible things as long as we don't have to further scrutinize it.

We can store a hundred nuclear reactors in our pouch right next to the pocket lint and the personal tank, but that's okay, other storage in chests and vehicles work the same way

We can hand craft an exoskeleton and complex circuits with our hands while throwing grenades and firing a rocket launcher at the same time, but that's okay, we have machines that can do similarly unfeasible things with no further question

But now when we launch goods, we have to consider weight, and now we're thinking about weight, and now we're wondering why this item, which cannot be launched by a rocket because it weighs a tonne is capable of being carried across the world en mass in our pocket, our car and our wee logistic bots.

Realism is a poor argument, but I find immersion is hugely important.



Unless I'm sorely mistaken, 1 ton is 907 Kg. Is this meant to be 980Kg / 1 tonne?

[blazespinnaker]

Realism is a poor argument, but I find immersion is hugely important.

They mean mostly the same thing, but I'd say lack of immersion is a poor argument as well or at least a symptom rather than the root cause.

The root cause is consistency. It's conceptual integrity. Inconsistency and cognitive dissonance make for poor experiences.

Factorio, without respect to well known systems, becomes like Candy Crush or Genshin or some other game where, sure, there's lots of complexity, but it's all arbitrary complexity that's just following some personal designer bias. It's like a mod that has all these weird mechanics that aren't really referencing something deep and sophisticated a community has in common, it's just referencing something in the imagination of the creator.

A good example is something like Game of Thrones or the Expanse. These TV shows referenced a very popular very well written series of novels. There's a lot of meat to those novels that the TV shows could leverage. Coming up with ideas is insanely hard work. Visualizing those ideas in the form of TV or Video Games is also insanely hard work.

Try to do both is just biting off way more than you can chew.

Factories flying between planets and pulling mini asteroids out of thin air with weird tentacles - what's that about? What deep, well thought out, and consistent system is this coming from? Of course you're going to end up with all these things that don't make any sense at all. That's because you're not leveraging or referencing any carefully thought out system, you're just randomly making things up as you go along.

Lost, the tv show, anyone?

Ever heard of Bussard ramjets? It's not real at all, but the concept has been well thought out. It has real depth to reference.

Just like asteroid outpost mining is not real. But there's been so many extremely smart people who've thought about this topic there's so much depth they could have referenced rather than making up fantasy of their own.

[Qon]

Unless I'm sorely mistaken, 1 ton is 907 Kg. Is this meant to be 980Kg / 1 tonne?

A metric ton/tonne is 1000kg. Kg does not exist, it's kg. Though in the screenshot even Wube somehow capitalized it wrong.
980/1000 kg, the bar isn't filled to 100%.
Factorio is using SI units, keep the imperial pounds and feet "measurements" out please, American.

[mmmPI]

maybe a filter combinator ? Maybe something like a sensor for the planet that would tell gravity or pressure or day-cycle ?

My first thought was some kind of sorting combinator; select minimum/maximum (non-zero) input. Lots of interesting possibilities. If it was a sensor would it require a separate input and output side? Filter would be very useful though, every time I create one of those filter circuits that starts by adding a billion to everything I want to keep it feels very wrong.

Maybe a combinator to help mathing out probabilities ? because another thing that feels wrong is dealing with very small numbers between 0 and 1. And the triangle read from left to right representing the large amount of material on the left; that becomes only a tiny fraction of higher quality ones on the right.

I agree with your observation that a sensor may not need input side, and it could as such be done with a constant combinator, just a new "gravity" signal would be enough to have contraption detecting on which environment they were pasted.

The sorting combinator maximum/minimum i don't understand how it would work; i know one can sort the maximum/minimum "coal" from different sources, so if you have 8 greens wire with coal signal, you could sort which one of the 8 was the maximum/minimum, but that require at least 8 combinators, if there was only 1 combinator you'd feed it the 8 different value and instead of summing them before processing, it would only outputthe highest of the value it received as input ?

Maybe a memory cell combinator ? or a repeater, in green wire you enter a number say 50, and in the red wire you have inputs, 50 ticks later, the inputs are brodacasted as output to ease up synchronisation of large build ?

[Henry Loenwind]

What happens to blueprints and blueprint books? Do I need to request them too, to avoid them getting trashed by trash-unrequested?

Normally, blueprints are supposted to be in the blueprint library. At this moment, blueprints are trashed as well, but we are planning to change it as it is quite annoying anyway, so blueprints-like items would be ignored by the trash-unrequested feature.

I'd suggest also adding a second checkbox, "[ ] Don't trash items that can be placed in the world (incl. modules)". Not only are those the most likely you want to keep on the player, but trashing those will make copy&paste a nightmare---especially when you're in an island logistics network that sends trash back to the main base automatically.

[Henry Loenwind]

Kg does not exist, it's kg.

Maybe they meant "Kelvin * grams"? That would be ... um ... the total heat energy in an object? Although, that measurement only works for items that are uniform in their composition...

*scnr*

[js1]

we lowered the cost of the rocket by 20 times

Oh. So what will the speedrunners do? I hope there will be another goal.. like a Dyson sphere or something?

As you might guess, this is not the last time we will talk about circuit stuff.

Looking forward to it. But I wish they would add recursive blueprints in some form, so that we could build von Neumann probes.

[TheRaph]

19 times out of 20, I already set the maximum equal to the minimum, and it's just extra clicks.

Crucially, the FFF makes it very clear that the autotrash button is intended to be toggled proactively by the user. If you know you're about to start deconstructing and don't want the items immediately trashed, that is when you disable autotrash. Once you finish rebuilding everything, re-enable autotrash to get rid of the leftovers.

Yeah you safe those extra clicks on configuration of that item once. An than you have to REMENBER every time to go to the inventory and deselect or select that button. I think, I will definitively struggle about that.
Normally I don't even think about logistics until I run out of something and I mostly use shortcuts, BPs and Q while building. So entering character menu isn't so common. Therefor its easy to miss.
And I'm sure the autotrash function has no high benefit for me.

So I would not ask for adding that feature (it is already there) I just ask to keep a feature I'm already convenient to.

[Tricorius]

Love it. Love it all. Remember there are plenty of players who remember Factorio is a game; and we appreciate adding some quirky, fun elements.

[Qon]

we lowered the cost of the rocket by 20 times

Oh. So what will the speedrunners do? I hope there will be another goal.. like a Dyson sphere or something?

They will play the game until "completion" of the new goal, in as little time as possible.
They have said there will be one. They will reveal what it is in a later FFF, obviously.

As you might guess, this is not the last time we will talk about circuit stuff.

Looking forward to it. But I wish they would add recursive blueprints in some form, so that we could build von Neumann probes.

Completely agree! But the Recursive Blueprints+ mod is great, so I'm already enjoying it. But combinators are almost pointless without RE since there's nothing they can read or write to that has any notable effect in vanilla.

Another great mod is PE Stringy Train Stops Redux, also a necessary addition to the game.

[TheRaph]

Very minor point but the rocket capacity is listed in the GUI as 1 ton. Ton is the imperial measurement (with several different possible values because yay imperial system). The metric measurement is a tonne (t).

As you say, there are several different tons. One of which is, of course, the metric ton, by definition equal to a tonne.

According to English Wikipedia "ton" can have the meaning of "long ton", "short ton" and "tonne".
On the other hand it stated that "tonne" and "metric ton" are synonyms. (they also refer to it as Megagram - that's weird.)
So I think to not confusing the imperialists accidentally it should be written as tonne in game. (So they do not divide the ton by 2,240 resp. 2,000.)

As a mid-Eurpean it makes me a little bit happy to know that citizens of the remaining 5 countries, stuck to to measuring their ways in multiples of body parts, are now being forced to learn a little bit about the metric system just to play game ...


*edit* Correcting: 3 countries because of people of North Korea might be not allowed to use internet and Liberians may have not the necessary money to buy that game.

[FuryoftheStars]

(they also refer to it as Megagram - that's weird.)

Well... it technically is.

[Svip]

Honestly, I would avoid writing tonne, and just write 1000 kg. Less confusing, and there is plenty of space in the progress bar.

[evgenybabenko]

My main problem to supply my defense with build robots which repair and rebuild destroyed stuff is the fact, that biters destroy them while repairing, because i cannot tell robots to just wait after the attack, before trying to repair and replace.

Will there be an automatic way to tell them: wait until attack ended?!

Greetings, Ronny

I’m just making the logic for this now using vanilla methods, I’ll share it soon)) And there’s also a way to supply the perimeter with the necessary items automatically.

[Ogro]

Hurray! Finally! That was such a pain for me that I created this account and made this post:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=93511

Their solution is similar to what I had in mind. They did not talked about conflicts, but I hope we can order the same item type in different groups.
I agree something has to be done for the crafting and also when we pick up something intentionally for use. Maybe a timer on each item created/picked up before it is sent to auto trash.

I am also a bit skeptical about the weight system, but we do not know the full picture yet. It definitively feels annoying to deal with this constraint when everything else works different jut because game balance for game completion curve... Same with the one landing rule. I liked some suggestions made here in regards to that, and I hope they consider them or give their ideas a second look.

[Xarfo]

Dear Factorio Team,
please do us a favor and put the idea of this spaceplatform to the trash.
Most of the points so far are really crappy...

Instead make a propper spaceship where you can walk inside, no need to let stuff "apear" on funny ways on the platform.
You can add fixed storage (so far the platform hub) and even tanks for spaceship fuel, maybe ammo storage too.
Expandable by upgrades behind research wall, and a way of free build in size and layout.
By using different buildings like shipwalls (can be used to mount the weapons changing to an input slot for ammo)
floors parts, instead of platform parts to extend the ship etc.

+ some extra infinity researches like:
Spaceship fuel consumption (x% less fuel consumption)
More % of thrust.
Research for better power usage in space. (decrease x% in energy consumption on board) even it is just 0.5% - 1% each research, capped by 25% or 50%
Extra range for spaceship weapons. (Yes, extra Weapons. Not gun turrets)
Magnetic shield generater, placeable on the ship + range and strengh upgrades.

Sorry for the bad criticism, but at the moment all I can see is how you're driving the game against the wall.
It's a shame because I like playing it with around 8000 in-game hours.