Friday Facts #399 - Trash to Treasure

[MeduSalem]

[...] Such a cycle could sink extra solid fuels, which are always in demand for train fuel, rocket fuel, and electric power. Why void solid fuels?

Put another way, a player feeds energy to a recycler to remove some potentially usable electric or mechanical energy. How do players make up for a loss in usable energy?

Meh... now you jump arguing about solid fuel... I start to think you are just raising concerns for the sake of it.

Why would you loop back solid fuel into the recycler to void it?

I mean sure you could do it if you wanted to, and it will likely also get voided over time, but why would you want to do that in the first place?

Did someone ever tell you that only because you can do something it does not mean you have to do it?

Just filter out the stone and send only the stone into the recycler if you want to get rid of that. Leave the solid fuel alone. Or do you have trouble to set up filters on inserters/splitters? ^^

And even if you run into a hypothetical situation where you overproduce solid fuel like crazy and have no meaningful use for it... Flare it off with boilers & produce electricity, or go back to steam-punk and set up tons of burner mining drills/inserters instead of normal ones. Or ship it to another planet where you have power issues. Do whatever you want with them. And if you don't need it elsewhere either then just throw it in the recycler. Who cares at that point because you have stockpiled so much of it that you would never use it anyway. ^^

Even if such a solution is reasonable, I play my way, like everybody else, and prefer not to void anything if I can avoid it.

That you have personal issues to deleting items... well tough luck. You will need to throw tons of stone back into the lava on Vulcanus as well unless you intent to stockpile the stuff forever or pave the whole area with concrete tiles. ^^

I am also not one to throw items into the void for no reason, but if I have to because I am running out of space or what is more likely... because I know I will never use all the garbage anyway (which is the most common reason why you start stockpiling in the first place because there simply is no use for it) then I have no issues getting rid of it.

[gGeorg]

Can you pls add a battery wagon to transport energy by train

It is already there, it is called Fluid wagon
https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_wagon

Fill up train by steam, then attach turbine at remote station.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Steam_turbine

[CiD337]

Hopefully lightning getting implemented will mean that you guys will implement dynamic weather on nauvis eventually, and the other planets too.
Would love to see Snow, Rain, Lightning, Fog and maybe strong winds and whatever stuff exists or works out. Or planetary seasons maybe? Biomes?

[cackling.fiend]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/scraporio

This is more fun than I thought.

[Mifczu]

Since each planet will be different, there is a chance that there will be many mods that will introduce even more different planets with different technologies and techniques.

Please give us some early access

[Pel00]

I am asking when are you going to implement these new things? I like Factorio, but when you keep adding something new just to brag that it's coming, and if it doesn't happen, do you know that you'll get a wave of hate?
Wouldn't it be better for you to finish what you're working on and inform us how many new things you're implementing into the game before the update?

It's not an update. It's a full on Expansion. And they already gave an estimated release date:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373

Expansion means DLC? Just DLC as option to buy or just DLC as expansion like in the No Man's Sky where you turn on game and you playing with new update? Because they said you can turn on Space Age in the beginning and you can finish the game in space or you can play vanila and later you can turn on Space Age and continue and for example mopve your base to other planet?

[Pel00]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/scraporio

This is more fun than I thought.

man, thats original idea for mining... looks incredible same as name! Scraporio? what about Scraptorio?

[Cynoid_alpha]

H Y P E

I'm very impressed. The main design of the planet is simply brilliant as a kind of "reverse Nauvis" (unlimited oil but limited water, separated power grid but trains galore, inverted production).

It actually completely flips my perception of the quality system. I was very dubious about the whole Quality thing at first, but since recyclers are actually an essential part of the prod chain here, quality focus become a fairly natural direction to go (instead of a massive headache for dubious rewards as it seemed at first glance form the early DD).

I understand now why it took so much time for you to be comfortable about sharing things about the expansion!

***

As for the inverted prod tree based on recycling... Having played a fair number of hours in BnA & SpaceExp, I don't particularly fear mixed-output systems, so I welcome it. That being said, I do have a few cautious warnings about the current implementation :

- Since heavy oil is already infinite, I'm not sure why solid fuel blocks are an output of scrap recycling. While processing by-products is an essential part of mixed-output systems (in BnA & SpaceEx notably), in nearly all cases involving a "free" resource (such as water) as an output its easier to simply void all of it, and produce it again as needed by the infinite process. And since there's already 11 other products of the recipe (which may sound daunting for fresh players), I would have removed the Solid Fuel from it. It's not a really interesting choice, so simplifying it a bit allow for more "complexity budget" elsewhere

- Mixed-output systems are much more design-intensive than standard one-product systems (even one with minor by-products) to work properly. Granted, the existence of a "void-loop" (by the mean of looping recycler output to its input) simplifies much of the headache that could come from it and variable demand from the rest of the factory, but its still most likely going to be a fairly attention-heavy mechanic at the beginning (even if its probably also a part of the fun to figure it out)

- And unfortunately, void-loops have their own kind of issues : the use of a void loop for a specific resource is by definition a net waste resource, which is psychologically something many player (me included) are find distasteful, or even downright distressing. Specially for a game like Factorio often described as a "confort game", it may be a much more significant problem for player experience. Worse still, in the case where resource consumption of the factory is insufficient (even momentarily), combinator-free systems are not going to be able to throttle the deletion rate of the void-loops, and the scrap recycling system is going to burn through a limited resource (I assume scrap is going to act as iron or copper ore and be limited per patch) for nothing. There's a reason mods add infinite resource well (like infinite ore patchs for BnA ; or core drillers for SpaceEx) if they have mixed-output systems

- And compound by that, space if going to be at a premium there (being an archipelago-like map), so clean/scalable designs are going to be even harder to do. And I hope to God you don't need to have free battery capacity to have your lighting rod to their protection job, otherwise it's going to be a pain to design things there

As presented in this DD, I don't see a way to have an "attention-free" (ie self-regulating) factory, which kind of sound like a necessity when you expect to be stuck a dozen hours on each other planets to kickstart your space program there. But fortunately, it's not a unsolvable design problem, merely a need to add a few modifications. It could even be done in a day-one mod.

Anyway, I'm hyped to see the rest!

[BEEFE]

Taking a close look at the map, I spy some dots that look the color of biters (easiest to find are at the top left) :{}

I'd venture any mobs would be robotic.

[mmmPI]

I am asking when are you going to implement these new things? I like Factorio, but when you keep adding something new just to brag that it's coming, and if it doesn't happen, do you know that you'll get a wave of hate?
Wouldn't it be better for you to finish what you're working on and inform us how many new things you're implementing into the game before the update?

I think you are like an island, and the actual wave is aware that all the content shown since the FFF resumed is spotlight of what the dev been working on those recent years behind closed door, and now that they have a more precise idea of what's to come, they can show things because they know those are not things that would be scrapped in a later stage of developpment. They also said they wouldn't give a precise date, maybe to avoid the wave of hate if the game is late, or if the game is not finished because of the deadline.

This means, that we have something we are happy with, is pretty stable, and we don't expect any further brutal changes to come. We have a relatively stable list of tasks to be finished both for programmers and artists, which makes us confident that we can release a polished product in about a year.

source

Expansion means DLC? Just DLC as option to buy or just DLC as expansion like in the No Man's Sky where you turn on game and you playing with new update? Because they said you can turn on Space Age in the beginning and you can finish the game in space or you can play vanila and later you can turn on Space Age and continue and for example mopve your base to other planet?

The meaning is close but it's still a little different, i think the term expansion was choosen overDLC because the devs works for providing an expansion, and not DLC's, or we would have had each planet for 5.99 and no one would have the same in multiplayer, and there could be a new planet every week ...

I don't think it will be recommended to turn on space age in the middle of the game, rather play with it from the start, as it was said it makes the rocket 10 times cheaper and accessible earlier in game so that part of the factory is made accross different planet instead of keeping that part only for the very late game that not all player would reach and enjoy.

[planetmaker]

Now, that was an interesting read and indeed it promises to be some quite different kind of experience and challenge compared to the "usual" settings. I'm very much looking forward to this planet, an the expansion as a whole

Currently I'm un-rusting my factorio skills - and they cannot wait to get their hands on all the nice changes we've seen here, but also previous FFFs, like the elevated rails, the quality of items etc etc.

[FuryoftheStars]

I am asking when are you going to implement these new things? I like Factorio, but when you keep adding something new just to brag that it's coming, and if it doesn't happen, do you know that you'll get a wave of hate?
Wouldn't it be better for you to finish what you're working on and inform us how many new things you're implementing into the game before the update?

It's not an update. It's a full on Expansion. And they already gave an estimated release date:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373

Expansion means DLC? Just DLC as option to buy or just DLC as expansion like in the No Man's Sky where you turn on game and you playing with new update? Because they said you can turn on Space Age in the beginning and you can finish the game in space or you can play vanila and later you can turn on Space Age and continue and for example mopve your base to other planet?

An expansion is much bigger than a DLC. This is what game devs used to do before game services like Steam made it easier to sell & distribute smaller bites for cumulatively more money. All of these little show cases we're being given are what they're putting into this Expansion. Note, too, that for many of these they mention how we're being shown place holder graphics and that some things haven't been finalized, yet.

This expansion is also coming with major engine overhauls, what they're calling 2.0, which they're actually going to release for free. So when the day finally comes, we're all going to get an update to 2.0, which will include many improvements and overhauls to the existing game, and then we'll all have the option to buy the Expansion, which will be a collection of Official Mods so we can (to some degree) piece meal the parts we want to play with (if we don't enable the Space Age piece, which presumably will require all the rest).

[XT-248]

No that is your (mis)understanding from my words, that i tried to dispell several time, i used the expression "fixed income RATIO" and you omitted the last word, and said i meant something else but no all along that's what i meant, that's why i compared it with the oil processing and the iron COMPARED to copper income, this is a fix ratio and so on.

I'm glad the mis understanding is now dispelled

Please help me understand something here.


Fixed means that something is predictable or does not change over time. Relating to scrap processing, people can always expect a particular product from the recycler instead of generating this or that or nothing (RNG or Non-deterministic).

Income means something enters a system (inserter picking up rocket fuel and placing it into the train, for example). That is what I understood you to mean, even though it makes for awkward phrasing.

The ratio is a measure of porporation between different objects. An electronic circuit consumes three copper wires and one iron plate, giving rise to three copper wires to one iron plate ratio.


Looking at scrap processing, people don't think of "fixed" or "income." Maybe ratio has some meaning over an extensive statistics data set of thousands of recycler crafts, but the phrase means something else here in this conversation.

You don't know all what exist, only 1 single receipe, maybe holmium refining need a ton of stone. Maybe you will want to make legendary wall and export them in all your planets when you need defense. And you will have to only sink some stone in the recycler when you don't need that extra stone. Purple science require electric furnace which require stone brick which require ... stone .... ! Maybe the whole process is going to yield more holmium than you need for science, but not enough stone, and you will not even need a sink for stone. As i said i'm curious to see how the dev made the expansion.

You are correct that no one knows what the entire Space Age expansion will be like once it comes out, except for people who work at WUBE.

However, I can take existing mods ( like the one cackling.fiend posted a few posts earlier ) and guess what 'scrap processing' from Space Age would be like. I have experience with non-deterministic recipes giving out mixed products.

One of the biggest challenges in making a design that works in the first place is considering every possible scenario and then making it work regardless of what can and will go wrong.

Also its not because you don't want to put chest under lightning that i'm going to restrict myself about doing it. You only have partial vision, then add arbitrary restriction and then complain it's too difficult even before trying, i can't agree with you, there's no need to try and convince me x)

The restriction is not arbitrary to me. It only appears to be so to you.


Imagine a scenario where I am deep in the middle of a colossal overhaul project on Nauvis that consumes holmium ore and some stone/concrete.

I spot a few production lines needing more raw material. The bottleneck is at Fulgora. Do I stop the overhaul project halfway through and head to Fulgora now? Or do I finish what I can on Nauvis and then head over to Fulgora later?


They both have downsides. It is better to mitigate/solve it beforehand.

Meh... now you jump arguing about solid fuel... I start to think you are just raising concerns for the sake of it.

Regardless of what you think I did or did not do.

I came here to provide constructive feedback.


The feedback is this: fewer byproducts from recycling scraps, by removing redundancy products (Fulgora has infinite heavy oil from an offshore pump, which people can then process into solid fuels) and moving one of the largest potential sources of blocking recyclers (concrete/stone modified to only concrete with a new value and stone is mined from ground deposits).


If I am 'arguing' about this and that, that is a response to your and other users' comments.

Why would you loop back solid fuel into the recycler to void it?

I mean sure you could do it if you wanted to, and it will likely also get voided over time, but why would you want to do that in the first place?

Here is the thing. Someone suggested that people can insert stone and solid fuel to fix/resolve the overflow buffer issue. I rightly pointed out that it was a silly concept back then, which hasn't changed.

I was utilizing solid fuel as an example of why people should not unquestioningly recycle everything.

Did someone ever tell you that only because you can do something it does not mean you have to do it?

I constantly re-evaluate what I want to do and how to do it. I don't always do something because I can or someone tells me to do it.

I do something because either that something is an optimized solution or the alternative has downsides.

Just because I can do something doesn't mean I will do it.

Just filter out the stone and send only the stone into the recycler if you want to get rid of that. Leave the solid fuel alone. Or do you have trouble to set up filters on inserters/splitters? ^^

I do set filters on filter inserters and splitters.

The problem is scaling the buffer storage to match the desired holmium ore production goal without overflow or block recyclers.

And even if you run into a hypothetical situation where you overproduce solid fuel like crazy and have no meaningful use for it... Flare it off with boilers & produce electricity, or go back to steam-punk and set up tons of burner mining drills/inserters instead of normal ones. Or ship it to another planet where you have power issues. Do whatever you want with them. And if you don't need it elsewhere either then just throw it in the recycler. Who cares at that point because you have stockpiled so much of it that you would never use it anyway. ^^

That you have personal issues to deleting items... well tough luck. You will need to throw tons of stone back into the lava on Vulcanus as well unless you intent to stockpile the stuff forever or pave the whole area with concrete tiles. ^^

I am also not one to throw items into the void for no reason, but if I have to because I am running out of space or what is more likely... because I know I will never use all the garbage anyway (which is the most common reason why you start stockpiling in the first place because there simply is no use for it) then I have no issues getting rid of it.

I would not void stone/concrete or solid fuels since there is a hidden reason why WUBE decided to settle on an 11% chance of concrete/stone and 7% for solid fuels for preliminary game balancing.

Those numbers are unusually high given the most common chance of 2% from four items: battery, processing circuits, steel plates, and copper wires.

All of those are consumed in larger quantities by a 1000 SPM megabase. Stop and think about this briefly and realize that Stone/concrete and solid fuel exist in higher amounts than copper wires (typically, players will have far more assemblers doing copper wires than anything else).

Currently, stone is not required to produce a rocket/satellite. I can't think of anything and don't even use that much wall or anything made with stone. What would require a non-trivial amount of stone?


The idea that we will require far more stones only magnifies my concern because different players use different amounts of each resource and are more likely to run into the buffer storage issue at some point without a proper warehouse (think thousands of inventory slots).

[FuryoftheStars]

Here is the thing. Someone suggested that people can insert stone and solid fuel to fix/resolve the overflow buffer issue. I rightly pointed out that it was a silly concept back then, which hasn't changed.

You raised the concern of solid fuel (and stone, and other similar items) causing the system to back up. It was pointed out to you, that barring any other means of properly using the stuff, a backup could still be avoided by voiding it via recycling. This, of course, should be a last resort method, but it's still a valid method.

In the case of solid fuel, though, this shouldn't cause a backup because as you've pointed out, it should always be needed. Yes, you can and most likely will be producing solid fuel from the oil fields, too. But you can very easily give solid fuel from scrap priority on being used. Same goes for any of the products gotten from scrap.

You also asked earlier about a source for whether or not stone and the like actually can be voided. I don't know if someone answered that, or if there is for sure an official source, but look at it like this: it can be taken as fact that (as of now, anyway) stone can be fed into the recyclers. It's shown in the gifs. With this in mind, does it make any sense at all from a design standpoint to allow something to be fed into a recycler, consume energy and time, and then output the same item unchanged 1:1? No, it doesn't. Therefore, it stands to reason that if you can feed stone in, then it's going to output ~25% quantity of what you put in, voiding the rest. It also stands to reason, that if you can feed in stone ore which can't be broken down any, then you can feed in other products that can't be broken down further for one reason or another.

[Svip]

The "useless" materials of the scrap recycling is merely a challenge to be dealt with. It would be weird if scrap was exclusively useful items, it wouldn't really fit the theme. This isn't like K2 or SE, where normal recipes suddenly have stone as a byproduct, we are literally processing scrap! Of course some of it will be trash.

Fortunately, the game gives us a way to get rid of said trash; by simply throwing it in another recycler. Much like how the crusher in K2 will void about anything, if it doesn't have a recipe; so will the recycler void it, if it cannot reduce it to anything. But if you don't like simply voiding it, then I guess you've decided on a "no voiding challenge", and godspeed to you!

[tjark_neutronium]

Can you pls add a battery wagon to transport energy by train

It is already there, it is called Fluid wagon
https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_wagon

Fill up train by steam, then attach turbine at remote station.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Steam_turbine

But on the new planet you cant do that you would need a way to recycle the water to turne it to steam again also you would need electric boilers

[mmmPI]

Please help me understand something here.

Fixed means that something is predictable or does not change over time. Relating to scrap processing, people can always expect a particular product from the recycler instead of generating this or that or nothing (RNG or Non-deterministic).

Income means something enters a system (inserter picking up rocket fuel and placing it into the train, for example). That is what I understood you to mean, even though it makes for awkward phrasing.

The ratio is a measure of porporation between different objects. An electronic circuit consumes three copper wires and one iron plate, giving rise to three copper wires to one iron plate ratio.

Looking at scrap processing, people don't think of "fixed" or "income." Maybe ratio has some meaning over an extensive statistics data set of thousands of recycler crafts, but the phrase means something else here in this conversation.

I'm not sure i can, at this point you might need a specialist. look =>

if you look at the receipe for recycling ,you can see 5% stone 1% holmium and this is fixed, this is not going to change over time if you keep using that receipe so yes it is FIXED.

Now this is your income of material, that's an economic term, it does mean "something enter the system" .( stone or holmium entering your factory)

Ratio means proportion, and it means you will have a fixed proportion of stone for holmium over the course of the game. ( 5/1)

When i look at the scrap processsin, i see fixed income ratio. You can't just put 10 holmium miners and 0 for stone to change the ratio of your income of holmium/stone, like you could add iron miner if you need more iron than copper.

If you want to name it otherway you can, it's a just a name for a mechanic, if you don't understand why i use those words it's ok it doesn't matter at all to the point that your concern about the difficulty of voiding stone are absolutly not mine concerns, i think they are a wrong anticipation due to your repeated and stubborn misunderstanding.

In case you really don't understand at this point i'm afraid it's beyond my ability. I suggest just taking it for granted that some people uses other words than you to describe things based on their perception of that things and their previous knowledge of things with similarities that may be obvious to other people with similar knowledge.

( say you have an animal that has 4 leg, this is a four legged animal, four refers to legs, which takes ed because 4-legged is used as adjective on the word animal, maybe it's my english that is wrong, how do you call an income that has a ratio of X and Y that is fix over time ? )

The problem is scaling the buffer storage to match the desired holmium ore production goal without overflow or block recyclers.

I have played with mods with similar mechanic of "fixed income ratio" it has never been a problem when you have means to recycle material or turn the excess into other things, and here you can just use the recycler to make material disapear, so there is :
1) no reason for them to block, just route the blocking material as input of the recycler, problem solved. (like the setup on the FFF )
2) no reason to scale storage of anything, since no material will acumulate, since you use the recycler on those.

I wish i could help you understand better, but when i see we are still there i think it's not working, Factorio is a "difficult" game, maybe it's the kind of things you will understand after a bit of time when you can actually use the recycler to prevent your holmium production to stall it would make more sense ?

[CyberCider]

Taking a close look at the map, I spy some dots that look the color of biters (easiest to find are at the top left) :{}

I'd venture any mobs would be robotic.

I think those white blobs on the map are actually hiding the new enemy spawners. They look like they were drawn in paint to cover something up, and not like something in-game. The fff says the small islands have some "special significance", and are surrounded by a moat. That sounds like they could be a challenge for the player to invade and clear out, to claim the rich scrap.

[CyberCider]

Can you pls add a battery wagon to transport energy by train

It is already there, it is called Fluid wagon
https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_wagon

Fill up train by steam, then attach turbine at remote station.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Steam_turbine

But on the new planet you cant do that you would need a way to recycle the water to turne it to steam again also you would need electric boilers

Scrap can give you both ice and solid fuel, that's all you need to make steam

[mmmPI]

I think those white blobs on the map are actually hiding the new enemy spawners. They look like they were drawn in paint to cover something up, and not like something in-game. The fff says the small islands have some "special significance", and are surrounded by a moat. That sounds like they could be a challenge for the player to invade and clear out, to claim the rich scrap.

They do look like they were drawn in paint to cover something up. Maybe friendly fulgorans ? with a compilatron face ? the last remains on Fulgora are their mining drones in desperate search for holmium ready to turn the player equipment to scrap or to get repaired ? Maybe they are entrances to some tunnels under fulgora... I was in no need to have my attention even more caught but there you are x)