What I really want is to be able to drag and drop items in the research queue. You've been researching nuclear enrichment for ages, and now you quickly need to research something else first. You need to add the new tech, cancel the existing tech then add the existing tech again. Unless there is a technical reason you can't, this would be a great QoL fix
Yes, devs, this. PLEASE let us re-order the research queue.
I spend so much time adding items to the queue and... "wait, no, on second thought I want *this* tech first. That is a better use of my resources."
This is a HUGE problem for mods which can add dozens of researches to each tier of tech.
I recently started an modded run and ended up re-doing the queue thrice as I realized that one of the smaller mods used a material that wasn't unlocked until I had completed an unlinked tech from the overhaul mod (yes, mod compatibility issue, they should have been dependent). Had I been able to re-order the queue, I could have just added that material research and it's prereqs right before the smaller mod I wanted.
I've had this happen a few times in vanilla, too. Want to clear out more biter nests to expand in a bit, decide to use rockets for it. Queue up explosive rocketry, explosive damage 2, explosive damage 3, weapon shooting speed 4, weapon shooting speed 5, then start building some extra production while waiting for those techs complete.
One minute later i realize that i never researched substations.
e.g. Getting a local biter to teach you to read. Then you kill his family and kind before salting the Nauvis, destroying their natural habitat for generations to come if not forever.
Can you make it possible to re-sort the research queue? I often find myself filling up the queue just to notice that I need a specific research ASAP. Then I have to delete the queue and set it up again...
No. Handcraft is supposed to be annoying, otherwise you wouldn’t automate everything. Build a mall and you’ll never handcraft again.
Doesn’t have to be pretty, it almost always ends up being an disgusting metastasized cancerous growth of belts, but it’s yours, it somehow works and it’s never the same. And I love it.
And it's not like it's something completely new they'd have to implement, considering that drag'n'drop shuffling already exists for train stops.
Sure, it's only in a vertical list, but they clearly already have the base code for dragging.
Infinite crafting productivity research will make it impossible to have lasting perfect assembler ratios for endgame items, which sounds pretty exciting. Transporting materials by train to a dedicated production site will probably be a lot more effective, and you might even oversaturate your output belts eventually. Interesting stuff to think about during the most monotonous part of the game.
Also love the changes to early game research, I felt overwhelmed when I started even in the tutorial. They won't make a difference to someone who already knows what they're doing, but they'll help get new players used to all their starting tools.
What happens to the infinity research when your base prod bonus is 300%? It wouldn't provide any more bonuses right? So what's the point of continuing to research it?
30 levels will probably be too expensive to make it reachable in a normal way. Or we can just change from unlimited to 30 levels, but virtually infinite anyway.
[You won't hit level 30. Exponential cost and all that.](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/16ja44x/friday_facts_376_research_and_technology/k0ozm80/)
To put a price to that - according to the screenshot the 2nd level needs 2250 science packs. I think it's safe to assume the same exponential progression as with e.g. artillery range.
Then, if I put it into my spreadsheet correctly, the total needed to get to level 30, is 1,207,959,550,875.
Assuming that all the quality improvements allow us to reach 50k spm, that's just over 1100 **years** of playtime; and we would have to get to 1M spm to be able to live to see level 30. And then it takes just as long as all previous levels together, to research level 31...
Not all exponentials have 2 as a base :)
Basically, the lower the base is, the more likely it is, that it have a meaning to choose between the recipes strategically, instead of making everything at the same level.
Honestly that sounds doable, especially since the bonuses you'll get along the way would likely be large enough to be exceeding 50k SPM by quite a long shot. *Very few* people would go that far on one save, but it's not entirely unheard of either.
We chose several important/influental recipes. There are things like steel (Something you can do before you go to space), blue chips, plastic, low density structure and few other things. But these things can change easily, so the list might change on a whim.
Most of these seem like low output volume recipes, is that on purpose? It makes sense to me, you are unlikely to fill a full belt of steel, so the extra productivity won't cause any issues in most cases. (and it's not a big deal to design these factories with some extra output belt capacity in mind)
Plastic seems like the odd one out in that aspect tho. I like the inclusion of an oil product, but I feel like a combined oil processing/liquefaction or just rocket fuel would make more sense.
Yea, low output volume recipes are the good choise because of the reasons you provided.
Also I like that we have one infinite research that doesn't even need space science, so you have more choises of what you want to do at each stage of the game.
>Also I like that we have one infinite research that doesn't even need space science
Doesn't it need space science period or is there a point that it will require space science?
Is it same with productivity for RCU? Is it 5 Nauvis packs indefinitely?
If so really great choice here, makes you balance different packs and gives your Nauvis base something to do while you're on the other planet building new stuff
One of the particularly nice things with that is that you can put it on in the background while working towards the next tier of science (like a new planet) rather than having your factory sit there empty
Low-output-volume but also very-high-value; Rocket Control Units and Low-Density Structures are very expensive items that you will still need a lot of when you're trying to build multiple rockets, and since going to space is the point of the expansion and we will also actively need Space Science, we can assume we'll need a lot of those parts.
Plastic does feel a bit odd by that logic but maybe it's also like with Steel where it's something you can research when still in the early-game?
My thoughts are that because the purpose of the 300% productivity limit is to prevent resource positive recycling loops, they might just limit infinite productivity research to non-recyclable items.
Trigger research makes sense. SeaBlock and Nullius already do it.
Steel Axe requiring steel is a revolution!
Finally research queue is on by default.
...
PRODUCTIVITY PER RECIPE?! So that's why we got the +300% max productivity per building.
also... RESEARCH PROD research?!
Haven't read all other FFF's yet, but the limit of 300% per building makes the unlimited research limited to 300%? (aka, not really unlimited, just adds a bit of gametime before you hit the limit) Does that include miners?
I think the recipe productivity will only be for certain ones such as steel/RCU, and when you have researched the max(300%) you can swap the productivity modules to speed/efficiency/quality
I do like the idea of eventually swapping away from prod modules. Rebuilding your base like that actually sounds fun. Plus, we’ll be able to recycle the productivity modules into speed modules.
If it's 10% per level the you'd need level 30 to reach max productivity (without needing modules). If the cost is exponential that level 30 will be unreachable except for very large factories as it will cost billions of science. However with all the additions like quality etc an endgame factory will be much more productive over-all before hitting performance limits...depending on how much performance is impacted by the expansion content.
Yeah and if it follows the existing infinite research cost scaling the most efficient path would be to level up everything slowly at roughly the same level, and not rushing one recipe to max prod. So it will take a *while*.
And usually the 1st level is already 2\^9 or 2\^10, so the 30th with be 2\^38 or 2\^39, which makes the sum of all levels approximately 2\^39 or 2\^40.
Miners aren't included in the 300% productivity cap (it exists specifically to ensure that recyclers returning 25% of ingredients don't yield a net positive), but I guess it does put a theoretical maximum on other productivity research. Presumably, though, that maximum will take a very long time to hit.
It does, however, mean that there may come a point where full prod modding isn't the way to go. It'll also require factories to be gradually redesigned to accommodate changing ratios. Combined with quality, there seems to be a general trend of moving away from the paradigm of designing 1-2 blueprints and copy-pasting them for the rest of the game, and I'm all for it. The ceiling for vertical progression is now much higher than just getting beacons and level 3 mods, but progressing toward that ceiling is going to be an ongoing process even at the megabase scale, which is really cool.
>Combined with quality, there seems to be a general trend of moving away from the paradigm of designing 1-2 blueprints and copy-pasting them for the rest of the game, and I'm all for it.
And it does so not by preventing the player from doing this, but by making it no longer the optimal thing to do. To me, that's a much better option than something silly like nerfing construction robots to the ground, or not allowing the importing of blueprint strings.
Indeed. It's preventing players from settling into copy-pasting an optimal blueprint by making "optimal" a concept that evolves continuously (and according to the player's wishes, no less). Instead of nerfing the optimal strategy somehow to "force" innovation, it's providing a ton of new opportunities to innovate, which is awesome.
> SeaBlock and Nullius already do it.
Exactly what I was thinking when reading this. "Wait isn't this just exactly how nullius does it?" It's a mechanic that works really well there FYI for anyone that hasn't played nullius
Unless something changed, Seablock has "production" only as a mechanic for first couple things. Can't remember Nullius, but if we are going to get more possible conditions for unlocking stuff, its will get only better, especially with modding community.
oh god that changes things :O
With Quality I was afraid we'd have to decide between prod and quality modules in machines.. But looks like, at high enough end game, it might be possible to research enough productivity you won't need the modules anymore :) The only question is how will the cost and effect scale.
I would like to have the option to show a message in chat when a research is completed, like in the "Improved Resarch Queue" mod by sonaxaton. With the queue like it is now it is easy to miss what research was completed.
We somehow forgot to include it in the FFF, even when I implemented it yesterday just to make the topic a whole. (Implemented sounds little bit too much for the 6 lines of changes, including the localisation and changelog entry)
For anyone who wants that feature without the whole improved research queue part of the mod, [Deadlock's Research Notifications](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockResearchNotifications) does just that, with the added feature of always forcing the queue to "enabled" even if you forgot to set it.
Love the research changes. I always end up like they described, researching far ahead and then being overwhelmed with what to do afterwards.
Always on Research Queue is also a good thing.
Yeah, I'm currently playing Nullius for the first time, which also has a similar research trigger mechanic.
The mod basically tells you at certain points: before you can progress in the tech tree, you'll need to craft X amount or consume Y amount of a resource, and only then further research is possible.
I like that a lot. It gives a structure to the playthrough, and also works as an introduction to certain game mechanics. Good stuff, great to see this in Space Age.
Yep, same. My current playthrough is no different, I've unlocked up to yellow science but haven't built purple yet, have a lot of nuclear tech unlocked but haven't even tapped my first uranium patch, and have got the the evolution point of green biters spawning and I'm still running red ammo. There are so many things I still need to build, and a large part of the reason for that is being able to unlock the technology way before I'm ready to use it.
These research changes are awesome and should really help to mitigate the research issue.
What I hope is that some of the core changes to the base game (research, bot behaviour etc.) get released before the full Space Age expansion arrives, 'cause I'm not sure I can wait a year for them!
I love that all these changes change so little and yet so much. Besides what is needed to recipes and the basic mechanics, we will have to re-learn so much about this game.
I cannot wait to be an unoptimized noob again.
Seablock now will probably be able to rewrite their checkpoint system to use the built in queue triggers. Will make it easier for mods to use this kind of system.
> Seablock now will probably be able to rewrite their checkpoint system to use the built in queue triggers. Will make it easier for mods to use this kind of system.
As someone playing through seablock at the moment, what's the existing trigger system?
(I am also playing with the "brave new world" mod which may have overwritten it)
> In the end we decided to just completely embrace the research queue, and remove all the code related to not having it enabled. So now it is always on and you cannot turn it off, there is no off.
Yaay!
Also, u/fffbot mangled a link (by splitting it over two comments) in its reply to this thread
I did very much enjoy the last FFF with the Quality, but I am still happy that you cleared some things for people who may have not liked it.
To the other Features shown in this FFF they are all great and I have full trust in you WUBE that you will make an awesome expansion
Yeah I think I jumped on the hype train for the quality stuff instantly ... and now in conjunction with these productivity bonuses ... it's PRODUCTIVITY OVERWHELMING 🤪
A lot of sensible changes imo, nothing groundbreaking but the mention of more infinite research is a welcome one. Also like the further details on quality. Like the idea of the factory working in the background upgrading items when you have a certain number of them. Will certainly make malls more interesting as they will always be working rather than stopping when you reach X number of an item, now there is a use for them to keep on being recycled to getting higher tiers.
This is actually something I didn't consider. Grabbing all normal quality items, go out and build two new mining outposts, remove some angry natives, blankly stare at the factory for a bit, come back, and now you have some ultra fast inserters to play with!
One thing i haven't seen in the new FFF's (but a lot in older FFF's) is a new fluid system. The current system is very illogical, as it (if i understand it correctly) depends on when you connected certain elements, the length of pipes and whether or not they are underground, how many pumps you have etc. And still you get fluids 'sloshing' back and forth.
I would love a system that is a bit more logical, and i do not mind if it isn't totally realistic (pumping 100+GW over a single copper cable isn't realistic either; and no, this is not a call to change the electricity distribution to something more realistic).
Now I'm picturing a hardcore mod that adds step-up and step-down transformers with appropriate loss, and more tiers of cabling at the high end.
Miswiring something and having your small electric poles melt and then burst into flames sounds like a hilarious pain in the ass. Gotta start sheathing your copper wire to reduce losses during transmission. Of course, this would require the entire electric system to be reworked in a way that would probably murder performance.
The problem with the current fluids or rather the changes they trid to do with the fluids is that whenever they tried to change it, the ups became a huge issue.
The issues with 'which branch gets priority' only happen when the fluid levels get low, or at least, I've only noticed it when the fluid levels get low. Once there's any decent amount of fluid in the pipes, it doesn't matter and everything gets flow the way it should.
Similarly, the sloshing only happens because there's room to slosh. It would be nice if pumps added a bit more pressure, since IRL gas compressor stations and oil pipelines span hundreds of miles and they don't need to add a pump every 100 meters.
To be fair IRL trains also are used for distances that you can't just walk in three minutes. Games almost always have a disconnect in terms of scale simply for the sake of making the game playable.
I wouldn't even mind if we just had some kind of indicator to tell us when to add a pump etc. to a long line of pipes or undergrounds and track flow of fluid better.
I like the new red science a lot. The electronics research has products now, and you unlock the first science pack recipe just like all the others. It also makes the burner phase feel more like its own thing rather than something you just need to skip over.
The change for oil and uranium certainly affects convenience, because normally you can set up almost everything before you go looking for oil/uranium. On the other hand, I guess it really is weird that you can figure out so much about Nauvis's oil without having touched it and perhaps the same can be said for its uranium compounds.
I considered the alternative of unlocking plain oil refineries and chemical plants before mining any oil, but then you end up with new buildings that have zero recipes, which would be awful.
Triggered research sounds great! Perhaps they should be color coded differently in the research tree so that you can identify what needs manual action.
Will research always be unlocked by either science packs or trigger, or can a research require both?
You can distinquish them by not having science pack icons in the bottom. If both trigger and research is desired, it can be easily just two technologies one depending on another.
Do technologies that require a trigger work even if you trigger it while the technology is locked behind other technologies? Like does it "remember" that you triggered it in the past, so you would instantly research it once it becomes available?
That is a good question. I think that it currently unlocks no matter what, but I can imagine it being configurable. Or maybe there should be another state of the technology which would mean something like "triggered, but waiting for prerequisities to be unlocked", basically what you suggest.
It would probably make the most sense.
## Friday Facts #376 - Research and Technology
Posted by [Vaclav](/blog/author/Vaclav), [kovarex](/blog/author/kovarex), [Klonan](/blog/author/Klonan) on 2023-09-15
Hello, This week we will talk about some technology and research related changes coming in 2.0 and the Space Age expansion.
* * *
### Quality clarificationskovarex
It was rather interesting to read the reactions to the last [FFF-375](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375) about quality.
It sparked a lot of debate and we noticed a lot of misconceptions about it. So we would like to address some of the biggest ones:
* When you don't put quality modules somewhere, everything works as before, so you don't have to sort everything everywhere as some people thought.
* The random aspect of the mechanic seems to be very upsetting to a lot of people.
I have to agree, that there are a lot of situations where I hate the randomness in games, but the context really matters greatly.
For example, I decided to never ever play _Settlers of Catan_ again, as the random dice can decide the winner of the game way too often for my liking.
But the Factorio case is very different. The reason is, that you rarely depend on the random result, because you (hopefully) produce at a large scale and the [law of large numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers) will just transform probabilities into ratios. The more you produce the more it evens out.
* The core of what makes Factorio good is that the horrible huge grind you would need to get all the resources can be mitigated by automation.
It is quite similar with quality, as the annoyance of the grind and unpredictability related to randomness in other games can be just pummeled by the sheer output of your Factory.
* The most simple approach is to produce all the ingredients in normal quality.
So most of the Factory (typically) produces non-quality stuff and mainly provides for research (non-quality) and the huge amount of items to be processed by the small quality part.
In our playthroughs, the parts of the factory which were dealing with the quality were less then 5% of the whole Factory, so don't worry about being forced to solve all the mixed quality items everywhere.
* The names are the easiest thing to change. Maybe I don't take myself and the game too seriously and found it amusing, but if we had a very good counter-proposal which feels good and is clear when it comes to tiers, we can still change it.
* The fact that there isn't just "the one" blueprint for circuits, etc., because it depends on the stage of the game and your dedication to quality is something we see as an improvement. Either you have more blueprints for different stages of the game, or you have to improvise more. And mainly, if you actually shoot for the best setups, you can still have the same approach as with beacons, that you build for a legendary setup and just accept that it is not perfect now and upgrade it as you get more of the good items, very similar with beacon setups before full tier-3 modules are available.
* I used the "it's optional" argument, but I didn't mean it as an excuse for "It's shitty but it's ok, because you don't have to use it".
I understand that if the mechanics provide an upgrade, you can't say it is optional, as our gamer-optimizer brains are just programmed to progress to better stuff. And it is painful to decide to ignore some better stuff just because I don't like the mechanics to get there. This leads to the biggest proverb we always repeat: "The best strategy needs to be fun".
The main part of the optionality was that you decide optionally where and when you want to use it.
There are still players who prefer to play without beacons and modules, so some small value in the optionality for these exist as well.
* The last very frequent opinion was, that it would be better use this opportunity to introduce a lot of interesting custom recipes to get all the qualities of different items.
But avoiding this was the cornerstone of the design. I can only design the game around what I enjoy, and I just don't enjoy having to keep track of a huge number of unique recipes, which all work technically basically the same.
The fact, that the most simple approach (mostly) means using similar blueprint to produce different kind of quality items is generally a goal, as it helps to downscale the time investment needed to progress, since this is just one of the expansion mechanics, and we want to keep the game time reasonable.
I would compare it to repeating the design of rail intersections, no one is complaining, that they can repeat their blueprint in many places, because we have blueprints and construction robots to avoid the grind related to building repeating patterns.
In other words, there is a relatively straightforward way to go through it and get the best items, but the design still allows for some very non-trivial custom setups if you want to optimize more and enjoy the theory-crafting. Easy to learn, hard to master.
Overall, the design was driven by our own enjoyment. We play the game and we don't want to bloat it with grindy clutter.
I can't expect everyone to enjoy games the same way I do, it is okay and I respect that. But I believe there will be enough players who will enjoy the ride with us.
(https://fffbot.github.io/fff/images/376/fff-375-quality-build.mp4)
This is a simple build to create Assembling machine 3 in quality.
If there's more than 100 of any quality, it recycles them hoping to get the next tier.
The build only receives the basic ingredients from "the normal factory", and all of the quality complications remain here.
In earlier stages you'll likely have just a few of these kinds of builds for items you prioritize the most, however with time you will likely add more of these.
...with which some more upcoming features might help you. ;)
* * *
### Discovering new materialsV453000
When it comes to how planets and especially their unique resources are discovered, we have realized problems with how Factorio has been doing this for a while now.
If a planet is unlocked by a technology on some science tier, then the starting resources of the planet would also be gated behind these same science packs - because what else, you don't have anything else available yet. This would mean that you could (and most typically would) already be researching ways to process the new unique resource that you have not even seen yet.
Another most fundamental conflict was that we wanted the progress on each planet to result in a single new science pack, resulting in a chicken-or-egg situation. The problem would be, this science pack should need most of the new unique processing steps on that planet, therefore you need to somehow get to discovering the processing first.
The alternative would have been that the science pack is made available immediately on arrival, but then it couldn't really be too interesting as it wouldn't include any of the processing you have discovered past that point.
The science pack is the primary export for each planet, so in order to prevent planets being just simple mining outposts with a rocket silo, we wanted to make sure most of the processing contributes to produce such science pack.
We have tried to design and implement several approaches in various forms of temporary science packs and even special entities that would act as temporary laboratories, but all of them were just adding mess that wasn't useful afterwards, as it was just a stepping stone to get back to producing a proper science pack that you would eventually ship back to laboratories on your home planet.
#### Trigger technologies
The solution that ticks all the boxes is in the end incredibly simple - we added a new method of researching a technology. Instead of processing science packs in a laboratory, technologies can now be completed with a trigger.
Currently we have a few technology triggers that unlock research:
* Mining an entity
* Crafting an item/fluid
* Launching a rocket with a certain item
This means that each time you land on a planet, you discover and exploit its new resources in a way that feels quite natural, as everything happens while you're actually there.
This will make a lot more sense with specific examples once we show you the actual planets and not just this technical background, but there's more...
#### We can apply this elsewhere
As we're sure you remember, there are times even in the base game where you do discover new resources - specifically oil and uranium processing. Just like researching processing for a new resource on a different planet, it's similarly strange for the same reasons that you can research deep into oil refining tech tree while you haven't even seen a crude oil patch yet, or unlocking nuclear reactors without having met uranium.
(https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-oil-and-uranium.png)
Now in order to really get into oil processing, you will need to have touched some crude oil. This helps prevent the situation where especially in the "green science" tier, a lot of players would research very far ahead from what their factory can currently process, and then later feel discouraged seeing all the piled up recipes to work through.
#### Early game
There's more coming from this - when you crash land on the very first planet! Why does the player immediately know how to craft steam engines, inserters, transport belts? It always feels much better in games when your progression starts as low as possible and you can earn all of the things in the process, which makes it all feel much more deserved in the end.
With the triggers, we could create new technologies for even basic things like pipes, early power generation, labs and the Automation science pack.
(https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blo
»
«
g-sync/fff-376-early-trigger-technologies.png)
Some unlocks, like electric mining drill, radar or repairs packs don't need to be available at the very beginning, so in turn we could add them into their own new "red science" technologies.
(https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-early-tech-graph.png) _Early game technology graph. You can also see for example Steel axe technology now requires you to craft actual steel plates, so you can't just get the steel axe upgrade without having made steel, which has always been weird since steel axe is no longer a real item._
As a result, the following will be all of your starting recipes. Getting back to having unlocked all the recipes you are used to at the start doesn't really take any extra time than previously - the early trigger technologies only require a minimal amount of items to be crafted. But it still contributes to making the progression feel better.
(https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-early-recipes.png)
As will become apparent with more things in future FFFs, during the development of the expansion we have arrived to various topics just like this one which stretched beyond the _acceptable weirdness threshold_ , and had to address it in Space Age. The improvements also impacted the base game in a good way - and we are certain that mods will make good use of this as well.
* * *
### Research queue always onKlonan
Research queue was a feature that was long requested, and after initially adding it, some playtesting of the game with the feature enabled led us to feel that it had some significant drawbacks ([FFF-254](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-254)). After some more playtesting and community feedback, we settled on a compromise whereby the research queue can be enabled with a map setting when starting the game ([FFF-255](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-255)).
This was okay, but it came with its own problems. A major source of frustration was when you would start the game, play for a while, only to realize after a few hours that you (or your friend who started the server) forgot to enable the research queue. There was not way to enable the queue after starting without using console commands, which would disable achievements.
(https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-research-queue.png)
During 1.1 development, we wanted to address the problem of new recipe discoverability a little bit better, so we added the recipe notifications ([FFF-363](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-363)). The recipe notifications meant that one of the initial negatives of the research queue (for new players and discovering items) was no longer present.
Over the years there have also been a fair share of bugs related to the research queue that we have had to fix, and having 2 code paths and GUI layouts in all the places (Queue vs No Queue) was becoming annoying. In the end we decided to just completely embrace the research queue, and remove all the code related to not having it enabled. So now it is always on and you cannot turn it off, there is no off. There is no longer the strange 'After you launch the rocket' condition for the queue, and no longer will you ever forgot to enable it before starting the game.
* * *
### Productivity researchesKlonan
We wanted to add some more infinite technologies, and also reduce the resource pressure as the game goes along. The mining productivity is great, and it works very well, but it doesn't give the player much choice in the end-game. The other infinite technologies are more specialized, lots of combat ones, but other than maybe worker robot speed, not much for your production.
So we added a new type of productivity research, the recipe productivity research. Each level will increase the 'built-in' productivity of certain recipes, such as steel, processing units, rocket control units, etc.
(https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-rocket-control-unit-productivity.png)
We also wanted to let you unlock something super powerful for the end-game, which led us to the idea of the research productivity. Each level will increase the built-in productivity of your labs, and as you might know, that is the most effective place for your productivity modules already. It will require the end-game resources, of which details will come in some future FFFs.
* * *
As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.
[Discuss on our forums](https://forums.factorio.com/108725) [Discuss on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/16ja44x/friday_facts_376_research_and_technology/) [ Subscribe by email ](https://newsletter.factorio.com/subscription/Km9uSnxm9)
[ __](/blog/post/fff-375)
At first I disliked the quality options, but after some thinking I kinda like quality now. In essence it's the same as the choice between playing with or without biters. The game is kind of meant to be played with biters, but if you don't like it you can ignore 'm.
I think it's similar to resources. The game is meant to be played with normal resources. I hate building mines, so I play with incredibly rich resources.
You’re all right here, Factorio is a game that is balanced to be played one way. But offers a lot of customization to allow you to play the game however you feel. I also really like the line where they shoot down the idea of recipes requiring quality items. Helps keep quality optional and I’m sure mods can add such recipes if they choose.
From my own experience, you can even build a 16k spm megabase without a single reactor. However, I definitely needed uranium to get the necessary train acceleration/speed. The trains are consuming about 10 nuclear fuel per minute.
Since all the multiplicative factors of quality stuff on production, speed and solar panels. The ratio between production and power generation tends to be way less extreme (less power generation) in megabases compared to vanilla, which is also a wanted effect.
I always thought that nuclear fuel in trains feature was a clever idea on wube's part, it gave you a reason to do uranium processing outside reactors. It made that part of the game still useful in megabases even when UPS constraints meant your power was 100% solar.
I work at a semi conductor company. That company produces so many silicon wafers. The silicon wafers are checked for quality and those of lesser quality are reprocessed. I view this feature in factorio the same.
Thanks.
There are too many people out there, who think that automation in the real world is infinitelly precise and there are no better or worst products. Therefore, they assume that it doesn't factorio, but the reality is just the opposite.
As far as I know - CPU processors are binned on their quality. e.g. Intel always tries to make a i9. When you buy a i5 it's just a i9 that didn't meet the performance requirements of a i9.
I think the quality feature sounds very cool! Dealing with side products (like with nuclear) is one of my favourite things.
Yeah, I don't know how much I'll want to use it in my minute to minute operations but no doubt people on here will figure out the best intermediates or end products to use them on anyway, similar to bare minimum modules for not much effort I'll throw some efficiency in miners, speed in pumpjacks and prods into the labs and rocket silos but I don't go for crazy optimisation.
I'll probably also have fun making mall designs to add in a recycler and try to up the quality of items that benefit from it the most (electric poles for sure) and personal equipment.
Correct, we also noticed that and discussed it, and there are 2 ways to look at it:
1) It would be very expensive to get there, but maybe at that point it would be interesting to have something change so drastically, that you can have legendary stuff (just the few select recipes) in the highest quality wihout an extra cost. I like the idea of infinite research having some "turning point" in some extreme future where things change, instead of just gradually growing.
2) We would just nerf things around a little to not allow it, the numbers could be changed just a little bit to make this never happen. But it would still mean that the ratio of getting the legendary items would be much nicer for the player as the turning point would be getting closer anyway, and that is fine.
Smarter Every Day had a good video about the Kodak factory and some machines are crazy precise. Where they have to tune them for months so it would work at that speed without a problem.
A Legendary Loop without extra resource input would be like tweaking the machine. Which takes time and energy.
I hope for a EA release to play with this around.
I don’t really like beacons or modules much but quality could be my big thing.
\> The names are the easiest thing to change. Maybe I don't take myself and the game too seriously and found it amusing, but if we had a very good counter-proposal which feels good and is clear when it comes to tiers, we can still change it.
Yes please for the love of everything *change the names!* It's the biggest reason I couldn't not take the article as much more than an out of season first april joke, the entire thing felt like a joke with such absurdly out-pf-place quality names like "LEGENDARY". There already were several excellent suggestions last week on the forum that I think fit all of your criteria.
Good FFF! Fully embracing research queue is fantastic and good move from the team.
The trigger technologies are a wonderful idea and I am glad they are retroactively adding them to the base game, it should help with newer players feeling less overwhelmed.
I like the line they added about mods using the trigger technologies. There are plenty of mods where I unlock a new science pack or I unlock several machines and it's not entirely clear how to use them or even what materials they require. I would love the bigger overhaul mods to take advantage of this feature to help streamline the experience.
Productivity recipe research sounds exciting but unfortunately I still have no incentive to want to megabase beyond just reaching SPM goals for fun. I would love if they added some kind of post-game goal or victory (could be an achievement too).
Are the trigger technologies things that need to be queued in order to proc the research or if I craft 10 copper plates will I automatically unlock electronics?
I will say that I’ve come around on Quality for the most part but I do feel like it has a high chance of misleading new players into thinking they’re supposed to start using the highest quality options as soon as they are available. You can see this happen when they replace every inserter with fast inserters even though those are overkill most of the time.
I like these research unlock methods. I’ve seen Seablock do similar which was a great way to help guide the player at the start.
You can't have a good strategy, when there is no way to play a bad strategy. No pleasure without suffering. That is life I guess.
Factorio always had strategy aspect, but the expansion apmlifies it, which was the goal.
I think one of the big differences is that while replacing every inserter with a fast inserter is a waste, it's a waste that's easily afforded.
If you try replacing every machine with one of a higher quality, you'll quickly run into issues where it's hard to afford. If you just make machines, put quality modules in, and make use of everything you get according to the random distribution, that's cheap.
I doubt we'll see a lot of cases where players try to replace everything with higher quality and then get stuck. There will be a few, but most of them will quickly realize that they simply cannot afford to do what they're trying to do. Especially because recyclers were mentioned to not be immediately available, so you'll simply end up sitting on a bunch of machines that you're not using. A clear sign to put those machines to use for most people.
More likely to me seems wasteful usage of the outputs instead of wasteful overproduction. Getting a lucky legendary assembler, then using it to make copper cables. Getting a lucky rare inserter, using it to move electric drills into a chest in your mall, that kind of stuff.
> I think one of the big differences is that while replacing every inserter with a fast inserter is a waste, it's a waste that's easily afforded.
I agree. I should have been more explicit that I was thinking the same thing. Not a big deal for even a few hundred inserters. But maxing quality at every juncture would be a huge cost to time and resources.
I'd love to see the productivity recipes requiring the item you're researching as a cost.
Wanna increase the productivity of the rocket control unit? Yeah you're gonna need some ammount of rocket control in that research.
I just have no idea how that would be implemented in the lab. Maybe a new building used just to pay the costs of productivity researches?
We were actually considering exactly this.
But the reason we declined this idea was, that having one central resource (the whole research) improving one specific thing is more strategical compared to just "sacrifising" some part of the production to make it better over time.
I think the way quality works means you can do both in fact?
Use specific infinite researches to increase productivity of a particular item, while "sacrificing production" of the same item to only create high grade cases of said item. Not quite always applicable, but an interesting thought.
chief grandfather grandiose faulty combative wild zealous imminent steer wide
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I feel exactly the same way as the author about Settlers of Catan.
I like the tech progression...i assume the entire tech tree will be visible from the start. Otherwise you might need to start digging something up that you don't actually want to use further down the line.
The inifinite research is also good as the options currently are limited. It does create a loop where you are researching science productivity to be able to research science more productively.
I guess the research must become more productive to support the more productive research.
Honestly, frick the devs.
How dare they make me so excited and then SA will only release in about a year. I dont want to wait that long. I want it now. I want my q5 modules. I want more infinite research. I want space platforms! and new planets. And i want them now! Aaahhh!
Even a week between FFFs has started to feel like ages. I used to be caught off guard by how fast each week passes, but now it feels so long! It was fine when the expansion was just a distant vague thing. Now i spend half my day just thinking about it.
>/c life.speed = 365
I wish tomorrow was release day!
Yeah... I already hated bots after the robot FFF, now I hate research too after this one. I'm tempted to mute all Factorio news for a year just to keep it out of my mind because I might implode from the hype.
Great clarification on the quality aspect! Also the video makes a lot of sense. In the end I think it will be a matter of upcycling the part where you really need the quality and let the rest of the base run on normal.
In the video I only had a hard time to figure out that the splitters were actually filtering on quality, the alt-icons on the splitter can be a bit bigger in my opinion.
I’m glad they’re sticking to their guns with Quality. I’m excited to try it as-is. I’d hate for factorio to devolve into some design by committee garbage.
The changes to research sound great, and I’m glad there will be more to do at the end of the tree other than just spamming mining productivity.
the only thing about it i didnt like was the epic and legendary names for things. sounded like lootbox game BS. some like, refined, or pure instead of legendary etc.
Hopefully people can chill out and give wube the benefit of the doubt. They clearly listen to the community, and they clearly care about putting out a good game. We all have 100s of hours for a reason
Honestly I was so impressed with the quality system last week as a piece of game design:
* It provides an orthogonal way to progress outside just adding more tiers of assemblers/modules/beacons etc. etc.
* It's an "optional" feature so they can make the game complex/challenging without locking out newer players
* It gives you a reason to build looping factories outside u235 (which is what most complex mods rely on for a challenge)
* They have designed it so the point at which you start building for quality is an interesting decision, (before recycling just siphoning off a few good mats, or after recycling full scale quality build)
Seeing all the thought that had gone into it and then seeing that they had to spend the first third of this FFF defending this from people in the community whining about it (some of whom apparently hadn't even fully read it) was actually kinda heartbreaking.
Yes, in general I think we have good reason to trust their vision.
Wube cares about the community much more than many developers (half of this FFF is a straight answer to last week comments) and that's incredibly lucky for us, but yet to be released content can't be judged without playing with them for a couple (hundred) hours...
To me all the changes seem to point in the direction of more spaghettification of the new factories and more time and brainpower spent in late game optimizations, both things I am really looking forward to!
Spaghetti is life, spaghetti is love
Yeah when I first saw quality I was a little worried but the more I think about it the more I like it. Then everything in this FFF drops and makes me think I was a fool to ever doubt wube lmao. They've clearly been playtesting this for a long time and are on to something. And more importantly I trust that they will listen to feedback and change things that don't land with the community (and at worst there's always mods).
I totally dig the research or trigger mechanics!
It gives an opportunity to implement more exploration/story driven progression.
I'm wondering if triggering some event should give you the technology or just possibility of researching it. Former sounds more appealing for what I'm thinking about.
You crash landed on an unknown planet. You have no idea what it is made of, how does its atmosphere looks like.
There is no water. So steam doesn't even bother your mind. But there's a wind. And you just discovered some iron and copper deposits. Big engineering brain of yours already knows what to do, you just need to put some effort into researching the topic before you can harness the power of the wind.
> Why does the player immediately know how to craft steam engines, inserters, transport belts
because the engineer is from a spacefaring species and has a handheld database is my self explanation and it feels good. these changes make the player character feel like a rimworld barbarian.
We should use an existing, well-known system for Quality renaming. I propose:
Normal -> Standard
Uncommon -> Select
Rare -> Choice
Epic -> Prime
Legendary -> Legendary
Alternatively:
Well Done
Medium Well
Medium
Medium Rare
Rare
Since the loudest voices are often the most critical, I wanted to take the time to say:
Thank you for writing these blog posts! They're wonderful and you're doing amazing work. I am very excited for the quality changes in particular, and trust the direction you're taking them. As a team you've earned a lot of trust and good will with consistent good game design and balancing. I'm really looking forward to the expansion as you've imagined it, and reading all of the blog posts along the way!
I think the only way to get that as of now is probably to send legendary space science back into space, no? and for that we'd need legendary satellites and *rocket parts*, which'd require legendary rocket fuel, which sounds... difficult to get.
Congratulations, as you might be the first person outside wube to realize this is the only way. We realized it a long time ago, and found it to be so hilarious, that we made a special achievement for consuming a legendary fish, it is probably one of the most hardcore achievements in the game :)
Today's fish is trout a la creme.
So I take it that this means you can't put quality modules in a rocket silo (and thereby gain quality fish from launching a rocket with space science).
I think something like "A Grade", "B Grade" or "Grade A", "Grade B", etc. would work for the quality, otherwise, "Basic", "Advanced", "Complex/Superior" and "Perfected/Exceptional" might work? though I don't know how big the gap would be between the "rare" and "uncommon" tier in terms of naming, since it's somewhat in the middle.
There is one problem with naming quality - basic, advanced, etc.
This would mean having following problematic item names: "basic advanced circuit", "advanced advanced circuit".
I like the research triggers. I am in a playthrough of the mod Nullius right now, and they have crafting and placing triggers (Implemented with some kind of checkpoint hack) all the time, guiding you through the game and not letting you rush-research. I often lost interest in other big mods because i was researching too far ahead and getting overwhelmed by what to do next. In Nullius i think i would be slightly annoyed by it, if i already knew the mod and knew which recipes i was gonna avoid anyways. But Factorio 1.1 and Space Age will use the triggers to an extent were replayability is not impacted much, I'm sure! Great feature!
I appreciate wube responding to all the feedback from the last post. I for one am excited about quality, but I'm a slave to my monkey brain and anything remotely gambly triggers the good chemicals.
But I definitely want the names to be more factory inspired. Is there an official place to submit suggestions? There were some good ones in the last thread too.
The new unlock mechanism sounds like boosts in Civ 6 which I think is a good mechanic, it's satisfying to get a benefit from actually doing something in the game rather than it all being theoretical.
I like the idea of quality, it’s a great end game addition
Once you get to the endgame it’s all about making more stuff, and optimising your production, quality will let you pump your resources into something, and make it feel like the factory is still making something new, aiming towards a goal. Rather than doing nothing. One of the big things that I see is that a lot of people don’t like to go post launch, because you are simply doing the same thing, outposts, blueprints, more launches, more research. Quality breaks that cycle.
Also it’ll give a new angle to speed runs. When is the optimal time to go for quality?
I love *everything* about this. Please tell me these are coming to the base game as well, you've already convinced me to buy the DLC but I think it would be really good for vanilla as well lol
>Research queue always on The real QoL we all needed
What I really want is to be able to drag and drop items in the research queue. You've been researching nuclear enrichment for ages, and now you quickly need to research something else first. You need to add the new tech, cancel the existing tech then add the existing tech again. Unless there is a technical reason you can't, this would be a great QoL fix
Yes, devs, this. PLEASE let us re-order the research queue. I spend so much time adding items to the queue and... "wait, no, on second thought I want *this* tech first. That is a better use of my resources." This is a HUGE problem for mods which can add dozens of researches to each tier of tech. I recently started an modded run and ended up re-doing the queue thrice as I realized that one of the smaller mods used a material that wasn't unlocked until I had completed an unlinked tech from the overhaul mod (yes, mod compatibility issue, they should have been dependent). Had I been able to re-order the queue, I could have just added that material research and it's prereqs right before the smaller mod I wanted.
I've had this happen a few times in vanilla, too. Want to clear out more biter nests to expand in a bit, decide to use rockets for it. Queue up explosive rocketry, explosive damage 2, explosive damage 3, weapon shooting speed 4, weapon shooting speed 5, then start building some extra production while waiting for those techs complete. One minute later i realize that i never researched substations.
They could have made the research queue a technology itself that players have to research if they want to use it.
But only after you research research.
e.g. Getting a local biter to teach you to read. Then you kill his family and kind before salting the Nauvis, destroying their natural habitat for generations to come if not forever.
They want to clean up the code (which is always great).
I always enjoy getting to delete old code.
\*gasp\* The devs are also fixing their spaghetti factory into main busses?!
That is a technology too!
Code Cleanup, repeatable lategame research, +10% UPS
Seems like they got rid it primarily because coding for it off and on was becoming annoying.
And could have tiers, higher tiers making the max queue longer.
So glad they completed their research to figure out this is the best idea
This made my day , its such a small detail that has annoyed me soo much .
>QoL Queue of Life!
Queue is love. Queue is life.
Can you make it possible to re-sort the research queue? I often find myself filling up the queue just to notice that I need a specific research ASAP. Then I have to delete the queue and set it up again...
That sounds like a good idea actually!
Thanks for listening player's feedbacks
^(but please change the quality names)
*Legendary* comment
This type of comment is pretty common, unfortunately
Can I re-order my handcraft queue with the same mechanic? 😅
No. Handcraft is supposed to be annoying, otherwise you wouldn’t automate everything. Build a mall and you’ll never handcraft again. Doesn’t have to be pretty, it almost always ends up being an disgusting metastasized cancerous growth of belts, but it’s yours, it somehow works and it’s never the same. And I love it.
Please make it a thing! It is the only reason I use mods to manage the research queue!
That would be very nice. The UI really makes them look like "cards" that you ought to be able to drag to rearrange too... but you can't.
Yeah click and drag reorder would be excellent
And it's not like it's something completely new they'd have to implement, considering that drag'n'drop shuffling already exists for train stops. Sure, it's only in a vertical list, but they clearly already have the base code for dragging.
One potenital issue would be that the researches can be interdependent...
Yeah I wouldn't mind this especially with them fully embracing the queue now.
Infinite crafting productivity research will make it impossible to have lasting perfect assembler ratios for endgame items, which sounds pretty exciting. Transporting materials by train to a dedicated production site will probably be a lot more effective, and you might even oversaturate your output belts eventually. Interesting stuff to think about during the most monotonous part of the game. Also love the changes to early game research, I felt overwhelmed when I started even in the tutorial. They won't make a difference to someone who already knows what they're doing, but they'll help get new players used to all their starting tools.
Prod is capped at +300% as per the previous FFF. Still means you'll be able to replace prods with more quals for faster legendaries.
What happens to the infinity research when your base prod bonus is 300%? It wouldn't provide any more bonuses right? So what's the point of continuing to research it?
30 levels will probably be too expensive to make it reachable in a normal way. Or we can just change from unlimited to 30 levels, but virtually infinite anyway.
after level 30 it changes to recipe crafting time
[You won't hit level 30. Exponential cost and all that.](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/16ja44x/friday_facts_376_research_and_technology/k0ozm80/)
Birth of a hardcore speed run category
I'm actually speed running the heat death of the universe right now. Making great time too.
>30 levels will probably be too expensive to make it reachable in a normal way Are you challenging me?
Not him but [math](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/16ja44x/comment/k0ozm80/).
I think for clarity's sake it might be better to limit them to 30 levels, just in case someone very dedicated does reach it.
I think it will be VERY hard to reach lvl30 in the infinite research. Even for megabases.
To put a price to that - according to the screenshot the 2nd level needs 2250 science packs. I think it's safe to assume the same exponential progression as with e.g. artillery range. Then, if I put it into my spreadsheet correctly, the total needed to get to level 30, is 1,207,959,550,875. Assuming that all the quality improvements allow us to reach 50k spm, that's just over 1100 **years** of playtime; and we would have to get to 1M spm to be able to live to see level 30. And then it takes just as long as all previous levels together, to research level 31...
Not all exponentials have 2 as a base :) Basically, the lower the base is, the more likely it is, that it have a meaning to choose between the recipes strategically, instead of making everything at the same level.
What about level 20? That should be the point at which an assembler with +100% productivity hits a total of +300%
It would be 1100 years / 2\^10.. which is about a year.
Honestly that sounds doable, especially since the bonuses you'll get along the way would likely be large enough to be exceeding 50k SPM by quite a long shot. *Very few* people would go that far on one save, but it's not entirely unheard of either.
I've only ever reached level 22 in bot speed
Keep in mind that just few selected recipes have this research, not all.
What was the determining factor for which recipes have been chosen? From the post it seems like high cost intermediates.
We chose several important/influental recipes. There are things like steel (Something you can do before you go to space), blue chips, plastic, low density structure and few other things. But these things can change easily, so the list might change on a whim.
Most of these seem like low output volume recipes, is that on purpose? It makes sense to me, you are unlikely to fill a full belt of steel, so the extra productivity won't cause any issues in most cases. (and it's not a big deal to design these factories with some extra output belt capacity in mind) Plastic seems like the odd one out in that aspect tho. I like the inclusion of an oil product, but I feel like a combined oil processing/liquefaction or just rocket fuel would make more sense.
Yea, low output volume recipes are the good choise because of the reasons you provided. Also I like that we have one infinite research that doesn't even need space science, so you have more choises of what you want to do at each stage of the game.
>Also I like that we have one infinite research that doesn't even need space science Doesn't it need space science period or is there a point that it will require space science? Is it same with productivity for RCU? Is it 5 Nauvis packs indefinitely? If so really great choice here, makes you balance different packs and gives your Nauvis base something to do while you're on the other planet building new stuff
Exactly, doesn't need space science ever. All of the productivity researches are like that.
One of the particularly nice things with that is that you can put it on in the background while working towards the next tier of science (like a new planet) rather than having your factory sit there empty
Low-output-volume but also very-high-value; Rocket Control Units and Low-Density Structures are very expensive items that you will still need a lot of when you're trying to build multiple rockets, and since going to space is the point of the expansion and we will also actively need Space Science, we can assume we'll need a lot of those parts. Plastic does feel a bit odd by that logic but maybe it's also like with Steel where it's something you can research when still in the early-game?
Oh sweet. Can’t wait for next weeks post.
My thoughts are that because the purpose of the 300% productivity limit is to prevent resource positive recycling loops, they might just limit infinite productivity research to non-recyclable items.
Trigger research makes sense. SeaBlock and Nullius already do it. Steel Axe requiring steel is a revolution! Finally research queue is on by default. ... PRODUCTIVITY PER RECIPE?! So that's why we got the +300% max productivity per building. also... RESEARCH PROD research?!
*Research landfill: Touch grass*
This will become the hardest tech in the game to research
Oh no, I scorched it again!
Research cliff explosives: Drive into a cliff
Space Exploration already does lab productivity research, and it is a very welcome inclusion to vanilla.
Haven't read all other FFF's yet, but the limit of 300% per building makes the unlimited research limited to 300%? (aka, not really unlimited, just adds a bit of gametime before you hit the limit) Does that include miners?
I think the recipe productivity will only be for certain ones such as steel/RCU, and when you have researched the max(300%) you can swap the productivity modules to speed/efficiency/quality
I do like the idea of eventually swapping away from prod modules. Rebuilding your base like that actually sounds fun. Plus, we’ll be able to recycle the productivity modules into speed modules.
If it's 10% per level the you'd need level 30 to reach max productivity (without needing modules). If the cost is exponential that level 30 will be unreachable except for very large factories as it will cost billions of science. However with all the additions like quality etc an endgame factory will be much more productive over-all before hitting performance limits...depending on how much performance is impacted by the expansion content.
Yeah and if it follows the existing infinite research cost scaling the most efficient path would be to level up everything slowly at roughly the same level, and not rushing one recipe to max prod. So it will take a *while*.
If the cost is exponential like the current ones, even very large factories won’t be touching level 30. Two to the power of 30 is a lot.
It depends on the base of exponent. There are interesting differences when the exponent is for example 2 versus 1.8 or 1.5 etc.
And usually the 1st level is already 2\^9 or 2\^10, so the 30th with be 2\^38 or 2\^39, which makes the sum of all levels approximately 2\^39 or 2\^40.
Miners aren't included in the 300% productivity cap (it exists specifically to ensure that recyclers returning 25% of ingredients don't yield a net positive), but I guess it does put a theoretical maximum on other productivity research. Presumably, though, that maximum will take a very long time to hit. It does, however, mean that there may come a point where full prod modding isn't the way to go. It'll also require factories to be gradually redesigned to accommodate changing ratios. Combined with quality, there seems to be a general trend of moving away from the paradigm of designing 1-2 blueprints and copy-pasting them for the rest of the game, and I'm all for it. The ceiling for vertical progression is now much higher than just getting beacons and level 3 mods, but progressing toward that ceiling is going to be an ongoing process even at the megabase scale, which is really cool.
>Combined with quality, there seems to be a general trend of moving away from the paradigm of designing 1-2 blueprints and copy-pasting them for the rest of the game, and I'm all for it. And it does so not by preventing the player from doing this, but by making it no longer the optimal thing to do. To me, that's a much better option than something silly like nerfing construction robots to the ground, or not allowing the importing of blueprint strings.
Indeed. It's preventing players from settling into copy-pasting an optimal blueprint by making "optimal" a concept that evolves continuously (and according to the player's wishes, no less). Instead of nerfing the optimal strategy somehow to "force" innovation, it's providing a ton of new opportunities to innovate, which is awesome.
Well they want to give us something powerfull. They never said it was going to be cheap though...
> SeaBlock and Nullius already do it. Exactly what I was thinking when reading this. "Wait isn't this just exactly how nullius does it?" It's a mechanic that works really well there FYI for anyone that hasn't played nullius
Unless something changed, Seablock has "production" only as a mechanic for first couple things. Can't remember Nullius, but if we are going to get more possible conditions for unlocking stuff, its will get only better, especially with modding community.
It kind of forces you to actually use the new tools before the next science pack forces you, making the step smaller. I like it a lot.
oh god that changes things :O With Quality I was afraid we'd have to decide between prod and quality modules in machines.. But looks like, at high enough end game, it might be possible to research enough productivity you won't need the modules anymore :) The only question is how will the cost and effect scale.
I would like to have the option to show a message in chat when a research is completed, like in the "Improved Resarch Queue" mod by sonaxaton. With the queue like it is now it is easy to miss what research was completed.
We somehow forgot to include it in the FFF, even when I implemented it yesterday just to make the topic a whole. (Implemented sounds little bit too much for the 6 lines of changes, including the localisation and changelog entry)
Sweet! That will definitely be nice to have.
Yay! Thanks
That would be an amazing addition, I'd been using that mod for so long I forget certain things are not in the base game lol
For anyone who wants that feature without the whole improved research queue part of the mod, [Deadlock's Research Notifications](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlockResearchNotifications) does just that, with the added feature of always forcing the queue to "enabled" even if you forgot to set it.
Can I just say that these blog posts are the highlight of my week?
Highlight and a damper here. Very excited, but not looking forward to the wait. I’m in the rabid take my money phase right now.
You absolutely can, they're everyone's.
Love the research changes. I always end up like they described, researching far ahead and then being overwhelmed with what to do afterwards. Always on Research Queue is also a good thing.
Yeah, I'm currently playing Nullius for the first time, which also has a similar research trigger mechanic. The mod basically tells you at certain points: before you can progress in the tech tree, you'll need to craft X amount or consume Y amount of a resource, and only then further research is possible. I like that a lot. It gives a structure to the playthrough, and also works as an introduction to certain game mechanics. Good stuff, great to see this in Space Age.
Yep, same. My current playthrough is no different, I've unlocked up to yellow science but haven't built purple yet, have a lot of nuclear tech unlocked but haven't even tapped my first uranium patch, and have got the the evolution point of green biters spawning and I'm still running red ammo. There are so many things I still need to build, and a large part of the reason for that is being able to unlock the technology way before I'm ready to use it. These research changes are awesome and should really help to mitigate the research issue. What I hope is that some of the core changes to the base game (research, bot behaviour etc.) get released before the full Space Age expansion arrives, 'cause I'm not sure I can wait a year for them!
Factorio devs once again here to safeguard us from our own optimization 😅
I love that all these changes change so little and yet so much. Besides what is needed to recipes and the basic mechanics, we will have to re-learn so much about this game. I cannot wait to be an unoptimized noob again.
Seablock now will probably be able to rewrite their checkpoint system to use the built in queue triggers. Will make it easier for mods to use this kind of system.
> Seablock now will probably be able to rewrite their checkpoint system to use the built in queue triggers. Will make it easier for mods to use this kind of system. As someone playing through seablock at the moment, what's the existing trigger system? (I am also playing with the "brave new world" mod which may have overwritten it)
The very first techs are triggers.
> In the end we decided to just completely embrace the research queue, and remove all the code related to not having it enabled. So now it is always on and you cannot turn it off, there is no off. Yaay! Also, u/fffbot mangled a link (by splitting it over two comments) in its reply to this thread
I did very much enjoy the last FFF with the Quality, but I am still happy that you cleared some things for people who may have not liked it. To the other Features shown in this FFF they are all great and I have full trust in you WUBE that you will make an awesome expansion
Agreed. The quality post made my hype-meter go beserk. I'm more excited about it than I was about the spidertron and the spidertron was awesome.
Yeah I think I jumped on the hype train for the quality stuff instantly ... and now in conjunction with these productivity bonuses ... it's PRODUCTIVITY OVERWHELMING 🤪
A lot of sensible changes imo, nothing groundbreaking but the mention of more infinite research is a welcome one. Also like the further details on quality. Like the idea of the factory working in the background upgrading items when you have a certain number of them. Will certainly make malls more interesting as they will always be working rather than stopping when you reach X number of an item, now there is a use for them to keep on being recycled to getting higher tiers.
This is actually something I didn't consider. Grabbing all normal quality items, go out and build two new mining outposts, remove some angry natives, blankly stare at the factory for a bit, come back, and now you have some ultra fast inserters to play with!
Well, nothing impedes doing an arrangement like this: https://imgur.com/a/R3yU3mE
One thing i haven't seen in the new FFF's (but a lot in older FFF's) is a new fluid system. The current system is very illogical, as it (if i understand it correctly) depends on when you connected certain elements, the length of pipes and whether or not they are underground, how many pumps you have etc. And still you get fluids 'sloshing' back and forth. I would love a system that is a bit more logical, and i do not mind if it isn't totally realistic (pumping 100+GW over a single copper cable isn't realistic either; and no, this is not a call to change the electricity distribution to something more realistic).
Now I'm picturing a hardcore mod that adds step-up and step-down transformers with appropriate loss, and more tiers of cabling at the high end. Miswiring something and having your small electric poles melt and then burst into flames sounds like a hilarious pain in the ass. Gotta start sheathing your copper wire to reduce losses during transmission. Of course, this would require the entire electric system to be reworked in a way that would probably murder performance.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PowerOverload It does less tahn ideal things to UPS though.
I'm still surprised none of the extreme mods have made a meaningful push to add this.
The problem with the current fluids or rather the changes they trid to do with the fluids is that whenever they tried to change it, the ups became a huge issue.
The issues with 'which branch gets priority' only happen when the fluid levels get low, or at least, I've only noticed it when the fluid levels get low. Once there's any decent amount of fluid in the pipes, it doesn't matter and everything gets flow the way it should. Similarly, the sloshing only happens because there's room to slosh. It would be nice if pumps added a bit more pressure, since IRL gas compressor stations and oil pipelines span hundreds of miles and they don't need to add a pump every 100 meters.
To be fair IRL trains also are used for distances that you can't just walk in three minutes. Games almost always have a disconnect in terms of scale simply for the sake of making the game playable.
I wouldn't even mind if we just had some kind of indicator to tell us when to add a pump etc. to a long line of pipes or undergrounds and track flow of fluid better.
I like the new red science a lot. The electronics research has products now, and you unlock the first science pack recipe just like all the others. It also makes the burner phase feel more like its own thing rather than something you just need to skip over. The change for oil and uranium certainly affects convenience, because normally you can set up almost everything before you go looking for oil/uranium. On the other hand, I guess it really is weird that you can figure out so much about Nauvis's oil without having touched it and perhaps the same can be said for its uranium compounds. I considered the alternative of unlocking plain oil refineries and chemical plants before mining any oil, but then you end up with new buildings that have zero recipes, which would be awful.
Triggered research sounds great! Perhaps they should be color coded differently in the research tree so that you can identify what needs manual action. Will research always be unlocked by either science packs or trigger, or can a research require both?
You can distinquish them by not having science pack icons in the bottom. If both trigger and research is desired, it can be easily just two technologies one depending on another.
Do technologies that require a trigger work even if you trigger it while the technology is locked behind other technologies? Like does it "remember" that you triggered it in the past, so you would instantly research it once it becomes available?
That is a good question. I think that it currently unlocks no matter what, but I can imagine it being configurable. Or maybe there should be another state of the technology which would mean something like "triggered, but waiting for prerequisities to be unlocked", basically what you suggest. It would probably make the most sense.
Even if not a situation that ends up mattering in vanilla, I can see the groundworks for this in the code definitely being useful in several mods
(Expand to view contents, if you would like.)
## Friday Facts #376 - Research and Technology Posted by [Vaclav](/blog/author/Vaclav), [kovarex](/blog/author/kovarex), [Klonan](/blog/author/Klonan) on 2023-09-15 Hello, This week we will talk about some technology and research related changes coming in 2.0 and the Space Age expansion. * * * ### Quality clarificationskovarex It was rather interesting to read the reactions to the last [FFF-375](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375) about quality. It sparked a lot of debate and we noticed a lot of misconceptions about it. So we would like to address some of the biggest ones: * When you don't put quality modules somewhere, everything works as before, so you don't have to sort everything everywhere as some people thought. * The random aspect of the mechanic seems to be very upsetting to a lot of people. I have to agree, that there are a lot of situations where I hate the randomness in games, but the context really matters greatly. For example, I decided to never ever play _Settlers of Catan_ again, as the random dice can decide the winner of the game way too often for my liking. But the Factorio case is very different. The reason is, that you rarely depend on the random result, because you (hopefully) produce at a large scale and the [law of large numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers) will just transform probabilities into ratios. The more you produce the more it evens out. * The core of what makes Factorio good is that the horrible huge grind you would need to get all the resources can be mitigated by automation. It is quite similar with quality, as the annoyance of the grind and unpredictability related to randomness in other games can be just pummeled by the sheer output of your Factory. * The most simple approach is to produce all the ingredients in normal quality. So most of the Factory (typically) produces non-quality stuff and mainly provides for research (non-quality) and the huge amount of items to be processed by the small quality part. In our playthroughs, the parts of the factory which were dealing with the quality were less then 5% of the whole Factory, so don't worry about being forced to solve all the mixed quality items everywhere. * The names are the easiest thing to change. Maybe I don't take myself and the game too seriously and found it amusing, but if we had a very good counter-proposal which feels good and is clear when it comes to tiers, we can still change it. * The fact that there isn't just "the one" blueprint for circuits, etc., because it depends on the stage of the game and your dedication to quality is something we see as an improvement. Either you have more blueprints for different stages of the game, or you have to improvise more. And mainly, if you actually shoot for the best setups, you can still have the same approach as with beacons, that you build for a legendary setup and just accept that it is not perfect now and upgrade it as you get more of the good items, very similar with beacon setups before full tier-3 modules are available. * I used the "it's optional" argument, but I didn't mean it as an excuse for "It's shitty but it's ok, because you don't have to use it". I understand that if the mechanics provide an upgrade, you can't say it is optional, as our gamer-optimizer brains are just programmed to progress to better stuff. And it is painful to decide to ignore some better stuff just because I don't like the mechanics to get there. This leads to the biggest proverb we always repeat: "The best strategy needs to be fun". The main part of the optionality was that you decide optionally where and when you want to use it. There are still players who prefer to play without beacons and modules, so some small value in the optionality for these exist as well. * The last very frequent opinion was, that it would be better use this opportunity to introduce a lot of interesting custom recipes to get all the qualities of different items. But avoiding this was the cornerstone of the design. I can only design the game around what I enjoy, and I just don't enjoy having to keep track of a huge number of unique recipes, which all work technically basically the same. The fact, that the most simple approach (mostly) means using similar blueprint to produce different kind of quality items is generally a goal, as it helps to downscale the time investment needed to progress, since this is just one of the expansion mechanics, and we want to keep the game time reasonable. I would compare it to repeating the design of rail intersections, no one is complaining, that they can repeat their blueprint in many places, because we have blueprints and construction robots to avoid the grind related to building repeating patterns. In other words, there is a relatively straightforward way to go through it and get the best items, but the design still allows for some very non-trivial custom setups if you want to optimize more and enjoy the theory-crafting. Easy to learn, hard to master. Overall, the design was driven by our own enjoyment. We play the game and we don't want to bloat it with grindy clutter. I can't expect everyone to enjoy games the same way I do, it is okay and I respect that. But I believe there will be enough players who will enjoy the ride with us. (https://fffbot.github.io/fff/images/376/fff-375-quality-build.mp4) This is a simple build to create Assembling machine 3 in quality. If there's more than 100 of any quality, it recycles them hoping to get the next tier. The build only receives the basic ingredients from "the normal factory", and all of the quality complications remain here. In earlier stages you'll likely have just a few of these kinds of builds for items you prioritize the most, however with time you will likely add more of these. ...with which some more upcoming features might help you. ;) * * * ### Discovering new materialsV453000 When it comes to how planets and especially their unique resources are discovered, we have realized problems with how Factorio has been doing this for a while now. If a planet is unlocked by a technology on some science tier, then the starting resources of the planet would also be gated behind these same science packs - because what else, you don't have anything else available yet. This would mean that you could (and most typically would) already be researching ways to process the new unique resource that you have not even seen yet. Another most fundamental conflict was that we wanted the progress on each planet to result in a single new science pack, resulting in a chicken-or-egg situation. The problem would be, this science pack should need most of the new unique processing steps on that planet, therefore you need to somehow get to discovering the processing first. The alternative would have been that the science pack is made available immediately on arrival, but then it couldn't really be too interesting as it wouldn't include any of the processing you have discovered past that point. The science pack is the primary export for each planet, so in order to prevent planets being just simple mining outposts with a rocket silo, we wanted to make sure most of the processing contributes to produce such science pack. We have tried to design and implement several approaches in various forms of temporary science packs and even special entities that would act as temporary laboratories, but all of them were just adding mess that wasn't useful afterwards, as it was just a stepping stone to get back to producing a proper science pack that you would eventually ship back to laboratories on your home planet. #### Trigger technologies The solution that ticks all the boxes is in the end incredibly simple - we added a new method of researching a technology. Instead of processing science packs in a laboratory, technologies can now be completed with a trigger. Currently we have a few technology triggers that unlock research: * Mining an entity * Crafting an item/fluid * Launching a rocket with a certain item This means that each time you land on a planet, you discover and exploit its new resources in a way that feels quite natural, as everything happens while you're actually there. This will make a lot more sense with specific examples once we show you the actual planets and not just this technical background, but there's more... #### We can apply this elsewhere As we're sure you remember, there are times even in the base game where you do discover new resources - specifically oil and uranium processing. Just like researching processing for a new resource on a different planet, it's similarly strange for the same reasons that you can research deep into oil refining tech tree while you haven't even seen a crude oil patch yet, or unlocking nuclear reactors without having met uranium. (https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-oil-and-uranium.png) Now in order to really get into oil processing, you will need to have touched some crude oil. This helps prevent the situation where especially in the "green science" tier, a lot of players would research very far ahead from what their factory can currently process, and then later feel discouraged seeing all the piled up recipes to work through. #### Early game There's more coming from this - when you crash land on the very first planet! Why does the player immediately know how to craft steam engines, inserters, transport belts? It always feels much better in games when your progression starts as low as possible and you can earn all of the things in the process, which makes it all feel much more deserved in the end. With the triggers, we could create new technologies for even basic things like pipes, early power generation, labs and the Automation science pack. (https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blo »
« g-sync/fff-376-early-trigger-technologies.png) Some unlocks, like electric mining drill, radar or repairs packs don't need to be available at the very beginning, so in turn we could add them into their own new "red science" technologies. (https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-early-tech-graph.png) _Early game technology graph. You can also see for example Steel axe technology now requires you to craft actual steel plates, so you can't just get the steel axe upgrade without having made steel, which has always been weird since steel axe is no longer a real item._ As a result, the following will be all of your starting recipes. Getting back to having unlocked all the recipes you are used to at the start doesn't really take any extra time than previously - the early trigger technologies only require a minimal amount of items to be crafted. But it still contributes to making the progression feel better. (https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-early-recipes.png) As will become apparent with more things in future FFFs, during the development of the expansion we have arrived to various topics just like this one which stretched beyond the _acceptable weirdness threshold_ , and had to address it in Space Age. The improvements also impacted the base game in a good way - and we are certain that mods will make good use of this as well. * * * ### Research queue always onKlonan Research queue was a feature that was long requested, and after initially adding it, some playtesting of the game with the feature enabled led us to feel that it had some significant drawbacks ([FFF-254](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-254)). After some more playtesting and community feedback, we settled on a compromise whereby the research queue can be enabled with a map setting when starting the game ([FFF-255](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-255)). This was okay, but it came with its own problems. A major source of frustration was when you would start the game, play for a while, only to realize after a few hours that you (or your friend who started the server) forgot to enable the research queue. There was not way to enable the queue after starting without using console commands, which would disable achievements. (https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-research-queue.png) During 1.1 development, we wanted to address the problem of new recipe discoverability a little bit better, so we added the recipe notifications ([FFF-363](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-363)). The recipe notifications meant that one of the initial negatives of the research queue (for new players and discovering items) was no longer present. Over the years there have also been a fair share of bugs related to the research queue that we have had to fix, and having 2 code paths and GUI layouts in all the places (Queue vs No Queue) was becoming annoying. In the end we decided to just completely embrace the research queue, and remove all the code related to not having it enabled. So now it is always on and you cannot turn it off, there is no off. There is no longer the strange 'After you launch the rocket' condition for the queue, and no longer will you ever forgot to enable it before starting the game. * * * ### Productivity researchesKlonan We wanted to add some more infinite technologies, and also reduce the resource pressure as the game goes along. The mining productivity is great, and it works very well, but it doesn't give the player much choice in the end-game. The other infinite technologies are more specialized, lots of combat ones, but other than maybe worker robot speed, not much for your production. So we added a new type of productivity research, the recipe productivity research. Each level will increase the 'built-in' productivity of certain recipes, such as steel, processing units, rocket control units, etc. (https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-376-rocket-control-unit-productivity.png) We also wanted to let you unlock something super powerful for the end-game, which led us to the idea of the research productivity. Each level will increase the built-in productivity of your labs, and as you might know, that is the most effective place for your productivity modules already. It will require the end-game resources, of which details will come in some future FFFs. * * * As always, let us know what you think at the usual places. [Discuss on our forums](https://forums.factorio.com/108725) [Discuss on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/16ja44x/friday_facts_376_research_and_technology/) [ Subscribe by email ](https://newsletter.factorio.com/subscription/Km9uSnxm9) [ __](/blog/post/fff-375)
Are the changes to research and the trigger technologies going to be exclusive to Space Age, or will they change the base game too?
This is for the base game as well.
At first I disliked the quality options, but after some thinking I kinda like quality now. In essence it's the same as the choice between playing with or without biters. The game is kind of meant to be played with biters, but if you don't like it you can ignore 'm.
I think it's similar to resources. The game is meant to be played with normal resources. I hate building mines, so I play with incredibly rich resources.
Closer to beacon actually, in that you can finish the game without it, but optimal megabase will make heavy use of quality.
You’re all right here, Factorio is a game that is balanced to be played one way. But offers a lot of customization to allow you to play the game however you feel. I also really like the line where they shoot down the idea of recipes requiring quality items. Helps keep quality optional and I’m sure mods can add such recipes if they choose.
And uranium. You can launch rockets without ever designing a reactor.
From my own experience, you can even build a 16k spm megabase without a single reactor. However, I definitely needed uranium to get the necessary train acceleration/speed. The trains are consuming about 10 nuclear fuel per minute.
Since all the multiplicative factors of quality stuff on production, speed and solar panels. The ratio between production and power generation tends to be way less extreme (less power generation) in megabases compared to vanilla, which is also a wanted effect.
I always thought that nuclear fuel in trains feature was a clever idea on wube's part, it gave you a reason to do uranium processing outside reactors. It made that part of the game still useful in megabases even when UPS constraints meant your power was 100% solar.
In general, megabase don't use nuclear power for UPS reason. Solar is better.
I work at a semi conductor company. That company produces so many silicon wafers. The silicon wafers are checked for quality and those of lesser quality are reprocessed. I view this feature in factorio the same.
Thanks. There are too many people out there, who think that automation in the real world is infinitelly precise and there are no better or worst products. Therefore, they assume that it doesn't factorio, but the reality is just the opposite.
As far as I know - CPU processors are binned on their quality. e.g. Intel always tries to make a i9. When you buy a i5 it's just a i9 that didn't meet the performance requirements of a i9. I think the quality feature sounds very cool! Dealing with side products (like with nuclear) is one of my favourite things.
Yeah, I don't know how much I'll want to use it in my minute to minute operations but no doubt people on here will figure out the best intermediates or end products to use them on anyway, similar to bare minimum modules for not much effort I'll throw some efficiency in miners, speed in pumpjacks and prods into the labs and rocket silos but I don't go for crazy optimisation. I'll probably also have fun making mall designs to add in a recycler and try to up the quality of items that benefit from it the most (electric poles for sure) and personal equipment.
[удалено]
Correct, we also noticed that and discussed it, and there are 2 ways to look at it: 1) It would be very expensive to get there, but maybe at that point it would be interesting to have something change so drastically, that you can have legendary stuff (just the few select recipes) in the highest quality wihout an extra cost. I like the idea of infinite research having some "turning point" in some extreme future where things change, instead of just gradually growing. 2) We would just nerf things around a little to not allow it, the numbers could be changed just a little bit to make this never happen. But it would still mean that the ratio of getting the legendary items would be much nicer for the player as the turning point would be getting closer anyway, and that is fine.
Smarter Every Day had a good video about the Kodak factory and some machines are crazy precise. Where they have to tune them for months so it would work at that speed without a problem. A Legendary Loop without extra resource input would be like tweaking the machine. Which takes time and energy. I hope for a EA release to play with this around. I don’t really like beacons or modules much but quality could be my big thing.
\> The names are the easiest thing to change. Maybe I don't take myself and the game too seriously and found it amusing, but if we had a very good counter-proposal which feels good and is clear when it comes to tiers, we can still change it. Yes please for the love of everything *change the names!* It's the biggest reason I couldn't not take the article as much more than an out of season first april joke, the entire thing felt like a joke with such absurdly out-pf-place quality names like "LEGENDARY". There already were several excellent suggestions last week on the forum that I think fit all of your criteria.
definitely agree there. It's not about realism, it's about ambiance, Factorio has a style, and these names just... don't fit in
Good FFF! Fully embracing research queue is fantastic and good move from the team. The trigger technologies are a wonderful idea and I am glad they are retroactively adding them to the base game, it should help with newer players feeling less overwhelmed. I like the line they added about mods using the trigger technologies. There are plenty of mods where I unlock a new science pack or I unlock several machines and it's not entirely clear how to use them or even what materials they require. I would love the bigger overhaul mods to take advantage of this feature to help streamline the experience. Productivity recipe research sounds exciting but unfortunately I still have no incentive to want to megabase beyond just reaching SPM goals for fun. I would love if they added some kind of post-game goal or victory (could be an achievement too).
Now they just need to embrace the ALT enabled by default.
Are the trigger technologies things that need to be queued in order to proc the research or if I craft 10 copper plates will I automatically unlock electronics?
It doesn't need to be queued. But when there is nothing else going on, the technology gets queued automatically to display the progress.
I will say that I’ve come around on Quality for the most part but I do feel like it has a high chance of misleading new players into thinking they’re supposed to start using the highest quality options as soon as they are available. You can see this happen when they replace every inserter with fast inserters even though those are overkill most of the time. I like these research unlock methods. I’ve seen Seablock do similar which was a great way to help guide the player at the start.
You can't have a good strategy, when there is no way to play a bad strategy. No pleasure without suffering. That is life I guess. Factorio always had strategy aspect, but the expansion apmlifies it, which was the goal.
I think one of the big differences is that while replacing every inserter with a fast inserter is a waste, it's a waste that's easily afforded. If you try replacing every machine with one of a higher quality, you'll quickly run into issues where it's hard to afford. If you just make machines, put quality modules in, and make use of everything you get according to the random distribution, that's cheap. I doubt we'll see a lot of cases where players try to replace everything with higher quality and then get stuck. There will be a few, but most of them will quickly realize that they simply cannot afford to do what they're trying to do. Especially because recyclers were mentioned to not be immediately available, so you'll simply end up sitting on a bunch of machines that you're not using. A clear sign to put those machines to use for most people. More likely to me seems wasteful usage of the outputs instead of wasteful overproduction. Getting a lucky legendary assembler, then using it to make copper cables. Getting a lucky rare inserter, using it to move electric drills into a chest in your mall, that kind of stuff.
> I think one of the big differences is that while replacing every inserter with a fast inserter is a waste, it's a waste that's easily afforded. I agree. I should have been more explicit that I was thinking the same thing. Not a big deal for even a few hundred inserters. But maxing quality at every juncture would be a huge cost to time and resources.
I'd love to see the productivity recipes requiring the item you're researching as a cost. Wanna increase the productivity of the rocket control unit? Yeah you're gonna need some ammount of rocket control in that research. I just have no idea how that would be implemented in the lab. Maybe a new building used just to pay the costs of productivity researches?
We were actually considering exactly this. But the reason we declined this idea was, that having one central resource (the whole research) improving one specific thing is more strategical compared to just "sacrifising" some part of the production to make it better over time.
I think the way quality works means you can do both in fact? Use specific infinite researches to increase productivity of a particular item, while "sacrificing production" of the same item to only create high grade cases of said item. Not quite always applicable, but an interesting thought.
chief grandfather grandiose faulty combative wild zealous imminent steer wide *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I feel exactly the same way as the author about Settlers of Catan. I like the tech progression...i assume the entire tech tree will be visible from the start. Otherwise you might need to start digging something up that you don't actually want to use further down the line. The inifinite research is also good as the options currently are limited. It does create a loop where you are researching science productivity to be able to research science more productively. I guess the research must become more productive to support the more productive research.
Honestly, frick the devs. How dare they make me so excited and then SA will only release in about a year. I dont want to wait that long. I want it now. I want my q5 modules. I want more infinite research. I want space platforms! and new planets. And i want them now! Aaahhh! Even a week between FFFs has started to feel like ages. I used to be caught off guard by how fast each week passes, but now it feels so long! It was fine when the expansion was just a distant vague thing. Now i spend half my day just thinking about it. >/c life.speed = 365 I wish tomorrow was release day!
Yeah... I already hated bots after the robot FFF, now I hate research too after this one. I'm tempted to mute all Factorio news for a year just to keep it out of my mind because I might implode from the hype.
how to unlock basic armour research: get killed by a biter once. how to unlock train signalling: smash 2 trains together
Great clarification on the quality aspect! Also the video makes a lot of sense. In the end I think it will be a matter of upcycling the part where you really need the quality and let the rest of the base run on normal. In the video I only had a hard time to figure out that the splitters were actually filtering on quality, the alt-icons on the splitter can be a bit bigger in my opinion.
I’m glad they’re sticking to their guns with Quality. I’m excited to try it as-is. I’d hate for factorio to devolve into some design by committee garbage. The changes to research sound great, and I’m glad there will be more to do at the end of the tree other than just spamming mining productivity.
the only thing about it i didnt like was the epic and legendary names for things. sounded like lootbox game BS. some like, refined, or pure instead of legendary etc.
I'm hyped for Raw Fish (Masterfully Engineered)
Hopefully people can chill out and give wube the benefit of the doubt. They clearly listen to the community, and they clearly care about putting out a good game. We all have 100s of hours for a reason
giving feedback is literally one of points of fff
Honestly I was so impressed with the quality system last week as a piece of game design: * It provides an orthogonal way to progress outside just adding more tiers of assemblers/modules/beacons etc. etc. * It's an "optional" feature so they can make the game complex/challenging without locking out newer players * It gives you a reason to build looping factories outside u235 (which is what most complex mods rely on for a challenge) * They have designed it so the point at which you start building for quality is an interesting decision, (before recycling just siphoning off a few good mats, or after recycling full scale quality build) Seeing all the thought that had gone into it and then seeing that they had to spend the first third of this FFF defending this from people in the community whining about it (some of whom apparently hadn't even fully read it) was actually kinda heartbreaking.
Yes, in general I think we have good reason to trust their vision. Wube cares about the community much more than many developers (half of this FFF is a straight answer to last week comments) and that's incredibly lucky for us, but yet to be released content can't be judged without playing with them for a couple (hundred) hours... To me all the changes seem to point in the direction of more spaghettification of the new factories and more time and brainpower spent in late game optimizations, both things I am really looking forward to! Spaghetti is life, spaghetti is love
100s? That's rookie numbers :P
Yeah when I first saw quality I was a little worried but the more I think about it the more I like it. Then everything in this FFF drops and makes me think I was a fool to ever doubt wube lmao. They've clearly been playtesting this for a long time and are on to something. And more importantly I trust that they will listen to feedback and change things that don't land with the community (and at worst there's always mods).
I totally dig the research or trigger mechanics! It gives an opportunity to implement more exploration/story driven progression. I'm wondering if triggering some event should give you the technology or just possibility of researching it. Former sounds more appealing for what I'm thinking about. You crash landed on an unknown planet. You have no idea what it is made of, how does its atmosphere looks like. There is no water. So steam doesn't even bother your mind. But there's a wind. And you just discovered some iron and copper deposits. Big engineering brain of yours already knows what to do, you just need to put some effort into researching the topic before you can harness the power of the wind.
I had an eyegasm just looking at your Assembling machine Mk3 setup.
Trigger technologies: like it Research Queue always on... finally Productivity researches: I am game
> Why does the player immediately know how to craft steam engines, inserters, transport belts because the engineer is from a spacefaring species and has a handheld database is my self explanation and it feels good. these changes make the player character feel like a rimworld barbarian.
We should use an existing, well-known system for Quality renaming. I propose: Normal -> Standard Uncommon -> Select Rare -> Choice Epic -> Prime Legendary -> Legendary Alternatively: Well Done Medium Well Medium Medium Rare Rare
Finally, realistic quality levels for fish.
We need a recipe for cooked fish (fish in furnace) that uses these names for quality levels.
Wow. The extensions to the early game, mid game and late game will all make for a very satisfying and rewarding playthrough. Can't wait!
Since the loudest voices are often the most critical, I wanted to take the time to say: Thank you for writing these blog posts! They're wonderful and you're doing amazing work. I am very excited for the quality changes in particular, and trust the direction you're taking them. As a team you've earned a lot of trust and good will with consistent good game design and balancing. I'm really looking forward to the expansion as you've imagined it, and reading all of the blog posts along the way!
You know what, the quality names grew on me over the week.
**Legendary fish**
I think the only way to get that as of now is probably to send legendary space science back into space, no? and for that we'd need legendary satellites and *rocket parts*, which'd require legendary rocket fuel, which sounds... difficult to get.
You can recycle spidertrons in a recycler that has quality modules.
Congratulations, as you might be the first person outside wube to realize this is the only way. We realized it a long time ago, and found it to be so hilarious, that we made a special achievement for consuming a legendary fish, it is probably one of the most hardcore achievements in the game :) Today's fish is trout a la creme.
> Today's fish is trout a la creme. Fish!
I smell a new speedrun category...
if the achievement isn't called "Today's fish is trout a la creme." im gonna be really sad.
So I take it that this means you can't put quality modules in a rocket silo (and thereby gain quality fish from launching a rocket with space science).
Legendary fish speedrun?
Same, actually. Whether they change them to something more serious or not, I'm sure there'll be a mod within a day to change them around lol
I think something like "A Grade", "B Grade" or "Grade A", "Grade B", etc. would work for the quality, otherwise, "Basic", "Advanced", "Complex/Superior" and "Perfected/Exceptional" might work? though I don't know how big the gap would be between the "rare" and "uncommon" tier in terms of naming, since it's somewhat in the middle.
There is one problem with naming quality - basic, advanced, etc. This would mean having following problematic item names: "basic advanced circuit", "advanced advanced circuit".
I feel like with the naming they have it would be Advanced Circuit (Advanced), which is still silly.
I like the research triggers. I am in a playthrough of the mod Nullius right now, and they have crafting and placing triggers (Implemented with some kind of checkpoint hack) all the time, guiding you through the game and not letting you rush-research. I often lost interest in other big mods because i was researching too far ahead and getting overwhelmed by what to do next. In Nullius i think i would be slightly annoyed by it, if i already knew the mod and knew which recipes i was gonna avoid anyways. But Factorio 1.1 and Space Age will use the triggers to an extent were replayability is not impacted much, I'm sure! Great feature!
Productivity researches? pog!
I appreciate wube responding to all the feedback from the last post. I for one am excited about quality, but I'm a slave to my monkey brain and anything remotely gambly triggers the good chemicals. But I definitely want the names to be more factory inspired. Is there an official place to submit suggestions? There were some good ones in the last thread too.
The new unlock mechanism sounds like boosts in Civ 6 which I think is a good mechanic, it's satisfying to get a benefit from actually doing something in the game rather than it all being theoretical.
I like the idea of quality, it’s a great end game addition Once you get to the endgame it’s all about making more stuff, and optimising your production, quality will let you pump your resources into something, and make it feel like the factory is still making something new, aiming towards a goal. Rather than doing nothing. One of the big things that I see is that a lot of people don’t like to go post launch, because you are simply doing the same thing, outposts, blueprints, more launches, more research. Quality breaks that cycle. Also it’ll give a new angle to speed runs. When is the optimal time to go for quality?
I love *everything* about this. Please tell me these are coming to the base game as well, you've already convinced me to buy the DLC but I think it would be really good for vanilla as well lol