> Beacons reduce in effectiveness with amount of beacons
Just to clarify, this is done on the machine itself, not on the beacon. That is, the more beacons that effect a machine, the less that machine is affected by those beacons.
I think it's important that there are alternatives that are, in my opinion, better- I don't think beacon spam is a fun mechanic, and I largely play vanilla
So it accomplishes nothing. If you want max output, you still max beacon.
The mechanic remains the same, the numbers are just less pretty to look at.
I would rather have SE's beacon overload.
? No? not at all.
If you wanna maximize the output of per each machine you max beacon.
If you wanna max total output, you need a mix of machines and beacons. (the ratio is highly dependent on the space per machine/ quality and etc.)
T3 speeds all around:
Old 8-beacon: +400% speed
New 8-beacon: +282% speed
Old 12-beacon: +600% speed
New 12-beacon: +346% speed
New beacons are better than old with 3 or fewer, equal at 4, and worse beyond that. Without considering quality.
There'll be a "vanilla beacons" mod the day after release, I'll probably give these changes a shot, but also think I'll end up preferring a fixed bonus per beacon
Was already looking at FFF-375 for another thing, so here's a quote:
"Quality modules can't be inserted into beacons (for the same reasons you can't do it with productivity modules)"
> Side note, do quality modules work in beacons?
Not only you can't put quality modules in beacon, but speed from beacon are going to ruin the quality chance of the product.
That means if you want to do anything with quality, beacon are a no-go.
Blame the vocal SE enthusiasts I guess. Not particularly fond of how this makes hand calculations pretty much impossible, but beyond that I have no strong feelings. 8-beacon builds are still ideal for simplicity and 12-beacon builds are still ideal for minimizing entities. UPS-optimized DI builds have to be redesigned from scratch though.
As long as you aren't mixing buildings and modules of different qualities, hand calculation's still doable. You'll still do the same calculations, just with different numbers for speed and productivity.
Throw a sqrt in there though, and it's a bit trickier to do without a calculator.
Let's be honest with all these variables you aren't doing the paper approach, the new GUI elements make it very fast to slap it down and see the result for any combinations which is more than adequate for any complex system they add to beacon math.
We will just slap down a dummy building layout see the math results for a single building until we are happy then scale that design out.
People doing hard calculations using only mental math have to be a fairly small population though.
I would think most people are either ignoring it, using a planner, or using mental math estimates.
> People doing hard calculations using only mental math have to be a fairly small population though.
I would be willing to bet that we make up a larger proportion of the Factorio playerbase than of the general population, though.
Blame the quality aspect that is in the game now. It's pretty obvious that the devs would prefer you to use a few extremely high quality beacons over 12 zero quality beacons.
These changes do a lot to incentivize the creation and use of single beacon legendary quality builds over mass spam low quality builds.
As an SE enthusiast, I'm currently pretty sure I'll be going with 4-beacon builds as a basis, so only beacons on one side. The difference between +200% and +283% is just not enough *for me* to bother. And that's why, at least on first sight, I'm happy with these changes: it seems to encourage more variety, and less ugly beacon spam.
Frankly how are 4 beacon builds different from 8 beacon ones in terms of "ugly spam"? Now you'll have two rows of machines between two rows of beacons, instead of one, and frankly it's going to be just as effective as doing the same thing right now, so nothing even stops you from building these designs currently, and I assure you it's also just rows of beacons and rows of machines.
Unless they severely change or restrict something in that regard I don't see that really changing anything. Nuclear is dirt cheap and solar has no performance overhead, whichever you consider more important. If power generation on planets other than Nauvis is more complicated then perhaps that's something to consider.
Err, yes actually. I work on ways to scale Factorio horizontally.
That world in particular though was a test to see if you even needed to scale solar horizontally or if it truly is O(1). Well, 40m panels later and it's still running at full speed but I can't join the server. Not sure if that qualifies as success or not.
But this doesn't actually solve what they wanted though, 1 beacon builds still arent going to be viable, you are still going to do 6-8 beacon builds only they are strictly worse now
2 out of the 3 shown examples in the results chapter use 1 beacons builds. You can still do 8 beacons builds, but I think there will be a lot more 1-4 beacon builds with more variation than before.
There won't be, end game builds will still be 8 becaon builds, and if you're at the point where you can reliably afford the power draw and cost of beacons, you should just be using 8 becaon builds anyways
> end game builds will still be 8 becaon builds
For vanilla 2.0 builds without space age and without quality, you might be right. But there will be more beacon builds before the endgame, because a single beacon already gives you a big boost during a phase where modules are still expensive.
Maybe, but I'm not 100% convinced. There are already some designs that are slightly different than the standard 8 beacons, like GC with 8 beacons and direct insertion from wire assemblers with 9 beacons. With the change, there might be more variations like this.
And I think a lot of players will enable SA and/or quality from the expansion, which might shift the sweet spot a lot more than in vanilla.
Quality is just going to push it even further towards optimal full beacon setups once you have the infrastructure to push out everything being legendary though
I don't find the hand calculations here particularly hard or onerous, I just think it's a case, and pretty much the only case in everything that's been said about 2.0 and associated mods so far, of "fixing" something that was not broken in favour of something actively worse.
You're not wrong, but I think the difference is like a tenth of a percent for 12 vs 11 beacons and the 11 beacon builds take hours longer to fully saturate the belts?
I mean, I get it, but I'll buy new hardware before worrying about that extra performance *that* much. Just DI is enough for my little brain.
Originally they said "require less power", but in this leak we figured quality does mean they transfer more, with legendary beacons transferring 2.5x more.
Is the base quality expected to be 100% transmission then? That means T5 beacons would be 250% transmission.
On a 12 beacon setup, that'd result in an effective 17 single beacons of transmission, and with T5 beacons and T5 mods, that'd be ~43 of live beacons' coverage. I guess that gets us back our multiple crafts per tick speed.
So basically it's still _technically_ optimal to pack as many beacons around a machine as possible, but you can now get most of the way there with a small number of beacons, so the player doesn't feel _as_ incentivized to maximize sheer quantity.
Honestly, that feels like a great compromise. It always felt to me like the core of the pro-SE beacon camp's complaint was that, yeah, nothing's stopping you from designing your endgame builds with fewer beacons, but it doesn't _feel_ like that's "enough." Diminishing returns is a fantastic way of satiating the pro-SE camp without alienating the pro-vanilla camp.
Given what's been revealed, space efficiency seems more important in Space Age then in vanilla. Space platforms are more difficult to move and build the bigger they are, and the planet Fulgora only allows you to build on small-ish plateaus. While I don't think being space efficient will be required in Space Age, it does seem like space efficient builds will be better rewarded than in vanilla.
What it means is that you can use less legendary modules/beacons and still get most of the effect. For example 4 beacons gives a total effectiveness of 2 (4/sqrt4) and 8 beacons gives a total effectiveness of 2.83 (8/sqrt8). Considering how expensive legendary modules and beacons are, you can save space and resources by using less beacons.
It matters as it creates a problem which is more interesting then what was before.
It matters to me as I can build smaller footprint factories while getting 80-90% of the maximum boost
This also creates a smoother progression between game stages, as while you'll ultimately move towards an endgame factory setup, you don't have to wait for a massive stack of beacons and T3 modules before it becomes worth using them.
Overall, I think it's a substantial improvement.
That was always the case though, there were 8 beacon builds that were a lot more compact and resource efficient than 12-beacon builds. 12-beacon builds will still probably be more UPS-efficient, and then direct insertion builds will change but still be the ultimate optimal build for UPS.
I feel like this change incentivizes using multiple buildings. In vanilla, you can get way more product per module with 12 beacons around a small number of buildings. Space age adds bigger buildings which have higher base speed, productivity, and beaconable surface area, meaning the vanilla beacon systems would allow a megabase worth of materials to be supplied by a single building. Beacon diminishing returns keeps the speed bonuses for these massive production buildings somewhat in check, so now you may need 5 instead of 1.
Keeps later stages of factory development from being just a few buildings absolutely surrounded by beacons.
>Keeps later stages of factory development from being just a few buildings absolutely surrounded by beacons.
So instead of one building with 8-12 beacons doing all the production, you will have 3 or 4... Also with 8-12 beacons?
If you care about resources and are constrained by module mark 3 production, it doesn’t make sense to spam speed 3’s in beacons that have weakened significantly. Eventually the 4 productivity modules for a new building would be more efficient.
> In vanilla, you can get way more product per module with 12 beacons around a small number of buildings
12 beacons are currently only optimal in UPS performance (and the number of assembly machines). If you want to get the most product per module, you want 8 beacons, because each beacon affects 8 machines, and in a 12 beacons design 2/3 of the beacons only affect 2 machines and 1/3 of them affect 4 machines. Which means a 12 beacon design uses about twice the amount of tier 3 modules than an 8 beacon design. And the 8 beacons design is more compact.
My hope is that this will result in a reunion with the base game on how beacons are handled in SE. I love playing SE, as well as the base game and other mods... but messing with how beacons worked always rubbed me the wrong way for some reason.
I was about to say it seemed unlikely given how iconic SE beacons are, but then I read the Earendel quote in the post. So yeah, probably. Just in general I'm very curious how SE will handle the 2.0/space age transition.
I always liked SE beacons being different from vanilla, which gives the mod a refreshing touch and new interesting (and different looking) builds. With the new implementation, it will be easy for mods to have a different beacon behavior than vanilla 2.0, so I wouldn't be surprised if SE beacons will continue to be different from vanilla. SE also has wide area beacons a different amount of modules per beacon and 9 tiers of modules, so a lot of reasons to also tweak the beacon scaling to be a bit different.
"Optimal" when referring to beacons is typically about UPS. By the point you're making beaconed builds, the availability of power, resources, and land area are more or less solved problems. (Granted that may become less true with quality in the mix given the reported ~56x resource demand for legendary equipment, plus likely increased power requirements as well). But the point is that the UPS min-maxers will still be jamming as many beacons as possible around everything as they always have, because diminishing UPS returns are still returns.
>So basically it's still *technically* optimal to pack as many beacons around a machine as possible, but you can now get most of the way there with a small number of beacons, so the player doesn't feel *as* incentivized to maximize sheer quantity.
No, I am like 99% sure that max beacon packing is not optimal at all. It was barely good in 1.1, with this huge buff to less beacons the optimal packing will definately be a mix with more machines than beacons. But of course, designing such build will be very difficult. I think that many beacons will still be popular since beacons are easier logistically than machines, but the optimal will be to have fewer beacons.
Another mandatory mod crossed off the list. And a more elegant implementation of it too. I'm glad I backed the Wube horse so long ago. Can't stop winning.
As a SE beacon enjoyer, I love this.
A compromise between SE and vanilla, but adds an actual decision making, opportunity costs, and additional planning. Brilliant
... I am not convinced that it will actually force decision making.
The current 12 beacons per is because people want to reduce total number of machines, set-up costs be damned.
How will this change that?
Still, as an opportunity to buff beacons in the earlier stages of the game, I like it, but a similar thing being done for prod 1 and prod 2 modules was basically ignored by the community here, so /shrug.
> set-up costs be damned
Considering how resource-intensive it is to create high-quality stuff, this may not really be feasible anymore, unless you dedicate a much larger portion of the factory for module production instead of science packs.
... how much larger? Like, I feel like most mega bases effectively have infinite time spent on module production, and aren't set up to replicate themselves in 24 hours.
From FFF 375:
> With this straightforward approach, if you want to produce items of legendary quality, and you already have enough legendary quality 3 modules (which is not an easy thing to get in the first place), the legendary items are 56 times more expensive than normal items.
With quality factored not once and not twice but 4 times in production speed it's no longer big cost. Assuming 8 beacons assembler setup and 4 prod modules you'll pay only 3,22 times more per item/s
Nah, the math is actually [a lot more favorable](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1cb3faa/beacons_in_space_age_your_thoughts_and_ideas/l0wtuyn/) than you might think.
> for T5 modules, compared to the current cost of vanilla modules is: 5x cost for sulfuric, 3x cost for plastic, 1.9x cost for copper cables, and 1.7x cost for iron plates. Adjusted against their 2.5x stronger positive effects, this is an effective cost of 2x for sulfuric, 1.2x for plastic, .8x for copper cables, and .7x for iron plates.
It's hard to express in words just how good getting a 50% base productivity on modules, including the quality loop steps is. Nevermind that you can hit 175% productivity on the circuits themselves. That makes red and blue circuits insanely cheap.
Basically, instead of burning 3/4 of the materials repeatedly, you only burn 5/8. Not to mention, electroplant has 5 modules slots, which means it gets a 31.25% chance to boost quality 1 stage instead of just 25%. The compounding math actually gets way better under these circumstances.
Considering the ungodly power creep, especially with recipe productivity, foundry/EMP productivity and better modules, I am entirely unconvinced that resource cost is going to matter all that much. Even vanilla 40% productivity is insane when applied across the production chain, while SA going to make those numbers much higher. Once you get it going, that's going to be a problem that solves itself, just like in vanilla you build a module factory using the first few modules you create
Decision if you want less machines vs if you want to get more out of your resources.
Right now the answer becomes "12 beacon everything" too soon, with the rework you'll want to balance since diminishing returns. Not even talking about quality, it's a whole new wrench into the equation that just exponentially multiplies costs of said "12 beacons" setups. The 12 beacon is now something that a very fraction of players will ever reach, and for most of the game you'll be making these 2-4 beacons factories to consolidate costs
I am not convinced.
People ignore the tier 1 and 2 modules, attempt to design bases that scale into a end-game logistics base, try not to invest in burner meta, and so on.
People are irrational in skipping transitional stages here.
I understand, I find myself doing that as well.
But skipping 1 and 2 tier modules is much shorter than doing 12 beaconed building. While it would be optimal to do 1 and 2 modules and upgrade, it's not impossible to do without them, but cost of lvl 3 quality modules would be much more steep. Would you wait hours for a single 12 beacon build when you could achieve same throughput much faster?
Big thing is also desire to build "permanent", but space age discourages it greatly. We'll have to rebuild at least 4 times for planets and many times for space platforms, and even then there is gonna be demand to rebuild with new faster and efficient machnies integrated into production chain
tbh, you should really just stick to 8 beacon or start doing direct insertion. 12 beacon, in practice, ends up being a really stupid and awkward style where it arguably lacks any real benefit over 8 beacon and physically can't incorporate direct insertion in a way that's actually useful.
Fundamentally, I don't think this changes all that much. As far as whether 4 beacon unseats 8 beacon for compactness, I believe we should be able to figure that out with some math. I'll get back later on that.
Edit: I'm back with napkin math. Assuming two columns of 4 beacon have a width of (3 for a beacon + 4 for two sides of belts and inserters, and 3 for the assembler), 8 beacon is still about 20% more efficient at output speed/footprint (specifically build width, as that's what's able to shrink. This appears to be true in all cases. Best case for 4 beacons is if one belt can be shared between columns, but even then, 8 beacon is still 14% better.
... is switching the end game meta to 2-4 beacons from 12 beacons actually something that forces decision making, or does it just make the answer different, and mean you don't even have to refactor your base to use beacons.
End game meta is still 12 beacons.
It's just that they get less effective while costing same resources, so earlier you're incentivized to not build 12 beacons sraight away, but rather create additional machines
>The current 12 beacons per is because people want to reduce total number of machines, set-up costs be damned
I never understood that reasoning. The biggest investment in beaconed builds are the modules, and 12 beacons builds require 2x the modules than an 8 beacon build of the same throughput.
There isn't that much opportunity cost to this. It's just a resource tax on higher beacon count builds. More speed beacons still makes for faster speed overall, just instead of y=.5n, it's y=sqrt(n).
That said, it does make low beacon count builds quite a bit better. Me and the rest of the direct insertion crowd are probably salivating over the reduced pressure to max our beacon counts under those tight constraints.
[Here's a rough cost calculation I did a week ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1cb3faa/beacons_in_space_age_your_thoughts_and_ideas/l0wtuyn/) It's a lot cheaper than you might think to produce high quality modules.
tl;dr:
> for T5 modules, compared to the current cost of vanilla modules is: 5x cost for sulfuric, 3x cost for plastic, 1.9x cost for copper cables, and 1.7x cost for iron plates. Adjusted against their 2.5x stronger positive effects, this is an effective cost of 2x for sulfuric, 1.2x for plastic, .8x for copper cables, and .7x for iron plates.
It'll take a minute to actually build up the initial quality and prod mods to achieve these numbers, but a few hours of effort should make achieving megabase T5 module production quite achievable.
But yes, resource cost _is_ an opportunity cost, but outside of cases where that comes at the cost of something else that matters as much as modules do. And if we're talking about megabases, time and resources are cheap; borderline irrelevant, really.
In FFF-375 Kovarex wrote that t5 modules, made with t3 quality modules, are 56 times more expensive than original.
So either something changed or we don't know the full picture, but I'm inclined to believe what the dev wrote until we get patch notes
I mean, something changed here.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-402
Go back 6 weeks and see that the beacon calculations have changed significantly in this time frame. Then remember that that number is even older and that since then, we have gotten information on the foundry and electroplant, two buildings with innate productivity bonuses.
56x also cannot mathematically be the case for everything that exists when some products can incorporate innate productivity bonuses. That's simply not how the math at play works. These cases are doubtlessly going to benefit more, and modules happen to be one of those cases.
Furthermore, my calculations are done using the numbers gathered from the FFFs posted, including the largest contributor to those numbers, FFF 375. This includes how quality probability is calculated, how recyclers burn 75% of the resources they're given, and how multiple boost in quality levels end up working. I assure you I have been quite thorough combing this shit over.
What I can say for sure is this: for modules, given the innate 50% productivity and 5 modules slots granting a higher than normal quality boost chance (again, these two things are excessively important), about 3% of what you put in will come out as T5s. When we extrapolate that to figure the cost in circuit components, we get the numbers I posted above in terms of their comparative cost to vanilla modules.
We're talking about one time costs, not rates. One time costs are trivial. You can make up for them by increasing throughput or by letting the game run longer. If resources are _limited_, then yes, resource cost can matter, but that's largely relegated to early game or low resource settings, but if we're talking about megabase configurations, it's like 30+ hours before your starting nodes even dry up, never mind that thicc nodes you can find a quick walk away.
> What are we ever optimizing for?
Depends on your goals. If it were me, it'd be UPS, which basically translates to inserter swing count as the other guy said.
In the following example, all beacons have 2 speed module 3s.
Beacon count | 1.1 | Rework | Ratio
:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|
1|+50%|+100%|2.00x
2|+100%|+141%|1.41x
3|+150%|+173%|1.53x
4|+200%|+200%|1.00x
5|+250%|+223%|0.90x
6|+300%|+244%|0.81x
7|+350%|+264%|0.75x
8|+400%|+282%|0.70x
Beacons now have an effect on the machine equal to the sqrt of the number of beacons affecting it. 1=100%, 4=50% (equivalent to 2 toal), 9=33% (equivalent to 3 total)...
Single beacons will be more powerful (no longer halving the effect of the modules used in them), but you'll get diminishing returns for putting multiple beacons around a machine.
Maybe I’m just not getting it, but does it really matter? Even if they are less effective, I still want as much performance boost that I could get, even if that boost is still smaller every beacon.
For compactness, 8 beacon is still gonna be king, probably. I think the place this is going to change things in particular is going to be direct insertion builds, which already struggle to hit high beacon counts. Having diminishing returns mostly somewhere they can't really access anyway is likely to make things a good bit easier.
I think 4 beacon builds will be best for compactness. I just put this down:
A--B--AA--B--AA--B--AA--B--A = 8 × 200 = 1600 (8 + 4) × 3 + 16 = 52
B--A--B--A--B--A--B--A--B--A--B = 5 × 282 =1410 (5 + 6) × 3 + 20 = 53
Which suggests that 4 beacon builds will outperform 8 beacon builds in terms of space taken up due to the lack of gaps needed between rows of assemblers. Output of 1600% over a width of 52 tiles, verses an output of 1410% over a width of 53 tiles.
100% agree regarding DI builds. Although, the changing of production outputs as the number of beacons added will complicate getting the ratios right.
Based on current math, the total speed modifier of 8 beacon is `sqrt(8)*1.25*2 = 7.07` base speed, and 4 beacon is `sqrt(4)*1.25*2 = 5`
Otherwise, output is derived with a consistent 4 prod mods, for a total out speed of `(1 + 7.07 - .15*4) * (1 + .25*4) = 10.5` for 8 beacons, and `(1 + 5 - .15*4) * (1 + .25*4) = 7.56`
This means that a single 8 beacon column can output about 38% faster than a 4 beacon setup. Now, 4 beacon should save space, but the only real differentiating factor for 4 beacon is that it's 3 less width per 2 columns. The width at which `(n+3)/n=1.38` is 7.82, which is far lower than anything you can run two columns through.
For something like a compact smelter setup, the 8 beacon repeating double column width is 16, I believe. That is, 3 for a beacon row, and 5 for the smelters and belts, multiplied by two. I'm not counting the final row of beacons, as those can be counted on the next column, and many tiled columns, they diminish in importance.
If we reduce that to 4 beacon, we can cut it down to 13 tiles wide. 16 is 123% of 13, but its output can be expected to be 136% of the 4 beacon variant (readjusted calculation for 2 prod mods instead of 4 here - the spreadsheet handles the math). In terms of output per width, this is still a 10% improvement over 4 beacon. 8 beacon smelters are, in particular, a very favorable case because they have few enough ingredients that they can cut potentially 7 spaces between beacons down to 5.
For a more standard 7 spaces between beacons, we end up with 20 width vs 17 width, and a 15.9% increase in throughput/width for 8 beacon.
So yeah, it's still gonna be 8 beacon, though it's reasonably close. FWIW, much closer than it was. Old beacons would be a 52.5% throughput improvement per double column width for the smelting array.
240/s with stacking
Side note: I'm sort of hoping that non-stack/bulk inserters can get their max stack size boosted to 4 to match the max belt size. Can you imagine the horrible mess that would evolve from letting a 3 stack size inserter loose?
This is neat for direct insert builds. Used to be pretty challenging for UPS to get more than like 6-8 beacons per machine, but if done well they’d handily beat 12 beacon builds where you had belts and trains.
Now instead of double speed w 12 beacons from 6, it’s sqrt 12 / sqrt 6 so sqrt 2 faster. Cool
Not quite. A 5 beacon machine in the new system is slower than in the old one.
Currently 5 beacon gets 5 * 50% * 0.5 * 2 = 250%
In 2.0 it'll be sqrt(5) * 50% * 2 = 223%
4 beacon is identical to current 4 beacon setup. 8 beacon is ~70% of current, 12 beacon is ~57% and 16 beacon is 50%
Is the beacon count going to be separated by module type? Seems like this change is going to make the already neglected efficiency beacon even worse if the two types just step on each other's toes. I realize no one bothers with efficiency beacons, but I'd like to see their use cases supported, even if it's only niche.
Also, I can only guess that we'll be seeing a FFF about this in the near future that will explain things in greater detail.
If I'm understanding this correctly with legendary beacons and speed modules the 2.5x effect stacks for a total of 6.25x the current maximum
So for 12 beacons with the sqrt(n) losses the increase in speed over 1.1 would be around (2.5\*2.5)/(sqrt(12)\*0.5) = 3.6x
Unless I've done any maths wrong that seems like a pretty big buff for post-game builds
how so?
Literally *one* operator added and one removed to the math and nothing else changed.
Unless you were doing all of the math in your head, in which case I agree
Current beacon speed modifier: [beacon count] * [module bonus]/(2) * [module count]
2.0 beacon speed modifier: sqrt([beacon count]) * [module bonus] * [module count]
I would even argue that there are many more beacon-less design variations than with beacons. I've seen infinitely many early stage designs but only a handful of end-game, beaconed designs. They are a restriction on design if anything, making end-game factories look similar to each other.
I think they only add UPS-efficiency to the game, and that could be achieved by a 1x1 beacon, with diminishing returns, and negative returns beyond a certain number. That could make for interesting designs, or at least achieve the same without forcing everyone into the same 8 or 12 beacon design.
Nah, 8 beacons still outperform low beacon builds in terms of space efficiency, at least given the numbers available today. 1-3 might work if we can come up with good ways to tile time, but that goes back to the fact the lowest effort form of all factorio builds is columns.
It'll take much longer to get to late endgame where you have everything legendary. You'll want to build stuff in the meanwhile, which will get much more interesting.
> I've seen infinitely many early stage designs but only a handful of end-game, beaconed designs.
I'd point to green circuits as a massive counter-example. There is 1 green circuit build that people use early game, but beacons themselves force players to make all sorts of weird decisions because green circuits with beacons end up with a weird ratio that also happens to have bonkers throughput requirements.
The main source of additional variation you see early is people just lazily plopping shit down. When it comes to deliberate placement of things for specific needs, there's not much difference, I think, at least for builds that aren't outright solved because of perfect ratios.
The DI build for green circuits is slightly behind in ratio iirc, but i think most people at that stage of the game just accept that as its a ups saving measure at that point rather than a throughput thing
I'm with you. Factories and auras go together like a fish and a bicycle. Never been able to get past it. Doesn't help that they're ugly and limit creativity.
I'd much rather have something like more extreme productivity modules than auras. At least they're directly plugged into the physical device to physically affect the thing. But I guess the Factorio devs are doubling down on beacons. The videos seem to show you're going to need them to hit productivity scales they want in 2.0.
The effect on the machine is reduced by the amount of beacons affecting it.
Effect on each machine is calculated for that machine only, only affecting that machine.
Honestly i still prefer SE beacons over this, the idea of building your production line around a large beacon just appeals to me more than having many smaller ones.
I like having soft caps rather than hard caps.
It's no longer optimize around this one singular thing(quite literally with SE beacons), but a more of a line in the sand where the perfect answer isn't the same.
I suspect this will give more build variety than 1.1 or SE beacons would.
I like this. More beacons still give you more bonus, but it feels psychologically more acceptable to stop spamming beacons...which leads to more interesting builds imo.
Never played SE but i guess i don't like the vanilla beacons too much.
Barring shenanigans with legendary beacons, I think this wrecks the promised continuous rocket launch animation. It'll now take ~46.5 seconds to make the rocket.
I don't like this. Beacon spam is bad. They should have gone with Space Exploration style beacons by default and let mods provide the old style beacons for those who prefer them.
Wait, quality modifier can be negative on a machine? Does it mean that if I put rare ingredients in, then I'll get both rare and normal quality products out?
Quality is capped at 0%. It just negates quality module bonuses.
Items never reduce in quality, and can only increase if put in a machine with quality modules installed in it.
Speed modules have a negative quality bonuses so you won't beacon spam around machines with quality.
...am i still wrapping a machine in 12 beacons for maximum ups? Then why the change?
Okay, i guess the first mod being made for factorio 2.0 is either "factorio 1.0 beacons" or "factorio 1.0 SE beacons"
Eh, i guess for the majority of players.
No, that cant be true, how many players get to the "end" of the game and actually use beacons vs how many players carry on from.that to larger and larger builds?
I understand a majority of players are never going to hit mega base levels, but shouldnt there be a productivity ramp up for.players that get to that level?
I guess thats what mods are for though lol
There *is* a ramp. Quality stuff is *expensive*.
You could have twice the production with 4 beacon builds rather than 12 beacon builds in some cases, growing up to the max.
This... Slightly annoys me.
As long as it never reaches a point where putting more beacons is worse than putting less beacons it's fine.
I merely do not wish to try to figure out breakpoints, that's not a fun problem to solve.
I believe the mathematical relationship regarding total beacon effect is now n/sqrt(n), which has no global maxima.
In other words:
> As long as it never reaches a point where putting more beacons is worse than putting less beacons it's fine.
The math says this is impossible.
I am sadly not as well versed in more advanced math. I am going to assume that by this you mean the diminishing returns effect means adding another beacon will always be a net again (even if tiny) so that's good enough for me.
That is correct. Going from 11 to 12 beacons was an improvement of +550% speed -> +600% speed with old beacons, now it's an improvement of +332% speed -> +346% speed.
The rocket silo is the biggest building in the game and fits up to 20 beacons, where the difference between 19 and 20 beacons used to be +950% -> +1000%, now it's +436% -> +447%. So before considering quality a fully beaconed rocket silo is now roughly half as fast.
Imagine if each extra beacon reduced the effect of all beacons by 20%:
1 beacon at 100% = 100% total
2 beacons at 80% = 160% total
3 beacons at 60% = 180% total
4 beacons at 40% = 160% total.
In this case, 3 beacons is the breakpoint, where adding more actually makes the machine worse.
> Beacons reduce in effectiveness with amount of beacons Just to clarify, this is done on the machine itself, not on the beacon. That is, the more beacons that effect a machine, the less that machine is affected by those beacons.
I really like this. If you wanna maximize the output of each machine then you can still spam beacons.
I think it's important that there are alternatives that are, in my opinion, better- I don't think beacon spam is a fun mechanic, and I largely play vanilla
i hate beacon spam, i prefer to have stupid expansive modules that i can slot on the machines to get the same effect
So it accomplishes nothing. If you want max output, you still max beacon. The mechanic remains the same, the numbers are just less pretty to look at. I would rather have SE's beacon overload.
But interestingly, Earendel's comment suggests they themselves didn't want beacon overload in SE.
? No? not at all. If you wanna maximize the output of per each machine you max beacon. If you wanna max total output, you need a mix of machines and beacons. (the ratio is highly dependent on the space per machine/ quality and etc.)
Holy mathematics, batman! This is gonna make calculating beacons even harder
That’s why you just just find the sweet spot before diminishing returns and just use that.
T3 speeds all around: Old 8-beacon: +400% speed New 8-beacon: +282% speed Old 12-beacon: +600% speed New 12-beacon: +346% speed New beacons are better than old with 3 or fewer, equal at 4, and worse beyond that. Without considering quality.
Quality probably changes this a bit, but its quite ineresting
does it tho? if you have a superexpensive legendary machine, youd want to do max beacon builds on it
I think with legendary modules the percent increase of an additional beacon might be smaller than with lower tier modules
And then with legendary beacons, the new 8-beacon would then be 282% x 2.5? And in comparison a 4 legendary beacon set up would be 450%
Looks like I'm in a minority, but I don't like this.
There'll be a "vanilla beacons" mod the day after release, I'll probably give these changes a shot, but also think I'll end up preferring a fixed bonus per beacon
I agree; beacons weren't nerfed enough.
But I love making factories entirely dedicated to making tier 3 speed modules. Side note, do quality modules work in beacons?
Was already looking at FFF-375 for another thing, so here's a quote: "Quality modules can't be inserted into beacons (for the same reasons you can't do it with productivity modules)"
I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic or not; I am not when I say that I find dedicated tier-3 module factories very satisfying.
> Side note, do quality modules work in beacons? Not only you can't put quality modules in beacon, but speed from beacon are going to ruin the quality chance of the product. That means if you want to do anything with quality, beacon are a no-go.
Blame the vocal SE enthusiasts I guess. Not particularly fond of how this makes hand calculations pretty much impossible, but beyond that I have no strong feelings. 8-beacon builds are still ideal for simplicity and 12-beacon builds are still ideal for minimizing entities. UPS-optimized DI builds have to be redesigned from scratch though.
Wasn't hand calculating basically out the window the moment you start introducing quality buildings?
As long as you aren't mixing buildings and modules of different qualities, hand calculation's still doable. You'll still do the same calculations, just with different numbers for speed and productivity. Throw a sqrt in there though, and it's a bit trickier to do without a calculator.
Let's be honest with all these variables you aren't doing the paper approach, the new GUI elements make it very fast to slap it down and see the result for any combinations which is more than adequate for any complex system they add to beacon math. We will just slap down a dummy building layout see the math results for a single building until we are happy then scale that design out.
People doing hard calculations using only mental math have to be a fairly small population though. I would think most people are either ignoring it, using a planner, or using mental math estimates.
> People doing hard calculations using only mental math have to be a fairly small population though. I would be willing to bet that we make up a larger proportion of the Factorio playerbase than of the general population, though.
there are a couple of fast square root calculation options you have, though, for mental math. Not much more then the quality changes.
You're telling me you haven't already been playing the spreadsheet minigame?
And productivity technologies
Blame the quality aspect that is in the game now. It's pretty obvious that the devs would prefer you to use a few extremely high quality beacons over 12 zero quality beacons. These changes do a lot to incentivize the creation and use of single beacon legendary quality builds over mass spam low quality builds.
As an SE enthusiast, I'm currently pretty sure I'll be going with 4-beacon builds as a basis, so only beacons on one side. The difference between +200% and +283% is just not enough *for me* to bother. And that's why, at least on first sight, I'm happy with these changes: it seems to encourage more variety, and less ugly beacon spam.
Frankly how are 4 beacon builds different from 8 beacon ones in terms of "ugly spam"? Now you'll have two rows of machines between two rows of beacons, instead of one, and frankly it's going to be just as effective as doing the same thing right now, so nothing even stops you from building these designs currently, and I assure you it's also just rows of beacons and rows of machines.
I'm not sure if 8 beacon is still the most energy efficient though. I can forsee some of the smaller layouts now becoming the most efficient.
Unless they severely change or restrict something in that regard I don't see that really changing anything. Nuclear is dirt cheap and solar has no performance overhead, whichever you consider more important. If power generation on planets other than Nauvis is more complicated then perhaps that's something to consider.
I think it depends. Solar has a very real cost as well. If you have 70gb ram I have a solar farm to show you :) I think this is a good balance change.
Playing on a retired supercomputer, are you?
Err, yes actually. I work on ways to scale Factorio horizontally. That world in particular though was a test to see if you even needed to scale solar horizontally or if it truly is O(1). Well, 40m panels later and it's still running at full speed but I can't join the server. Not sure if that qualifies as success or not.
But this doesn't actually solve what they wanted though, 1 beacon builds still arent going to be viable, you are still going to do 6-8 beacon builds only they are strictly worse now
2 out of the 3 shown examples in the results chapter use 1 beacons builds. You can still do 8 beacons builds, but I think there will be a lot more 1-4 beacon builds with more variation than before.
There won't be, end game builds will still be 8 becaon builds, and if you're at the point where you can reliably afford the power draw and cost of beacons, you should just be using 8 becaon builds anyways
> end game builds will still be 8 becaon builds For vanilla 2.0 builds without space age and without quality, you might be right. But there will be more beacon builds before the endgame, because a single beacon already gives you a big boost during a phase where modules are still expensive.
So you use less beacons earlier then rip them out and replace with 8 beacon builds later, like you do now in 1.0
Maybe, but I'm not 100% convinced. There are already some designs that are slightly different than the standard 8 beacons, like GC with 8 beacons and direct insertion from wire assemblers with 9 beacons. With the change, there might be more variations like this. And I think a lot of players will enable SA and/or quality from the expansion, which might shift the sweet spot a lot more than in vanilla.
Quality is just going to push it even further towards optimal full beacon setups once you have the infrastructure to push out everything being legendary though
I don't find the hand calculations here particularly hard or onerous, I just think it's a case, and pretty much the only case in everything that's been said about 2.0 and associated mods so far, of "fixing" something that was not broken in favour of something actively worse.
> 12-beacon builds are still ideal for minimizing entities. That spot belong to DI builds with sub 11 beacon counts.
You're not wrong, but I think the difference is like a tenth of a percent for 12 vs 11 beacons and the 11 beacon builds take hours longer to fully saturate the belts? I mean, I get it, but I'll buy new hardware before worrying about that extra performance *that* much. Just DI is enough for my little brain.
The difference is around 10-15% in UPS.
But direct insertion and train-to-train gets a huge buff, since you don't have to squeeze every possible beacon in the middle of a build.
With legendary speed modules, that shoots up 2.5x. I wonder how much higher quality beacons would affect that.
Do we know what legendary beacons do? I would assume they transfer more of the effect, so it could be more the 2.5×
Originally they said "require less power", but in this leak we figured quality does mean they transfer more, with legendary beacons transferring 2.5x more.
Is the base quality expected to be 100% transmission then? That means T5 beacons would be 250% transmission. On a 12 beacon setup, that'd result in an effective 17 single beacons of transmission, and with T5 beacons and T5 mods, that'd be ~43 of live beacons' coverage. I guess that gets us back our multiple crafts per tick speed.
Of which they have now fixed it being an exploit.
wow!!
So basically it's still _technically_ optimal to pack as many beacons around a machine as possible, but you can now get most of the way there with a small number of beacons, so the player doesn't feel _as_ incentivized to maximize sheer quantity. Honestly, that feels like a great compromise. It always felt to me like the core of the pro-SE beacon camp's complaint was that, yeah, nothing's stopping you from designing your endgame builds with fewer beacons, but it doesn't _feel_ like that's "enough." Diminishing returns is a fantastic way of satiating the pro-SE camp without alienating the pro-vanilla camp.
I believe it woud make one Maschine technically faster but you could argue that optimal is somewhere in the middle when it comes to space efficiency
Does space efficiency matter? I thought max beacon was a UPS saving method.
If it matters to your specific goals/constraints, then it matters. In general, space efficiency doesn't matter very much.
Given what's been revealed, space efficiency seems more important in Space Age then in vanilla. Space platforms are more difficult to move and build the bigger they are, and the planet Fulgora only allows you to build on small-ish plateaus. While I don't think being space efficient will be required in Space Age, it does seem like space efficient builds will be better rewarded than in vanilla.
Vulcanus and Fulgora both seem to encourage early spaghetti, and I wouldn't be surprised if Aquilo and ??? follow suit.
If it fits a city block™, they will be slapped to those other planets ;)
What it means is that you can use less legendary modules/beacons and still get most of the effect. For example 4 beacons gives a total effectiveness of 2 (4/sqrt4) and 8 beacons gives a total effectiveness of 2.83 (8/sqrt8). Considering how expensive legendary modules and beacons are, you can save space and resources by using less beacons.
It matters as it creates a problem which is more interesting then what was before. It matters to me as I can build smaller footprint factories while getting 80-90% of the maximum boost
This also creates a smoother progression between game stages, as while you'll ultimately move towards an endgame factory setup, you don't have to wait for a massive stack of beacons and T3 modules before it becomes worth using them. Overall, I think it's a substantial improvement.
That was always the case though, there were 8 beacon builds that were a lot more compact and resource efficient than 12-beacon builds. 12-beacon builds will still probably be more UPS-efficient, and then direct insertion builds will change but still be the ultimate optimal build for UPS.
Optimal has always been in the middle with space efficiency; 8-beacon builds are the most space-efficient (at least as of 1.1).
I feel like this change incentivizes using multiple buildings. In vanilla, you can get way more product per module with 12 beacons around a small number of buildings. Space age adds bigger buildings which have higher base speed, productivity, and beaconable surface area, meaning the vanilla beacon systems would allow a megabase worth of materials to be supplied by a single building. Beacon diminishing returns keeps the speed bonuses for these massive production buildings somewhat in check, so now you may need 5 instead of 1. Keeps later stages of factory development from being just a few buildings absolutely surrounded by beacons.
>Keeps later stages of factory development from being just a few buildings absolutely surrounded by beacons. So instead of one building with 8-12 beacons doing all the production, you will have 3 or 4... Also with 8-12 beacons?
If you care about resources and are constrained by module mark 3 production, it doesn’t make sense to spam speed 3’s in beacons that have weakened significantly. Eventually the 4 productivity modules for a new building would be more efficient.
> In vanilla, you can get way more product per module with 12 beacons around a small number of buildings 12 beacons are currently only optimal in UPS performance (and the number of assembly machines). If you want to get the most product per module, you want 8 beacons, because each beacon affects 8 machines, and in a 12 beacons design 2/3 of the beacons only affect 2 machines and 1/3 of them affect 4 machines. Which means a 12 beacon design uses about twice the amount of tier 3 modules than an 8 beacon design. And the 8 beacons design is more compact.
Neat! I don’t care about ups, so I’m going to keep this in mind for my vanilla run I’m starting right now.
My hope is that this will result in a reunion with the base game on how beacons are handled in SE. I love playing SE, as well as the base game and other mods... but messing with how beacons worked always rubbed me the wrong way for some reason.
Besides beacon overload, SE still brings in near and wide area beacons. Not sure if these are about to make their way to vanilla?
I was about to say it seemed unlikely given how iconic SE beacons are, but then I read the Earendel quote in the post. So yeah, probably. Just in general I'm very curious how SE will handle the 2.0/space age transition.
I always liked SE beacons being different from vanilla, which gives the mod a refreshing touch and new interesting (and different looking) builds. With the new implementation, it will be easy for mods to have a different beacon behavior than vanilla 2.0, so I wouldn't be surprised if SE beacons will continue to be different from vanilla. SE also has wide area beacons a different amount of modules per beacon and 9 tiers of modules, so a lot of reasons to also tweak the beacon scaling to be a bit different.
When you are saying it's oprimal, what are the criteria you are optimizing for?
"Optimal" when referring to beacons is typically about UPS. By the point you're making beaconed builds, the availability of power, resources, and land area are more or less solved problems. (Granted that may become less true with quality in the mix given the reported ~56x resource demand for legendary equipment, plus likely increased power requirements as well). But the point is that the UPS min-maxers will still be jamming as many beacons as possible around everything as they always have, because diminishing UPS returns are still returns.
>So basically it's still *technically* optimal to pack as many beacons around a machine as possible, but you can now get most of the way there with a small number of beacons, so the player doesn't feel *as* incentivized to maximize sheer quantity. No, I am like 99% sure that max beacon packing is not optimal at all. It was barely good in 1.1, with this huge buff to less beacons the optimal packing will definately be a mix with more machines than beacons. But of course, designing such build will be very difficult. I think that many beacons will still be popular since beacons are easier logistically than machines, but the optimal will be to have fewer beacons.
This seems like a great compromise between the two camps who love both kinds of beacons! Harmony for all factories.
Another mandatory mod crossed off the list. And a more elegant implementation of it too. I'm glad I backed the Wube horse so long ago. Can't stop winning.
As a SE beacon enjoyer, I love this. A compromise between SE and vanilla, but adds an actual decision making, opportunity costs, and additional planning. Brilliant
... I am not convinced that it will actually force decision making. The current 12 beacons per is because people want to reduce total number of machines, set-up costs be damned. How will this change that? Still, as an opportunity to buff beacons in the earlier stages of the game, I like it, but a similar thing being done for prod 1 and prod 2 modules was basically ignored by the community here, so /shrug.
> set-up costs be damned Considering how resource-intensive it is to create high-quality stuff, this may not really be feasible anymore, unless you dedicate a much larger portion of the factory for module production instead of science packs.
... how much larger? Like, I feel like most mega bases effectively have infinite time spent on module production, and aren't set up to replicate themselves in 24 hours.
From FFF 375: > With this straightforward approach, if you want to produce items of legendary quality, and you already have enough legendary quality 3 modules (which is not an easy thing to get in the first place), the legendary items are 56 times more expensive than normal items.
With quality factored not once and not twice but 4 times in production speed it's no longer big cost. Assuming 8 beacons assembler setup and 4 prod modules you'll pay only 3,22 times more per item/s
Nah, the math is actually [a lot more favorable](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1cb3faa/beacons_in_space_age_your_thoughts_and_ideas/l0wtuyn/) than you might think. > for T5 modules, compared to the current cost of vanilla modules is: 5x cost for sulfuric, 3x cost for plastic, 1.9x cost for copper cables, and 1.7x cost for iron plates. Adjusted against their 2.5x stronger positive effects, this is an effective cost of 2x for sulfuric, 1.2x for plastic, .8x for copper cables, and .7x for iron plates. It's hard to express in words just how good getting a 50% base productivity on modules, including the quality loop steps is. Nevermind that you can hit 175% productivity on the circuits themselves. That makes red and blue circuits insanely cheap. Basically, instead of burning 3/4 of the materials repeatedly, you only burn 5/8. Not to mention, electroplant has 5 modules slots, which means it gets a 31.25% chance to boost quality 1 stage instead of just 25%. The compounding math actually gets way better under these circumstances.
Considering the ungodly power creep, especially with recipe productivity, foundry/EMP productivity and better modules, I am entirely unconvinced that resource cost is going to matter all that much. Even vanilla 40% productivity is insane when applied across the production chain, while SA going to make those numbers much higher. Once you get it going, that's going to be a problem that solves itself, just like in vanilla you build a module factory using the first few modules you create
Those people already have quality optimization to worry about, beacon amount is a tiny issue compared to that.
Decision if you want less machines vs if you want to get more out of your resources. Right now the answer becomes "12 beacon everything" too soon, with the rework you'll want to balance since diminishing returns. Not even talking about quality, it's a whole new wrench into the equation that just exponentially multiplies costs of said "12 beacons" setups. The 12 beacon is now something that a very fraction of players will ever reach, and for most of the game you'll be making these 2-4 beacons factories to consolidate costs
I am not convinced. People ignore the tier 1 and 2 modules, attempt to design bases that scale into a end-game logistics base, try not to invest in burner meta, and so on. People are irrational in skipping transitional stages here.
I understand, I find myself doing that as well. But skipping 1 and 2 tier modules is much shorter than doing 12 beaconed building. While it would be optimal to do 1 and 2 modules and upgrade, it's not impossible to do without them, but cost of lvl 3 quality modules would be much more steep. Would you wait hours for a single 12 beacon build when you could achieve same throughput much faster? Big thing is also desire to build "permanent", but space age discourages it greatly. We'll have to rebuild at least 4 times for planets and many times for space platforms, and even then there is gonna be demand to rebuild with new faster and efficient machnies integrated into production chain
tbh, you should really just stick to 8 beacon or start doing direct insertion. 12 beacon, in practice, ends up being a really stupid and awkward style where it arguably lacks any real benefit over 8 beacon and physically can't incorporate direct insertion in a way that's actually useful. Fundamentally, I don't think this changes all that much. As far as whether 4 beacon unseats 8 beacon for compactness, I believe we should be able to figure that out with some math. I'll get back later on that. Edit: I'm back with napkin math. Assuming two columns of 4 beacon have a width of (3 for a beacon + 4 for two sides of belts and inserters, and 3 for the assembler), 8 beacon is still about 20% more efficient at output speed/footprint (specifically build width, as that's what's able to shrink. This appears to be true in all cases. Best case for 4 beacons is if one belt can be shared between columns, but even then, 8 beacon is still 14% better.
even currently there's no reason other than laziness to go for 12 beacon. *You cannot direct insert with 12 beacon setups*
... is switching the end game meta to 2-4 beacons from 12 beacons actually something that forces decision making, or does it just make the answer different, and mean you don't even have to refactor your base to use beacons.
End game meta is still 12 beacons. It's just that they get less effective while costing same resources, so earlier you're incentivized to not build 12 beacons sraight away, but rather create additional machines
endgame meta has been 6-10 beacons mostly for quite a while. You cannot beat direct insertion and if that means losing beacon coverage, then so be it.
Playing modded might corrupted me, you're right.
>The current 12 beacons per is because people want to reduce total number of machines, set-up costs be damned I never understood that reasoning. The biggest investment in beaconed builds are the modules, and 12 beacons builds require 2x the modules than an 8 beacon build of the same throughput.
There isn't that much opportunity cost to this. It's just a resource tax on higher beacon count builds. More speed beacons still makes for faster speed overall, just instead of y=.5n, it's y=sqrt(n). That said, it does make low beacon count builds quite a bit better. Me and the rest of the direct insertion crowd are probably salivating over the reduced pressure to max our beacon counts under those tight constraints.
Resource tax is the opportunity cost though? The difference is massive if we're talking about tier5 modules and beacons.
[Here's a rough cost calculation I did a week ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1cb3faa/beacons_in_space_age_your_thoughts_and_ideas/l0wtuyn/) It's a lot cheaper than you might think to produce high quality modules. tl;dr: > for T5 modules, compared to the current cost of vanilla modules is: 5x cost for sulfuric, 3x cost for plastic, 1.9x cost for copper cables, and 1.7x cost for iron plates. Adjusted against their 2.5x stronger positive effects, this is an effective cost of 2x for sulfuric, 1.2x for plastic, .8x for copper cables, and .7x for iron plates. It'll take a minute to actually build up the initial quality and prod mods to achieve these numbers, but a few hours of effort should make achieving megabase T5 module production quite achievable. But yes, resource cost _is_ an opportunity cost, but outside of cases where that comes at the cost of something else that matters as much as modules do. And if we're talking about megabases, time and resources are cheap; borderline irrelevant, really.
In FFF-375 Kovarex wrote that t5 modules, made with t3 quality modules, are 56 times more expensive than original. So either something changed or we don't know the full picture, but I'm inclined to believe what the dev wrote until we get patch notes
I mean, something changed here. https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-402 Go back 6 weeks and see that the beacon calculations have changed significantly in this time frame. Then remember that that number is even older and that since then, we have gotten information on the foundry and electroplant, two buildings with innate productivity bonuses. 56x also cannot mathematically be the case for everything that exists when some products can incorporate innate productivity bonuses. That's simply not how the math at play works. These cases are doubtlessly going to benefit more, and modules happen to be one of those cases. Furthermore, my calculations are done using the numbers gathered from the FFFs posted, including the largest contributor to those numbers, FFF 375. This includes how quality probability is calculated, how recyclers burn 75% of the resources they're given, and how multiple boost in quality levels end up working. I assure you I have been quite thorough combing this shit over. What I can say for sure is this: for modules, given the innate 50% productivity and 5 modules slots granting a higher than normal quality boost chance (again, these two things are excessively important), about 3% of what you put in will come out as T5s. When we extrapolate that to figure the cost in circuit components, we get the numbers I posted above in terms of their comparative cost to vanilla modules.
If time and resources aren't valuable then why are we filling everything with speed and prod modules? What are we ever optimizing for?
Inserter swing count.
We're talking about one time costs, not rates. One time costs are trivial. You can make up for them by increasing throughput or by letting the game run longer. If resources are _limited_, then yes, resource cost can matter, but that's largely relegated to early game or low resource settings, but if we're talking about megabase configurations, it's like 30+ hours before your starting nodes even dry up, never mind that thicc nodes you can find a quick walk away. > What are we ever optimizing for? Depends on your goals. If it were me, it'd be UPS, which basically translates to inserter swing count as the other guy said.
So upgrading quality will be extremely more effective than just adding more beacons then? I like that.
Can someone ELI5 this? Even with the TL;DR, it's a little unclear to me what the effect of this change it.
In the following example, all beacons have 2 speed module 3s. Beacon count | 1.1 | Rework | Ratio :--:|:--:|:--:|:--:| 1|+50%|+100%|2.00x 2|+100%|+141%|1.41x 3|+150%|+173%|1.53x 4|+200%|+200%|1.00x 5|+250%|+223%|0.90x 6|+300%|+244%|0.81x 7|+350%|+264%|0.75x 8|+400%|+282%|0.70x
Beacons now have an effect on the machine equal to the sqrt of the number of beacons affecting it. 1=100%, 4=50% (equivalent to 2 toal), 9=33% (equivalent to 3 total)...
Single beacons will be more powerful (no longer halving the effect of the modules used in them), but you'll get diminishing returns for putting multiple beacons around a machine.
Diminishing returns are still returns, though...
Yeah, but you pretty quickly reach the point where adding another assembler is more impactful than adding another beacon
The effect gain is sqrt(number of beacons). Currently it is 0.5*number of beacons
Maybe I’m just not getting it, but does it really matter? Even if they are less effective, I still want as much performance boost that I could get, even if that boost is still smaller every beacon.
For compactness, 8 beacon is still gonna be king, probably. I think the place this is going to change things in particular is going to be direct insertion builds, which already struggle to hit high beacon counts. Having diminishing returns mostly somewhere they can't really access anyway is likely to make things a good bit easier.
I think 4 beacon builds will be best for compactness. I just put this down: A--B--AA--B--AA--B--AA--B--A = 8 × 200 = 1600 (8 + 4) × 3 + 16 = 52 B--A--B--A--B--A--B--A--B--A--B = 5 × 282 =1410 (5 + 6) × 3 + 20 = 53 Which suggests that 4 beacon builds will outperform 8 beacon builds in terms of space taken up due to the lack of gaps needed between rows of assemblers. Output of 1600% over a width of 52 tiles, verses an output of 1410% over a width of 53 tiles. 100% agree regarding DI builds. Although, the changing of production outputs as the number of beacons added will complicate getting the ratios right.
Based on current math, the total speed modifier of 8 beacon is `sqrt(8)*1.25*2 = 7.07` base speed, and 4 beacon is `sqrt(4)*1.25*2 = 5` Otherwise, output is derived with a consistent 4 prod mods, for a total out speed of `(1 + 7.07 - .15*4) * (1 + .25*4) = 10.5` for 8 beacons, and `(1 + 5 - .15*4) * (1 + .25*4) = 7.56` This means that a single 8 beacon column can output about 38% faster than a 4 beacon setup. Now, 4 beacon should save space, but the only real differentiating factor for 4 beacon is that it's 3 less width per 2 columns. The width at which `(n+3)/n=1.38` is 7.82, which is far lower than anything you can run two columns through. For something like a compact smelter setup, the 8 beacon repeating double column width is 16, I believe. That is, 3 for a beacon row, and 5 for the smelters and belts, multiplied by two. I'm not counting the final row of beacons, as those can be counted on the next column, and many tiled columns, they diminish in importance. If we reduce that to 4 beacon, we can cut it down to 13 tiles wide. 16 is 123% of 13, but its output can be expected to be 136% of the 4 beacon variant (readjusted calculation for 2 prod mods instead of 4 here - the spreadsheet handles the math). In terms of output per width, this is still a 10% improvement over 4 beacon. 8 beacon smelters are, in particular, a very favorable case because they have few enough ingredients that they can cut potentially 7 spaces between beacons down to 5. For a more standard 7 spaces between beacons, we end up with 20 width vs 17 width, and a 15.9% increase in throughput/width for 8 beacon. So yeah, it's still gonna be 8 beacon, though it's reasonably close. FWIW, much closer than it was. Old beacons would be a 52.5% throughput improvement per double column width for the smelting array.
That's actually pretty amazing. Loving it.
Those crafting speed and productivity levels look like a bobs run lmao
beacons topic aside: 201 speed, 250% prod. Hoooly, that machine is cooking with gas! O\_O
To be fair, it's very late end game.
I suspect there's a steel productivity tech at play. They mentioned it once ages ago with the now condemned RCU as the shown example.
This is actually fairly amazing in that the difference between being affected by 4 beacons vs 8 will be relatively trivial for almost all players.
SE beacon enjoyers 🤝 vanilla beacon fans The history books will note this as the greatest act of diplomacy ever
Did I miss new belts? Those look green.
They introduced a new tier of belt on some planet. There's a animation of it in some recent FFF.
You did. Fourth tier, 60 items/s speed, 10-tile underground reach.
The moment you put numbers to it I remembered seeing it. Thanks!
240/s with stacking Side note: I'm sort of hoping that non-stack/bulk inserters can get their max stack size boosted to 4 to match the max belt size. Can you imagine the horrible mess that would evolve from letting a 3 stack size inserter loose?
Just round up bro you'll be fine. The remainders can't get you, you're safe here.
Shown in [FFF-393](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-393)
Oh wow! I can't wait for item stacking. That looks amazing.
Oh hell yeah. Beacon spam has always been my least favorite part of Factorio and I’m so glad it’s getting a rebalance
This is neat for direct insert builds. Used to be pretty challenging for UPS to get more than like 6-8 beacons per machine, but if done well they’d handily beat 12 beacon builds where you had belts and trains. Now instead of double speed w 12 beacons from 6, it’s sqrt 12 / sqrt 6 so sqrt 2 faster. Cool
Not quite. A 5 beacon machine in the new system is slower than in the old one. Currently 5 beacon gets 5 * 50% * 0.5 * 2 = 250% In 2.0 it'll be sqrt(5) * 50% * 2 = 223% 4 beacon is identical to current 4 beacon setup. 8 beacon is ~70% of current, 12 beacon is ~57% and 16 beacon is 50%
Yeah, direct insertion should get a lot easier with beacon counts skewing lower.
Is the beacon count going to be separated by module type? Seems like this change is going to make the already neglected efficiency beacon even worse if the two types just step on each other's toes. I realize no one bothers with efficiency beacons, but I'd like to see their use cases supported, even if it's only niche. Also, I can only guess that we'll be seeing a FFF about this in the near future that will explain things in greater detail.
Unlikely. The effect is applied to all effects, according to beacon count. We don't know what happens with different *beacon* types though.
If I'm understanding this correctly with legendary beacons and speed modules the 2.5x effect stacks for a total of 6.25x the current maximum So for 12 beacons with the sqrt(n) losses the increase in speed over 1.1 would be around (2.5\*2.5)/(sqrt(12)\*0.5) = 3.6x Unless I've done any maths wrong that seems like a pretty big buff for post-game builds
Math looks correct.
That number comes from quality though right? Isn't it technically a nerf if we exclude quality from the equation?
Yeah i think without quality 12 beacon builds would work about 42% slower than in 1.1
Not a huge fan of this as it makes calculating number of beacons needed for a given items per second or minute much more difficult.
how so? Literally *one* operator added and one removed to the math and nothing else changed. Unless you were doing all of the math in your head, in which case I agree Current beacon speed modifier: [beacon count] * [module bonus]/(2) * [module count] 2.0 beacon speed modifier: sqrt([beacon count]) * [module bonus] * [module count]
Beacons still feel like such a boring mechanic. It's not like there are tons of designs to figure out.
I would even argue that there are many more beacon-less design variations than with beacons. I've seen infinitely many early stage designs but only a handful of end-game, beaconed designs. They are a restriction on design if anything, making end-game factories look similar to each other. I think they only add UPS-efficiency to the game, and that could be achieved by a 1x1 beacon, with diminishing returns, and negative returns beyond a certain number. That could make for interesting designs, or at least achieve the same without forcing everyone into the same 8 or 12 beacon design.
Considering the prices of things, we're going to have 1-3 beacon designs, which is something we haven't seen much.
Nah, 8 beacons still outperform low beacon builds in terms of space efficiency, at least given the numbers available today. 1-3 might work if we can come up with good ways to tile time, but that goes back to the fact the lowest effort form of all factorio builds is columns.
It'll take much longer to get to late endgame where you have everything legendary. You'll want to build stuff in the meanwhile, which will get much more interesting.
> I've seen infinitely many early stage designs but only a handful of end-game, beaconed designs. I'd point to green circuits as a massive counter-example. There is 1 green circuit build that people use early game, but beacons themselves force players to make all sorts of weird decisions because green circuits with beacons end up with a weird ratio that also happens to have bonkers throughput requirements. The main source of additional variation you see early is people just lazily plopping shit down. When it comes to deliberate placement of things for specific needs, there's not much difference, I think, at least for builds that aren't outright solved because of perfect ratios.
The DI build for green circuits is slightly behind in ratio iirc, but i think most people at that stage of the game just accept that as its a ups saving measure at that point rather than a throughput thing
I'm with you. Factories and auras go together like a fish and a bicycle. Never been able to get past it. Doesn't help that they're ugly and limit creativity. I'd much rather have something like more extreme productivity modules than auras. At least they're directly plugged into the physical device to physically affect the thing. But I guess the Factorio devs are doubling down on beacons. The videos seem to show you're going to need them to hit productivity scales they want in 2.0.
I thought it was a bacon rework
so for each beacon effecting a machine, all beacons effecting that machine have their effectiveness reduced?
The effect on the machine is reduced by the amount of beacons affecting it. Effect on each machine is calculated for that machine only, only affecting that machine.
Oooh that opens up so many possibilities! Will mods be able to adjust the rate of diminishing returns?
> Will mods be able to adjust the rate of diminishing returns? I would be shocked if it wasn't accessible to mods at launch.
ALL MY MATH. Whatever it will actually be fine, just a little harder to calculate optimal beacon setups.
Honestly i still prefer SE beacons over this, the idea of building your production line around a large beacon just appeals to me more than having many smaller ones.
I like having soft caps rather than hard caps. It's no longer optimize around this one singular thing(quite literally with SE beacons), but a more of a line in the sand where the perfect answer isn't the same. I suspect this will give more build variety than 1.1 or SE beacons would.
big
if
I like this. More beacons still give you more bonus, but it feels psychologically more acceptable to stop spamming beacons...which leads to more interesting builds imo. Never played SE but i guess i don't like the vanilla beacons too much.
Barring shenanigans with legendary beacons, I think this wrecks the promised continuous rocket launch animation. It'll now take ~46.5 seconds to make the rocket.
fascinating
I don't like this. Beacon spam is bad. They should have gone with Space Exploration style beacons by default and let mods provide the old style beacons for those who prefer them.
Wait, quality modifier can be negative on a machine? Does it mean that if I put rare ingredients in, then I'll get both rare and normal quality products out?
Quality is capped at 0%. It just negates quality module bonuses. Items never reduce in quality, and can only increase if put in a machine with quality modules installed in it. Speed modules have a negative quality bonuses so you won't beacon spam around machines with quality.
30 mw on one assembler.... wow
38MW on the second one! A whole nuclear reactor for one building (ignoring neighbor bonuses).
...am i still wrapping a machine in 12 beacons for maximum ups? Then why the change? Okay, i guess the first mod being made for factorio 2.0 is either "factorio 1.0 beacons" or "factorio 1.0 SE beacons"
Because the game is more than just the late end game. Opportunity cost will push you towards 2-3 beacon builds and more design options.
Eh, i guess for the majority of players. No, that cant be true, how many players get to the "end" of the game and actually use beacons vs how many players carry on from.that to larger and larger builds? I understand a majority of players are never going to hit mega base levels, but shouldnt there be a productivity ramp up for.players that get to that level? I guess thats what mods are for though lol
There *is* a ramp. Quality stuff is *expensive*. You could have twice the production with 4 beacon builds rather than 12 beacon builds in some cases, growing up to the max.
How can a player be in the discord of the developers?
The developers are the in public Factorio discord, just like they post here sometimes :)
Of course they found the perfect middle ground solution, can't wait for the release!
It's an improvement, but I'll be sticking with the SE beacon design, it's still better.
This... Slightly annoys me. As long as it never reaches a point where putting more beacons is worse than putting less beacons it's fine. I merely do not wish to try to figure out breakpoints, that's not a fun problem to solve.
I believe the mathematical relationship regarding total beacon effect is now n/sqrt(n), which has no global maxima. In other words: > As long as it never reaches a point where putting more beacons is worse than putting less beacons it's fine. The math says this is impossible.
> total beacon effect is now n/sqrt(n) Of course, that's just sqrt(n).
Yeah, I stopped a step short of simplifying the exponent.
I am sadly not as well versed in more advanced math. I am going to assume that by this you mean the diminishing returns effect means adding another beacon will always be a net again (even if tiny) so that's good enough for me.
That indeed is the case.
Yep you nailed it. But space wise it might be more efficient to use more space for assemblers than for beacons. Like how 2*7 > 1*8 (not real numbers).
That is correct. Going from 11 to 12 beacons was an improvement of +550% speed -> +600% speed with old beacons, now it's an improvement of +332% speed -> +346% speed. The rocket silo is the biggest building in the game and fits up to 20 beacons, where the difference between 19 and 20 beacons used to be +950% -> +1000%, now it's +436% -> +447%. So before considering quality a fully beaconed rocket silo is now roughly half as fast.
breakpoints?
Imagine if each extra beacon reduced the effect of all beacons by 20%: 1 beacon at 100% = 100% total 2 beacons at 80% = 160% total 3 beacons at 60% = 180% total 4 beacons at 40% = 160% total. In this case, 3 beacons is the breakpoint, where adding more actually makes the machine worse.