I’ll be honest, the quality feature sounds awful. I thought the randomness in uranium processing presented an interesting twist on the production formula, but I definitely don’t want it everywhere in my factories. It also breaks the “you can always disassemble something and get 100% of its materials back” ethos of the game since the Recycler only gives you 25%.
It doesn’t sound awful to me, but I am very skeptical of it. Agreed that it was an interesting part of uranium processing, but I’m not sure about scaling it out to the whole game.
Also I would have preferred the Recycler to give 80% back or so. I think there should be a slight penalty, but 25% is too much. I understand the part about productivity modules enabling a net positive recycling loop, but I’d prefer to have it that items produced with a productivity module have fractionally reduced recycling (or productivity bonus items produce no recycling). I understand the implementation would be tricky, or at least annoying, but it must be feasible, I think.
Also, you can disassemble things in vanilla Factorio?
That was the question I had :)
Maybe I’m getting things mixed up with another game, but can’t you destroy a building and get 100% of the materials back?
You can pick up anything, which gives you the item you placed down. I wouldn’t call that “disassembly”. That is, you can put down a factory (so it’s on the map), then pick it up (so it’s an item in your inventory). But you can’t disassemble the factory item (in your inventory) into its component circuits, plates, and whatever.
Another Friday, another post from Wube.
Some clarifications about last week’s entry and then discussion about tech and planets.
Rails 2.0:
If they are going to improve anything I wish it is the oil systems.
Don’t worry, they have like 47 FF’s to go.
What’s your issue with it?
I found the oil production chains one of the better ones in Factorio. Different recipes provide some leeway but the soft need to find use for all resulting resources in the ratio you produce them in was very satisfying for me. That those uses were relatively easily scalable at the end of the chain made it even better in my eyes, compared to the furnace and assembler spam a lot of the rest of the game is based on.
I hated the ratios and the way they work.
I actually didn’t see a lot of evidence in that FF that they fixed the rails. It still looks like signaling and creating any slightly complex rail network will require reading a multipage Steam guide.
“Chain in, rail out” is really all you need to know for a majority of your signalling needs.
More train revamps:
A key thing is that using the new elevated trains will require buying the expansion, but once you have the new expansion’s executable you can use the upgraded trains as a separate mod in order to mix and match with the space and quality stuff if you want or don’t want them.
I generally really like Factorio’s implementation of trains. I’ve played around with limited automatic routing of trains, and there’s a ton of flexibility there.
The one thing I think it’s mising, however, is better autoplacement of signals. You can drag placement of power poles and it will automatically place them as you move, but I can’t find a similar option for signals. I really want something similar to OpenTTD, where you can configure the distance between signals (e.g. 5 wagons) and it’ll place them for you. If you can do the same in Factorio, I couldn’t find it last time I played.
Hm, I never thought about automatic signal placement. I just don’t think about rail signals that way–to me, they always belong at the intersections, and you’ve got to think about chain vs regular signals and make sure you get it right. Would having regularly spaced signals actually help?
I also really like the look of the elevated trains, I guess I’ll be buying the expansion. (Who am I kidding, this is probably the best ever entertainment / dollar ratio, I should support them.)
Other trains can’t enter the same segment of rail, whether it’s small or large, so it depends. If multiple trains on a long segment is something you need, I’d expect it to.
Handwaving slightly, if you have a 100 tile section of track with signals at either end, you can run one train at a time in it. If you split it into 4 blocks with signals, you can run 4 trains at the same time in it, as long as they’re all shorter than the shortest block. From that, making all blocks the same size lets you fit the most trains into any given section. (I’m ignoring things like braking and acceleration distances that reduce the number of trains that can actually fit, but the point remains.)
I find placing consistently spaced signals on long runs to be tedious and would like the game to do it for me.
Oh yeah, you are both totally correct. I also section out long stretches like that, I just forgot. It’s been probably a year or two since I spun up the game. ;)
Hopefully they will mention signals in a future update, because that would be a nice QoL addition. I’m looking forward to trying the elevated rails and the new track laying.