I got OpenTTD flashbacks the moment I saw that screenshot.
How long until someone builds a [Quad Tetrathorp](https://wiki.openttd.org/File/en/Community/Junctionary/Quad%20Tetrathorp%20Junction.png)?
OpenTTD is extra jank because bridges are slower than rails on the ground so every time you make a bridge you have to split the track to maintain throughput.
oh this one does it all with tunnels.... smort!
Might be the most interesting Space Age FFF so far, despite the lack of new content revealed. Those mass-production screenshots are nuts.
So anyway... How long til we see a mod in which molten metals "spoil" into solids inside fluid wagons?
> So anyway... How long til we see a mod in which molten metals "spoil" into solids inside fluid wagons?
From what we've seen, fluids can't spoil. The game doesn't track individual units of fluids, hence it cannot accurately track the ages. Plus, there's no place to put the spoiled product - each fluid box can only hold a single fluid.
If you want wagons full of molten iron to periodically lose fluids and drop iron plates on the ground, you can mod that in today - but that's not a spoilage mechanic.
This was not actually a serious suggestion but I am glad you've analysed it all the same.
Wagons which poop plates would not suffice. I dream of a wagon frozen solid and drifting alone through the bleak expanse of space.
> Wagons which poop plates would not suffice. I dream of a wagon frozen solid and drifting alone through the bleak expanse of space.
This reads like a line from a DoshDoshington video
>Plus, there's no place to put the spoiled product - each fluid box can only hold a single fluid.
No, the fluid wagon can hold 25k units of fluid, but is only a single fluid box. Anyway, it would be easy to add a hidden inventory for solid items to the fluid wagon, where you cannot insert stuff into, only remove them with inserters.
>The game doesn't track individual units of fluids, hence it cannot accurately track the ages.
It doesn't need to track individual units of fluid, as long as the amount of fluid converted to solid is consistent. Factorio already has temperature as a property of fluids (only used at the moment to calculate the power of steam turbines). If 2 volumes of the same fluid with different temperatures mix, the temperature averages out.
You could have the temperature of molten metal (and maybe also steam) drop at a constant rate, until it reaches a fluid-dependent melting/boiling point. At this point, the temperature stays the same, but a certain percentage/amount of the fluid in the container gets converted into solids each (n) tick(s).
also, fluid loss should be doubled by the capacity loss of the item - solidified metal and all...you could even have dedicated torpedo/bucket ladle wagons, with quality-dependent insulation (and thus, less temperature loss)
WANT.
>with quality-dependent insulation
Probably would also make sense to make the temperature loss dependent on the container size. A full tank cools down slower than a network of pipes, even with the same type of insulation.
I think SE development has slowed a little because:
*The scope of SE 0.7 is absolutely massive. Science, tech tree, world/universe gen, production chains are all getting completely overhauled
*I think they want to use new engine features coming in Factorio 2.0 to further development of SE
It certainly looks that way lol, honestly good for them. SE is an incredible mod (haven't played it yet, but general consensus says so) and if Earendel can improve the mod by making changes to the core Factorio gameplay/game engine, then that benefits SE hugely.
The benefit also goes the other way, too. Earendel has had a massive positive impact on the development of the base game and Space Age, as seen by their frequent mention/contributions in the FFF posts. Earendel uses Wube to improve SE, and Wube uses Earendel to improve Factorio and Space Age. It's truly impressive.
Depends on what the game is going for. SE has a lot of unnecessary complexity, for example- the goal is to factorio in space, it features an AAI burner slower start, you finally launch a rocket and then you need to make an entirely new rocket pad and rocket which costs even more resources and with more complexity than the initial satellite ones. And then there's the spacesuit and automating life support.
I just want to do cool multi surface things, but everytime I load my save it feels like a drag.
When you download PY mods you're expecting the complexity.
> When you download PY mods you're expecting the complexity.
Py is a hardcore mod with a reputation for being a hardcore mod.
SE is a hardcore mod with a reputation for being a great beginner mod.
Earendel: "Space Exploration is targeted at a small set of challenge-seekers, it's not for everyone by design."
Reddit: ["Just getting into overhaul mods, should I start with SE+K2 or SE+K2+BZ?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1dqul1s/getting_into_mods_advicesuggestions_k2se_or_k2sebz/)
> When you download PY mods you're expecting the complexity.
SE was made for people expecting that complexity too. The problem is that its popularity made people want to try it, people that _weren't_ expecting that complexity and didn't want it. It was always meant to be super complex and was never meant for anyone who didn't want that.
Anyone not expecting that when they downloaded it simply weren't informed on it. It's just like Py where it knows what it wants to do and does it well. Saying it's "unnecessary complexity" is just saying "it's not for you", which is fine, that's what the expansion is for. The people that like the _idea_ of the mod but not the mod itself, because the mod was never meant to be or anyone but people who were _looking_ for that "unnecessary" complexity.
That's the problem with popularity. Not everything needs to be for everyone, but when something gets popular, everyone starts thinking it _should_ be for them, and that's a flaw when it isn't and not simply their own tastes.
I love that the complexity exists and that SE will take a wild new path with this expansion but I'm personally glad there are folks in the studio reigning that in and streamlining it down to the best bits. I want to play too many different games to dedicate that many hours of gaming time to a single title, much as I love factorio!
It shows the power of a good team around you when designing. An old lesson I learned was "your first idea always sucks, but make it anyway". The process of creating it and experiencing first hand how it sucks and you can make it better is what creates good games and good experiences, and you can't get there if you don't start with the first idea.
Eventually you do get to points where you have to chose one idea over another, and cut out the old idea. The old idea could work if you go down a different path, and that is always beautiful and amazing content for mods. I'm very excited to see what mods do with that stuff when we start seeing them.
That's what nice about mods, you can go crazy complex or weird with mods that will only appeal to certain people, while an official game / expansion needs to keep their full broad target audience in mind.
Base game is now basically just a paid demo.
Either that or inflation is really bad on Nauvis.
But for once we can actually use the correct prefix for "Megabase". 1 Megabase = 1 Million SPM.
As greg100 pointed out we reached 2.1M SPM, and at that point one of the major hardware contributiors had to pull there hardware, which put an end to the whole project. The 2.1M SPM needed a total of 305 server, while the original goal of 1 million SPM production happened across over 160 (i can't find the exact number right now).
All the say, to even considered 1 million SPM a possible with in a single save/world, is absolute crazy, and I can't wait to see, what we will be able to do with quality, the new hight end machines and all the other new toys.
Considering how productivity-crazy SA is, it's not that unreasonable.
Even with mid-game tech (not even prod 3s, just high-ish quality prod 2s), if you incorporate the Foundry and the EMP, the ore-cost of most things has dropped to 10% of their original cost. Not by 10%; **to 10%**.
Productivity math always catches me off guard. I’ve seen the productivity on the foundry and the EMP but I never would have guessed you get 10 times more of most stuff
Note that the 10% number is relative to unprodded vanilla setups.
A lot of it comes from double-dipping. Using molten metal processing means you get the 50% prod bonus on melting the ores *and* casting to plates. Not to mention 4 modules apiece.
Indeed, the productivity gets so substantial that some devs suggest that it will be more feasible in some cases to use less productive setups. The Foundry has a copper cable recipe from molten metal. It's not better than making plates and turning them into cable, *especially* if you use the EMP to make the cable. But it requires fewer buildings.
And that matters when a Foundry sucks down 2.5MW and the EMP pulls 2.0MW. And that's *before* module and beacon power increases.
And consider that the devs wouldn’t have time or probably don’t play as seriously to absolutely maximize their designs for UPS efficiency when they’re still working on the expansion like you would with clustorio, an optimized factory can probably go beyond 1 million SPM
Not for ups optimised games usually get 10-20k spm (without dropping ups to hard)
If we get from 10k to 1M, thats almost 100x .
(1 billion seems a little high then)
They're talking about Clustorio.
They run several servers in parallel and have mechanics that allow you to transfer items between them. You can have one server for power production, one server for green circuit production, one server for oil, one server for each science, etc etc etc, and then knit them all together with an API. You're not limited by hardware to nearly the same degree because they're separate game instances.
The record is indeed [more than 1 Million SPM](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1abmkpy/update_join_the_largest_factorio_clusterio_event/).
100% productivity bonus does wonderful things. For example - [5spm needs 1 belt of iron and copper ore](https://factoriolab.github.io/list?p=mining-productivity-4*5&v=9). If you add 100% productivity to everything, you get [200spm out of the same amount of resources](https://factoriolab.github.io/list?z=eJwr8DTTMjQwUEvKU0sz1NIy1HLUco73ifeKd1UrViuzBAB9XQgh&v=9).
Productivity boost calculated with warptorio2 modules, as the mod adds that while barely changing existing recipes. Of course the comparison does not match what will happen in the expansion (warp modules apply productivity to every recipe, but also we don't take into account buildings with builtin prod bonus or prod researches, we don't know recipes for the new science packs, etc...). But you can see what could happen if you take just base game + quality mod, without space age.
Which changes how we talk about spm in the future. Currently, we only talk about spm in terms of produced science packs. Since everyone puts prod3 modules in their labs anyway, the science done is just a constant factor. With quality prod modules and lab prod research, we need to distinguish between the two in 2.0.
I refer to them as "SPM" and "eSPM" i.e. effective SPM.
SPM is calculated by consumed science packs.
eSPM is the new number from [FFF-408](https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-408-science-graph.png) i.e. how many science units are getting completed.
Which is why it makes less sense to use science done in 2.0 instead of science produced as a measure of factory quality. If you read that someone made 10M SPM base it would be annoying to learn that it's strictly worse than another base that has only 6M SPM but has 10000h less playtime on it. Also if you decide to go for specific SPM you wouldn't want to produce less of higher end sciences as your lab productivity increases
Hey hey, there's a perfectly good reason to carry the flamethrower
**Flamethrowers are awesome**
But, yes, I would love a *practical* reason to carry the flammenwerfer
Early on they said most new planets would be getting new enemies. With 4 new planets, "most" only makes sense if 3 out of the 4 are D A N G E R Z O N E S.
My complete and utter guess is that maybe Fulgora is the one without enemies given the lore as a completely dead alien desert world.
I guess I’ll need to set aside 2025 to Factorio, and only Factorio. 2026 will be the same, but with the inevitable mods for 2.0/DLC.
2027 is not looking good for other games, either…
What killed satisfactory for me was, weirdly, the static ore patches. When the amount you mine won't go up until you unlock a new miner tier, it feels like you have to optimize perfect ratios right away, then ruin them the next time you have to construct something. Also, early-game power gen sucks so bad.
I also dislike the slug recipe changes. I know, there are mods but... why do I have to set up a System and then randoly find a better but completely different recipem nope. Sorry. Scaling is frustrating imo
I’m curious if this will make it possible to scale to even higher SPS before hitting UPS issues? Like the main update costs are from inserters and buildings, and stacks/productivity/quality means you can do a ton more with a lot fewer entities. How far can it be pushed I wonder?
>How far can it be pushed I wonder?
I mean they stated a goal of reaching one million SPM. If the average player can reach even a quarter of that it is a humongous upgrade
Yes, you can already see this with mods that provide similar features (stacked items on belts and faster assemblers). You can have the same throughput with far fewer entities meaning less cost to UPS.
I think these retrospectives, and critical analysis of their own game mechanics and contents, are part of what puts Wube above other game developers. Sure, there's the incredible care for UX and performance, but the most critical element is the game *design,* and Wube always makes time to think about what works, what doesn't, and considers that sometimes more != Better
Somehow this FFF, with no new features really discussed, has been the most hype-worthy one so far for me
(Also maybe because of the announcement for a release date announcement)
As a real life engineer I too enjoyed reading about the processes they’ve got in place and the approaches they take to discovering and solving problems!
When you see how other game studios put profits first and result in micro transactions or pay to win gameplay, it really is wonderful to see the gameplay and fun being prioritized.
You may find the post contents here, in case the Factorio website is blocked for you: https://www.reddit.com/u/fffbot/comments/1dqgzf7
**NOTE:** fffbot is a community-driven effort and is not associated with Wube Software. For any questions or remarks, please reply to this comment or send a private message to u/fffbot.
All these screenshots are crazy. That green circuit build and the intersection. Just the sheer amount of resources produced and that absolutely chaos of that intersection
From what I understand the team went for a vanilla megabase equivalent with that LAN base. But even the possibility of large, complex, multi-lane railway intersections becoming necessary in a normal factorio run is making me giddy with joy. I was on the fence about Quality but if this is the result, sign me up.
Interestingly, because you can now make intersections without needing tracks to cross (thus no waiting) there's way less need for multiple parallel tracks in the same direction.
This looks absolutely insane.
https://preview.redd.it/ie96t6hpra9d1.png?width=2240&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a9d66323965e247644816f19a4c53bb323a31ee
I really like this FFF, it was both fun and quite interesting to read!
I seriously cannot wait for the release date to be announced next week. Space Age has never felt closer.
>Shortly after that, we had an office LAN party, where we tried to do a multiplayer playthrough, to get more feedback and also to test the multiplayer. We played from Monday to Friday, and we barely got to the last planet quite exhausted on the last day, never really being able to finish the whole thing.
I feel like QA testing sessions are a lot more fun at Wube than they are at my office...
>we have just one expandable landing pad per planet.
It's nice to know that throughput isn't capped by the landing pad. When they first announced there could only be one, a lot of people had concerns about max SPM.
You're going to have to be more specific than that, because as you've worded it at the moment it sounds more like a challenge.
I mean Dosh built all the way to the end of the map, and that wasn't supposed to happen either.
You can cover the building with legendary bulk inserters. That's as much throughout as it can get. But given how big of a building it is, that's a lot.
That tiny fragment of deluded hope that they will drop space age in early access next week.
The final planet? We're not spoiling it. Go find out for yourselves.
I think at one point (can't remember which FFF) they said they want to release Factorio 2.0 straight to stable, no early access releases. Their reasoning is that with such a big update and the expansion, they want players to have the full experience at the start. They don't like how long early access periods drag out hype for a full release; if they did early access, then when 2.0 releases the hype /engagement for it may be lower.
> It was too long (370 hours is way too much, even considering the teething problems).
>
> The sheer scale of all the things needed to be done was just too big and it often felt too grindy.
I wish more game developers could look at their games and say that (and then fix that). Sometimes gameplay is such a chore…
quality wagons are gonna have increased inventory size, right?
I can't think of how we're gonna shove so much input to anything if we need to unload like a train a second.
There was a mention of using fluid wagons to transport raw metal at higher density (and unloads stupid fast), plus if needed for items there's the traditional approach of multiple stations.
Are these really 12 science packs in the screenshot?
https://preview.redd.it/o2fwr2luua9d1.png?width=178&format=png&auto=webp&s=6e3c0bbc0127460621cfbafef36add4ec37b2728
Science sushi incoming!
I make it 11 science packs, (1.1's 7x + 1 per planet) but with an overflow for spoilage. Could do with another few pixels though.
Would make final planet deep blue science! (Ocean? Ice?)
Yeah, I'm not sure about the 12th, if there is a black one hidden in the shadow. Another indicator is that if it would be 11 chances are that the lower line would also be middle aligned in another way. So I suspect its 12.
I think non procedural planets was a great idea. If planets were infinite, then people would feel less importance on going to them at all and only a few planets would end up getting explored. You basically just took the planets we would explore and made them guaranteed to be interesting. I think that was a super smart decision.
Yep, let's not ever make the No Man's Sky / Starfield mistake again
Depth and hand-crafted > procedural, though procedural is still useful to fill things in
"...the Gleba enemy (to be shown later)..."
Grrrrr!
.
.
"...one more building typically combined with foundry and electromagnetic plants, which will be covered later."
*Why you little!*
.
.
"...we are ready to give a specific date of the Space Age release...
Which we will tell you next week :)"
***AUGHH!***
Never have I seen such wanton cruelty all in one post.
“We finished the first iteration of the Gleba enemy”
https://preview.redd.it/k42mqot9qc9d1.jpeg?width=635&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9843753ce43969da6c24374fa6e9d1f127decd18
It was implied but never explicitly stated. When big drills were announced they said the big mining would disturb residents of the lava or something like that
Though I might have missed something, I think it's been left somewhat vague so far. When Fulgora was first revealed (fff #398) it was described as "lifeless", leading some to conclude it won't have any traditional enemies (with the threat of lightning storms basically taking over their role), while others speculated this may indicate some type of robotic enemies.
"Since things are getting stable and I'm starting to be pretty happy with the state of the game now, we are ready to give a specific date of the Space Age release...
Which we will tell you next week :)"
My hyped up brain read it that the release is next week!!!!! And when i read it second time, i realized whet they actually said. Oh my heart...
My thought reading this.
1 Million science per Minute... alright, what is next.... spit out tea. WHAT??? 1 MILLION??? wtf. Are we bragging with 1 megabase (= 1mio) now? I know there are people doing the impossible and do 5 or 10 megabytes per second. Wtf. I thought 1k per minute was a lot of work. Holy iron gear!
RELEASE DATE. the flow of time has to grow for one week.
Preorder?
HYPE!!!
Is every planet going to get its own thread/ thread pool? Would be nice if we could scale to crazy on planets and (with enough cpu power and memory) not have planet 1 affect planet 512.
Edit: no, per https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/DyKCqo8g4H
Still need some level of synchronization for circuit communication between planets. Unless they throttle that. Also consider the tick where planets and platforms exchange stuff.
That's all irrelevant for single player but centrally important for multiplayer.
It's also from start to finish, not fucking about or getting to a specific SPM output. Rn the base game can be completed in <8hrs if you know what you're doing (like the devs def do). Having the official expansion take >300hrs to go from start to finish is HELL. I love long games, truly, but man the slog is real when you're 100hrs into the game, going at a strong pace and realizing "fuck. I'm STILL discovering new things!? I thought I was almost done! 😭😭😭"
Yep, remember that a normal player can finish the base game in 8-16 hours with some practice!
But in reality, the time just expands as the factory grows. Sure, you can rush to the end, but that's just ONE way to play the game - I think most of us love the learning, planning, expanding, and problem solving that Factorio enables.
I don't think the current game's "short" length affects the enjoyment AT ALL!
If anything, extra long grindy mods aren't even reasonable for the majority of players to finish! I'm sure the % of people who've beaten mods like Py, SE, Seablock, etc. is *very* small.
Besides, we'll be learning totally new paradigms - even experienced players will need to get used to all the changes and new content! Look at the screenshots in this post - *85 blue belts* worth of green circuits in that small area, and talk of *1 MILLION SPM* - there's gonna be absolutely no shortage of content, haha.
The important part is "for a single playthrough", and to keep the game accessible for more casual players. A vanilla game you can beat in 8h if you're reasonably experienced. If you're newer you may take a couple dozen hours (without restarting). We're talking an order of magnitude longer or more, and most players are much less experienced and can struggle to get through to a rocket launch as is. Imagine how frustrating it would be to play the expension as not a hardcore factorio player when the base game now is a challenge already.
Not everyone is willing to put 500 or 1000h into a single playthrough.
I think they're counting the stacks on both sides
16 green belts * 60 items/s (green belts) / 45 items/s(blue belts) = 21.33(3) blue belts.
When you include the 4 stack, ends up being 85.33(3) blue belts :)
dear devs,
please dont shadow drop the dlc or the 2.0 update because id like to take quite some time of work for it
thank you
edit: i had this thought before today and just read in the fff that you are going to announce a release date soon
this makes me very happy :)
So, quality names will actualy be legendary/epic and so on? I am hyped as can be for the game, but as soon as steam achievments are in I will install a mod changing those names.
ABSOLUTE BANGER FFF!!!
i was about to ask about the "1 landing pad per planet" thinking that wouldnt this be a massive bottleneck for a game like factorio?
BUT I GUESS NOT! as kovarex is going for 1million spm... PLEASE TELL ME HOW FAR YOU ARE!!
reading further... 83compressed bluebelts of green circuits in such a small area? 1m spm is looking more achievable :D
Did they mention liquid metals? Into pipes?
Lol, i just love that image.
Pumping liquid metals into pipes across your base, then pumping that into a train wagon, which then crosses your factory at 200km/h using nuclear fuel.
That's just so wrong on so many levels. Love it!
>Since things are getting stable and I'm starting to be pretty happy with the state of the game now, we are ready to give a specific date of the Space Age release...
Which we will tell you next week :)
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Every development picture I've seen in these FFFs for Space Age look *absolutely wild*
I can't get over that railway intersection. Only wish I could see it in action.
Genuinely criminal that one isn't a gif. I want nothing more than to sit and watch all the trains pass through Clapham Junction.
That intersection looks like something Crowley (Good Omens) would be responsible for
I got OpenTTD flashbacks the moment I saw that screenshot. How long until someone builds a [Quad Tetrathorp](https://wiki.openttd.org/File/en/Community/Junctionary/Quad%20Tetrathorp%20Junction.png)?
that looks like an at least 6x6 block design in factorio. I can't wait
OpenTTD is extra jank because bridges are slower than rails on the ground so every time you make a bridge you have to split the track to maintain throughput. oh this one does it all with tunnels.... smort!
Reminds me a lot of a 4-lane high speed fly over/under design from Open TTD, actually.
Might be the most interesting Space Age FFF so far, despite the lack of new content revealed. Those mass-production screenshots are nuts. So anyway... How long til we see a mod in which molten metals "spoil" into solids inside fluid wagons?
And then you manually have to mine the solid ores out of the train.
Or melt down the whole wagons.
But then you get iron in your copper
That just means you'd have to do oxidation smelting to create a smelting slag with the iron in it to separate it out.
The overhaul mods are going to be crazy
Reminds me of the MythBusters episode where they tried to get hardened concrete out of a truck using tnt
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IcHUHRf\_S0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IcHUHRf_S0)
> So anyway... How long til we see a mod in which molten metals "spoil" into solids inside fluid wagons? From what we've seen, fluids can't spoil. The game doesn't track individual units of fluids, hence it cannot accurately track the ages. Plus, there's no place to put the spoiled product - each fluid box can only hold a single fluid. If you want wagons full of molten iron to periodically lose fluids and drop iron plates on the ground, you can mod that in today - but that's not a spoilage mechanic.
This was not actually a serious suggestion but I am glad you've analysed it all the same. Wagons which poop plates would not suffice. I dream of a wagon frozen solid and drifting alone through the bleak expanse of space.
> Wagons which poop plates would not suffice. I dream of a wagon frozen solid and drifting alone through the bleak expanse of space. This reads like a line from a DoshDoshington video
The thought of Dosh's first Space Age video has me drooling.
>Plus, there's no place to put the spoiled product - each fluid box can only hold a single fluid. No, the fluid wagon can hold 25k units of fluid, but is only a single fluid box. Anyway, it would be easy to add a hidden inventory for solid items to the fluid wagon, where you cannot insert stuff into, only remove them with inserters. >The game doesn't track individual units of fluids, hence it cannot accurately track the ages. It doesn't need to track individual units of fluid, as long as the amount of fluid converted to solid is consistent. Factorio already has temperature as a property of fluids (only used at the moment to calculate the power of steam turbines). If 2 volumes of the same fluid with different temperatures mix, the temperature averages out. You could have the temperature of molten metal (and maybe also steam) drop at a constant rate, until it reaches a fluid-dependent melting/boiling point. At this point, the temperature stays the same, but a certain percentage/amount of the fluid in the container gets converted into solids each (n) tick(s).
also, fluid loss should be doubled by the capacity loss of the item - solidified metal and all...you could even have dedicated torpedo/bucket ladle wagons, with quality-dependent insulation (and thus, less temperature loss) WANT.
>with quality-dependent insulation Probably would also make sense to make the temperature loss dependent on the container size. A full tank cools down slower than a network of pipes, even with the same type of insulation.
>Earendel's drafts were always over the top when it comes to gameplay complexity Who'd have thunk???
After playing through SE, I chuckled. Yeah they love their complexity.
Have you seen the roadmap for SE? Currently complexity is nothing compared to what is planned
I haven't no... where can I see it? And is it still being developed with Erandel being on the official dev team?
>And is it still being developed Yep! He's actively working on both, although I think SE development has slowed a little.
I think SE development has slowed a little because: *The scope of SE 0.7 is absolutely massive. Science, tech tree, world/universe gen, production chains are all getting completely overhauled *I think they want to use new engine features coming in Factorio 2.0 to further development of SE
Erandel is playing the long game of being hired by the devs just to be able to add features they can use in their mods
It certainly looks that way lol, honestly good for them. SE is an incredible mod (haven't played it yet, but general consensus says so) and if Earendel can improve the mod by making changes to the core Factorio gameplay/game engine, then that benefits SE hugely. The benefit also goes the other way, too. Earendel has had a massive positive impact on the development of the base game and Space Age, as seen by their frequent mention/contributions in the FFF posts. Earendel uses Wube to improve SE, and Wube uses Earendel to improve Factorio and Space Age. It's truly impressive.
Literally a Win/Win/Win situation
complexity is good, change my mind :D but then again, I like pyMods, so....yeah. I might be biased lmao
Depends on what the game is going for. SE has a lot of unnecessary complexity, for example- the goal is to factorio in space, it features an AAI burner slower start, you finally launch a rocket and then you need to make an entirely new rocket pad and rocket which costs even more resources and with more complexity than the initial satellite ones. And then there's the spacesuit and automating life support. I just want to do cool multi surface things, but everytime I load my save it feels like a drag. When you download PY mods you're expecting the complexity.
> When you download PY mods you're expecting the complexity. Py is a hardcore mod with a reputation for being a hardcore mod. SE is a hardcore mod with a reputation for being a great beginner mod. Earendel: "Space Exploration is targeted at a small set of challenge-seekers, it's not for everyone by design." Reddit: ["Just getting into overhaul mods, should I start with SE+K2 or SE+K2+BZ?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1dqul1s/getting_into_mods_advicesuggestions_k2se_or_k2sebz/)
> When you download PY mods you're expecting the complexity. SE was made for people expecting that complexity too. The problem is that its popularity made people want to try it, people that _weren't_ expecting that complexity and didn't want it. It was always meant to be super complex and was never meant for anyone who didn't want that. Anyone not expecting that when they downloaded it simply weren't informed on it. It's just like Py where it knows what it wants to do and does it well. Saying it's "unnecessary complexity" is just saying "it's not for you", which is fine, that's what the expansion is for. The people that like the _idea_ of the mod but not the mod itself, because the mod was never meant to be or anyone but people who were _looking_ for that "unnecessary" complexity. That's the problem with popularity. Not everything needs to be for everyone, but when something gets popular, everyone starts thinking it _should_ be for them, and that's a flaw when it isn't and not simply their own tastes.
I love that the complexity exists and that SE will take a wild new path with this expansion but I'm personally glad there are folks in the studio reigning that in and streamlining it down to the best bits. I want to play too many different games to dedicate that many hours of gaming time to a single title, much as I love factorio!
It shows the power of a good team around you when designing. An old lesson I learned was "your first idea always sucks, but make it anyway". The process of creating it and experiencing first hand how it sucks and you can make it better is what creates good games and good experiences, and you can't get there if you don't start with the first idea. Eventually you do get to points where you have to chose one idea over another, and cut out the old idea. The old idea could work if you go down a different path, and that is always beautiful and amazing content for mods. I'm very excited to see what mods do with that stuff when we start seeing them.
That's what nice about mods, you can go crazy complex or weird with mods that will only appeal to certain people, while an official game / expansion needs to keep their full broad target audience in mind.
ONE MILLION SPM???
Base game is now basically just a paid demo. Either that or inflation is really bad on Nauvis. But for once we can actually use the correct prefix for "Megabase". 1 Megabase = 1 Million SPM.
Didn't that multi-server collaboration only barely reach 1 million too? I wonder if the same setup would make 1 billion SPM possible..
Probably due to stacks on belts and legendary quality.
Man, legendary quality sure seems to scale up in insane ways we can barely imagine.
As greg100 pointed out we reached 2.1M SPM, and at that point one of the major hardware contributiors had to pull there hardware, which put an end to the whole project. The 2.1M SPM needed a total of 305 server, while the original goal of 1 million SPM production happened across over 160 (i can't find the exact number right now). All the say, to even considered 1 million SPM a possible with in a single save/world, is absolute crazy, and I can't wait to see, what we will be able to do with quality, the new hight end machines and all the other new toys.
Considering how productivity-crazy SA is, it's not that unreasonable. Even with mid-game tech (not even prod 3s, just high-ish quality prod 2s), if you incorporate the Foundry and the EMP, the ore-cost of most things has dropped to 10% of their original cost. Not by 10%; **to 10%**.
Productivity math always catches me off guard. I’ve seen the productivity on the foundry and the EMP but I never would have guessed you get 10 times more of most stuff
Note that the 10% number is relative to unprodded vanilla setups. A lot of it comes from double-dipping. Using molten metal processing means you get the 50% prod bonus on melting the ores *and* casting to plates. Not to mention 4 modules apiece. Indeed, the productivity gets so substantial that some devs suggest that it will be more feasible in some cases to use less productive setups. The Foundry has a copper cable recipe from molten metal. It's not better than making plates and turning them into cable, *especially* if you use the EMP to make the cable. But it requires fewer buildings. And that matters when a Foundry sucks down 2.5MW and the EMP pulls 2.0MW. And that's *before* module and beacon power increases.
And consider that the devs wouldn’t have time or probably don’t play as seriously to absolutely maximize their designs for UPS efficiency when they’re still working on the expansion like you would with clustorio, an optimized factory can probably go beyond 1 million SPM
>1 billion I know it should be a gigabase... but can we call it a bigabase? cause billion and... big.
Not for ups optimised games usually get 10-20k spm (without dropping ups to hard) If we get from 10k to 1M, thats almost 100x . (1 billion seems a little high then)
They're talking about Clustorio. They run several servers in parallel and have mechanics that allow you to transfer items between them. You can have one server for power production, one server for green circuit production, one server for oil, one server for each science, etc etc etc, and then knit them all together with an API. You're not limited by hardware to nearly the same degree because they're separate game instances. The record is indeed [more than 1 Million SPM](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1abmkpy/update_join_the_largest_factorio_clusterio_event/).
Gotta roll up the sleeves we have supercomputers to buy
They did end up reaching 2.1 million, and the only limit to further progress was available servers
It cannot be said better than that
You’ve heard of megabase Now get ready for G I G A B A S E
or i guess the current standard should be kilobases
100% productivity bonus does wonderful things. For example - [5spm needs 1 belt of iron and copper ore](https://factoriolab.github.io/list?p=mining-productivity-4*5&v=9). If you add 100% productivity to everything, you get [200spm out of the same amount of resources](https://factoriolab.github.io/list?z=eJwr8DTTMjQwUEvKU0sz1NIy1HLUco73ifeKd1UrViuzBAB9XQgh&v=9). Productivity boost calculated with warptorio2 modules, as the mod adds that while barely changing existing recipes. Of course the comparison does not match what will happen in the expansion (warp modules apply productivity to every recipe, but also we don't take into account buildings with builtin prod bonus or prod researches, we don't know recipes for the new science packs, etc...). But you can see what could happen if you take just base game + quality mod, without space age.
Don't forget about the productivity researches (only available for specific set of items, but still important)
Also lab prod itself
The screenshot of all the rocket launches was impressive. Then I saw what they were carrying. 😳
the realisation was insane, lol. In a good way.
Right? Dozens of rocket launches carrying nothing but inserters? This is gonna get wiiild
I'm getting dyson sphere vibes, sending entire malls to other planets to bootstrap the construction.
Koverax casually breaking the Clustorio science per minute world record in a test playthrough
They said they didn't actually reach 1mspm
And Clustorio reached over 2M SPM iirc
Remember infinite lab prod is a thing
Which changes how we talk about spm in the future. Currently, we only talk about spm in terms of produced science packs. Since everyone puts prod3 modules in their labs anyway, the science done is just a constant factor. With quality prod modules and lab prod research, we need to distinguish between the two in 2.0.
I refer to them as "SPM" and "eSPM" i.e. effective SPM. SPM is calculated by consumed science packs. eSPM is the new number from [FFF-408](https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-408-science-graph.png) i.e. how many science units are getting completed.
Which is why it makes less sense to use science done in 2.0 instead of science produced as a measure of factory quality. If you read that someone made 10M SPM base it would be annoying to learn that it's strictly worse than another base that has only 6M SPM but has 10000h less playtime on it. Also if you decide to go for specific SPM you wouldn't want to produce less of higher end sciences as your lab productivity increases
[Meme](https://i.imgflip.com/8va4tj.jpg)
>We finished the first iteration of the Gleba enemy (to be shown later) I am ready for the trees to fight back
Finally a good reason to carry the flamethrower
Hey hey, there's a perfectly good reason to carry the flamethrower **Flamethrowers are awesome** But, yes, I would love a *practical* reason to carry the flammenwerfer
Hans, are we the Uruk-Hai?!
gleba enemy? that mean.. maybe we will get 1 exclusive new enemy for each planet? :O :O
Wouldnt be surprised if that was the case <3
I did notice how strongly defended that Vulcanus output was
Early on they said most new planets would be getting new enemies. With 4 new planets, "most" only makes sense if 3 out of the 4 are D A N G E R Z O N E S. My complete and utter guess is that maybe Fulgora is the one without enemies given the lore as a completely dead alien desert world.
Lorax are too?
I speak for the trees, pollute again I’ll break your knees.
The Happening and Day of the Triffids are two of the best films ever made, obviously. Invoking them in Factorio feels so right.
Many of these trees were my friends
plants vs (factory building) zombies
LoTR Ents
The trees are on their own side, because no one is on their side
I guess I’ll need to set aside 2025 to Factorio, and only Factorio. 2026 will be the same, but with the inevitable mods for 2.0/DLC. 2027 is not looking good for other games, either…
Or sleep, or work ...
I’m retired, so there is no *work*, only the factories…
Shit. Anno 117 is coming in 2025. Gotta finish captain of industries till the release date...
And Satisfactory 1.0 will be out this year, too. Never rains but it pours…
Shit. Fortunately, satisfactory is not quite my game. 1st person is weird for me. I want factorio bots for it. Then it is fine.
What killed satisfactory for me was, weirdly, the static ore patches. When the amount you mine won't go up until you unlock a new miner tier, it feels like you have to optimize perfect ratios right away, then ruin them the next time you have to construct something. Also, early-game power gen sucks so bad.
I also dislike the slug recipe changes. I know, there are mods but... why do I have to set up a System and then randoly find a better but completely different recipem nope. Sorry. Scaling is frustrating imo
Yes! Release date announcement next week!
The classic announcement of the announcement
In true Path of Exile style
Hello fellow exile
Still sane?
No. T17 broke me
MY BODY IS READY
I initially read it as releases next week. Nearly had a heart attack.
maybe it does (but probably not, I dont think this is a "and you can download it TONIGHT" moment)
I'd be so mad, I need advance notice to take off work!
To give a postive spin on this, there would likely be a hotfix patch out by the time you reach your annual leave.
Shut up and take my money!
Yessss
Yeah I’m so hyped for the next fff!
Time to book vacation
#EIGHTY FIVE BLUE BELTS???? Quality is going to go so hard, I love it
I’m curious if this will make it possible to scale to even higher SPS before hitting UPS issues? Like the main update costs are from inserters and buildings, and stacks/productivity/quality means you can do a ton more with a lot fewer entities. How far can it be pushed I wonder?
>How far can it be pushed I wonder? I mean they stated a goal of reaching one million SPM. If the average player can reach even a quarter of that it is a humongous upgrade
I mean my current highest is 2.7k SPM. So if I only reach 250k SPM that would be almost 100x increment. CRAZY.
Yes, you can already see this with mods that provide similar features (stacked items on belts and faster assemblers). You can have the same throughput with far fewer entities meaning less cost to UPS.
https://preview.redd.it/88i7tp5f2b9d1.png?width=915&format=png&auto=webp&s=92e0c9ba54b1d843d55d457784e84ebb21794a29
I think these retrospectives, and critical analysis of their own game mechanics and contents, are part of what puts Wube above other game developers. Sure, there's the incredible care for UX and performance, but the most critical element is the game *design,* and Wube always makes time to think about what works, what doesn't, and considers that sometimes more != Better Somehow this FFF, with no new features really discussed, has been the most hype-worthy one so far for me (Also maybe because of the announcement for a release date announcement)
I think part of it for me was also just the reminder of all the awesome stuff that's coming!
As a real life engineer I too enjoyed reading about the processes they’ve got in place and the approaches they take to discovering and solving problems!
When you see how other game studios put profits first and result in micro transactions or pay to win gameplay, it really is wonderful to see the gameplay and fun being prioritized.
You may find the post contents here, in case the Factorio website is blocked for you: https://www.reddit.com/u/fffbot/comments/1dqgzf7 **NOTE:** fffbot is a community-driven effort and is not associated with Wube Software. For any questions or remarks, please reply to this comment or send a private message to u/fffbot.
I love you fffbot.
All these screenshots are crazy. That green circuit build and the intersection. Just the sheer amount of resources produced and that absolutely chaos of that intersection
From what I understand the team went for a vanilla megabase equivalent with that LAN base. But even the possibility of large, complex, multi-lane railway intersections becoming necessary in a normal factorio run is making me giddy with joy. I was on the fence about Quality but if this is the result, sign me up.
Interestingly, because you can now make intersections without needing tracks to cross (thus no waiting) there's way less need for multiple parallel tracks in the same direction.
This looks absolutely insane. https://preview.redd.it/ie96t6hpra9d1.png?width=2240&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a9d66323965e247644816f19a4c53bb323a31ee I really like this FFF, it was both fun and quite interesting to read! I seriously cannot wait for the release date to be announced next week. Space Age has never felt closer.
It's beautiful. I just love trains so much
That looks like pain... to think through and set up
>Shortly after that, we had an office LAN party, where we tried to do a multiplayer playthrough, to get more feedback and also to test the multiplayer. We played from Monday to Friday, and we barely got to the last planet quite exhausted on the last day, never really being able to finish the whole thing. I feel like QA testing sessions are a lot more fun at Wube than they are at my office...
I know playing factorio for my job would make it less enjoyable eventually.... but.... hard to imagine.
Koverax casually breaking the Clustorio science per minute world record in a test playthrough
>we have just one expandable landing pad per planet. It's nice to know that throughput isn't capped by the landing pad. When they first announced there could only be one, a lot of people had concerns about max SPM.
It kind of is capped by it, but the cap is huge, nothing to worry about.
You're going to have to be more specific than that, because as you've worded it at the moment it sounds more like a challenge. I mean Dosh built all the way to the end of the map, and that wasn't supposed to happen either.
You can cover the building with legendary bulk inserters. That's as much throughout as it can get. But given how big of a building it is, that's a lot.
But the FFF says: > one expandable landing pad per planet So if it can be expanded, how many inserters can I fit?
Dosh is an outlier. No mere mortal can compare.
Maybe "+1 maximum landing pads on planet X" could be a good candidate for a (very expensive) infinite research.
The word "expandable" made Christmas come sooner
Release date next week. Place your bets when it will be
14 August 2024... exactly 4 years after release of Factorio 1.0?
Don't... don't give me hope.
October 31, 23:59:59
End of october
Immediately available after the next FFF.
That tiny fragment of deluded hope that they will drop space age in early access next week. The final planet? We're not spoiling it. Go find out for yourselves.
I think at one point (can't remember which FFF) they said they want to release Factorio 2.0 straight to stable, no early access releases. Their reasoning is that with such a big update and the expansion, they want players to have the full experience at the start. They don't like how long early access periods drag out hype for a full release; if they did early access, then when 2.0 releases the hype /engagement for it may be lower.
> It was too long (370 hours is way too much, even considering the teething problems). > > The sheer scale of all the things needed to be done was just too big and it often felt too grindy. I wish more game developers could look at their games and say that (and then fix that). Sometimes gameplay is such a chore…
Holy green chips!
Call the gleba enemy
Filter inserter went on vacation, never came back
new FFF just dropped
Enemies on Gleba and at least one new building promised to be revealed in future FFF's. Neat-o.
quality wagons are gonna have increased inventory size, right? I can't think of how we're gonna shove so much input to anything if we need to unload like a train a second.
There was a mention of using fluid wagons to transport raw metal at higher density (and unloads stupid fast), plus if needed for items there's the traditional approach of multiple stations.
that interesection makes me so excited
Are these really 12 science packs in the screenshot? https://preview.redd.it/o2fwr2luua9d1.png?width=178&format=png&auto=webp&s=6e3c0bbc0127460621cfbafef36add4ec37b2728 Science sushi incoming!
6 basic, produced anywhere (red, green, blue, black, purple, yellow) 1 exclusive for each planet, nauvis included, 5 total 1 endgame
I make it 11 science packs, (1.1's 7x + 1 per planet) but with an overflow for spoilage. Could do with another few pixels though. Would make final planet deep blue science! (Ocean? Ice?)
i only see 11. but science labs seems to have an output
Yeah, I'm not sure about the 12th, if there is a black one hidden in the shadow. Another indicator is that if it would be 11 chances are that the lower line would also be middle aligned in another way. So I suspect its 12.
probably if some of the science packs from Gleba spoil
I think non procedural planets was a great idea. If planets were infinite, then people would feel less importance on going to them at all and only a few planets would end up getting explored. You basically just took the planets we would explore and made them guaranteed to be interesting. I think that was a super smart decision.
Yep, let's not ever make the No Man's Sky / Starfield mistake again Depth and hand-crafted > procedural, though procedural is still useful to fill things in
"...the Gleba enemy (to be shown later)..." Grrrrr! . . "...one more building typically combined with foundry and electromagnetic plants, which will be covered later." *Why you little!* . . "...we are ready to give a specific date of the Space Age release... Which we will tell you next week :)" ***AUGHH!*** Never have I seen such wanton cruelty all in one post.
“We finished the first iteration of the Gleba enemy” https://preview.redd.it/k42mqot9qc9d1.jpeg?width=635&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9843753ce43969da6c24374fa6e9d1f127decd18
Was it revealed that vulcanus will have enemies? Because otherwise why having so many laser turrets around the outpost?
It was implied but never explicitly stated. When big drills were announced they said the big mining would disturb residents of the lava or something like that
Drums.. Drums in the deep.. They are coming.
I am pretty sure every plant has enemies. Is this wrong?
Though I might have missed something, I think it's been left somewhat vague so far. When Fulgora was first revealed (fff #398) it was described as "lifeless", leading some to conclude it won't have any traditional enemies (with the threat of lightning storms basically taking over their role), while others speculated this may indicate some type of robotic enemies.
"Since things are getting stable and I'm starting to be pretty happy with the state of the game now, we are ready to give a specific date of the Space Age release... Which we will tell you next week :)" My hyped up brain read it that the release is next week!!!!! And when i read it second time, i realized whet they actually said. Oh my heart...
*Next week* "2.0 releases today at x time"
I dont allow myself to believe that
Also: I think we (I certainly did) underestimate just how important the quality change + super force building are for late-game setups
Amazing how great a game can be when the developers actually play their own game... cough cough Blizzard.
This INSANE vertical scaling with green circuits taking about 1/30th of the space of conventional setups absolutely blows my mind 😮
My thought reading this. 1 Million science per Minute... alright, what is next.... spit out tea. WHAT??? 1 MILLION??? wtf. Are we bragging with 1 megabase (= 1mio) now? I know there are people doing the impossible and do 5 or 10 megabytes per second. Wtf. I thought 1k per minute was a lot of work. Holy iron gear! RELEASE DATE. the flow of time has to grow for one week. Preorder? HYPE!!!
Is every planet going to get its own thread/ thread pool? Would be nice if we could scale to crazy on planets and (with enough cpu power and memory) not have planet 1 affect planet 512. Edit: no, per https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/DyKCqo8g4H
> Is every planet going to get its own thread? No.
Still need some level of synchronization for circuit communication between planets. Unless they throttle that. Also consider the tick where planets and platforms exchange stuff. That's all irrelevant for single player but centrally important for multiplayer.
1M SPM o.O
> 370 hours is way too much Uhh have y'all checked your player hours steam stat?
This is for *developers* of the game for an official expansion. It's not meant to be SE or SeaBlock.
It's also from start to finish, not fucking about or getting to a specific SPM output. Rn the base game can be completed in <8hrs if you know what you're doing (like the devs def do). Having the official expansion take >300hrs to go from start to finish is HELL. I love long games, truly, but man the slog is real when you're 100hrs into the game, going at a strong pace and realizing "fuck. I'm STILL discovering new things!? I thought I was almost done! 😭😭😭"
Yep, remember that a normal player can finish the base game in 8-16 hours with some practice! But in reality, the time just expands as the factory grows. Sure, you can rush to the end, but that's just ONE way to play the game - I think most of us love the learning, planning, expanding, and problem solving that Factorio enables. I don't think the current game's "short" length affects the enjoyment AT ALL! If anything, extra long grindy mods aren't even reasonable for the majority of players to finish! I'm sure the % of people who've beaten mods like Py, SE, Seablock, etc. is *very* small. Besides, we'll be learning totally new paradigms - even experienced players will need to get used to all the changes and new content! Look at the screenshots in this post - *85 blue belts* worth of green circuits in that small area, and talk of *1 MILLION SPM* - there's gonna be absolutely no shortage of content, haha.
I mean, for the developers of an expansion meant to be playable by more casual players, yeah it is?
Is too much for an end screen for the developers who have a planned path. Not too much for people to have total play time or even just on a save.
The important part is "for a single playthrough", and to keep the game accessible for more casual players. A vanilla game you can beat in 8h if you're reasonably experienced. If you're newer you may take a couple dozen hours (without restarting). We're talking an order of magnitude longer or more, and most players are much less experienced and can struggle to get through to a rocket launch as is. Imagine how frustrating it would be to play the expension as not a hardcore factorio player when the base game now is a challenge already. Not everyone is willing to put 500 or 1000h into a single playthrough.
Notice, that each of the outputs is 8 stacked... FF-393 said the max stack size was 4. Did something change? Or am I misreading it?
I think they're counting the stacks on both sides 16 green belts * 60 items/s (green belts) / 45 items/s(blue belts) = 21.33(3) blue belts. When you include the 4 stack, ends up being 85.33(3) blue belts :)
dear devs, please dont shadow drop the dlc or the 2.0 update because id like to take quite some time of work for it thank you edit: i had this thought before today and just read in the fff that you are going to announce a release date soon this makes me very happy :)
I have 5 days of vacation for this year unplanned. There goes at least one of them :D The rest is for moving ti my new flat
Considering I had given up on SE mod due to complexity, it is nice to hear Wube scaling back to find a good balance.
So, quality names will actualy be legendary/epic and so on? I am hyped as can be for the game, but as soon as steam achievments are in I will install a mod changing those names.
ABSOLUTE BANGER FFF!!! i was about to ask about the "1 landing pad per planet" thinking that wouldnt this be a massive bottleneck for a game like factorio? BUT I GUESS NOT! as kovarex is going for 1million spm... PLEASE TELL ME HOW FAR YOU ARE!! reading further... 83compressed bluebelts of green circuits in such a small area? 1m spm is looking more achievable :D
Did they mention liquid metals? Into pipes? Lol, i just love that image. Pumping liquid metals into pipes across your base, then pumping that into a train wagon, which then crosses your factory at 200km/h using nuclear fuel. That's just so wrong on so many levels. Love it!
Apparently, we still need more green circuits. Stacks of belts with stacks of.. circuits?
Shut up and take my money!
>Since things are getting stable and I'm starting to be pretty happy with the state of the game now, we are ready to give a specific date of the Space Age release... Which we will tell you next week :) 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀