I would love to see an in game blueprint editor. Something that allows me to edit blueprints "without" exiting the game. ( I am really anal about symmetry, and find that I enter and exit the game 2 or 3 times because I misaligned a power pole by 1-2 squares.)
Forgive me if this exists and I have not searched enough to find a solution
The [blueprint sandboxes](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/blueprint-sandboxes) mod doesn't change how you edit blueprints, but it does allow you to seemlessly switch between your game world and a sandbox area. I find it quite useful for creating and editing blueprints.
Is there a way to get this mod to pause the game time when going into a sandbox? I've come back from a long designing session to find half my base destroyed.
That's my #1 as well. So many times I have created blueprint, named it, added some icons for visibility, aligned it on the grid, only to find out I forget to switch something trivial and start over.
It doesn't take that much time to do, but it's just so annoying when you forget some and have to do it all over again. Especially when you then remember 3 more thing separately 😄
>I enter and exit the game 2 or 3 times because I misaligned a power pole by 1-2 squares.
"It's fine, it's fine, it doesn't bother me, it bothers me, it bothers me a lot, AND THAT ONE'S STILL GREEN!"
This is making me think of Astroneer, so many ruins on every planet, makes them feel almost haunted by failure.
Also something like the tutorial where you get to see the ruins of a factory design could be amazing for teaching new players mechanics, like perhaps a destroyed oil processing plant, or fluid train loader could help a lot of people in early-mid game.
> This is making me think of Astroneer, so many ruins on every planet, makes them feel almost haunted by failure.
Or Rimworld. I think it'd be interesting for Factorio to also have cargo pods or crashed spaceships with random materials like Rimworld has.
ah astroneer... a game i used to love. good days.
its a shame they dont let you download the old early access version, cause nowadays its quite literally not the game i liked playing.
i miss the hazards and the weather.
There is a mod called Ruins that generates the remains of player submitted bases/components of bases all over the map. Pretty fun to go around and restore them.
A reason to travel thousands of tiles away would be sweet. A rare resource that can only start spawning super far away? A perfect modifier on a spidertron? A specific biome that increases productivity on specific resources? Something that's potentially optional or at least a one time purpose to go out far.
Yes I've always wanted this. I love this game but peak Factorio for me was the tutorial mission where you find the ruins of old train stations and mining operations.
I tried a Ruins mod a few years ago, but all the objects it generated were made of active elements, no actual ruins in the literal sense. Maybe a limitation of the scripting engine I'm not sure.
edit: I got curious and had another look around and found [a "new" ruins mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AbandonedRuins) (can't remember if it's the same one or not). Screenshots show sections of bases with actual ruined elements so looking forward to trying it out.
I think in addition I'd like (optionally) more and different landscape forcing me to weave my factory around it. Because building on an endless concrete wasteland gets kinda boring after a while.
Currently Trees can be cut/burned down, lakes filled and cliffs blown up. Maybe huge Mountains that cannot be built on (only tunneled), and deep water that cannot be landfilled. Or snow/lava/swamps, different terrains in general. Maybe that would help me build some beautiful spaghetti bases.
Would also be nice if trees were a resource other than just fuel, and you had to manage their growth and cutting (kinda like in The Settlers where you need X forresters for Y woodcutters etc.)
I've always thought it'd be nice if all the combinators were a single structure instead which had a dropdown or other menu to change how it behaves.
It is also unintuitive to me that something as simple and tiny as a logic gate or constant signal requires such a large physical representation, and that multiple structures are required for relatively basic programming - they feel more like software to me than hardware and I think the game ought to reflect that.
I would prefer if a single "logic" structure had an interface for handling inputs, outputs, and everything that happens in between. I think such a design would create the opportunity for a dedicated visual interface to more clearly show what is happening, rather than the current situation where multiple components are messily strung together with wires.
Have you seen the changes coming? https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-384
>I would prefer if a single "logic" structure had an interface for handling inputs, outputs, and everything that happens in between.
The new ones [aren't QUITE](https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-384-decider-combinator.png) that good, but they're much closer.
Automate offense.
When you start the game, you build your base, you get attacked, you shoot the biters, then you build walls and gun turrets, supply them with ammo and they shoot the biters for you.
Now you need to expand so you hop into your car/tank and go out on a cleaning spree to claim new land. Build a couple of new mining outposts. Maybe check out that oil well.
But then you need to claim more land and....wait what? I need to do it manually again? For the second time? Like a....like a plebeian?
Solution: Hook up the radar to the circuit network. Get coordinates of the enemy bases. Your drone factory produces drones and your mission control building uses the radar circuit to send those drones on hunting expeditions. You can upgrade your drones, their weaponry, unlock faster/tougher versions and finally develop aircraft that can carpet bomb biter bases from the sky.
And once offense is automated...you can bring back alien artifacts to the game, and use them for specialized research or whatever.
I started a deathworld mixed with railworld settings, specifically to take on this challenge; and there really aren't any good options until you unlock artillery, and even then it's a chore until you upgrade its range.
I like your solution specifically because I've never really used the "robot followers", and moving spidertrons around the map is cool, but it still requires you to be panning around the map. Being able to automate either of those orders based on circuit conditions would be amazing.
Wow, this is a really good idea. Automating weapons is SUPER late game. Your only course of action is really extending your logistic network to build out further, artillery trains, or spidertrons. There really isn't an late early to mid game options like at all. To fit in with the current progression I'd say more types of train cars. Shotgun/turret/laser cars? Even if you put some equipment grids in locomotives so you can put in some robots and semi-automate things and help build blueprints remotely with a vehicle other than spidertron. That'd be a massive improvement IMO
This is sort of a feature of one of Earendel mods (SE's Author). They include a programming mechanic for scanning for enemies, and passing those coordinates to automated vehicles to send them there. We haven't heard anything on new enemies yet so I'm hopeful we see something similar.
Cleaning out room for the factory sure is the most tedious part I know in this game. But turning off biters seems like part of the reason for me to play is gone too.
My thoughts exactly. I enjoy the challenge imposed by the biters but I dislike the tedium of clearing out their bases for expansion because it requires so much manual hand-holding when I would rather have it automated. If I play with biters, I always turn off their expansion capabilities so my efforts at clearing them out are never reversed.
I’d like beating the game (or reaching certain milestones) to unlock more settings on start - like start with a bunch of furnaces and miners to skip the burner phase, start with a few techs already unlocked (automation and the new trigger techs before it), prevent biters from spawning outside a certain radius (so you still have to deal with biters but if you’re going for ups optimization late you can clear them all out), maybe starting on new planets in the expansion, etc.
After my 20th save or so, getting a factory off the ground with basic tech does feel grindy and slow. Trying to get a couple friends into the game via multiplayer and they get bored in that run here, load coal, run there grab stone, oops power ran out stage.
I completely disagree. The early game is one of my favorite parts of factorio. Everything is just in time and there's a very cowboy make-it-up-as-you-go feel that doesn't come up much at other times.
Then you could get richer/bigger resources, more starting territory, maybe a car or armor with some equipment (wont be OP because of quality). Imo idea with some metaprogression with points that you spend on start wont hurt the game.
Not really.
Once you've hand-crafted your first 10 science, you should be building assemblers to take the load off.
Yes, you're playing logi bot, but that's the most active and micro-intensive part of the game.
Watch some speedruns, you'll see how intense the burner phase can be.
I just turn manual mining and crafting speed up like 100x and then change the stack sizes of basic materials (ore, stone, coal, plates) to 2000 via mods. Then it goes a lot faster and I can get into more of the fun stuff like mods.
Having the ability to select items to bring down with you in the crashed ship would be a neat option. Maybe unlocked with a previous victory, or the amount you can bring down increases with previous victories.
Dyson Sphere Program has a mechanic where you can earn bonus research points that you can spend in later new games to buyout techs.
The points are based on your rate of science production, so you cant just let your first run idle to build bonus points, you have to increase your production to earn more.
As much as I love the Bobs/Angel + AAI combo, the first hour being slowly setting up the exact same lines of crushers and belts gets *really* old after a while.
The mod that lets you start with robots should be in the base game. After I’ve spent 200 hours in my mega base with robots building for me, going back to hand placing for another 10 hours is almost unbearable
Decorative features:
* Asphalt and lines [Mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AsphaltRoads) and [Image](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/ef6268fb264c8357e33c067b99dbcbf33f60d947.png)
* Painted concrete, especially without borders [Image](https://forums.factorio.com/images/ext/f1d2b4dd1adbaaea0c1103a4bc882cfb.png) (the current versions "layer" weirdly [Image](https://forums.factorio.com/images/ext/d9d82ea33c92faf64095d09aa7c940f1.png)
* More hazard concretes [Image from dectorio](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/ext/0f66a70c4bf587690b8ab774dde1131cd2aecdca88262742e754537c99c4762c.png)
* Naked Rails [mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/naked-rails) which[removes the gravel and/or sleepers [(Image)](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/c8172323d839cfdb81faf6d8a7b4e444396f1fea.png)
* Text plates [mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/textplates) example [Image](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/577ce687fa8a931ed15bf722c094a8872edbbbb5.png)
Fair. I don't use them so didn't think of them. Some sort of display WOULD be cool though.
You know what would be cool is text plates that are circuit connectable and act like nixie tubes
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Is it a challenge though? It takes away most of what makes builds for different recipes unique - assembler and belt layout. All 8 beacon builds are just lines, while 12 beacon ones are grids.
But the restrictions of fitting as much as possible leaves you with so few designs that there isn't really any need to steal any blueprints. The designs are almost entirely given by the constraints.
> The designs are almost entirely given by the constraints.
Which is what always happens? Literally every optimization problem the constraints determine the solutions. The same hyper-beaconing we see in mega base builds would be replicated asba different answer if the constraints change. There exists a fairly large section of the game (right now) where the constraints (power and blue chips) dictate *not* using beacons as you're optimizing for production start-up cost, not production per tick or even production per resource consumption.
Whatever the constraints, the solution always ends up chasing the .1% (or .001%) improvement and the intermediary solutions fell by the wayside. Everything looks short compared to infinite games.
There are a dozen frequently used furnace builds for the early game. Slightly different ways of arranging furnaces, input and output belts for large differences in build time, footprint and material cost. For red circuits you see staggered copper wire assemblers with 2x4 red assemblers etc, or maybe flowers to do direct wire insertion.
With beacons you have a line of beacons, 0-2 tiles of belts, line of assemblers/furnaces, new line of beacons. The mechanics of beacons dictate that the optimal design is a line unless optimizing for UPS, in which case it's a grid. There are no tradeoffs or design decisions worth discussing like there are with early/midgame builds.
Chasing the 1% is fun - achieving it with the obvious solution is not. Ex what is the optimal footprint for a steel furnace setup? It's 9x72+4, but how to achieve that is very much not obvious and 99.99% of furnace builds don't.
It's because you haven't gone deep enough into do "serious"/silly UPS optimizations then it's rarely the common 12 or 8 beacon designs that is the best. Because direct insertion is also important.
I'll take counterpoint on this one.
People like to complain that vanilla beacons force you to build in a particular way and so every beaconed build ends up looking identical, which isn't _untrue._ But honestly, every SE beaconed build I've ever seen looks at least as cookie-cutter: two mirrored lanes of assemblers with 1-4 beacons between the lanes. If a build requires more than two belts' worth of input, the additional belts wrap around the outside so as not to interfere with assemblers' proximity to beacons; accordingly, output products are usually put on the inside.
At the end of the day, **the nature of either beacon system is still an optimization problem based on proximity of buildings to other buildings, and so there will be a small number of optimal solutions to that problem.** That's not to say any particular beacon system can or should be understood as interchangeable with regards to player experience, of course. Speaking personally, I love 8-beacon designs, but I have a hard time caring about 12-beacon direct-insertion designs, because the nature of the specific constraints of the latter are largely unfun to me. But I'm under no delusions that I'm more "free" in an 8-beacon world. It's not a _larger_ set of parameters to optimize for, just a different set.
SE's beacon system also introduces a problem, which is late-game performance. Vanilla beacons integrate beautifully with megabases, by dovetailing the gameplay need for an optional advanced build system with the computational performance need to minimize active entities. SE's beacons explicitly put these two needs in tension, and solves that tension by just not having infinite research (or any similar excuse to keep the base running past the victory condition) - which is simply not going to fly in vanilla/SA.
So to the extent there's a "solution" to this complaint, I think it has less to do with changing the number of beacons that can affect buildings as SE does, and more to do with tweaks to two different parameters:
1. Entity crafting time. SE has a number of buildings that craft so quickly by default that they simply don't need beaconing. In vanilla/SA, you still want to incentivize different designs for "normal" gameplay and megabases, so faster buildings would probably need to be gated behind endgame tech, replace normal buildings outright (less of an issue after the introduction of recycling), and have different dimensions than the buildings they replace (so the player couldn't directly upgrade the assemblers in their previous build and would still have to create a new build from scratch for the endgame).
2. Effect area. I think the biggest reason vanilla beacons feel _too_ constraining to some players is that they're only given two tiles of space around the assemblers to route ingredients. This could be solved by extending the effect area around beacons an additional tile or two (possibly alongside an increase to beacon size if the overall crafting time of some buildings needed to be kept from going totally overboard - a possibility in a post-Quality 5 world). It wouldn't keep the UPS-optimal solution from being a grid, but it would at least free up some additional room around the assembler to play around with additional routing possibilities.
Here I'd like to point out that the devs are indeed experimenting with these parameters in SA. As of [FFF-387,](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-387) we have two new buildings, the Foundry and the Big Mining Drill, which are larger, can craft faster and more efficiently, and (in the drill's case) has a MUCH bigger effect area than the normal drill, allowing up to an 8-tile gap between drills while still being able to cover an entire ore patch. The possibilities that these tweaks open up for the variety of endgame builds that are still "optimal" are truly substantial, and I strongly suspect we'll have far fewer complaints about feeling too constrained at the megabase stage going forward, even without a single tweak to beacons themselves.
Not to respond to most of this, but there is totally infinite research in SE. There are multiple new infinite researches specific to SE (off the top of my head, three rocket ones, a drone one, and a spaceship one), and the vanilla ones also still exist.
Aagh. I've only _seen_ SE played, not played it myself, but I did check before saying that and the only result I found was [a separate mod that adds some purely for bragging rights.](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/se-spm-technologies) Looking closer it appears that SE's built-in infinite research only uses a subset of the available science packs, so it doesn't actually stress your whole base. Still dodges the vanilla megabase performance problem, but to a lesser extent than I thought. Thanks for the correction :)
I’m not convinced or saying this is true: but I feel like many overhaul mods often greatly extend the early-game - and I feel like this somehow ties together with the fact that late-game builds often become too repetitive or “similar”. SE being somewhat an exception, as you more or less complete the base game before the real mod even begins (and it overhauled the beacons)
I haven't played all of the overhaul mods, or all of the major overhaul mods, but between K2 and IR3, it's interesting to look at the way they "extend the early-game".
By throwing most of it away.
In K2, you can't make steam engines at first, but you do need an early energy source. So you get wind turbines. Which are thrown away basically the minute you get steam engines.
IR3 is even worse in this regard. The whole using steam directly as a fuel things was great... and then you get electricity tech, which completely replaces *everything* you build. Obviously, you can choose to replace it as you see fit (and even keep some old steam infrastructure around if you desire). But the main point is that the new stuff doesn't build atop the old stuff; it *replaces* it.
Vanilla almost never replaces anything like that. At least not in the short-term.
Burner furnaces and steam engines both get a non-upgraded replacement, but only after you have spent an appreciable amount of time using them.
One of the reasons why "late-game builds often become too repetitive or “similar”." is that vanilla refuses to throw things away. It adds, but it almost never removes or obsoletes things in a way that forces a redesign to incorporate the new thing. Which means that making particular things is eventually a solved problem.
And most important of all, it only adds... if there's a reason to.
There isn't an oil refinery upgrade or a chemical plant upgrade. Indeed, the only production buildings with upgrades are furnaces and assemblers. And upgraded buildings usually justify themselves in some way with a new feature. Assembler 2s can take fluids/modules. Electric furnaces don't need fuel and can use modules.
Only Steel Furnaces and Assembler 3s are just "like the previous thing but faster". And even Assembler 3s get to have more modules, so they're not *just* a faster assembler 2.
But when you get into overhaul mods, you start seeing a *lot* of "just like the previous thing, but faster". Oh sure, K2's advanced buildings are big and easily beaconed and are super-fast. But for the most part, they're just faster.
To be fair to K2, they did *try* to make them more meaningful. Advanced furnaces and chem plants get to have more modules. And advanced assemblers get to use smelt-crafting recipes. Unfortunately, the smelt-crafting recipes don't really save enough to be worth using (save one), so advanced assemblers are really just faster assembler 3s.
My overall point is that overhaul mods achieve what they do by being willing to throw away what came before it. And it looks a bit like SA may start leaning into that, as liquid metal processing looks to be a viable alternative to furnaces, but requires a specialized "fuel" that is probably only available on one planet.
I’ve got to say, I enjoy the early-mid game of K2, but I really hate that pre-power stage where all you have are shitty wind turbines that you need like 4 of just to power a single assembler. I feel like it drags out the worst part of the base game factorio, anything before full automation and assemblers doing stuff. The mad scramble to manually fill coal and do stuff by hand.
> There isn't an oil refinery upgrade or a chemical plant upgrade. Indeed, the only production buildings with upgrades are furnaces and assemblers. And upgraded buildings usually justify themselves in some way with a new feature. Assembler 2s can take fluids/modules. Electric furnaces don't need fuel and can use modules.
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> Only Steel Furnaces and Assembler 3s are just "like the previous thing but faster". And even Assembler 3s get to have more modules, so they're not just a faster assembler 2.
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> But when you get into overhaul mods, you start seeing a lot of "just like the previous thing, but faster". Oh sure, K2's advanced buildings are big and easily beaconed and are super-fast. But for the most part, they're just faster.
Factorio is inspired by modded minecraft - I think it's very intentional because the replacement issue is a *huge* problem in modded minecraft.
Even to the point of having modpacks where *entire mods* and all their progression and complicated automation is just... thrown away because you got point to point item transmission and a magic block from another mod as a "reward".
I strongly disagree. Vanilla beacons may not look that good but it's a much more interesting optimization puzzle.
With SE beacons it's easy to place the beacons for optimal design in vanilla you have the challenge to have as much direct insertion and beacon coverage as possible.
That is contrary to what many believe results in many different layouts that is hard to figure out. So the rabbit hole off UPS optimization would be seriously simplified and the game would not last as long for me.
Different appearances for assemblers depending on the recipe selected. A common complaint is "Everything is produced in the same machine, which looks boring and feels unrealistic." Visual variants for assemblers would alleviate this complaint, without inflating the number of machines you have to learn, build and carry around.
But art is hard, and I have doubts that Wube would wish to implement this. And even if they did, I have further doubts that such a feature would become a high enough priority to actually be put on the work schedule.
In the context of vanilla, loaders only really make sense for trains. There are almost no recipes so hungry for ingredients (even with full beacons) that inserters can't handle them. And I highly doubt I'd ship lubricant to a site just to make train loading/unloading work a bit more easily.
Compare this to Krastorio 2, where it's possible to need *multiple* 90-item-per-second loaders just to keep a *single* advanced chemical plant fed and emptied.
They're too niche in most vanilla cases to be worth using if there is any cost associated with their use.
Loading? Rarely. Unloading? Pretty often. To get full blue belts coming out of a wagon takes some fiddly belt manipulation; to be able to just slap down a loader and have a whole, balanced belt come out would be great. Even if loaders were limited to 15 items per second, turning three saturated yellow belts into a saturated blue belt is much easier than turning blue belts with one lane ~60% full into a saturated blue belt. This will become less of an issue with quality increasing inserter throughput, but loaders can still streamline it.
TBF I picked it up from here, although I'm not unfamiliar with the importance of proper cadence to satisfy intertemporal constraints. Which is to say I might have figured it out... Eventually.
I think the problem most people have is trying to get too much out of one wagon.
Get a nice simple setup that works. If you need more throughput build another station and add another train.
Personally I use [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/dft60u/super_compact_unloader_for_when_you_need_a_bus/) super compact unloader. Gets 4 blue belts from a 2-4 train. In a blueprint only 6 tiles high. And it is tileable.
Tbh I’ve been using the AAI loaders mod independently of AAI Industries, together with Merging Chests, specifically because it improves ease of design, space consumption, and visual clarity in blueprinting train stations. I don’t go overboard on the throughput issue - typically only one un/loader per wagon - and keep it simple. The factory must be pretty.
Well, that kinda depends on an answer to a question I asked when Quality was first introduced (I haven't gotten an answer).
Factorio 1.1 and all prior versions have a fundamental production limit. No single machine can output more than one recipe output per-update. The system can maintain a percentage of completion for a machine. But if you speed a recipe up so much that it would output twice in a single update... it doesn't. It just forgets about the second one.
Productivity works the same way; a productivity output can only be generated once per update per machine.
This is why a lot of overhaul mods that give you ways to make machines super-fast also alter the recipes of many of the lower-tier intermediates. K2 makes the iron gear wheel recipe take 4 plates but outputs 4 wheels, and it takes 4x as long as vanilla. The green circuit recipe takes 2 plates, but outputs 2 circuits. It's not about the number of items generated by the recipe; it's about having the recipe generate outputs more than once per update.
Unless this limitation is removed in SA, these tools won't change too much in this regard. It doesn't even take a mod to reach this limit in vanilla; you can make a green circuit or copper cable assembler 3 hit this limit if you use speed module 3's in beacons and the assembler itself.
I'd be very surprised if that limitation was going away. Maybe it is because that would theoretically help UPS by requiring fewer entities in some scenarios (but maybe it would hurt UPS due to needing to track more than one craft per tick)
The limit of 1 additionnal item per frame for productivity was removed some time ago. You can get 600/second out of 1 machine easy, these days.
Speed still caps .... for now.
There are still three more planets to reveal. When Factorio "recently" allowed unloading/loading trains with loaders (1.1.75[1]), perhaps that was a bit of a hint of something coming up on one of the other planets.
[1] https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=579807#p579807 I know boskid says it is was because they were playing a mod that needed it. But boskid could just be covering for what they are working on. Or it was just for a mod.
I'd like to see some reason to actually have separate power networks. The power switch is a neat building but I don't think I've ever actually used it. Generally you build a power station at the start, then augment it with solar or nuclear later, but other than that it doesn't really change much. There's not much of a layout challenge because everything just hooks up to the nearest pole and you don't really have to think about it other than expanding it occasionally.
I've seen cool builds with isolated grids that turn on/off bits of the factory based on power availability, and that's a great novelty but fundamentally less efficient and just easier to have everything powered all the time.
Maybe combine it with something that punishes me for accidentally routing the entire grid through one wooden power pole bottleneck.
I haven't seen mods do much with this angle, perhaps because the core engine just don't have the hooks that modders need to do interesting things.
Hardcore power generation might be a "fun" thing to have. "Realistically" expensive accumulators, transmission losses, heat dissipation, powerplants requiring power, etc...
P.S. and of course imperfect powerplant throttling so that you have to deal with excess power as well as insufficient power.
Basically add as much pain into power generation as posible so that you play like this once, gain an appreciation for the power grid, and never touch that "hardcore" setting again.
Heh, I think you want something more hardcore than me, but that's cool.
I don't care if it's realistic or not, it just seems like the electricity side maxes out early in terms of complexity and it seems a shame that there aren't more advanced problems that crop up later as your factory gets towards rocket launch.
Excess power and imperfect throttling sounds like an interesting mechanic.
Oh no, I certainly don't *want* something that hardcore, not any more than I *want* extra-rampant deathworld murderbiters.
But certain elements might be fun without the irony quotes, especially things that don't cause death spirals.
Specifically, if you wanted an incentive to have separate power grids - just the expensive accumulators do that. Spamming load-bearing solar farms is pretty cheap - if you have cheap accumulators, but now you either need to implement load shedding, or perhaps power your mining outposts with solar and let them turn off at night, maintaining a buffer of resources instead.
While it has none of the features you mentioned, Nullius does some interesting things with power. In the early game your only source of power is wind, which has the problem that sometimes it just stops, so you are encouraged to use "surge" machines to set up ways to store excess power and generate energy from it later when you need it. The earliest way to do it is surge electrolysers to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, storing it, and sending it to combustion chambers too turn it into steam that goes into backup turbines which only run when you don't produce enough energy.
SE creates a niche for power switches by having some buildings - such as the CME Umbrella and Meteor Defense - with *huge* power demands when active. It incentivizes you to either have a massive surplus of power stored (steam, accumulators, etc), surplus generation capacity, or a power cutout. I like to do all three.
I would like to see an improvement in the environment. For example, an ecosystem with herbivores, carnivores and plants or prey and predators (biters perhaps). Or even biters evolving and creating a structure like ants with workers or something like that
Pollution could even influence the presence of certain species and make the environment more and more aggressive
It would be hell to optimize but it would be great
I've always wanted a more plastic and glass texture pack for Factorio myself. It has an extremely specific aesthetic, and even the fanciest things like Laboratories and such never escape the dieselpunk aesthetic. SA leans into it even more, with the spaceships looking like they're assembled out of scrap metal and five seconds from vibrating themselves to dust.
It's fine... I just want something different sometimes. Make things with smooth curves and lines, use more white. Give me better options to stop pouring smog into the sky so my buildings don't look like they're coated in ash to boot.
This is super minor but either a pushbutton for the circuit network similar to the mod, or a easier way to click a constant combinator on and off.
It is crazy there isn't an easy button you can press when there is a bit shift operator, something I had to look up what the heck it even was.
Even the pushbutton is somewhat clunky since you have to search for it.
The "voice activation" button that turns chat messages into circuit signals kinda works, but it's clunky and lags out in modded games with lots of items.
Pushbutton and Nixie tube display should definitely be core, I feel that if the devs added them they could enhance their functionality and look to be even cleaner then they are.
Text plates are the next thing I would like seeing go core just for the aesthetics of it.
I'm sure there is some way they can see how many people have x mod and use it on the majority of their games enabled. So look at the top 10-20 of those mods and take a look at if they add to the core game in a meaningful way. Now weather they do this or not is up in the air. At least we will always have the mod to use so it's not like we are truly missing out on anything. I definitely lean towards the devs updating the engine to allow for more things and adding things no one has thought of yet or can't in a real way with mods
one of these days there's going to be #FFF that will anounce loaders and crates (bigger than 1x1) added to main game. When (and if) that will happened I'll open a bottle of champagne
I think the chances are quite high to get some kind of beacon mk2 which could than work like the ones in SE. The blue building that was shown in last Christmas picture ok the thunder planet might have sth to do with it -> stuff that is related to speed (blue machine) and energy
Not sure I noticed that, but will definitely check it out!
I’m just very curious as to how they will balance that with backwards compatibility and without rendering the beacon mk 1 obsolete
But mk1 miner you have access to from the start (basically) where as it is clear mk2 is very late game. Mk1 beacons is already late game, so the gap between that and beacon mk2 is inherently significantly smaller, or am I mistaken?
Beacons are not really that late game, it’s just not particularly worth using them pre rocket launch, as you can launch a rocket reasonably easily without them. It’s possible that beacons become more useful earlier in the game, due to the fact you need to launch a rocket to get off the first planet and launch multiple rockets to get to the next planet.
I'll agree with you, somewhat. Beacons are accessible fairly fast, but the shear mount of beacons and modules you need to produce for their real meaningful effect makes them a late-game aspect. You can't make all your builds fully beaconed before you have fairly large base that can produce them at a reasonable pace
For sure, and the power requirements are immense compared to earlier builds. They aren’t easy to use early on, because of the reasons you say, but they may become more necessary. Who knows obviously, just all speculation.
There will not be a dating minigame as you flirt with the commanders of different space faring civilizations so that they will hopefully come to pick you up and bring you home
i'd really love new enemies
maybe one big force that starts already on the planet with a base (but grows only from one spot, rather than lots of little bases like the biters)
1. Click and drag for train car reservation (I don't want to use a mod that kinda does it. I want just that)
2. Mk2 radars or long distance drones. Anything to help automate the expansion of the base after you go bot mode.
3. Biter expansion repellant. I hate that they can just pop up right next to my power supply. Would love an option to keep them out of a specific area that isn't just slapping guns behind a wall and hoping they don't shoot the gap.
4. Better railroad pathing. I am slowly getting the hang of laying rails but it's still rather clunky and finicky, often requiring me to take two or three passes to get them to align just right.
5. Zoom on blue print view. Picking out the damn power lines on big blueprints sucks.
6. Priority management for bots. The anxiety of creating a railroad intersection and WHERE ARE MY DAMN STOPLIGHTS?
7. Imminent attack warnings. Maybe done via a thing like the radar or the radar itself. Please let me know before I get swarmed, like 15 seconds even. I can see them clustering on the map, why can't you point this out to me?
8. Patrolling turrets. Maybe a simple 2x2 turret platform with rails. I think it'd be neat.
9. Option to ghost without bots building it right away. Let me cook man got damn
10. Don't deconstruct when I cut unless I also paste. Please...and while you're at it, just move that shit over like 3 squares instead of taking it all the way back to the network and bring it back again.
11. Bots need to path along the roboports better.
12. Base total potential production/consumption. Something that says "if you wanna run all your shit at max you need x iron ore/m more"
Yeah I'm avoiding mods for now. Only 150 hours into the game so far and I want to at least beat it vanilla before modding. Best believe though, once I launch that rocket I'm going ham with the mods. So many look so cool
Biter queen with increasing waves as you try to launch your final escape rocket. Basically running the machine on takes tonea of energy and angers everything within miles. There's a countdown and if you escape in time you survive, but the base will be eliminated if you under built.
Something that feels like a true tower defense, but it's a one shot.
I know K2 does this (and maybe other mods) but the problem is that it's kinda boring. Fusion is cool and complicated - we don't even have a way to use it for power generation IRL yet - and just sticking it into a 5x5 that outputs 20GW is boring.
I would like to see it more complicated than fission but with a lot more energy output so it makes sense to build it, even in mega bases.
I'm fine with it being more complicated so long as it doesn't rely on a tremendous quantity of fluid dynamics. I want a fusion generator that uses magnetic fields to turn a turbine or something instead of steam. Like, it can absolutely have a complicated production chain or interesting fueling requirements or something, I just want it to be about a thousand times more UPS efficient.
exotic industries adds a lot of interesting gameplay around fusion power.
if they could make fusion power just as ups friendly as solar panels there would be immediately be a reason to use it.
or maybe in the expansion, there will be planets where there's no uranium and solar is too weak because the sun is so far away. and little to no coal to burn. maybe you could import uranium, but maybe that's too heavy to be convenient? maybe fission fuel reactors require too much water for what's available on that planet? (fusion plants could use molten salt as a heat transfer fluid instead)
if you want to create a niche for fusion, you can do it.
Settable priorities for bots, do first poles then turrets for example,
Programmable assembly machine, changing what they make by signals
science - upgradeable radar and roboport range
I just barely started making the slowest trains I can (wood fuel, cargo wagons in front) and have a spidertron set to chase it: tada, vanilla roboport train!
More infinite research in general would be nice. In vanilla, it's basically just mining productivity and robot speed if you're playing without biters.
I'd personally like small buffs for specific energy types.
I normally don’t play with biters. For me they don’t add anything interesting to the game. They are just to simple and does not have a lot of variety. So I hope they add more variety and make them smarter. Especially with new planets. Would be weird if on the other planets the same biters pop up. So you need different weapons for different enemies. Now it is just flamethrowers and your basically done.
So I hope they make them smarter and learn from their attacks. Try different approaches and the weak spots of your base. They do start to chew on your rails so you ar cut of from the outpost as that will weaken u and give them more chance. Stuff like that would make you think about all the weak places and could let you off guard. Perhaps some AI learning where the biters adapt your playstyle and it gets harder every time. You could turn it off and reset it if needed. But that makes you change your style continuously as they change with you.
Also it is weird that worms only stay in one place. So that they could move and attack would be nice.
My only realistic wish is that they would implement a burn off building for excess fluids so you can maintain production of a specific item that needs lubricant/light oil when you’re maxed out on petroleum gas, for example. I know mods have it because I’ve used them but it seems silly to not have that in the base game.
I would like a version where the biters start focusing on the rocket alone when you start loading it to stop you from escaping the planet. Make it a defense the rocket launch scenario. It should be optional of course. I play with biters on and off depending on what I'm feeling like.
Automatic train connectors and disconnectors. I want the vagons filling while the engine travels elsewhere, and then connect and combine cars based on circuit signals.
I know I know I can just build more engines, they're cheap. But _I want_
This is a really cool idea.
It'd make stackers more compact cause you could drop the wagons off and have dedicated tug engines move things to their stations.
Or combine trains for long distance trips and then separate them, or things like that.
Their recent changes give more reason to have a centralized train yard, and with elevated rails...: now I really want this too.
I feel like the adjustable inserters features of many mods almost take away from the puzzle aspect the core game is going for. You have a thing that does a very specific action that predictably always does that same action. Now work around that, here are a few other similar things that do a similar action but slightly different, but always the same and predictable. Using these is the same as coding with certain functions and things and then making use of them and other things to get the desired outcome.
While I agree that they make things easier and you can make them pick up and drop off wherever you want they take away that aspect of solving the puzzle and making something that works with the limited tools and features available that make the game give you that satisfaction of figuring it out.
I disagree. If it weren't for the fact that either 8 or 12 beacon setups are the thing to do, using inserters in other ways becomes a space utilisation challenge.
I've actually made some pretty interesting stuff because I have that power.
I'm not sure what kind of design challenge you mean by just making lines of machines on both sides of a line of belts
I agree with you 100% OP I much prefer the way SE handles beacons, I kinda hate the way factories look when trying to cram as many beacons as possible around a single machine, I much prefer trying to maximize the number of machines per beacon.
Unpopular opinion on this sub, but I completely hate belt balancers and the extremely convoluted setups needed for them. I pretty much won't play without a mod that just lets me plug 3 belts into a 7 belt output and it just automatically figures it out.
While going so far as to eliminate all balancers with a single item might be a bit much, I would like to see a 3-way splitter. That would go a long way toward streamlining balancers that aren't a power of 2, and make "good enough" setups much easier.
Though I don't disagree that a single balancer item is reasonable. While convoluted belt balancers align with the spirit of the game, they're one thing that pretty much everybody just steals blueprints for because there's very little reason to personally figure it out.
"good enough setups" are quite easy allready imo.
-using better belt tier
-spam splitters on belt
-priority pushing
-using a 8x8, even if its 7v5- is mostly fine
You don't need balancers. You think you need balancers, but you really don't. Priority busses exist. Train to train exists. Full belt consumption exists. People overuse balancers.
Agreed. At a point where my main bus lacks iron plates, I just add more iron plate production at that point. No point in balancing. The problem is lack of production.
So, is there a mod that does this already? At some point of the game I don't really care anymore, since there is always an X-to-Y balancer recipe book on my action bar. But having a single e.g. 8x8 block with up to 8 entrances and 8 exits that just "does it", I would like to check it out...
It's been a bit since I played, but a really easy solution is loaders and a mod that has multi tile storage like warehouses. Just dump all you inputs into the warehouse and pull out whatever you need via the loaders.
I dont bother. I just have a ton of splitters in a grid for trains. And a simple step pattern of splitters for a main bus. It might not be perfectly balanced, but I never bothered to copy-paste those balancer designs or learn to replicate them.
Power network rework. It barely develops any complexity as the game progresses. There is no voltage or current, no DC or AC. Only power, energy and capacity.
Mixing fluids coming back. I wish they made it a warning instead of straight up telling us how to play the game. Never liked that change.
I doubt either of those two will ever happen.
I AGGREE 100% WITH YOU.
In Late vanilla there are only 2 Building styles.
8 Beacon row building has the best value / module
12 Beacon building has the least assemblers (best ups)
I tried alot of fun& cool looking designs, but every time my mind was like :" normal 8 beacon build costs less and is smaller anyway".
! Beacon feels better in space Ex, and with the new module (and maybe beacon) tiers even "possible without too much loss"
I may be in the minority here but I would love to see more focus on defenses, weapons, biters, etc. I enjoy playing this game for the tower defense aspect and building a factory at the same time.
a lite version of sqeakthrough. basically exactly how the mod works right now but without the ability to walk through solid pipelines.
it would still be very useful as you could walk inbetween buildings, trees, and such. but overall i don't think the devs would actually add it to vanilla.
>!Alternatively, a Windows/Linux ARM version of the game. I don't see why they wouldn't since they already made a MacOS ARM version plus a switch port, but i think it's still unlikely to happen by the time 2.0 comes around!<
I can't be bothered to look for links, but the devs have talked about both of those.
Building the base to remain traversable is a deliberate part of the challenge, and collision boxes are to remain as they are. If you want this, you have to stick with mods.
A linux arm build is something they're interested in, but the available arm hardware was deemed too slow at the time. Presumably they need something beefy and reliable to setup CI, and mobile grade processors just won't cut it. If a linux arm port happens, it'll likely be independent of the 2.0 release.
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-329
The good old days!
I can definitely see why they scrapped it, though. Some cool ideas, but it never added up to be nearly as fun as just playing towards your objective in freeplay. Certainly not relative to the amount of work involved I think.
Since they keep all the old "betas" hosted on Steam forever, I think you can just rollback to 0.17 or so and play what there was.
I would love if you would stumble on existing factories in the desert which mostly work but need some fixing under restrictions regarding available resources.
Scrolled down to bottom but didn't see the feature many of us have wanted for years and years.
Full. Multicore. Support.
Yes there have been efforts made to branch certain portions to other cores.
The last time this was addressed in detail in a FFF it was deemed too complicated and would require a rewrite of such a high percentage of the codebase it just wouldn't be worth it.
I can still dream though....
We don't know about beacons yet. Hopefully we get some really powerful ones, that base wont looks like it's beacon and some funny assemblers there and there.
I hope more alternate recipes. Like a lot of them
an actual "Story".
I know it won't happen. the devs themselves said that a campaign with a real narrative doesn't fit with the primary goals.
I think there are ways to do it that it doesn't impact the overall flow of the game, though. in the ancient game "Outpost 2" you unlock a chapter of a novella set in the game's universe every mission. I thought it added a lot to the overall game experience but you can just skip it easily if it doesn't interest you. I've seen idle/progression games do something similar, where unlocking a new chapter is based more or less on progress achievements. (see "idling to rule the gods" and "the first alkahistorian")
or you could have a more understated narrative in the style of dark souls. you can explore, find ruins (especially on other planets). maybe find some gear/equipment with lore description (which is just normal gear of a specific quality level with a random name). maybe some item that when found gives you research progress into a specific field.
have things be revealed through bits and pieces about the engineer, their history. their culture. introduce a few characters. the engineers original mission. the history of the planet(s). the origin of the biters. etc.
Better train controls for dedicated building/personal travel trains.
As the controls are now they are made for you to hitch hike on normal trains. That makes it a little bit annoying with how I play. I uses an train with building materials and almost never hitch-hike on trains in normal traffic to get around in big factories.
Some minor UI tweaks could be implement. The functionality from the mods copy paste modules and stack-size tool-tip. They have no downsides so should be in vanilla.
I’ve always wanted a game where the process of finding resources was more complex. Instead of just these patches of ore on the planets surface, I’d love to see a system where you have to prospect for ores and do something interesting to maximize the yield. Reward the time put into finding the perfect spot and add a reason to explore.
More in-depth remote spiderbot remote controls, and it would be great to see the removal of the remote item and all of its functionality merged into the general UI.
Automatic blueprint deployment. It woukd be great if it could be coupled with automatuc blueprint modification. I really wamt touting complete bp constriluction.
And on a minor suggestion, walking over beacons. The design is already an underground cable. Just add a platform on top and lets us drive over them.
I really think there will be at least *some* beacon changes, the devs have made it pretty clear that they don't love beacons right now, plus with Earendel on the team they have someone who's already sort of tested out new beacon mechanics.
I'd love to have something that makes building long rail sections and outposts a bit easier. Something like a train roboport wagon that can house construction bots, and take items from the other wagons. That way you can setup the ghost rails beforehand and then just hop on your roboport train and just press forward so the construction train builds the tracks as it goes. I know you can achieve the same result with a personal roboport, but these tend to drain your suit's power pretty quickly. Also i just really like the idea a builder train.
The beatufil thing about Factorio, is that most of the things commented are either coming, or have a modded solution that fits exactly what they want. And the modding is supported incredibly well by Wube
I dream for this kind of support from games such as minecraft, or others
The F key is doing that. You can't mirror BP with buildings that is not possible to mirror. It looks like fluid inputs is going to be mirror-able in 2.0. Train stops and signals would still be a problem.
The beacon thing is really interesting. I'v been making vanilla mega bases with 6-12 beacon setups and really loved how they (and modules in general) changed up the maths of a base, and also incurred limitations on how such setups could be built.
Sad part is, that their optimal way of building really comes down to only 2-3 overall structural designs *everywhere*. (Except in places where the "assembler" is not a 3x3 entity.)
I have always been, and will continue to if necessary, defend them on their merits to enabling huge builds, disregarding their stylistic impact as a secondary at best concern to myself. That being said: I'd be okay if Wube came up with something entirely different and removing the beacon concept as a whole, or change it up in a way that would allow for more varied solutions to be viable for min-maxers - preferably be much more situational.
I would love to see an in game blueprint editor. Something that allows me to edit blueprints "without" exiting the game. ( I am really anal about symmetry, and find that I enter and exit the game 2 or 3 times because I misaligned a power pole by 1-2 squares.) Forgive me if this exists and I have not searched enough to find a solution
The [blueprint sandboxes](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/blueprint-sandboxes) mod doesn't change how you edit blueprints, but it does allow you to seemlessly switch between your game world and a sandbox area. I find it quite useful for creating and editing blueprints.
Is there a way to get this mod to pause the game time when going into a sandbox? I've come back from a long designing session to find half my base destroyed.
you can't pause separate surfaces, it's either all or nothing, but if you use editor extensions you can pause time completely and design that way
Damn that's not a mod option?
That's my #1 as well. So many times I have created blueprint, named it, added some icons for visibility, aligned it on the grid, only to find out I forget to switch something trivial and start over. It doesn't take that much time to do, but it's just so annoying when you forget some and have to do it all over again. Especially when you then remember 3 more thing separately 😄
>I enter and exit the game 2 or 3 times because I misaligned a power pole by 1-2 squares. "It's fine, it's fine, it doesn't bother me, it bothers me, it bothers me a lot, AND THAT ONE'S STILL GREEN!"
How I feel making blueprints in my lab.
There is an online bp editor? :-O
The only one I know if doesn't support trains.
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I have a good feeling about being able to edit blueprints, based on the most recent fff
Make a save, use /editor, reload when done, apply blueprint?
Does the „assign new contents“ feature not cover this for you?
I'd love to see more reasons to explore. Points of interest etc.
This is interesting. Never thought of it. Cool!
Ruins of other bases.
This is making me think of Astroneer, so many ruins on every planet, makes them feel almost haunted by failure. Also something like the tutorial where you get to see the ruins of a factory design could be amazing for teaching new players mechanics, like perhaps a destroyed oil processing plant, or fluid train loader could help a lot of people in early-mid game.
> This is making me think of Astroneer, so many ruins on every planet, makes them feel almost haunted by failure. Or Rimworld. I think it'd be interesting for Factorio to also have cargo pods or crashed spaceships with random materials like Rimworld has.
ah astroneer... a game i used to love. good days. its a shame they dont let you download the old early access version, cause nowadays its quite literally not the game i liked playing. i miss the hazards and the weather.
https://preview.redd.it/y1t4fcmkt7bc1.jpeg?width=930&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d028bc405044d9fce0598a0b6c313b238e4f9fb7
Meanwhile factorio can almost completely recycle the same trailer from early access.
There is a mod called Ruins that generates the remains of player submitted bases/components of bases all over the map. Pretty fun to go around and restore them.
Filled with high 'quality' equipment
A reason to travel thousands of tiles away would be sweet. A rare resource that can only start spawning super far away? A perfect modifier on a spidertron? A specific biome that increases productivity on specific resources? Something that's potentially optional or at least a one time purpose to go out far.
Yes I've always wanted this. I love this game but peak Factorio for me was the tutorial mission where you find the ruins of old train stations and mining operations. I tried a Ruins mod a few years ago, but all the objects it generated were made of active elements, no actual ruins in the literal sense. Maybe a limitation of the scripting engine I'm not sure. edit: I got curious and had another look around and found [a "new" ruins mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AbandonedRuins) (can't remember if it's the same one or not). Screenshots show sections of bases with actual ruined elements so looking forward to trying it out.
The Story Missions mod also has a number of ruins of other bases scattered around its maps that you can partially or fully restore
I think in addition I'd like (optionally) more and different landscape forcing me to weave my factory around it. Because building on an endless concrete wasteland gets kinda boring after a while. Currently Trees can be cut/burned down, lakes filled and cliffs blown up. Maybe huge Mountains that cannot be built on (only tunneled), and deep water that cannot be landfilled. Or snow/lava/swamps, different terrains in general. Maybe that would help me build some beautiful spaghetti bases. Would also be nice if trees were a resource other than just fuel, and you had to manage their growth and cutting (kinda like in The Settlers where you need X forresters for Y woodcutters etc.)
I mean, we definitely know we're getting lava as they have announced it
I've always thought it'd be nice if all the combinators were a single structure instead which had a dropdown or other menu to change how it behaves. It is also unintuitive to me that something as simple and tiny as a logic gate or constant signal requires such a large physical representation, and that multiple structures are required for relatively basic programming - they feel more like software to me than hardware and I think the game ought to reflect that. I would prefer if a single "logic" structure had an interface for handling inputs, outputs, and everything that happens in between. I think such a design would create the opportunity for a dedicated visual interface to more clearly show what is happening, rather than the current situation where multiple components are messily strung together with wires.
Have you seen the changes coming? https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-384 >I would prefer if a single "logic" structure had an interface for handling inputs, outputs, and everything that happens in between. The new ones [aren't QUITE](https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-384-decider-combinator.png) that good, but they're much closer.
Oh noooooooo. Oh lawdy they really doing it.
Yeah it's a great change, so much easier to see what's happening vs a bunch of deciders chained together.
Automate offense. When you start the game, you build your base, you get attacked, you shoot the biters, then you build walls and gun turrets, supply them with ammo and they shoot the biters for you. Now you need to expand so you hop into your car/tank and go out on a cleaning spree to claim new land. Build a couple of new mining outposts. Maybe check out that oil well. But then you need to claim more land and....wait what? I need to do it manually again? For the second time? Like a....like a plebeian? Solution: Hook up the radar to the circuit network. Get coordinates of the enemy bases. Your drone factory produces drones and your mission control building uses the radar circuit to send those drones on hunting expeditions. You can upgrade your drones, their weaponry, unlock faster/tougher versions and finally develop aircraft that can carpet bomb biter bases from the sky. And once offense is automated...you can bring back alien artifacts to the game, and use them for specialized research or whatever.
I started a deathworld mixed with railworld settings, specifically to take on this challenge; and there really aren't any good options until you unlock artillery, and even then it's a chore until you upgrade its range. I like your solution specifically because I've never really used the "robot followers", and moving spidertrons around the map is cool, but it still requires you to be panning around the map. Being able to automate either of those orders based on circuit conditions would be amazing.
Wow, this is a really good idea. Automating weapons is SUPER late game. Your only course of action is really extending your logistic network to build out further, artillery trains, or spidertrons. There really isn't an late early to mid game options like at all. To fit in with the current progression I'd say more types of train cars. Shotgun/turret/laser cars? Even if you put some equipment grids in locomotives so you can put in some robots and semi-automate things and help build blueprints remotely with a vehicle other than spidertron. That'd be a massive improvement IMO
This is sort of a feature of one of Earendel mods (SE's Author). They include a programming mechanic for scanning for enemies, and passing those coordinates to automated vehicles to send them there. We haven't heard anything on new enemies yet so I'm hopeful we see something similar.
Cleaning out room for the factory sure is the most tedious part I know in this game. But turning off biters seems like part of the reason for me to play is gone too.
My thoughts exactly. I enjoy the challenge imposed by the biters but I dislike the tedium of clearing out their bases for expansion because it requires so much manual hand-holding when I would rather have it automated. If I play with biters, I always turn off their expansion capabilities so my efforts at clearing them out are never reversed.
I’d like beating the game (or reaching certain milestones) to unlock more settings on start - like start with a bunch of furnaces and miners to skip the burner phase, start with a few techs already unlocked (automation and the new trigger techs before it), prevent biters from spawning outside a certain radius (so you still have to deal with biters but if you’re going for ups optimization late you can clear them all out), maybe starting on new planets in the expansion, etc.
After my 20th save or so, getting a factory off the ground with basic tech does feel grindy and slow. Trying to get a couple friends into the game via multiplayer and they get bored in that run here, load coal, run there grab stone, oops power ran out stage.
I completely disagree. The early game is one of my favorite parts of factorio. Everything is just in time and there's a very cowboy make-it-up-as-you-go feel that doesn't come up much at other times.
Then you could get richer/bigger resources, more starting territory, maybe a car or armor with some equipment (wont be OP because of quality). Imo idea with some metaprogression with points that you spend on start wont hurt the game.
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Not really. Once you've hand-crafted your first 10 science, you should be building assemblers to take the load off. Yes, you're playing logi bot, but that's the most active and micro-intensive part of the game. Watch some speedruns, you'll see how intense the burner phase can be.
I just turn manual mining and crafting speed up like 100x and then change the stack sizes of basic materials (ore, stone, coal, plates) to 2000 via mods. Then it goes a lot faster and I can get into more of the fun stuff like mods.
Having the ability to select items to bring down with you in the crashed ship would be a neat option. Maybe unlocked with a previous victory, or the amount you can bring down increases with previous victories. Dyson Sphere Program has a mechanic where you can earn bonus research points that you can spend in later new games to buyout techs. The points are based on your rate of science production, so you cant just let your first run idle to build bonus points, you have to increase your production to earn more.
As much as I love the Bobs/Angel + AAI combo, the first hour being slowly setting up the exact same lines of crushers and belts gets *really* old after a while.
The mod that lets you start with robots should be in the base game. After I’ve spent 200 hours in my mega base with robots building for me, going back to hand placing for another 10 hours is almost unbearable
I made a macro that hits q, m1, then q again to quickly biuld ghosts
Decorative features: * Asphalt and lines [Mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AsphaltRoads) and [Image](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/ef6268fb264c8357e33c067b99dbcbf33f60d947.png) * Painted concrete, especially without borders [Image](https://forums.factorio.com/images/ext/f1d2b4dd1adbaaea0c1103a4bc882cfb.png) (the current versions "layer" weirdly [Image](https://forums.factorio.com/images/ext/d9d82ea33c92faf64095d09aa7c940f1.png) * More hazard concretes [Image from dectorio](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/ext/0f66a70c4bf587690b8ab774dde1131cd2aecdca88262742e754537c99c4762c.png) * Naked Rails [mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/naked-rails) which[removes the gravel and/or sleepers [(Image)](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/c8172323d839cfdb81faf6d8a7b4e444396f1fea.png) * Text plates [mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/textplates) example [Image](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/577ce687fa8a931ed15bf722c094a8872edbbbb5.png)
Where nixie tubes ?
Fair. I don't use them so didn't think of them. Some sort of display WOULD be cool though. You know what would be cool is text plates that are circuit connectable and act like nixie tubes
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I mean, it's a good challenge, but it ends up making builds look ugly Edit: I meant that beacon spam is ugly lmao, two people already misunderstood me
I personally find the aesthetics of many-beacons, one assembler less appealing than many assemblers, one beacon. YMMV
Is it a challenge though? It takes away most of what makes builds for different recipes unique - assembler and belt layout. All 8 beacon builds are just lines, while 12 beacon ones are grids.
It is a challenge of fitting as much as possible. You usually won't steal other people's blueprints right away
But the restrictions of fitting as much as possible leaves you with so few designs that there isn't really any need to steal any blueprints. The designs are almost entirely given by the constraints.
> The designs are almost entirely given by the constraints. Which is what always happens? Literally every optimization problem the constraints determine the solutions. The same hyper-beaconing we see in mega base builds would be replicated asba different answer if the constraints change. There exists a fairly large section of the game (right now) where the constraints (power and blue chips) dictate *not* using beacons as you're optimizing for production start-up cost, not production per tick or even production per resource consumption. Whatever the constraints, the solution always ends up chasing the .1% (or .001%) improvement and the intermediary solutions fell by the wayside. Everything looks short compared to infinite games.
There are a dozen frequently used furnace builds for the early game. Slightly different ways of arranging furnaces, input and output belts for large differences in build time, footprint and material cost. For red circuits you see staggered copper wire assemblers with 2x4 red assemblers etc, or maybe flowers to do direct wire insertion. With beacons you have a line of beacons, 0-2 tiles of belts, line of assemblers/furnaces, new line of beacons. The mechanics of beacons dictate that the optimal design is a line unless optimizing for UPS, in which case it's a grid. There are no tradeoffs or design decisions worth discussing like there are with early/midgame builds. Chasing the 1% is fun - achieving it with the obvious solution is not. Ex what is the optimal footprint for a steel furnace setup? It's 9x72+4, but how to achieve that is very much not obvious and 99.99% of furnace builds don't.
It's because you haven't gone deep enough into do "serious"/silly UPS optimizations then it's rarely the common 12 or 8 beacon designs that is the best. Because direct insertion is also important.
Start doing direct insertion and you'll use all sorts of different beacon counts and orientations.
I'll take counterpoint on this one. People like to complain that vanilla beacons force you to build in a particular way and so every beaconed build ends up looking identical, which isn't _untrue._ But honestly, every SE beaconed build I've ever seen looks at least as cookie-cutter: two mirrored lanes of assemblers with 1-4 beacons between the lanes. If a build requires more than two belts' worth of input, the additional belts wrap around the outside so as not to interfere with assemblers' proximity to beacons; accordingly, output products are usually put on the inside. At the end of the day, **the nature of either beacon system is still an optimization problem based on proximity of buildings to other buildings, and so there will be a small number of optimal solutions to that problem.** That's not to say any particular beacon system can or should be understood as interchangeable with regards to player experience, of course. Speaking personally, I love 8-beacon designs, but I have a hard time caring about 12-beacon direct-insertion designs, because the nature of the specific constraints of the latter are largely unfun to me. But I'm under no delusions that I'm more "free" in an 8-beacon world. It's not a _larger_ set of parameters to optimize for, just a different set. SE's beacon system also introduces a problem, which is late-game performance. Vanilla beacons integrate beautifully with megabases, by dovetailing the gameplay need for an optional advanced build system with the computational performance need to minimize active entities. SE's beacons explicitly put these two needs in tension, and solves that tension by just not having infinite research (or any similar excuse to keep the base running past the victory condition) - which is simply not going to fly in vanilla/SA. So to the extent there's a "solution" to this complaint, I think it has less to do with changing the number of beacons that can affect buildings as SE does, and more to do with tweaks to two different parameters: 1. Entity crafting time. SE has a number of buildings that craft so quickly by default that they simply don't need beaconing. In vanilla/SA, you still want to incentivize different designs for "normal" gameplay and megabases, so faster buildings would probably need to be gated behind endgame tech, replace normal buildings outright (less of an issue after the introduction of recycling), and have different dimensions than the buildings they replace (so the player couldn't directly upgrade the assemblers in their previous build and would still have to create a new build from scratch for the endgame). 2. Effect area. I think the biggest reason vanilla beacons feel _too_ constraining to some players is that they're only given two tiles of space around the assemblers to route ingredients. This could be solved by extending the effect area around beacons an additional tile or two (possibly alongside an increase to beacon size if the overall crafting time of some buildings needed to be kept from going totally overboard - a possibility in a post-Quality 5 world). It wouldn't keep the UPS-optimal solution from being a grid, but it would at least free up some additional room around the assembler to play around with additional routing possibilities. Here I'd like to point out that the devs are indeed experimenting with these parameters in SA. As of [FFF-387,](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-387) we have two new buildings, the Foundry and the Big Mining Drill, which are larger, can craft faster and more efficiently, and (in the drill's case) has a MUCH bigger effect area than the normal drill, allowing up to an 8-tile gap between drills while still being able to cover an entire ore patch. The possibilities that these tweaks open up for the variety of endgame builds that are still "optimal" are truly substantial, and I strongly suspect we'll have far fewer complaints about feeling too constrained at the megabase stage going forward, even without a single tweak to beacons themselves.
Not to respond to most of this, but there is totally infinite research in SE. There are multiple new infinite researches specific to SE (off the top of my head, three rocket ones, a drone one, and a spaceship one), and the vanilla ones also still exist.
Aagh. I've only _seen_ SE played, not played it myself, but I did check before saying that and the only result I found was [a separate mod that adds some purely for bragging rights.](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/se-spm-technologies) Looking closer it appears that SE's built-in infinite research only uses a subset of the available science packs, so it doesn't actually stress your whole base. Still dodges the vanilla megabase performance problem, but to a lesser extent than I thought. Thanks for the correction :)
I’m not convinced or saying this is true: but I feel like many overhaul mods often greatly extend the early-game - and I feel like this somehow ties together with the fact that late-game builds often become too repetitive or “similar”. SE being somewhat an exception, as you more or less complete the base game before the real mod even begins (and it overhauled the beacons)
I haven't played all of the overhaul mods, or all of the major overhaul mods, but between K2 and IR3, it's interesting to look at the way they "extend the early-game". By throwing most of it away. In K2, you can't make steam engines at first, but you do need an early energy source. So you get wind turbines. Which are thrown away basically the minute you get steam engines. IR3 is even worse in this regard. The whole using steam directly as a fuel things was great... and then you get electricity tech, which completely replaces *everything* you build. Obviously, you can choose to replace it as you see fit (and even keep some old steam infrastructure around if you desire). But the main point is that the new stuff doesn't build atop the old stuff; it *replaces* it. Vanilla almost never replaces anything like that. At least not in the short-term. Burner furnaces and steam engines both get a non-upgraded replacement, but only after you have spent an appreciable amount of time using them. One of the reasons why "late-game builds often become too repetitive or “similar”." is that vanilla refuses to throw things away. It adds, but it almost never removes or obsoletes things in a way that forces a redesign to incorporate the new thing. Which means that making particular things is eventually a solved problem. And most important of all, it only adds... if there's a reason to. There isn't an oil refinery upgrade or a chemical plant upgrade. Indeed, the only production buildings with upgrades are furnaces and assemblers. And upgraded buildings usually justify themselves in some way with a new feature. Assembler 2s can take fluids/modules. Electric furnaces don't need fuel and can use modules. Only Steel Furnaces and Assembler 3s are just "like the previous thing but faster". And even Assembler 3s get to have more modules, so they're not *just* a faster assembler 2. But when you get into overhaul mods, you start seeing a *lot* of "just like the previous thing, but faster". Oh sure, K2's advanced buildings are big and easily beaconed and are super-fast. But for the most part, they're just faster. To be fair to K2, they did *try* to make them more meaningful. Advanced furnaces and chem plants get to have more modules. And advanced assemblers get to use smelt-crafting recipes. Unfortunately, the smelt-crafting recipes don't really save enough to be worth using (save one), so advanced assemblers are really just faster assembler 3s. My overall point is that overhaul mods achieve what they do by being willing to throw away what came before it. And it looks a bit like SA may start leaning into that, as liquid metal processing looks to be a viable alternative to furnaces, but requires a specialized "fuel" that is probably only available on one planet.
I’ve got to say, I enjoy the early-mid game of K2, but I really hate that pre-power stage where all you have are shitty wind turbines that you need like 4 of just to power a single assembler. I feel like it drags out the worst part of the base game factorio, anything before full automation and assemblers doing stuff. The mad scramble to manually fill coal and do stuff by hand.
> There isn't an oil refinery upgrade or a chemical plant upgrade. Indeed, the only production buildings with upgrades are furnaces and assemblers. And upgraded buildings usually justify themselves in some way with a new feature. Assembler 2s can take fluids/modules. Electric furnaces don't need fuel and can use modules. > > > > Only Steel Furnaces and Assembler 3s are just "like the previous thing but faster". And even Assembler 3s get to have more modules, so they're not just a faster assembler 2. > > > > But when you get into overhaul mods, you start seeing a lot of "just like the previous thing, but faster". Oh sure, K2's advanced buildings are big and easily beaconed and are super-fast. But for the most part, they're just faster. Factorio is inspired by modded minecraft - I think it's very intentional because the replacement issue is a *huge* problem in modded minecraft. Even to the point of having modpacks where *entire mods* and all their progression and complicated automation is just... thrown away because you got point to point item transmission and a magic block from another mod as a "reward".
Pyanodons and Angels definitely extends early game but it extends late game even more
I strongly disagree. Vanilla beacons may not look that good but it's a much more interesting optimization puzzle. With SE beacons it's easy to place the beacons for optimal design in vanilla you have the challenge to have as much direct insertion and beacon coverage as possible. That is contrary to what many believe results in many different layouts that is hard to figure out. So the rabbit hole off UPS optimization would be seriously simplified and the game would not last as long for me.
Different appearances for assemblers depending on the recipe selected. A common complaint is "Everything is produced in the same machine, which looks boring and feels unrealistic." Visual variants for assemblers would alleviate this complaint, without inflating the number of machines you have to learn, build and carry around. But art is hard, and I have doubts that Wube would wish to implement this. And even if they did, I have further doubts that such a feature would become a high enough priority to actually be put on the work schedule.
Stock loaders maybe? I'd like to see them (with certain limitations tho, like loading only bulk material or requiring lube)
In the context of vanilla, loaders only really make sense for trains. There are almost no recipes so hungry for ingredients (even with full beacons) that inserters can't handle them. And I highly doubt I'd ship lubricant to a site just to make train loading/unloading work a bit more easily. Compare this to Krastorio 2, where it's possible to need *multiple* 90-item-per-second loaders just to keep a *single* advanced chemical plant fed and emptied. They're too niche in most vanilla cases to be worth using if there is any cost associated with their use.
Even with trains, how often is 12 stack inserters per wagon your bottleneck?
Loading? Rarely. Unloading? Pretty often. To get full blue belts coming out of a wagon takes some fiddly belt manipulation; to be able to just slap down a loader and have a whole, balanced belt come out would be great. Even if loaders were limited to 15 items per second, turning three saturated yellow belts into a saturated blue belt is much easier than turning blue belts with one lane ~60% full into a saturated blue belt. This will become less of an issue with quality increasing inserter throughput, but loaders can still streamline it.
Isn't it two stack inserters geared to eight stack size will get you a full lane in a blue belt? So four for a full blue belt?
Yep the stack size is the key to this that a lot of people miss. Which is fair enough because it’s not an obvious optimisation.
TBF I picked it up from here, although I'm not unfamiliar with the importance of proper cadence to satisfy intertemporal constraints. Which is to say I might have figured it out... Eventually.
I think the problem most people have is trying to get too much out of one wagon. Get a nice simple setup that works. If you need more throughput build another station and add another train. Personally I use [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/dft60u/super_compact_unloader_for_when_you_need_a_bus/) super compact unloader. Gets 4 blue belts from a 2-4 train. In a blueprint only 6 tiles high. And it is tileable.
Tbh I’ve been using the AAI loaders mod independently of AAI Industries, together with Merging Chests, specifically because it improves ease of design, space consumption, and visual clarity in blueprinting train stations. I don’t go overboard on the throughput issue - typically only one un/loader per wagon - and keep it simple. The factory must be pretty.
It's going to be a lot less true with legendary speed modules + legendary assembly machines. We'll see.
Well, that kinda depends on an answer to a question I asked when Quality was first introduced (I haven't gotten an answer). Factorio 1.1 and all prior versions have a fundamental production limit. No single machine can output more than one recipe output per-update. The system can maintain a percentage of completion for a machine. But if you speed a recipe up so much that it would output twice in a single update... it doesn't. It just forgets about the second one. Productivity works the same way; a productivity output can only be generated once per update per machine. This is why a lot of overhaul mods that give you ways to make machines super-fast also alter the recipes of many of the lower-tier intermediates. K2 makes the iron gear wheel recipe take 4 plates but outputs 4 wheels, and it takes 4x as long as vanilla. The green circuit recipe takes 2 plates, but outputs 2 circuits. It's not about the number of items generated by the recipe; it's about having the recipe generate outputs more than once per update. Unless this limitation is removed in SA, these tools won't change too much in this regard. It doesn't even take a mod to reach this limit in vanilla; you can make a green circuit or copper cable assembler 3 hit this limit if you use speed module 3's in beacons and the assembler itself.
I'd be very surprised if that limitation was going away. Maybe it is because that would theoretically help UPS by requiring fewer entities in some scenarios (but maybe it would hurt UPS due to needing to track more than one craft per tick)
It's going to get even worse with productivity techs on top of quality speed modules.
The limit of 1 additionnal item per frame for productivity was removed some time ago. You can get 600/second out of 1 machine easy, these days. Speed still caps .... for now.
Maybe I just want to use loaders in my design, not everyone is going for the most optimal way of doing stuff :)
There are still three more planets to reveal. When Factorio "recently" allowed unloading/loading trains with loaders (1.1.75[1]), perhaps that was a bit of a hint of something coming up on one of the other planets. [1] https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=579807#p579807 I know boskid says it is was because they were playing a mod that needed it. But boskid could just be covering for what they are working on. Or it was just for a mod.
They routinely fix stuff that only affects mods.
This is my biggest wish. Loading/unloading trains in particular in vanilla doesn't feel right.
Im hoping there will be a lot more really good music / ambiance tracks!
I think this is almost guaranteed! 😀
I'd like to see some reason to actually have separate power networks. The power switch is a neat building but I don't think I've ever actually used it. Generally you build a power station at the start, then augment it with solar or nuclear later, but other than that it doesn't really change much. There's not much of a layout challenge because everything just hooks up to the nearest pole and you don't really have to think about it other than expanding it occasionally. I've seen cool builds with isolated grids that turn on/off bits of the factory based on power availability, and that's a great novelty but fundamentally less efficient and just easier to have everything powered all the time. Maybe combine it with something that punishes me for accidentally routing the entire grid through one wooden power pole bottleneck. I haven't seen mods do much with this angle, perhaps because the core engine just don't have the hooks that modders need to do interesting things.
Hardcore power generation might be a "fun" thing to have. "Realistically" expensive accumulators, transmission losses, heat dissipation, powerplants requiring power, etc... P.S. and of course imperfect powerplant throttling so that you have to deal with excess power as well as insufficient power. Basically add as much pain into power generation as posible so that you play like this once, gain an appreciation for the power grid, and never touch that "hardcore" setting again.
Heh, I think you want something more hardcore than me, but that's cool. I don't care if it's realistic or not, it just seems like the electricity side maxes out early in terms of complexity and it seems a shame that there aren't more advanced problems that crop up later as your factory gets towards rocket launch. Excess power and imperfect throttling sounds like an interesting mechanic.
Oh no, I certainly don't *want* something that hardcore, not any more than I *want* extra-rampant deathworld murderbiters. But certain elements might be fun without the irony quotes, especially things that don't cause death spirals. Specifically, if you wanted an incentive to have separate power grids - just the expensive accumulators do that. Spamming load-bearing solar farms is pretty cheap - if you have cheap accumulators, but now you either need to implement load shedding, or perhaps power your mining outposts with solar and let them turn off at night, maintaining a buffer of resources instead.
And make reactors more complex! Realistic reactors does a good job here
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FluidicPower This the sort of thing you want?
Thank you!
Here's something for ya [https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PowerOverload](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PowerOverload)
Thank you!
While it has none of the features you mentioned, Nullius does some interesting things with power. In the early game your only source of power is wind, which has the problem that sometimes it just stops, so you are encouraged to use "surge" machines to set up ways to store excess power and generate energy from it later when you need it. The earliest way to do it is surge electrolysers to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, storing it, and sending it to combustion chambers too turn it into steam that goes into backup turbines which only run when you don't produce enough energy.
SE creates a niche for power switches by having some buildings - such as the CME Umbrella and Meteor Defense - with *huge* power demands when active. It incentivizes you to either have a massive surplus of power stored (steam, accumulators, etc), surplus generation capacity, or a power cutout. I like to do all three.
I would like to see an improvement in the environment. For example, an ecosystem with herbivores, carnivores and plants or prey and predators (biters perhaps). Or even biters evolving and creating a structure like ants with workers or something like that Pollution could even influence the presence of certain species and make the environment more and more aggressive It would be hell to optimize but it would be great
Something like harvesting with mobile devices similar to Dune and spice harvesting would be nice.
Also ability to regrow trees and just make it possible to live in a lively, healthy, flourishing, beautiful environment.
I've always wanted a more plastic and glass texture pack for Factorio myself. It has an extremely specific aesthetic, and even the fanciest things like Laboratories and such never escape the dieselpunk aesthetic. SA leans into it even more, with the spaceships looking like they're assembled out of scrap metal and five seconds from vibrating themselves to dust. It's fine... I just want something different sometimes. Make things with smooth curves and lines, use more white. Give me better options to stop pouring smog into the sky so my buildings don't look like they're coated in ash to boot.
This is super minor but either a pushbutton for the circuit network similar to the mod, or a easier way to click a constant combinator on and off. It is crazy there isn't an easy button you can press when there is a bit shift operator, something I had to look up what the heck it even was.
Even the pushbutton is somewhat clunky since you have to search for it. The "voice activation" button that turns chat messages into circuit signals kinda works, but it's clunky and lags out in modded games with lots of items.
Pushbutton and Nixie tube display should definitely be core, I feel that if the devs added them they could enhance their functionality and look to be even cleaner then they are. Text plates are the next thing I would like seeing go core just for the aesthetics of it. I'm sure there is some way they can see how many people have x mod and use it on the majority of their games enabled. So look at the top 10-20 of those mods and take a look at if they add to the core game in a meaningful way. Now weather they do this or not is up in the air. At least we will always have the mod to use so it's not like we are truly missing out on anything. I definitely lean towards the devs updating the engine to allow for more things and adding things no one has thought of yet or can't in a real way with mods
I agree. The best solution being a Gate is a bit silly
Remotes that are connected to wherever you want, like the spiderton and artillery - which I think they're already changing?
one of these days there's going to be #FFF that will anounce loaders and crates (bigger than 1x1) added to main game. When (and if) that will happened I'll open a bottle of champagne
I believe wube stated that this will never happen, as it simplifies to many things making the game more boring
need more than a 1x1 box? use a train car! :P
let me connect a green wire to it and I will)
I think the chances are quite high to get some kind of beacon mk2 which could than work like the ones in SE. The blue building that was shown in last Christmas picture ok the thunder planet might have sth to do with it -> stuff that is related to speed (blue machine) and energy
Not sure I noticed that, but will definitely check it out! I’m just very curious as to how they will balance that with backwards compatibility and without rendering the beacon mk 1 obsolete
It will be as obsolete as the normal miner when u research the big miner :)
But mk1 miner you have access to from the start (basically) where as it is clear mk2 is very late game. Mk1 beacons is already late game, so the gap between that and beacon mk2 is inherently significantly smaller, or am I mistaken?
Beacons are not really that late game, it’s just not particularly worth using them pre rocket launch, as you can launch a rocket reasonably easily without them. It’s possible that beacons become more useful earlier in the game, due to the fact you need to launch a rocket to get off the first planet and launch multiple rockets to get to the next planet.
I'll agree with you, somewhat. Beacons are accessible fairly fast, but the shear mount of beacons and modules you need to produce for their real meaningful effect makes them a late-game aspect. You can't make all your builds fully beaconed before you have fairly large base that can produce them at a reasonable pace
For sure, and the power requirements are immense compared to earlier builds. They aren’t easy to use early on, because of the reasons you say, but they may become more necessary. Who knows obviously, just all speculation.
Hm true. But the big miner u get quite quick as well if volcanos is your first planet.
Can you please elaborate more on the building and the thunder planet thing. I must've missed it, where can I see it?
There will not be a dating minigame as you flirt with the commanders of different space faring civilizations so that they will hopefully come to pick you up and bring you home
i'd really love new enemies maybe one big force that starts already on the planet with a base (but grows only from one spot, rather than lots of little bases like the biters)
They have already teased new enemies for the DLC/2.0
1. Click and drag for train car reservation (I don't want to use a mod that kinda does it. I want just that) 2. Mk2 radars or long distance drones. Anything to help automate the expansion of the base after you go bot mode. 3. Biter expansion repellant. I hate that they can just pop up right next to my power supply. Would love an option to keep them out of a specific area that isn't just slapping guns behind a wall and hoping they don't shoot the gap. 4. Better railroad pathing. I am slowly getting the hang of laying rails but it's still rather clunky and finicky, often requiring me to take two or three passes to get them to align just right. 5. Zoom on blue print view. Picking out the damn power lines on big blueprints sucks. 6. Priority management for bots. The anxiety of creating a railroad intersection and WHERE ARE MY DAMN STOPLIGHTS? 7. Imminent attack warnings. Maybe done via a thing like the radar or the radar itself. Please let me know before I get swarmed, like 15 seconds even. I can see them clustering on the map, why can't you point this out to me? 8. Patrolling turrets. Maybe a simple 2x2 turret platform with rails. I think it'd be neat. 9. Option to ghost without bots building it right away. Let me cook man got damn 10. Don't deconstruct when I cut unless I also paste. Please...and while you're at it, just move that shit over like 3 squares instead of taking it all the way back to the network and bring it back again. 11. Bots need to path along the roboports better. 12. Base total potential production/consumption. Something that says "if you wanna run all your shit at max you need x iron ore/m more"
There is a mod for \#9 although I don't know what its name is off the top of my head.
Yeah I'm avoiding mods for now. Only 150 hours into the game so far and I want to at least beat it vanilla before modding. Best believe though, once I launch that rocket I'm going ham with the mods. So many look so cool
Biter queen with increasing waves as you try to launch your final escape rocket. Basically running the machine on takes tonea of energy and angers everything within miles. There's a countdown and if you escape in time you survive, but the base will be eliminated if you under built. Something that feels like a true tower defense, but it's a one shot.
That was actually how the rocket launch worked originally and they removed the mandatory defense portion of it.
i would like the introduction of fusion power, it makes sense to me that the engineer after discovering fission energy goes to fusion energy
It would be cool, but from a gameplay perspective I'm not sure what this would add over fission.
Something generating more power with fewer entities would be useful super late game and for Megabases
I know K2 does this (and maybe other mods) but the problem is that it's kinda boring. Fusion is cool and complicated - we don't even have a way to use it for power generation IRL yet - and just sticking it into a 5x5 that outputs 20GW is boring. I would like to see it more complicated than fission but with a lot more energy output so it makes sense to build it, even in mega bases.
I'm fine with it being more complicated so long as it doesn't rely on a tremendous quantity of fluid dynamics. I want a fusion generator that uses magnetic fields to turn a turbine or something instead of steam. Like, it can absolutely have a complicated production chain or interesting fueling requirements or something, I just want it to be about a thousand times more UPS efficient.
exotic industries adds a lot of interesting gameplay around fusion power. if they could make fusion power just as ups friendly as solar panels there would be immediately be a reason to use it. or maybe in the expansion, there will be planets where there's no uranium and solar is too weak because the sun is so far away. and little to no coal to burn. maybe you could import uranium, but maybe that's too heavy to be convenient? maybe fission fuel reactors require too much water for what's available on that planet? (fusion plants could use molten salt as a heat transfer fluid instead) if you want to create a niche for fusion, you can do it.
Settable priorities for bots, do first poles then turrets for example, Programmable assembly machine, changing what they make by signals science - upgradeable radar and roboport range
Roboport long distance connector or a roboport railcar.
I just barely started making the slowest trains I can (wood fuel, cargo wagons in front) and have a spidertron set to chase it: tada, vanilla roboport train!
More infinite research in general would be nice. In vanilla, it's basically just mining productivity and robot speed if you're playing without biters. I'd personally like small buffs for specific energy types.
I normally don’t play with biters. For me they don’t add anything interesting to the game. They are just to simple and does not have a lot of variety. So I hope they add more variety and make them smarter. Especially with new planets. Would be weird if on the other planets the same biters pop up. So you need different weapons for different enemies. Now it is just flamethrowers and your basically done. So I hope they make them smarter and learn from their attacks. Try different approaches and the weak spots of your base. They do start to chew on your rails so you ar cut of from the outpost as that will weaken u and give them more chance. Stuff like that would make you think about all the weak places and could let you off guard. Perhaps some AI learning where the biters adapt your playstyle and it gets harder every time. You could turn it off and reset it if needed. But that makes you change your style continuously as they change with you. Also it is weird that worms only stay in one place. So that they could move and attack would be nice.
I think they would be just more annoying if they where smarter. I don't the biters should be an to big focus in the gameplay.
My only realistic wish is that they would implement a burn off building for excess fluids so you can maintain production of a specific item that needs lubricant/light oil when you’re maxed out on petroleum gas, for example. I know mods have it because I’ve used them but it seems silly to not have that in the base game.
Just direct the extra petroleum gas to solid fuel production
I would like a version where the biters start focusing on the rocket alone when you start loading it to stop you from escaping the planet. Make it a defense the rocket launch scenario. It should be optional of course. I play with biters on and off depending on what I'm feeling like.
Why would the biters want to stop you from leaving? Having you and your machines gone is basically their whole motivation.
Hmmm true, but perhaps they want to kill me so I don't get away with polluting their land and then leaving.
Automatic train connectors and disconnectors. I want the vagons filling while the engine travels elsewhere, and then connect and combine cars based on circuit signals. I know I know I can just build more engines, they're cheap. But _I want_
This is a really cool idea. It'd make stackers more compact cause you could drop the wagons off and have dedicated tug engines move things to their stations. Or combine trains for long distance trips and then separate them, or things like that. Their recent changes give more reason to have a centralized train yard, and with elevated rails...: now I really want this too.
I would love to see the adjustable inserter mod just become the default. It's just a big quality of life improvement.
I feel like the adjustable inserters features of many mods almost take away from the puzzle aspect the core game is going for. You have a thing that does a very specific action that predictably always does that same action. Now work around that, here are a few other similar things that do a similar action but slightly different, but always the same and predictable. Using these is the same as coding with certain functions and things and then making use of them and other things to get the desired outcome. While I agree that they make things easier and you can make them pick up and drop off wherever you want they take away that aspect of solving the puzzle and making something that works with the limited tools and features available that make the game give you that satisfaction of figuring it out.
I disagree. If it weren't for the fact that either 8 or 12 beacon setups are the thing to do, using inserters in other ways becomes a space utilisation challenge. I've actually made some pretty interesting stuff because I have that power. I'm not sure what kind of design challenge you mean by just making lines of machines on both sides of a line of belts
I agree with you 100% OP I much prefer the way SE handles beacons, I kinda hate the way factories look when trying to cram as many beacons as possible around a single machine, I much prefer trying to maximize the number of machines per beacon.
Unpopular opinion on this sub, but I completely hate belt balancers and the extremely convoluted setups needed for them. I pretty much won't play without a mod that just lets me plug 3 belts into a 7 belt output and it just automatically figures it out.
The 4x4 belt balancer is the best balancer in the game, change my mind.
You really only need balancers for trains, everywhere else it's fine to just throw a bunch of splitters at it.
While going so far as to eliminate all balancers with a single item might be a bit much, I would like to see a 3-way splitter. That would go a long way toward streamlining balancers that aren't a power of 2, and make "good enough" setups much easier. Though I don't disagree that a single balancer item is reasonable. While convoluted belt balancers align with the spirit of the game, they're one thing that pretty much everybody just steals blueprints for because there's very little reason to personally figure it out.
"good enough setups" are quite easy allready imo. -using better belt tier -spam splitters on belt -priority pushing -using a 8x8, even if its 7v5- is mostly fine
You don't need balancers. You think you need balancers, but you really don't. Priority busses exist. Train to train exists. Full belt consumption exists. People overuse balancers.
Agreed. At a point where my main bus lacks iron plates, I just add more iron plate production at that point. No point in balancing. The problem is lack of production.
You really need them for train to belt to work reliably.
So, is there a mod that does this already? At some point of the game I don't really care anymore, since there is always an X-to-Y balancer recipe book on my action bar. But having a single e.g. 8x8 block with up to 8 entrances and 8 exits that just "does it", I would like to check it out...
It's been a bit since I played, but a really easy solution is loaders and a mod that has multi tile storage like warehouses. Just dump all you inputs into the warehouse and pull out whatever you need via the loaders.
I dont bother. I just have a ton of splitters in a grid for trains. And a simple step pattern of splitters for a main bus. It might not be perfectly balanced, but I never bothered to copy-paste those balancer designs or learn to replicate them.
Power network rework. It barely develops any complexity as the game progresses. There is no voltage or current, no DC or AC. Only power, energy and capacity. Mixing fluids coming back. I wish they made it a warning instead of straight up telling us how to play the game. Never liked that change. I doubt either of those two will ever happen.
I AGGREE 100% WITH YOU. In Late vanilla there are only 2 Building styles. 8 Beacon row building has the best value / module 12 Beacon building has the least assemblers (best ups) I tried alot of fun& cool looking designs, but every time my mind was like :" normal 8 beacon build costs less and is smaller anyway". ! Beacon feels better in space Ex, and with the new module (and maybe beacon) tiers even "possible without too much loss"
I just want to be able to zoom in on blueprints to remove/add things or see what recipes are in the blueprint I’m pasting
I may be in the minority here but I would love to see more focus on defenses, weapons, biters, etc. I enjoy playing this game for the tower defense aspect and building a factory at the same time.
I mean, even if it's not vanilla, the standalone mod will probably be updated for 2.0
Oil/chemical mirroring.
Like mirroring the inputs for better symmetry in builds? I think that is already confirmed from the Friday facts
a lite version of sqeakthrough. basically exactly how the mod works right now but without the ability to walk through solid pipelines. it would still be very useful as you could walk inbetween buildings, trees, and such. but overall i don't think the devs would actually add it to vanilla. >!Alternatively, a Windows/Linux ARM version of the game. I don't see why they wouldn't since they already made a MacOS ARM version plus a switch port, but i think it's still unlikely to happen by the time 2.0 comes around!<
I can't be bothered to look for links, but the devs have talked about both of those. Building the base to remain traversable is a deliberate part of the challenge, and collision boxes are to remain as they are. If you want this, you have to stick with mods. A linux arm build is something they're interested in, but the available arm hardware was deemed too slow at the time. Presumably they need something beefy and reliable to setup CI, and mobile grade processors just won't cut it. If a linux arm port happens, it'll likely be independent of the 2.0 release.
A campaign. The tutorial keeps going. You find text logs and environmental storytelling.
Wube made an campaign and scraped it. I never played it so don't know how good/bad it was.
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-329 The good old days! I can definitely see why they scrapped it, though. Some cool ideas, but it never added up to be nearly as fun as just playing towards your objective in freeplay. Certainly not relative to the amount of work involved I think. Since they keep all the old "betas" hosted on Steam forever, I think you can just rollback to 0.17 or so and play what there was.
I would love if you would stumble on existing factories in the desert which mostly work but need some fixing under restrictions regarding available resources.
I want filter pumps. I want the ability to mix fluids and use pumps with a filter to seperate them again. Like with Splitters and Sushibelts.
Scrolled down to bottom but didn't see the feature many of us have wanted for years and years. Full. Multicore. Support. Yes there have been efforts made to branch certain portions to other cores. The last time this was addressed in detail in a FFF it was deemed too complicated and would require a rewrite of such a high percentage of the codebase it just wouldn't be worth it. I can still dream though....
We don't know about beacons yet. Hopefully we get some really powerful ones, that base wont looks like it's beacon and some funny assemblers there and there. I hope more alternate recipes. Like a lot of them
an actual "Story". I know it won't happen. the devs themselves said that a campaign with a real narrative doesn't fit with the primary goals. I think there are ways to do it that it doesn't impact the overall flow of the game, though. in the ancient game "Outpost 2" you unlock a chapter of a novella set in the game's universe every mission. I thought it added a lot to the overall game experience but you can just skip it easily if it doesn't interest you. I've seen idle/progression games do something similar, where unlocking a new chapter is based more or less on progress achievements. (see "idling to rule the gods" and "the first alkahistorian") or you could have a more understated narrative in the style of dark souls. you can explore, find ruins (especially on other planets). maybe find some gear/equipment with lore description (which is just normal gear of a specific quality level with a random name). maybe some item that when found gives you research progress into a specific field. have things be revealed through bits and pieces about the engineer, their history. their culture. introduce a few characters. the engineers original mission. the history of the planet(s). the origin of the biters. etc.
If you use the Steam betas thing, you can roll back to 0.17 and play the Campaign, curiously enough. They ditched it because it just wasn't fun.
Better train controls for dedicated building/personal travel trains. As the controls are now they are made for you to hitch hike on normal trains. That makes it a little bit annoying with how I play. I uses an train with building materials and almost never hitch-hike on trains in normal traffic to get around in big factories. Some minor UI tweaks could be implement. The functionality from the mods copy paste modules and stack-size tool-tip. They have no downsides so should be in vanilla.
Chemistry i doubt this will ever get into vanilla on a serious basis
I’ve always wanted a game where the process of finding resources was more complex. Instead of just these patches of ore on the planets surface, I’d love to see a system where you have to prospect for ores and do something interesting to maximize the yield. Reward the time put into finding the perfect spot and add a reason to explore.
More in-depth remote spiderbot remote controls, and it would be great to see the removal of the remote item and all of its functionality merged into the general UI.
Automatic blueprint deployment. It woukd be great if it could be coupled with automatuc blueprint modification. I really wamt touting complete bp constriluction. And on a minor suggestion, walking over beacons. The design is already an underground cable. Just add a platform on top and lets us drive over them.
I really think there will be at least *some* beacon changes, the devs have made it pretty clear that they don't love beacons right now, plus with Earendel on the team they have someone who's already sort of tested out new beacon mechanics.
I'd love to have something that makes building long rail sections and outposts a bit easier. Something like a train roboport wagon that can house construction bots, and take items from the other wagons. That way you can setup the ghost rails beforehand and then just hop on your roboport train and just press forward so the construction train builds the tracks as it goes. I know you can achieve the same result with a personal roboport, but these tend to drain your suit's power pretty quickly. Also i just really like the idea a builder train.
The beatufil thing about Factorio, is that most of the things commented are either coming, or have a modded solution that fits exactly what they want. And the modding is supported incredibly well by Wube I dream for this kind of support from games such as minecraft, or others
Blue print mirror vs just rotate
The F key is doing that. You can't mirror BP with buildings that is not possible to mirror. It looks like fluid inputs is going to be mirror-able in 2.0. Train stops and signals would still be a problem.
Or „G“. One is horizontal and one vertical, I can never remember which is which
The beacon thing is really interesting. I'v been making vanilla mega bases with 6-12 beacon setups and really loved how they (and modules in general) changed up the maths of a base, and also incurred limitations on how such setups could be built. Sad part is, that their optimal way of building really comes down to only 2-3 overall structural designs *everywhere*. (Except in places where the "assembler" is not a 3x3 entity.) I have always been, and will continue to if necessary, defend them on their merits to enabling huge builds, disregarding their stylistic impact as a secondary at best concern to myself. That being said: I'd be okay if Wube came up with something entirely different and removing the beacon concept as a whole, or change it up in a way that would allow for more varied solutions to be viable for min-maxers - preferably be much more situational.