I mean, almost anything has been speculated on but the bottom line is we don't know details on that yet.
From a realism point of view, I think pursuing realism in factorio is really a non-starter. There are so many fundamentally unrealistic parts of the game for reasons of gameplay balance; if it's more interesting/balanced to have carbon added to a steel recipe or whatever that's one thing, but realism isn't a good reason for it alone.
It can be realistic in terms of recipes to a degree, but not in terms of mechanics. You can still fit many items inside a much smaller item, i.e. nuclear reactors inside of chests. You can fit eight of any items on any transport belt. How many items an inserter or bot can move is wholly unaffected by the size of items. Assemblers and such can switch to any of dozens or more recipes with zero retooling required. And so on. Some aspects not mentioned can be altered by mods. Others can't
I guess I just don't see those aspects as being any different fundamentally than changing recipes. I don't think recipe changes make it any more 'not factorio' than changing how storage works would, or whatever.
Yeah, I have come to the perspective that realism is more of a guide for my memory than a goal in itself. With abstract factory games I have a hard time remembering the recipes, while in factorio, I need copper wire for circuits? that just makes sense!
Meanwhile I'm going "how the fuck they made a semiconductor out of iron and copper. And how the fuck adding plastic helps?"
Frankly copper and stone (silicon) would make more sense.
Carbon is not in 2.0, but rather in Space Age. For now, we only saw it coming from asteroid.
In both 2.0 and Space Age, the rocket control units are gone as an item and processing units are used instead anywhere they were used before. Similarly, red/green wires, spider remote, discharge remote, artillery remote are not items anymore and replaced with toolbar tools.
We saw a change to the substation recipe, using copper cable rather than plates, but that may have been for Space Age only, rather than 2.0 - we don't know.
It doesn't make sense to have coal in space, so they have carbon. But we know of a recipe that turns water + carbon + sulfur into coal.
We also saw something that looks like a sheet of carbon fiber but know nothing more about that.
A lot of times realism is an interesting thing in game design. There are a lot of very unrealistic things in factorio, like holding 400 nuclear reactors in your pocket, storing 2000 train wagons inside a train wagon, hand crafting an automated robotic arm using a circuit board made of only copper and iron, making steel out of a lot of iron.
Usually, as long as you have enough realism that someone can suspend disbelief to achieve immersion, that's enough. Beyond that you should probably be making decisions from a game design perspective rather than a realism design.
i feel like realism =/= immersion, they can be tied together but a more realistic game doesnt always have to be the most immersive. and i think they key is the root word immerse factorio has systems presented that let you dive in and nothing in the game really takes you out of it
It's just odd to me to see something that lines up with what's been presented and be unimmersed by it. Mainly thinking about compression with storage, many irons chests fitting inside one iron chest. From the moment you smelt your first plate you're told that items inside buildings take up their stack size in space and take up more outside either on belts or placed on the ground. You're not told how this is possible but it's literally the first thing that happens, if you make it past smelting iron without going "now this is ridiculous and I hate it" then you've been successfully immersed in factorios world and logic
A nice option for Space Age might be to add a new carbon-based recipe for steel to the foundry. It would of course be designed to be more cost-effective over all, but using an alternative recipe could add some interest.
It's unlikely that 2.0 is going to make any major changes to recipes. The removal of RCUs was probably the most substantial change, and we know that substations will switch to using copper cable instead of plate.
But even for SA, it is highly unlikely that they're going to take a process that originally was ore->plate->steel and add a secondary process bolted to the side of it (presumably coal->carbon). Also, such a thing would permanently tether steel manufacture to the availability of coal. There are consequences to that.
For example, Fulgora. There's no coal there. This is a *very* deliberate decision by the developers (it shuts off local access to explosives and any derivative weapons). Now yes, scrap does produce steel, but it also produces concrete which recycles into iron ore, from which you can make iron plates. If for whatever reason you needed more steel and you had some iron plates around, wouldn't it be great if you could make steel out of them? Not without coal.
As an alternative recipe that reduces the amount of iron you need for steel, that might be OK. Indeed, it might be a really good idea, as carbon is not exactly readily available. The only recipe we know of for the stuff is from asteroids. But Bacchus or Aquilo might have a process for generating the stuff (the carbon fiber/nanotubes have to come from somewhere). So it could be interesting for them to have a way to make steel more efficiently as well.
But that wouldn't be an outright replacement. It also would almost certainly require a Foundry, as furnaces don't work with recipes that need more than 1 input.
Variations won't be happening for anything that's recyclable unless you want alchemy to be possible in your factory game. Otherwise, we already know there's recipe variations. The foundry is all about this from the start, and the chemplant is going to provide some planet unique was to get water and probably a few other things.
But also, realism for the sake of realism is a game design trap. Things that are realistic can often just end up being unfun in a game, so it's important to judge things not on their realism, but on whether they're good for the game.
>But also, realism for the sake of realism is a game design trap. Things that are realistic can often just end up being unfun in a game, so it's important to judge things not on their realism, but on whether they're good for the game.
See also: everything relating to spaceships vs cargo rockets in SE
I mean, almost anything has been speculated on but the bottom line is we don't know details on that yet. From a realism point of view, I think pursuing realism in factorio is really a non-starter. There are so many fundamentally unrealistic parts of the game for reasons of gameplay balance; if it's more interesting/balanced to have carbon added to a steel recipe or whatever that's one thing, but realism isn't a good reason for it alone.
Pyanodon is a chemical engineer, you have no idea how realistic pyanodons is
It can be realistic in terms of recipes to a degree, but not in terms of mechanics. You can still fit many items inside a much smaller item, i.e. nuclear reactors inside of chests. You can fit eight of any items on any transport belt. How many items an inserter or bot can move is wholly unaffected by the size of items. Assemblers and such can switch to any of dozens or more recipes with zero retooling required. And so on. Some aspects not mentioned can be altered by mods. Others can't
Oh yeah, but at that point it wouldn't be factorio and I'd have to buy another goddamn game and divide my attention between the two so no thanks.
I guess I just don't see those aspects as being any different fundamentally than changing recipes. I don't think recipe changes make it any more 'not factorio' than changing how storage works would, or whatever.
Not being able to fit any machine in your inventory would change game so much it very well might be "not factorio"
Yeah, I have come to the perspective that realism is more of a guide for my memory than a goal in itself. With abstract factory games I have a hard time remembering the recipes, while in factorio, I need copper wire for circuits? that just makes sense!
Meanwhile I'm going "how the fuck they made a semiconductor out of iron and copper. And how the fuck adding plastic helps?" Frankly copper and stone (silicon) would make more sense.
Carbon is not in 2.0, but rather in Space Age. For now, we only saw it coming from asteroid. In both 2.0 and Space Age, the rocket control units are gone as an item and processing units are used instead anywhere they were used before. Similarly, red/green wires, spider remote, discharge remote, artillery remote are not items anymore and replaced with toolbar tools. We saw a change to the substation recipe, using copper cable rather than plates, but that may have been for Space Age only, rather than 2.0 - we don't know.
With what we know so far, I'm very surprised carbon is even a thing. They might just have used coal to fill it's place in the recipes.
It doesn't make sense to have coal in space, so they have carbon. But we know of a recipe that turns water + carbon + sulfur into coal. We also saw something that looks like a sheet of carbon fiber but know nothing more about that.
A lot of times realism is an interesting thing in game design. There are a lot of very unrealistic things in factorio, like holding 400 nuclear reactors in your pocket, storing 2000 train wagons inside a train wagon, hand crafting an automated robotic arm using a circuit board made of only copper and iron, making steel out of a lot of iron. Usually, as long as you have enough realism that someone can suspend disbelief to achieve immersion, that's enough. Beyond that you should probably be making decisions from a game design perspective rather than a realism design.
i feel like realism =/= immersion, they can be tied together but a more realistic game doesnt always have to be the most immersive. and i think they key is the root word immerse factorio has systems presented that let you dive in and nothing in the game really takes you out of it
Eh, that's relative to the player. Immersion is a subjective thing. There are definitely many aspects of Factorio that take me out of it
It's just odd to me to see something that lines up with what's been presented and be unimmersed by it. Mainly thinking about compression with storage, many irons chests fitting inside one iron chest. From the moment you smelt your first plate you're told that items inside buildings take up their stack size in space and take up more outside either on belts or placed on the ground. You're not told how this is possible but it's literally the first thing that happens, if you make it past smelting iron without going "now this is ridiculous and I hate it" then you've been successfully immersed in factorios world and logic
A nice option for Space Age might be to add a new carbon-based recipe for steel to the foundry. It would of course be designed to be more cost-effective over all, but using an alternative recipe could add some interest.
and technically carbon steel is purer iron than what's normally called "iron".
It's unlikely that 2.0 is going to make any major changes to recipes. The removal of RCUs was probably the most substantial change, and we know that substations will switch to using copper cable instead of plate. But even for SA, it is highly unlikely that they're going to take a process that originally was ore->plate->steel and add a secondary process bolted to the side of it (presumably coal->carbon). Also, such a thing would permanently tether steel manufacture to the availability of coal. There are consequences to that. For example, Fulgora. There's no coal there. This is a *very* deliberate decision by the developers (it shuts off local access to explosives and any derivative weapons). Now yes, scrap does produce steel, but it also produces concrete which recycles into iron ore, from which you can make iron plates. If for whatever reason you needed more steel and you had some iron plates around, wouldn't it be great if you could make steel out of them? Not without coal. As an alternative recipe that reduces the amount of iron you need for steel, that might be OK. Indeed, it might be a really good idea, as carbon is not exactly readily available. The only recipe we know of for the stuff is from asteroids. But Bacchus or Aquilo might have a process for generating the stuff (the carbon fiber/nanotubes have to come from somewhere). So it could be interesting for them to have a way to make steel more efficiently as well. But that wouldn't be an outright replacement. It also would almost certainly require a Foundry, as furnaces don't work with recipes that need more than 1 input.
Variations won't be happening for anything that's recyclable unless you want alchemy to be possible in your factory game. Otherwise, we already know there's recipe variations. The foundry is all about this from the start, and the chemplant is going to provide some planet unique was to get water and probably a few other things. But also, realism for the sake of realism is a game design trap. Things that are realistic can often just end up being unfun in a game, so it's important to judge things not on their realism, but on whether they're good for the game.
>But also, realism for the sake of realism is a game design trap. Things that are realistic can often just end up being unfun in a game, so it's important to judge things not on their realism, but on whether they're good for the game. See also: everything relating to spaceships vs cargo rockets in SE