Factorio - a factory building game

[Kruyurk]

Now, my biggest concern is the many other devs that already have overpriced games start copying Wube.

For Wube it's simply a dumb move, for lesser games it will be suicide. The smart developers will realize that.

But if everybody could sell their game for 35$ instead of 34.99$ the world would be a little less retarded.

 

[Demo.Graph]

I don't know how much coins it's worth, but I assure you it's well worth your dime.

Fixed.

 

[Jaedar]

Conspiracy theory:
The price is increasing on thursday, because the dlc will release at that time and it will no longer be possible to buy just the base game, only the full edition. The whole "oh no price is increasing due to inflation" is just a marketing stunt.

Spoiler

I want to believe.

 

[Ironmonk]

Finally expansion news:

Friday Facts #373 - Factorio: Space Age​

Posted by kovarex, Earendel on 2023-08-25


Hello, long time no see!
Today we are going to talk about the expansion which is called Factorio: Space Age.

(Click here for static image version)

---

What is Factorio: Space Age?kovarex​

Factorio: Space Age continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms.
Vanilla Factorio ends by launching the rocket into space, so I always expected it to be quite obvious what we are going to do next. Honestly the space platform related gameplay was actually planned a very long time ago, and we had shown a little bit in FFF-74. We had a similar kind of story with the Spidertron. Its concept was teased for the first time in FFF-120, just to be quietly abandoned and then revived 4 years later.
But as you might or might not know, the name 'WUBE' is an abbreviation of Wszystko będzie, which means something like "Everything will be done eventually". We didn't abandon the plan, we just realized it would be way too ambitious to try to fit it into the 1.0 Factorio release, so it was eventually just postponed to the expansion. In retrospect, it was clearly a good idea.

The main structure​

Instead of sending one rocket to space, you have to send many, because you need to use them to transport materials to build big space platforms in orbit. The rocket is cheaper in Space Age to not make it drag forever, but you still are expected to build bigger in preparation of what is to come.

• The space platforms are used on their own to generate space science, but mainly, they are eventually used to travel to different planets, and for automated interplanetary logistics.
• We decided to go with the approach of having a small number of predefined planets, which represent your progression through the game.
• The expansion contains 4 additional planets. Each of which has its own unique theme, resource, challenges and gameplay mechanics. Most of them also have different military targets.
• Every planet leads to production of specific science packs and its technologies.
• The order in which you exploit the planets is an impactful strategic choice.

The rewards​

Since we have a lot of new challenges, we also had to balance the set of rewards you get for each stage of the game. We have a set of cool new things in the expansion, but the player is quite omnipotent at the end of the vanila playthrough so we had to make some tough decisions.
Since the goal was to make the overall expansion experience as good as possible, we have rebalanced the tech tree. This means, that with Space Age enabled, some items that are available in vanilla are unlocked later on some planet. This specifically applies to artillery, cliff explosives (this is the masochist part of me speaking), Spidertron, best tier of modules, and some personal equipment upgrades.
Based on testing, these changes made the choice of where and when to go even more meaningful. On the other hand, space will be available sooner and there will be some nice additions available directly on Nauvis (the vanilla planet).
This implies that technically, you could just take your vanilla base, activate the expansion, and continue playing. But the best way to experience it will be to play with Space Age from start to finish.

Version 2.0 is not just about the expansion​

In the previous news about the expansion FFF-367, we declared that the content will be technically a mod taking advantage of the updated engine. What this means is that a lot of the improvements will be for all players, regardless of them having the expansion or not.
Examples of things that will be in the 2.0 update are: the ability to control train systems better, better blueprint building, better flying robot behaviour and many more. It will all be covered in more details in future FFFs.

---

The good news and the bad newskovarex​

Lets start with the (probably) bad news. Since we know where we are and what is the goal, we can start to approximate the date of releasing the expansion, which is planned to be about one year from now. It is still a long time, but at least it is getting more specific.

Current state​

In the previous post FFF-367, we declared a 7 step plan, where we were at step 4. Now we are at the end of step 5, and have started some things from step 6 already.
It has been playable from start to finish for more than a year. This means that we have already made several improvement iterations based on the playthroughs behind us.
We are doing 3 types of testing which were all very useful:

• Just playing the game on our own and contemplating how it feels.
• Office LAN party, which is also a great way to test multiplayer.
• Individual testers. We had a few outside testers who played it from start to finish and gave us detailed feedback.

The feedback led us to make different kinds of changes, for example:

• Two planets were way too repetitive and similar to Nauvis, and we had to do a complete overhaul to make them more different.
• The game was a little bit too slow and grindy, so we were speeding things up, which doesn't mean dumbing it down. The goal was to be able to finish it in non-speedrun mode in less than 80 hours for an experienced player. We were trying to keep the mechanics and just cut down on the recipe counts and costs.
• We improved many UIs related to the new (and sometimes old) parts of the game many times.

It was kind of annoying to redo so much, but based on the result and reactions, it was definitely worth it.

This means, that we have something we are happy with, is pretty stable, and we don't expect any further brutal changes to come. We have a relatively stable list of tasks to be finished both for programmers and artists, which makes us confident that we can release a polished product in about a year.

The good news​

But then there is the (hopefully) good news! From now on, we are stopping the embargo on the expansion content, and we will be publishing Friday Facts every week about all the different aspects of the expansion until release!
We will mostly show what we have done, or what we are working on. We are also looking forward to the feedback from the community which has proved useful so many times already. With the quantity of things we have, I'm confident that we won't run out of topics until the release.

---

There's a mod for thatEarendel​

A lot of people are going to make comparisons between the Space Age expansion and the Space Exploration mod. I've worked on the game design for both: On Space Age I made the first space + planets prototype builds and plus I've been involved in most of the gameplay discussions since. On Space Exploration, well it's my mod, I made it.
I think that makes me the most qualified to talk about how these two things are very different from the ground up. Sure there's some overlap in the broader topics: you go to space, you visit planets; but these similarities end up being fairly superficial when all of the decisions along the way are made with different design goals:

• Target Audience: Space Exploration is targeted at a small set of challenge-seekers, it's not for everyone by design. Space Age is targeted at all Factorio players with better approachability in mind.
• Game Length: Space Exploration is a long-form adventure designed for players to gradually uncover many interconnected challenges over 150-500 hours (or more). Space Age challenges are more streamlined and self-contained for a faster pace of 60-100 hours (rough estimate).
• Complexity: Space Exploration challenges ramp up to a very high difficulty towards the end. Some of the last challenges cannot be automated without a set of arithmetic combinators, so it is not expected that all players will be able to complete it. Space Age has a lot of different challenges but they never get too extreme and the usage of combinators is quite lightweight, so we expect that most players will be able to complete it.
• Engine Support: There are so many things that Space Exploration just can't do because it's a mod. Space Age has very different capabilities because the game engine can be made to support it. Large parts of the expansion are focused on game mechanics that just aren't possible otherwise, so the gameplay will be unique and refreshing even if you're a Space Exploration veteran.

There are many more differences that will become apparent when we look at individual features of the expansion in upcoming FFFs.

 

[HeyCheckOutHowHardICanPee]

As someone currently at the last few steps of a Space Exploration playthrough, I'm flooded with conflicting opinions considering the obvious similarities, but..

Each of which has its own unique theme, resource, challenges and gameplay mechanics. Most of them also have different military targets.

these parts sound really great, considering so far my biggest issue with Space Exploration as a mod(pack?) itself is that the planets are quite frankly only relevant in that they provide a new ore, and that is about it.

 

[Ironmonk]

I still hope they include water and flight related tech + enemies for these new planets.

Currently I'm playing with Krastorio2 and man, this mod is fucking overwhelming, too many things to do and too many bitter attacks to keep an eye on... the mod page was not kidding, this really should be played in multiplayer.

 

[Jaedar]

I'm like 200 hours into a space exploration run, going to have to try and finish it a good while before this releases. Interesting to see they took some design help from the guy who made SE.
The gif shown in the post looks glorious.

 

[Kruyurk]

The gif shown in the post looks glorious.

Thanks for pointing that out, glorious indeed.

I think I will avoid reading the FFF every week, because otherwise there would not be much left to discover when the extension releases.

 

[Caim]

A bit on robots:

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-374

I know that you are mainly looking forward to the new content, and that just quality of life improvements aren't the kind of things that make people buy the game and get excited for.


But I strongly believe, that if you want to add content, mechanics, and systems to a game, which already isn't simple, there is always a risk of just it being too much. By doing QOL improvements, we reduce the small hassles and annoyances, which effectively creates an extra mental space to enjoy more in the game. Its like cleaning your room before getting a new toy.


So to make things clear, the reason that we make and present these kind of changes is not because we don't want to make new flashy features, we just want the new stuff to be enjoyable without a burden of having too much to deal with.
But don't worry, we will show something new next week!

kovarex wants to add just a teeny little QOL update that is instead a major improvement to the fundamentals of how robots work.

Smarter robot tasks​

Logistic and construction robots have been in the game for a while, and at their core they are fairly simple entities. A logistic robot, for example, may be told to go pick up an item from a chest, and deliver it to another chest. So far so good, but in Factorio there usually is more than one item to be transferred — so what does the game do when tasked with transferring, say, 500 items from one box to another?

The Old Way​

In Factorio 1.1, the game keeps a list of all idle robots, including those hiding away in roboports, and when a task needs to be taken care of, it selects the nearest idle robot from that list. So, to transfer 500 items from a provider chest to requester, the game would find the first idle robot closest to the provider chest and task it with the transfer. This robot now has a task, so it is removed from the list of idle robots.

But we still have 499 other items to transfer (ignoring robot capacity bonus for simplicity). The logistic network simply repeats the previous steps for all the other items — find the next closest idle robot, task it with transferring the next item and so on until there is a robot for each of the 500 items in the box.

The problem with this strategy is that while the first few robots may be located in roboports reasonably close to the provider chest, by the time we get to the last items the network may have to reach for robots at the other end of the factory because there is no closer idle robot for the task. The end result is that the first batch of robots will arrive at the chest, take the item and deliver it to the destination, and then recharge and go have a nap in a roboport — transferring a single item was all these robots were tasked with and the remaining items have already been assigned to other robots. After that, a slow trickle of robots from far away parts of the factory will come in and transfer the remaining items.

The situation is similar for construction robots, and this can be especially apparent when using one's portable roboport. Say the player wants to remove a bunch of trees in their factory. A single personal roboport can have up to 25 construction robots, so that's up to 25 trees that will be deconstructed using the player's personal robots. All remaining trees will be assigned to robots from the main logistic network, and the player will have to wait for them to arrive for the trees to be gone — even though the player's personal robots are right there with nothing better to do!

The New Way​

Choosing a robot for a task only from the list of idle robots clearly isn't the best strategy. Assigning a task to a robot that is currently busy but nearby may be a better choice, even if the new task may have to wait until the robot finishes its other tasks. This required two main changes to the logistic network code.

The first change was to allow robots to have multiple tasks assigned to them. Much of the code has been written with the assumption that a robot has exactly one job, but after some code refactor, robots now have a queue of tasks.

Second, we need a way to select a robot for a task. Each task has a starting position, for example a deconstruction order starts at the entity to be deconstructed. Until now, the selection process was simple — just select the idle robot closest to that point.
But now, when we can also select a robot with one or more queued tasks, the process becomes a bit more complex.

The new metric for robot selection is the arrival time. For an idle robot, its arrival time is simply the distance to the starting position divided by its speed. For a busy robot, we can look through its queue of tasks, figure out where and when the robot is going to end up when its done, and then add the flight time from there to the starting position of the new job.
When selecting a robot for a task, we select the one that is going to arrive first, even if it has to take care of other things before that.

It is worth pointing out that the arrival time calculation is only an estimate. For example, we simplify the effects of the recharging times. A keen-eyed player will no doubt notice situations where choosing a different robot could have been a little bit more efficient. But in the big picture, it doesn't seem to be very noticeable.

Let's see how the new system handles our previous two examples. The initial batch of robots is tasked with transferring all the items which results in them shuffling back and forth between the requester and the provider.

For deconstructing trees, each of the player's personal robots does more than just a single tree. Robots from the main network still come to help out, but this time it's because they can help get the whole job done faster.

Performance​

Having a simple list of all busy robots and going through it each time a new task comes in may work fine for small factories, but with several thousand robots flying everywhere it can quickly become a UPS drain. To alleviate that, we implemented a different representation.

Whenever a robot's queue of tasks is updated, it calculates its final position estimate — that is, its final position and the time at which it will finish. Each map chunk now stores a list of all busy robots that are estimated to finish on that chunk. So when a robot updates its final position estimate, it registers itself in that chunk's list of robots. When searching for a robot for a particular task, the game now starts its search at the chunk where the job's starting position is located, and continues its search in an outward spiral.

Storing busy robots on chunks and searching in a spiral improved the performance by a lot, and even factories with thousands of busy robots run well.

Smarter robot other things​

While playing and developing the expansion for the last 2 years, we have also accumulated a few more features and changes to make the robots feel smarter and work better.

Roboport robot requests​

There are some situations when you need to make sure some roboports always have robots to service tasks. For example if you have a little resupply point with buffer chests, you want logistic robots around to quickly empty your trash and refill your supplies. It is quite annoying when all the materials are right there, but you are stuck waiting around, because due to natural robot migratory patterns, the roboports in the area are quite empty.

It could be solved with requester chests, inserters, circuit network, and such... but we decided a smoother approach. You can now set logistic requests for robots directly inside the roboport GUI. Robots will be dispatched from other roboports to fulfill the request (important to note, robots will not be taken from storage or provider chests).

With this new feature, we can set all the roboports near our resupply point to always have 100 logistic robots available. Once we arrive, our needs are serviced in record time, and afterwards you can see robots arriving to get the roboport back up to 100.

Another nice use of this is that we can use the roboport requests to remove certain robots from the network. Perchance we had some mod with higher quality worker robots, we can request the low quality ones and remove them with a filter inserter, over time removing the worse robots from circulation.

Better robot charging heuristic​

When a worker robots runs low on energy, they need to find a nearby roboport to charge at, but they need to be a little bit smart about it. For instance if they always chose the closest roboport, then you would get queues and traffic jams at some roboports while others are completely empty.

For these 'smarts' we use a quite simple heuristic, factoring in not just how close the roboport is, but also how many other robots are currently charging there. Typically this worked 'well enough' but every so often you could encounter a little inconvenient situation where they are still bunching up on some roboports while ignoring others that are just a little bit further.

In some extreme cases this can actually be quite a problem, as the robots waiting to charge still use energy for hovering, so lose more energy, in a positive feedback loop where all robots who join the queue will fall to 0 energy while they are waiting their turn. Generally though the main problem here is that the player looks at the robots and thinks "These robots are so dumb...". Not the end of the world, but we can do better...

Surprisingly in this case the issue can be helped a lot by just a small improvement in the heuristic logic. When deciding which roboport to charge at, the robots crucially did not consider the current robots on the way to that roboport, only those already in the queue, and did not factor in how many free charging spots the roboport has open. By adding these two extra parameters into the equations, the distribution of the robots improves quite nicely.

Mitigation for robot pathing over lakes​

It has been a problem for a long time, the robots are pretty dumb when it comes to pathfinding, and try to fly over areas that have no logistic network coverage. This is because for performance reasons, we don't do any pathfinding at all. The robots just fly in a straight line to the job position.

One major problem of this is the possibility of the robots to get stuck in an infinite loop. This is because they fly out over uncovered territory, run out of battery, and return back to recharge and try again. Obviously they will never make it.

This issue was notable enough and annoying enough for us that we really did want to come up with a fix. The solution we came to was a smart trick in the roboport selection when they run out of energy. Usually the robot just chooses one of the nearest roboports, which is fine for normal circumstances, but in this case leads to the robot turning completely around in failure.

So we changed the selection logic, so that the robot tries to always charge at a roboport that is closer to the destination than the robot is. This means that even if the robot will potentially fly with low energy for longer, it will always be able to make some progress towards the target, and eventually complete their mission.

It is not a perfect solution, but should hopefully help prevent the most egregious issue of this technical constraint.

Look at the linked page for the comparison videos, but it's a massive improvment across the board to how robots work.

 

[Jaedar]

Look at the linked page for the comparison videos, but it's a massive improvment across the board to how robots work.

I wish they'd patch this in before the expansion

 

[HeyCheckOutHowHardICanPee]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375

So what is quality?​

Every Item, Entity, and Equipment has 5 possible qualities now, and each quality tier gives an improved bonus value, used for most of the stuff:

• 
  Normal: Base quality for everything, no bonus
• 
  Uncommon: +30% bonus
• 
  Rare: +60% bonus
• 
  Epic: +90% bonus
• 
  Legendary: +150% bonus

 

[Jaedar]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375

So what is quality?​

Every Item, Entity, and Equipment has 5 possible qualities now, and each quality tier gives an improved bonus value, used for most of the stuff:

• 
  Normal: Base quality for everything, no bonus
• 
  Uncommon: +30% bonus
• 
  Rare: +60% bonus
• 
  Epic: +90% bonus
• 
  Legendary: +150% bonus

I am very happy this is optional.

 

[Ironmonk]

Yeah... when I was reading through it I thought it was a April's fool joke or something

To play with this without going crazy will require to remove any mod that add improved machines/vehicles/equipment AND specially mods that increase the production chain with more intermediates and/or modified/complex recipes.

 

[Caim]

Oh wow I can't wait to upgrade an entire solar farm to max quality.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Here's a game for prestigious gentlemen of the codex who like factorio, but feel it lacks enough autism.



edit..

You can play it for free here currently. The developer originally had released it for free and still offers the game as a trial.

https://incremental-factory.vercel.app/

Make sure to "export" your save string so you can reimport it later to continue the game. I wouldn't trust the autosave nonsense.

 

[Average Manatee]

Oh wow I can't wait to upgrade an entire solar farm to max quality.

Solar power is something you'd never upgrade because the only downside of lower quality is taking up more space, which is irrelevant.

Now, nuclear power on the other hand... (although there's already problems transmitting the output of more than 4 reactors to all of your turbines, so ehh...)

Really this just makes your armor and vehicles much better.

 

[Caim]

Now, nuclear power on the other hand... (although there's already problems transmitting the output of more than 4 reactors to all of your turbines, so ehh...)

Hook the heat exchangers up to some pipes, pumps and storage tanks, build a train with fluid wagons, drive it to a place where turbine placement is optimal and job's a good one. With some proper placement this lets you build nuclear facilities in places where space is at a premium.

 

[Kruyurk]

I don't like the randomness of this quality mechanic. Before, the factory was working like a clockwork, exactly the same way at any time, considering all inputs constants. Now, even if any input parameter stays the same, the output will be random. It changes how I perceive the factory and all its parts. Leave the randomness and chaos to the biters, I want certainty and order for my machines.

And it does not sound like an interesting progression. There is already some interesting "quality" progression in the game, where it makes sense: inserter types, conveyor speed, bullets types. The less interesting progression that concerns only numerical values stayed hidden inside the research menu (train brakes, weapon damage, research speed, etc).
This new mechanic feels so uninteresting, in your face, and unnecessary compared to what is already in the game. Even if it is optional, it is not what they should be spending time on, and I fear the game as a whole would be balanced with this option turned on (forcing people not using quality to build even wider factories for the late game stuff).

 

[Average Manatee]

Now, nuclear power on the other hand... (although there's already problems transmitting the output of more than 4 reactors to all of your turbines, so ehh...)

Hook the heat exchangers up to some pipes, pumps and storage tanks, build a train with fluid wagons, drive it to a place where turbine placement is optimal and job's a good one. With some proper placement this lets you build nuclear facilities in places where space is at a premium.

Hmm... doing some calculations and you'd need slightly under 1 filled fluid wagon every second for a 4x2 nuclear setup... not too unreasonable.

Although thinking further, nuclear is so damn efficient already that increasing the quality of the reactor is pretty weak too. Rather than making 10 reactors and recycling them to get a better quality reactor, just plant the 10 reactors.

Really I can't think of an instance where quality would benefit you significantly except for personal equipment/vehicles. Anything else you either want huge amounts of (good luck producing that in high quality) or you want few enough that it isn't a problem to produce more (e.g. the nuclear reactors). Aside from that it feels like its just there for late game autism. Trying to get high quality is otherwise massively reducing your efficiency in the short term in exchange for potentially more efficiency later.

Also this feels like its going to be annoying if from the start of the game I'm incentivized to keep collecting high-quality iron/copper/steel plates just so when I craft my new armors they will be slightly better. The idea of needing to filter out high-quality stuff feels like it will always be tedious, you basically need a filter after every production step. Sure I guess a lot of stuff you don't care about but every intermediate definitely matters. Imagine trying to filter out the entire copper plate->wire->green circuit->red circuit->blue circuit for maximum quality at each step.

 

[Jaedar]

Hmm... doing some calculations and you'd need slightly under 1 filled fluid wagon every second for a 4x2 nuclear setup... not too unreasonable.

It's not entirely unreasonable, but it's a lot of trains and a lot of stations. And 4x2 isn't a particularly big nuclear setup.

Really I can't think of an instance where quality would benefit you significantly except for personal equipment/vehicles.

Yeah. But at the same time, am I really going to craft 100 power armors / RTGs to get a higher quality one, when they're already super expensive? Probably not.

The thing that makes upgrading via modules "work" for me is that modules just slot in everywhere, and you build them in a single place. Filtering the output of a dozen production structures just in case I want a little bit extra speed for that particular type doesn't really interest me. I guess it might be a good resource sink for people who want to spend 100+ hours in the same map but want more variety than infinite research.

The whole mechanic is optional though, so I guess I'll just never build the quality module.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah. But at the same time, am I really going to craft 100 power armors / RTGs to get a higher quality one, when they're already super expensive? Probably not.

The thing that makes upgrading via modules "work" for me is that modules just slot in everywhere, and you build them in a single place. Filtering the output of a dozen production structures just in case I want a little bit extra speed for that particular type doesn't really interest me. I guess it might be a good resource sink for people who want to spend 100+ hours in the same map but want more variety than infinite research.

The whole mechanic is optional though, so I guess I'll just never build the quality module.

I think the way to do it is to just filter out all of the quality level 2/3 ingredients you produce elsewhere naturally and them build it just with that and you get a quality level 2/3 armor after crafting it once? It's kind of a pain to do but should be possible, just a few filter inserters everywhere (the amount of high quality ingredients you get is so low it should be possible to use just 1 or 2). So basically you don't have to produce 100 power armors, you just have to produce about 100 power armors worth of input ingredients and produce a quality 2 armor out of the filtered results.

So if you're rushing then obviously your first armor produced out of your first 40 blue circuits will be quality 1 but once your factory has produced 4,000 blue circuits you should have enough lying around to make a quality 2 armor with them, if I'm understanding the mechanics properly? Next level would require an average of 400,000 blue circuits produced I think which is substantial megabase territory. Though its probably a bit less since you're producing inputs to blue circuits that are higher quality and therefore those increase the chance of higher quality blue circuits.

You don't need quality modules, they just increase the chance of upgrading. I'm sure they have an absolutely awful ROI in almost everything, both on their own and because you can't use productivity modules on them. Of course getting better productivity modules is probably also a worthwhile quality increase, slot it into the rocket for massive gains.

At the very least I guess it will lead to some interesting late game setups. Don't think I'll be making them but I'd be interested to look at them.

EDIT: although, I wonder how it works. Say you have 40 quality 4 steel and use that to produce the power armor along with quality 1 blue circuits (pretend power armor only requires these two ingredients for this thought experiment). Is it a 50/50 chance of quality 4, or automatic quality 2? Considering how much cheaper and quicker certain ingredients are to produce it may be better to do it that way.

 

[Jaedar]

You don't need quality modules, they just increase the chance of upgrading.

As I understood it, without quality modules you have 0% chance to getting higher quality goods from base materials, but both high quality materials and quality modules increase the chance of upgrading. And using quality modules means not fitting productivity modules.

 

[Average Manatee]

As I understood it, without quality modules you have 0% chance to getting higher quality goods from base materials, but both high quality materials and quality modules increase the chance of upgrading. And using quality modules means not fitting productivity modules.

Hmm, you may be right. The fact that they say quality modules increase the chance of higher quality results and add +1% chance implied to me that there was some kind of base quality chance, but then everything else talks about quality modules.

If it works like that and you need 3 level 3 quality modules just to get a 10% chance of quality stuff then this seems pretty weak except for what is now essentially post-game stuff. I guess a lot might depend on how the tech tree changes. If quality modules are "free" upgrades then that makes them potentially a good option compared to prod/speed if power consumption is a concern. Also of course, you might as well put some quality modules in the end products that prod modules can't fit. So putting quality in your module assemblers to get better productivity modules (which you then put into your silos for mad gains).

Another issue I have is that this is gonna be full chaos trying to manage who has what quality modules. If you have a quality 4 something produced then you want to replace the most important assembler using a quality 3 component, then that quality 3 component goes in the most important assembler using a quality 2, then so on...

 

[Hellraiser]

So now even factorio got infected with the looter shooter virus?



As long as the system doesn't make the mass production of basic/lowest quality materials obsolete (ex. for research, ammo) I'm fine with it, otherwise it also makes productivity modules obsolete.

 

[Caim]

Rails.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-377

Old rails. Blocky, angular:

New rails. Smooth, round:

Tight rails:

Unfortunately they won't be included until 2.0, but this doesn't require the expansion.