#factorio space age

[e17omm]

Im starting to really feel the countdown

[estavionpira]

just got factorio space age and am playing with a friend, spawned annoyingly close to a biter nest and was getting full biter waves before red science automation, still we struggle onwards, one must imagine sisyphus happy, etc, etc

[alexanderwales]

My early impression of Factorio: Space Age are extremely positive, though it's much more geared toward veterans than I would have expected. I guess sushi belts aren't entirely mandatory, but I don't know how you would get by without them. They are easier now, but there are other mechanics that take things up a notch.

Mild spoilers follow, but it's not really a spoiler kind of game, and the UI seems very ready to give you all kinds of information about places you haven't been and things you haven't seen.

It's got a ton of content, the game design is overall fantastic on several levels, the music has been great, and in general I'm just a huge fan of it.

I am curious how well it holds up on repeat play, since a lot of doing a blind playthrough is figuring things out, and after you've figured them out, a lot of the gameplay is gone.

One slightly negative note, at least for me, is that the early game felt much too longer when I just wanted to get to space, and I kind of wanted … I don't know, an accelerated start option, not necessarily something like Faster Start, but a few technologies researched and maybe a tiny starter base or something. Setting up a furnace stack by hand is not something that I feel like I really need to do again, but I did it for the first SA playthrough, because I wanted the default expansion experience. I did kind of regret it in the end though.

I made it to deep space science in SE, so that's the point of comparison for me, and this is far far less of a grind, along with far more interesting challenges. The cheap rockets that can't carry a lot really incentivize building up a proper base on each planet, one that can make its own buildings and infrastructure, which is neat, and thankfully on all but Gleba (and Nauvis) you don't really have to set up permanent defenses against enemies, which can be a bit of a pain if you want to get on to the next thing. I set up defenses on Nauvis, and that was a time sink, but with the enemy expansion mechanics it was very very necessary. I think next time, rail world setting might be better, but I don't know how that would change the other worlds.

I think the thing that I admire most about it is that they really worked hard on making sure that each planet was very very distinctly different from the others, that each planet had some kind of new threat that was very different from the others, that each planet had gameplay mechanics that were very different from the others ... and it all works wonderfully, at least so far.

There are a few things that I wish were in the expansion, which aren't (at least as far as I know), and some of those are a matter of creative vision, some are a matter of development time taking forever, and others are just engine limitations. The spaceships are ... I mean, they're fine, but it's very clear that they're using the "surface" class, which is what I would have expected, but still means that there's none of the cool space stuff like docking procedures and ships that split apart and spinning up for artificial gravity. It's another interesting challenge in terms of game mechanics, but it's definitely aesthetically the worst of the new things.

The spaceships do not particularly look like spaceships, an issue which I think could have been partially solved by having new spaceship wall sprites and requiring the spaceship to be enclosed. The rocket engines look incredibly cool when they fire up, but then you look up at the gun turrets just sort of clinging onto this platform, and it seems a bit jank. But it's also the thing you probably spend the least amount of time on overall, since the ships get built a few times and then never looked at again, moving between planets without much intervention once the design works well.

(The space map is also a bit of a disappointment. I wasn't expecting orbital mechanics, but ... actually, I think I would have liked some kind of simulation of it. Launch windows for shortest time between planets would have been cool. Some circuit-readable calculation of how much thrust/time it will take, which rises and falls with the motion of the planets?)

But yes, overall, very positive on the expansion. I think there are a few kinks that aren't quite worked out, but in my opinion they're nothing major, just some features and mechanics that aren't signposted or a few wonky UI elements.

[kaiasky]

Factorio: space age post. blacklist 'kaias factorio playthrough' to not see it.

Gotta work now so byeee factory. A thing I like doing with the starter base is building it in some intentionally weird ways, like curling the mall thing around when it hit the furnaces. obvs the next step is to make a proper furnace stack area and all that. though I'm going to try and not build Main Bus, I'm trying out my own style ive practiced a bit.

now, did i notice the issue with the green science? not until i took the screenshot, no.

[craccoonofficial]

Remctangle

[superstrijder00]

Playing the new Factorio DLC. Love this game but oh I'm not used to the first 10 hours of a playthrough anymore. At least I've gotten better at it so it only takes a couple hours to get robots, launch a rocket, and get trains.

And then the true game can begin.

[onaperd]

Not me falling deep into the Factorio hole again.

[trainsinanime]

Since people keep sharing their Factorio space platforms, here's mine. It's ugly, but it works, at least for Vulcanus and Fulgura (I know that one of the four "u"s in these planet names is supposed to be an "o", but I refuse to learn which one).

Notable features:

Probably too much firepower, but just barely

No turrets firing backwards. It hasn't been a problem for me so far (in orbit), fingers crossed.

A bit of quality keeps power supply up, but it's probably still a bit on the low side for Fulgura (the one for Vulcanus has considerably fewer solar panels)

The sushi belt is unclogged by… randomly dumping some stuff overboard, constantly, at all times.

The platform relies on munition resupply from the ground, the bit that it can produce itself is just a nice bonus. The logistic condition is 1.4k from the ground, and it stops producing new ammo (or rather, adding it to the inventory) at 2k. I'm calculating that a single trip is about 300-400 shots, so this is well above what is needed for a roundtrip and close enough to two if times are tough.

It took me until today to realise that the thrusters work best staggered, I previously had a very annoying pipe setup there.

Is any of this a good idea? I dunno. But I am having fun, so it can't be that wrong.

[factoriobuilds]

First post!

Really I have no idea if anyone will even pick this up or care, but if you happen to want to share the things you've made in or around factorio then I want to put them together here. Not sure how the best way to operate this would be, either on submissions or just reblogging stuff shared, although I haven't seen much of that. Doesn't have to just be serious builds though, decorative stuff, art stuff, neat designs, functional spaghetti. So long as it's yours and factorio, I think it'd be cool to share

[akushiaudio]

It has arrived!

[typecasto]

IT’S OUT!!! IT’S FUCKING FACTORIO TIME!!!!

[e17omm]

I am going to wait until the first science packs are crafted and then I am getting the hell off this planet

I have been here for at least 18 hours now. I want to get the hell off this planet. I dont care (right now) that this base only makes science packs and nothing else. I am TIRED and I want to LEAVE.

I did enjoy it though. This was fun.

[mad-mathematician]

FIRST DAY OF SPACE AGE!!!!

Started playing Factorio Space Age today!! It honestly feels surreal to say those words, but here we are!

First of all, this is the first time I'm ever playing Factorio on fully default settings. No extra starting area, no deeper resource patches, just fully stock settings! It'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

Second, while I haven't gotten that far in just the first day, things already feel more streamlined!! Ghosts have a nicer blue color, remote view is very useful, factory search is so nice!! I cannot WAIT to see how the other QOL changes affect the game :D

Third, FISH SPOIL. It makes perfect sense, but it still surprised me!!!! Fish spoil now!!! I'll (hopefully) be posting updates about my playthrough as the days go on!!

[alexanderwales]

Factorio: Space Age introduces the "quality" system, which you can technically play without, though I'm not sure it's balanced around that. I've now played with it enough that I have some thoughts on it.

First, I think it's kind of stupid that machines cannot naively use mixed-quality materials. It means that if you put a quality module in a single furnace, the lines will get "polluted" by the plates that are produced, and the whole factory will eventually gum up. Ask me how I know. I would vastly have preferred that it not matter: use a rare gear in a belt, and either it has no special benefit, or gives a chance to grant quality or something. But if it did that, I suppose it wouldn't be much of a gameplay challenge.

There are a few other pain points. One of them is that bots and the interface in general do not handle quality very well. Quality is almost always a strict upgrade, so it would be nice if there was a setting I could tick that said "hey, go upgrade things if possible". But instead, the UI and mechanics are such that you need to specify it, and this is super annoying, because it means that I have to manually go do the replacement myself, or have an upgrade planner to upgrade quality, then cancel the job once everything that can be replaced is so that the game will stop giving me an alert. I have accumulators and solar panels set up for quality right now, and I can't immediately think of a way to automate the process of upgrading the solar fields. I'm guessing that mods will help with that eventually. I also definitely want a keybind for "increase quality" and "decrease quality" on a machine, though I guess I never went looking to see whether that was a thing, so maybe it exists and I'm ignorant.

So as I see it, there are three main ways to engage with the mechanics:

Put quality modules in a machine that you're going to craft once and hope to roll high. The advantage is that hey, maybe you'll get lucky, and for stuff that goes in the equipment grid, I think this is sensible to do. Probably also wise for infrastructure, so long as you're fine doing some manual finagling that really should be done with bots.

Put quality modules in (some) machines that make intermediates, then use whatever you skim off the top there to make quality things. This does work, but you have to skim off essentially every single production line, and I think over time you end up with too much of certain things, which kind of sucks. It's one of the things that I've been doing, since it can guarantee the higher quality stuff, and ideally all the stuff in a spaceship and your equipment grid is at highest quality available. (You can also "skim" off anything you're making a shit-ton of for science: electric furnaces and yellow inserters are the two most obvious ones. I do wish this were easier to automate so that at some point you could say "actually, don't do the quality thing anymore". Probably some circuit logic could get you there, but you can't replace modules automatically that I know of.)

Use the recycler to "reroll" quality, making a gear over and over and over until it rolls high and can be separated out. The only issue with this is that it requires the recycler, and also is very expensive, but it does mitigate the randomness in its own way.

There's a secret fourth way that I've been noodling, which is that you could essentially build five separate copies of your base, put quality modules in everything, then if you roll high, send the better materials to the other base. This is insane, which is why I like it. So you would have miners mining with quality, which then gets separated onto five different trains and brought to the smelters, which then turn some fraction into higher quality plates that get sent to the "higher" factories. Those plates go into assemblers, which have a chance of upgrade, and so on, until there are five sets of labs, each of which is working with a different set of quality flasks. But I'm pretty sure that this would have a lot of technical problems, and really risk gumming up, as well as being very space inefficient and resource intensive. Still, might be workable end game, if you could deal with the inevitable overflows and imbalances.

Overall, I like it as a problem to chew on, but I think in practice they made a few decisions that I find annoying. Mods seem like they're fix some of it, like having to manually select upgrades, but the "clogging up the inventory" issue isn't going to go away, and in fact seems like one of the basic things that the mechanic is balanced around. I really appreciate that there are many ways to approach it, and that it creates this tradeoff of "go tall" or "go wide".

I'm very curious to see what people do with it, though I think the "throw vast resources into recycling" approach is probably going to be the dominant one unless there's a great blueprint for handling the overhead. And I'm also curious where public opinion is going to land on it, since it seems like the kind of thing that might end up divisive.

[not-a-wumpus]

Factorio DLC came out so I will not be sleeping for the next week, do not be worried if you do not hear from me for some time I am simply expanding the factory. :3

[craccoonofficial]

Factorio Space Age spoilers under the cut

THE FUCKING AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE PACK SPOILS. IT LASTS AN HOUR AND A HALF BEFORE IT FUCKING DIES. FUCK THIS GAME.

I'm still gonna play it, though...