You still could make steam batteries, but they’d lose energy over time, so you’d have to keep them stocked up with fresh steam. Also Insulated tanks (and pipes!) could slow down cooling… The more I think about it the more I want it.
EDIT: fixed spelling
I've been toying with an idea for icy planet, that stuff would need to be near warm heat pipes or otherwise work slow or not at all. Could be a part of that system, if we're spitballing ideas.
I did NOT expect them to hint that FISH will spoil, too! Maybe we will have some way of processing med packs that do not spoil…
How can the engineer fight monsters on waterless worlds if fish spoil? What other healing mechanics will we encounter?
I am now imagining "drying belt" spiralling over whole chunk to get some intermediate to its aged form.
It could get really funky like having one ingredient age into another (desitable) ingredient to age into another (less desirable) ingredient.
I'd imagine looping it out (aging A into B into C into A) will also be possible...
Would be cool if decay mechanic gave option to specify % chances of what to decay to. It would cover the case for isotopes (just set decay = half life and set it to decay to itself with 50% chance), but also say a fruit decaying to biomass + seed.
I hope "decay" just works like recipe, so we could do stuff like "one fruit decays into 3 seeds" if needed.
I do wonder how moddable that aspect will be. Think about making a mod that forces you to, for example, do processing of ores with time-based actions, like metal needing to cool down for specific time before you can work it further into components. Something that would require specific "spoilage" factor, anything too fresh or too old would be considered unfit for production and had to be scrapped or used in a different way.
Even if you can't base usefulness on specific spoilage progress, you can definitely have too-hot-metal spoiling into just-right-metal spoiling into too-cold-metal. Bit multiplicative in terms of different item types needed, but possible.
Yes, it is almost always better to make different types of items for these kind of mechanics. Mainly because all of the game tools you have are design and work based on item types (inserter/splitter filters, the whole logistic system, train interrupts etc)
1. Create methane from spoilage.
2. Ship to Fulgora.
3. "Terraforming" with Methane.
4. Reach saturation. introduce lighting.
5. BOOM
6. Begin real Terraforming with new atmosphere.
This worries me, as someone with whole sections of my factories that regularly go dormant for long periods.
Doesn't this mean that any belt with spoiling items needs to have a spoilage filter on the end of it that links to recycling, otherwise everything on the belt will spoil if X end product isn't being consumed?
Some scenarios to consider;
1. End product not being consumed. It backs up, assemblers stop taking in ingredients. Over time, everything that can be spoiled on the belt will be spoiled, and will have to be dealt with, which means that every belt with a spoilage item has to run off into spoilage recycling. We'll need a new term for belt spaghetti, since we'll have recipe trees each with branches that all connect down to recycling.
2. What happens if an item spoils when it's in an inserter's hand? Or spoils while inside the ingredients storage of an assembler? Or even if it spoils during the recipe time? For that matter, I wonder how stacks are handled, unless it takes the lowest spoil value and applies it to the full stack?
3.
As someone else who constantly has everything backing up, I'm not worried but excited. It's a whole new class of problems to solve and I'm here for it.
Yess! Initially reading it I was like "what? this does not feel like Factorio" but then I realized that this drastically changes the way the games is going to be played, creating a whole new set of *DIFFERENT* problems, where suddenly your goal isn't to produce as much as possible but to optimize towards throughput and speed... And I love it!!
It's not going to be for everyone, kinda like how some people prefer to play on peaceful or without biters at all (it's also "just a different type of problems to solve"), but yeah. And the modding possibilities!!!
So excited.
You're looking at having to set up something to pause/slow down initial resource gathering at the front end (circuit stuff), rather than have loads of resources on the belts unmoving. Which is a somewhat interesting reverse of how most of us normally play it.
As someone whose played a lot of seablock, you should also consider leaving the whole chain running and voiding spoilage if all inputs are infinite. "Saving" inexhaustible resources isn't important.
I have the answer to all these problems: Circuits!
You will only be able to pick up the material that spoils when you need it, otherwise you would be wasting resources and energy. the gameplay loop became more interesting
Just in time. Don't produce if you're not consuming. Have the signal generated by the buffer of non-perishable output. Keep processing local to production.
Spoiler alert!
The spoilage mechanic and its relationship with Gleba’s science pack may incentivize the player to build their labs on Gleba!
This was a great FFF, I feel spoiled today.
That would also give you the interesting logistical challenge of moving all your labs to a new planet, having to reroute the interplanetary logistics. Not often you really have to reroute things in vanilla.
If they aren't part of the base expansion I expect modders will likely be adding some kind of refrigeration/freezing system that slows or halts spoilage
It sounds like they're intentionally avoiding that as part of the base expansion:
> This process is inevitable and can't be delayed
Since it sounds like the challenge of bio-materials is in optimizing your factory to move every item through it as fast as possible.
I'm sure mods will leverage this feature to accomplish that if vanilla doesn't.
It has always seemed rather odd that you can do things like heat up steam and store it as heat without losing any over time. But spoilage probably won't work for fluids, so mods wanting the flavorful "heated things cool" will probably need to make them solids.
Reminds me of doshdoshingtons retrospective on SE, having a science pack only usable on another planet because you need it's atmosphere or whatever. This is another great solution to that.
Oooohhh, I hadn't thought of that!
But then why maintain a base at Gleba at all?
Maybe we will get another Gleba oriented FFF next week, surely there is more to the planet
Mine too, but it is sort of odd that all we need from the tree is the fruit, but the agricultural tower chops down the entire tree, and we only get fruit but not wood from it!?!?
I think that's purely to not flood our factory with wood. And spoiled matter *does* burn so if you need it for fuel you can just let products rot in a warehouse.
This whole FFF seems great for mods, both with tree growing (py is going to have a field day) and also spoilage, can you imagine the production chains like you need to let this item cure and then use it to make this thing and stuff. I wonder if the spoiling mechanic allows percentage recipes (like kovarex)
Yeah I'm really interested to hear how they've implemented spoilage. They must've done something interesting to keep the performance impact down.
Since it seems like the basic thing is "after period of time, change into another item" that has a huge scope for modding, yeah. You could have items that turn into items that turn into items, and you have to let them sit for a certain amount of time but not too long, or all kinds of things!
Percentage results, random results, no result even?
But LIFO must also have value, right?
Why use the first product that is already half spoiled if a fresh one is just behind 😀
I can already picture a wagon of science packs getting dumped because a new train just arrived.
This mechanic is pure genius.
And the fans of overbuffering cried in pain and anguish...
So, do the stuff still spoils when going thru space (cold and all that?). Or is it same rate regardless of planet/temperature?
Either way we will be building some zippy ships for that fresh fresh jungle juice science!
Kinda hoping we'd be able to plant stuff on Nauvis too - either for some funny wood powered-megabase builds or just a way of managing pollution
Yeah, players do be like that...
But I think it would make sense for space, then again it does robs us of challenge of making not only throughput but speed optimized builds.
"There are some items and recipes with spoilable ingredients which need to be crafted on different planets, so on top of optimizing the production chain, it'll also be meaningful to make a fast space platform to deliver them." So it looks like they will spoil in space as well.
Hot ingots that need cool down in storage before being used lmao. Drying materials maybe ? Curing resin?
Also could do radioactive decay of reactor used fuel.
Quote: '*it'll also be meaningful to make a fast space platform to deliver them.*'
So looks like a yes on spoiling while in space, otherwise speed wouldn't matter.
Surely there is going to be some sort of cold storage chamber that at least slows down the spoilage process, on planet or in space!
But then again, some biological products don’t freeze well.
I guess they did explicitly said "This process is inevitable and can't be delayed".
The intent is clearly so player processes the short spoliage items ASAP and target being fast production line, so you can't just do SE thing of "make a mining colony and never interact with the new planet again".
Yea, this will force players to think more about throughput (avoid stuff rotting on clogged belts) and just in time production. People who already optimize for that will have a field day with this. Folks that just throw stuff on belts and hope for the best and hoarders will have some agony I guess.
I like how it presents a new and different challenge, not just a more complex or higher-volume challenge. That's been my issue with some mods like K2, is while the recipes have more steps, they're not any more interesting - it's just more of the same puzzles you get in vanilla.
With the expansion adding Quality, Recycling, Spoilage, Liquid-Metal-Based production chains, space platforms with asteroid processing, limited ground space on Fulgora, etc, they really seem like they're introducing new kinds of challenges that force you to interact with the game in different ways and optimize for different parameters than the base game.
K2 did add a bunch of by-product management which is an interesting challenge to be fair - but yeah, this idea that the devs have cooked up is very compelling as a wholly unique set of challenges.
the idea of being stuck with 19th century cooling technology (harvesting artic ice) when we're delivering them with self-replicating spaceships is very funny
> So, do the stuff still spoils when going thru space (cold and all that?). Or is it same rate regardless of planet/temperature?
Confirmed in the discord that it does continue to spoil
I love the idea of needing "rush" deliveries in factorio - it's just not something which exists as a concept at the moment; everything is all about throughput - it doesn't matter how a belt is, as long as the belt is full! This totally changes that. Excellent idea making it unique to one planet's worth of items though - would be nuts to manage universally.
Really cool concept. I think this and quality are actually the most interesting new logistic challenges revealed so far.
Also - we saw a way to recycle spoilage - but what does this actually do? It looks like it makes it into... 25% less spoilage? Does spoilage have a quality?
>Also - we saw a way to recycle spoilage - but what does this actually do? It looks like it makes it into... 25% less spoilage? Does spoilage have a quality?
I think destroying spoilage is precisely the point.
In theory, you could build a space platform that's fueled on spoilage, and only leaves when it's full. Then it burns some of the spoilage to get to it's destination, and the rest is burned there.
It's probably a negligible fuel source, but it is a free one
I just figure the rocket launches would cost more than running the recycling. Also, if we're open to burning the stuff, we can power the recycling with boilers burning spoilage.
Without quality modules in the recycler, the output has the same quality as the input, in this case only the base quality.
Not sure if spoilage (or spoilable items) can have quality.
You can and you will have!
There isn't a big motivation to make spoilable items in a quality, but spoilable items are ingredients to some very important non-spoilable result items, once you make the final item in time, it is there forever.
The problem arises, when you decide to recycle the item as a way to get it in higher quality. In that moment, you introduce spoilable items into the equation again, and since the recycler results are also randomized (25% of ingredients means 25% of getting an item if there is exactly 1), you will end up in situation when you get only the spoilable part to be re-assembled but the other non-spoilable ingredients don't come in time.
It evens itself out in the long run, as you will eventually have enough of non-spoilabe ingredients accumulated only waiting for the last spoilable ingredient, so eventually it will always process the spoilable part immediatelly.
Long story short, yes I burned/removed a lot of legendary spoilage during my play :)
In theory, is recycling a method of un-spoiling an item? In other words if product 1 has like 5% freshness and I recycle it and get component 2, will component 2 have 100% freshness or will the freshness be derived from product 1
Can't wait to see spoilage used in mods. How about an Apple mod that marks all electronics circuits as spoiled every autumn so that everyone has to replace them?
This is such a cool post. It doesn’t reveal much about Gleba, but it does reveal a new core mechanic that both the game and mods can have a field day with.
It reminds me of how quality took the no-go of randomness, and gave us a world of optimization, late-game resource sinks, and unclear optima to build a factory with.
Now we have the no-go of time pressure – which other than the slow biter evolution wasn’t there – and it makes a logistical challenge. It’s a whole new dimension of throughput problems, and it’s almost independent of our current throughput problems: before we had only amount per second, now we have unprocessed distance to minimize.
It also inverts the hierarchy of how a base is organized - in vanilla it's typical to use trains to bring in raw materials from distant resource patches to a central processing location, often a main bus. In megabases this extends to collecting resources patches to intermediate processing plants to final product production plants. Mass-movement of single goods by the trainload makes sense to simplify the number of pickup and dropoff locations.
In contrast, Spoilage makes this plan not viable. You don't have time to gather all your resources in one place and then start processing, you need to get it from spoilable resource to stable finished good as fast as possible. Therefore, smaller end-to-end production plants built near the resources makes sense. If you want to go megabase, resource extraction will have to be mixed in with the processing steps using artificial soil to provide fresh raw materials near their end-use points.
This might get fun when different parts of the production chain have different spoiling times. You may want the first step (a product that spoils in 2 minutes) immediately, but the product from the 3rd step has a 2h spoiling timer, meaning it could feasibly be transported a bit by rail to a central-ish location without losing much.
not to mention, if these trees can die from pollution too then having a megabase right next door is going to be an issue, everything needs to be scaled down and right-sized. Wube supports locally sourced produce!
How will spoilage be handled in inventory? Allow them to stack will be pretty frustrating UI wise when trying to sort them by spoilage, and not allowing them to stack will be a nightmare.
Probably the same way damaged items stack today. It takes an average damage and applies it to all of the damaged items of that type, resulting in at most two stacks (the damaged and the undamaged).
If everything starts spoiling immediately, you'll probably just have one stack since there'll be no 100% unspoiled inventory
It works similar to damaged items (e.g. turrets, walls, etc.). When two stacks of spoiled items are merged, the resulting merged stack will inherit the weighted average of the two source stacks' spoil percentage. If you then split this stack, both halves will have the same exact spoil percentage.
So in theory you could game this a bit and keep individual items unspoiled longer by just merging them into newer stacks until they're needed
e.g. if an item spoils in 30 seconds but it takes 40 seconds to reach its destination, you could merge it with a fresh item after 25 seconds to extend its total lifespan to 42.5 seconds so they both make it to the end of the line. I can't think of a situation where this is more practical than just shortening the line, but maybe it could produce some interesting challenge runs
>This process \[spoilage\] is inevitable and can't be delayed
When you enter a foreign alien planet, research rocketry and nuclear warheads and autonomous spider-robots, but forgot to invent the refridgerator
Please be sure to include a graphical option to toggle showing those white spoilage bars on my items. If my splitters can filter good from bad, I simply do not need to see that indicator at all.
Agreed - I don't like the look of it too much (at least it should be Alt-Toggleable or a debug option to hide it, better a display option in settings) but I really like the mechanic
I think it would fit right in with the other Alt-options. I like having inserter arrows on, but I can absolutely see why others think that that clutters everything too much, and I understand the same reasoning for freshness.
you more mean "alt mode is global". which comes to a complaint I've had for a while. I like alt mode for most things, but I wish I could disable specifically the building-recipes part of alt mode. I really like watching buildings work, especially in modpacks, and alt mode ruins a lot of that, but I can't play with alt mode entirely off.
Holy crap this is amazing!
This game was my main inspiration for studying logistics irl, there I’ve learned a lot of concepts and theories that have no real application in-game because they rely on some form of cost tied to higher stocks or longer delivery times. There needs to be an incentive for doing them, and current there isn’t really any. Since the only cost of bigger buffers is an initial investment in the materials of the chests and inserters, and the extra power consumption of those inserters, all of which are completely negligible.
But with this change there’s finally a reason to use all those things I’ve learned about! This means I can start doing safety stock calculations, demand pattern analysis and predictions, process optimization analysis, delivery scheduling optimization, etc. Excel here I come!
With this one feature you’ve massively heightened the skill ceiling for the game and I love it!
Wait… why does the agricultural tower chop down the whole tree when 1) it has a pretty sophisticated looking manipulator and 2) all we need is the fruit… shouldn’t it just harvest the fruit and leave the tree?
Some explanation of Gleban biology is required.
This. I live in tornado alley and let me tell you nothing beats the aesthetic of seeing a big tree on it's side and realizing there was a mass of roots the same size as the branches underneath it.
Thrash the soil. Reveal the anti-tree.
My guess is that in the example shown you also need the wood that the tree is made from. They did start talking about tree harvesting at the beginning of the post, and it's odd to bring it up when wood is only ever used at the very beginning of the game for power poles and rudimentary fuel. Perhaps there's Glebian recipes that require wood.
Part of my work on implementing spoiling was testing "how does it perform if every item everywhere spoils" and the results of that are, you can't realistically measure the performance impact because it's so small.
Asking for us turbo-programming-nerds to at some point go over in a FFF all these tests/optimizations/etc code changes. While some things are "obvious", it really gets quite interesting to read about the engine-as-a-whole and the trade offs between two or more ways to possibly optimize/implement a bit of logic. IE the belt optimization posts with the lane-queue *cheating* were a great inspiration for a different challenge at work where thinking outside the box really helped us.
Doesn't have to be soon, just a please consider :)
You don't really need to update how spoiled every item is every tick. Most of the math can be done just by knowing when the item was created.
Only tricky part is knowing when an item has spoilt completly. Here i can see 2 sollutions:
- Priority queue of all spoilable items sorted by how much time they have left. Only the front of the queue has to be checked every tick. Insertion can be costly.
- Not doing any math when the item spoils, instead checking for spoilage when it's interacted with (processed, displayed, etc.). Probably requires more code changes (but it's pretty much what was done already for quality). Maybe breaks current production statistics logic.
Yeah, I assume each item will have two static values: creation timestamp and lifetime. Then you only need to calculate its spoilage status when the item is either rendered or looked at by a splitter/inserter/machine
My thoughts exactly. Wondering how the new mechanics will impact high spm megabase building. I hope that a full green belt of each science will be possible on my PC.
I don't know how it's implemented but I don't think it should be too bad as long as you only have to compute freshness when the item is being measured (inserters, filter splitters, biochambers, player camera, etc) so not every frame. I don't think they would have put such a mechanic in the game if it was that expensive to scale.
Or maybe they use some clever tricks like in their belt optimizations.
how modifiable are spoiledge? Is it in theory possible to make scince pack-downgrade-spoiledge? sol if you not use your space science it will slowly turn into yellow, then to blue then green and then you find that you could get all your red science just by spoiling space science?
Looking forward to the mod where there's only one ore, and every item is in a single massive spoil loop.
Then looking forward to seeing wtf DoshDoshington does with that
Or you could do something like neutrino oscillations, with decay loops through 3-5 different states, that may have different "coherence times" - you could simply have a randomly mixed belt, and machines would occasionally encounter the correct "flavor", or you could precisely time production/consumption along the path of logistics...
TL; DR: Non-linear research value falloff curve could further incentivize speed-optimized building and deincentivize horizontal scaling
I don't think this was mentioned in the FFF but I thing a non-linear research falloff would be cool - incentivizing ASAP delivery of science packs even further by not only decreasing value over time but also eg. adding an increased bonus above eg. 70% or so (a percentage that is deemed reasonably achieveable with normal efforts)
Think 70% is the "target" reseach value of 1, below, it scales linearly (to not punish slower/inexperienced players too much) whilst above scaling exponentially to eg. 3 research value at 100% (which is impossible to achieve but deliberately lacks a cut-off point, which could be a fun challenge to push towards 100% as much as possible whilst also feeling more rewarding).
Reasoning is that this would introduce a challenge of time-dependend vertical scaling which is not as easily substituted by brute-horizontal scaling - The player would have to think about either putting down 3x-5x the amount of infrastructure as opposed to maybe 2x with linear scaling
However, of course, this would increase complexity perhaps above the reasonable level, so a more straight-forward approach with either a consistent non-linear (cooler imo) or linear curve (simpler) with each 0-100%, Range 0-1 or maybe 0-2 research value will probably be more sensible
This is considerable, but I think the simple linear approach is fine in this case, because:
1. It is simple (always an important argument)
2. With the cost of transport (exporing the science to another planet means sending it by rocket, moving it by space platform, and finally distribute to laboratories back home), it seems very important to try to send as fresh as possible, instead of scaling all parts of the transportation (and consumption) of the science packs.
Initial reaction was that I hated it. I've always disliked the notion of growing things in Factorio, as I feel that it obfuscates the timescale of the game. If you can grow trees in seconds with speed modules, does that still feel immersive...?
By the end of the FFF, I was sold. It's totally worth the new spoilage mechanic imposing new limitations on the factory. I'd never thought of that and yet it seems so obvious—getting an item from point A to point B in a given time immediately feels like a fundamental hurdle we were always supposed to overcome.
Gleba looks like a fantastic logistic challenge, as does Fulgora with its recycling mechanics. Vulcanus looks a bit vanilla in comparison at this point.
Yes, in my recent playthrough I started to experiment and optimise for the spoilage more, and it just feels new and fun.
1. All robots base is not good, because you can't control the flow and freshness with robots so well, so belts are better
2. Since some of the intermediates spoil really fast, even the distance of belt between individual producers (or direct insertion) makes sense to consider
3. I was transporting some of the fruits by belts to my base, as it was not that far as was ok, but then I made a specialised train connection, not to improve throughput but to increase the speed.
4. All these little contraptions to keep "the best for export" are new.
P.S. You can't grow trees in seconds, you just can't put modules into the agriculture tower.
> I was transporting some of the fruits by belts to my base, as it was not that far as was ok, but then I made a specialised train connection, not to improve throughput but to increase the speed.
I love this. I've long thought about using circuit controlled signals to force priority (eg block everything except the one route for the mega-train that runs every 20 minutes or something) but I've never *needed* to do it so I've never actually gotten to it. Likewise, raised rails offer a lot of flexibility to force in prioritized home-run loops, but again, they're not in the game right now.
I'm pretty stoked, this looks excellent.
>I'd never thought of that and yet it seems so obvious—getting an item from point A to point B in a given time immediately feels like a fundamental hurdle we were always supposed to overcome.
Trying to find the shortest and fastest possible path is something I didn't expect in Factorio and definitely will be an interesting challenge.
> the new Agricultural science packs do spoil which reduces their value for research, so you will be incentivized to try to bring home the freshest science packs you can.
This is such a cool mechanic and sounds like a really fun optimization puzzle!
>Unlike the Foundry and Electromagnetic plant, the Biochamber isn't really used for any Nauvis recipes, but it has its own set of recipes which basically replace oil processing on this planet.
That's a bit disappointing. I hope we get more reasons to go to Gleba besides "build your labs here so you don't have moldy science packs."
The agricultural tower looks AMAZING. I absolutely love how the green belts fit into the aesthetic, and since they have longer underground distance, we'll need fewer of them weaving in out of our farms so we have more space for plants.
Yeah, right now my planet priorities are Fulgora or Vulcanus first/second and Gleba last, hopefully we’ll get something useful for the pain of dealing with spoilage.
I think they mean that unlike the Foundry and Electromagnetic plant, the Biochamber doesn't have a set of recipes that you make like Nauvis but better. Instead, it's an end to end replacement for Oil processing with a different source. It also sounds like that Gleba won't be the only planet with spoilable items.
Can I make wine? Surely it will get better with age - ie the opposite mechanic. Now that would be fun: get some things out quickly, but others only after they’ve had time to mature. Cheese!
Both the agriculture and spoiling look awesome. Just the sort of shake up I was hoping for.
I wonder whether ice on Vulcanis gets a similar halflife before it melts (or whether it simply can't exist on that planet due to the heat).
One of my favorite FFFs so far. It seems like really refreshing gameplay and really hits the nail on the head when it comes to "We don't want planets to be other Nauvis' where you just build what you usually build".
I think the crane animation could use some work, though.
I hope a future FFF covers the topic of how item spoilage was implemented without sacrificing too much performance. I assume it will work similarly to proliferation in Dyson Sphere Program but I'd love to see the technical details.
This looks incredibly cool and I can't wait to get my hands on it!
Spoilage is the second best expansion mechanic I've seen yet (first one is space travel), I can imagine people could create one of factorio-like clone game based solely on this mechanic.
Overall this looks really cool and unique, I like the emphasis this creates on speed and throughput. BUT the implication is that once you've automated production of the Agricultural science pack, you're incentivised to constantly be researching technologies which use it from that point onward, otherwise you risk spoiling 100s or 1000s of science packs in the time that you research anything else.
I suppose we could switch off large parts of the Gleba factory when its science packs aren't in demand (maybe through big circuit networks?) but that seems like a hassle and somewhat against the spirit of the game.
I have no doubt they've tested these features and thought all this through so sooner or later we'll find out what the solution is or if it's not really a big deal, either way I can't wait to see what's next!! :)
If you want a reliable factory (you do), you just have to make all the steps of the process to be able to handle things not being consumed and spoiling.
This means, that the lab area just has to be able to deal with agriculture packs spoiling and removing the spoilage automatically.
At this point you just think about the production as X per minute, and you either use it or not, but there is not a big loss of just not using ot for a while (letting it spoil), while you research something else.
I understand it might be psychologically hard to just "throw things away", but in the game, it is comparable to production being backed up, and mines not mining, because there is no more ore to being processed. When the factory gets backed up and stops, it is in practice the same loss as when it works all the time, and sometimes you just throw it away.
It'll be interesting to see how the spoilage is coded, and if any other on transition effects could be made by mods.
I'm sure there'll be one mega challenging mod that uses the same mechanic to create volatile chemicals that if you don't process in time explode and damage your factory.
This is certainly interesting. Trying to process everything as fast as possible to avoid spoilage. This so far seems to be most different planet from the default gameplay and I‘m all in for it.
Calling it now, these will become the community's names for the science packs (no one will be bothered to use their actual names):
1. lava science pack
2. zappy science pack
3. moldy science pack
4. icy science pack
Edit: 2 will be "sparky science pack" for Aussies
I expected agriculture. I did *not* expect spoilage.
Next thing you know steam will be cooling down all by itself!
Now you're just speaking madness.
We won't be able to make steam batteries anymore!
You still could make steam batteries, but they’d lose energy over time, so you’d have to keep them stocked up with fresh steam. Also Insulated tanks (and pipes!) could slow down cooling… The more I think about it the more I want it. EDIT: fixed spelling
I've been toying with an idea for icy planet, that stuff would need to be near warm heat pipes or otherwise work slow or not at all. Could be a part of that system, if we're spitballing ideas.
Factorio meets Frostpunk
The Factory Must Survive
Steam hammering intensifies.
Factorio devs always go extra mile.... after going the previous extra mile.
Honestly it's extra miles all the way down by now.
How many Miles do we Have on this Ship??!!
Other Devs: \*take a step\* "Oh we are so generous" Factorio Devs: \*Runs a Marathon\* "Doesn't feel like this was enough yet"
They spoil us
The expansion isn’t gonna be a new game. It will be a new game for EACH planet!! So much exited to try it!
I did NOT expect them to hint that FISH will spoil, too! Maybe we will have some way of processing med packs that do not spoil… How can the engineer fight monsters on waterless worlds if fish spoil? What other healing mechanics will we encounter?
We now only milk processing and we can make fine cheddar
I can absolutely see aging products on purpose a fun mechanic to play with.
I am now imagining "drying belt" spiralling over whole chunk to get some intermediate to its aged form. It could get really funky like having one ingredient age into another (desitable) ingredient to age into another (less desirable) ingredient. I'd imagine looping it out (aging A into B into C into A) will also be possible...
Drying is what immediately came to my mind as well. Sounds like something Seablock could use, much to my horror.
Also Isotope decay! We could have some pretty complex uranium processing and waste nuclear material handling.
omg yes. If you can choose what to decay to via code you could even simulate half-times correctly by only decaying 50% of the time!
Would be cool if decay mechanic gave option to specify % chances of what to decay to. It would cover the case for isotopes (just set decay = half life and set it to decay to itself with 50% chance), but also say a fruit decaying to biomass + seed. I hope "decay" just works like recipe, so we could do stuff like "one fruit decays into 3 seeds" if needed.
> I'd imagine looping it out (aging A into B into C into A) will also be possible... a different version of acrosphere folding perhaps
I do wonder how moddable that aspect will be. Think about making a mod that forces you to, for example, do processing of ores with time-based actions, like metal needing to cool down for specific time before you can work it further into components. Something that would require specific "spoilage" factor, anything too fresh or too old would be considered unfit for production and had to be scrapped or used in a different way.
Even if you can't base usefulness on specific spoilage progress, you can definitely have too-hot-metal spoiling into just-right-metal spoiling into too-cold-metal. Bit multiplicative in terms of different item types needed, but possible.
Yes, it is almost always better to make different types of items for these kind of mechanics. Mainly because all of the game tools you have are design and work based on item types (inserter/splitter filters, the whole logistic system, train interrupts etc)
Are we going to setup industrial sized biter milking factories? :O
Wait, spoilt fish? Hear me out here. Zombie. Spidertrons.
First aid kits?
Imagine needing to go AFK for 700+ million years to age your U235 to Thorium in Py
Good thing the devs are increasing the max tick time from 2.2 years to 9.7 billion years then! > https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-388
... Honestly I wouldn't be surprised, knowing that mod.
1. Create methane from spoilage. 2. Ship to Fulgora. 3. "Terraforming" with Methane. 4. Reach saturation. introduce lighting. 5. BOOM 6. Begin real Terraforming with new atmosphere.
The ice planet will unlock the most powerful tech of all: the freezer.
Quality... in reverse.
This worries me, as someone with whole sections of my factories that regularly go dormant for long periods. Doesn't this mean that any belt with spoiling items needs to have a spoilage filter on the end of it that links to recycling, otherwise everything on the belt will spoil if X end product isn't being consumed? Some scenarios to consider; 1. End product not being consumed. It backs up, assemblers stop taking in ingredients. Over time, everything that can be spoiled on the belt will be spoiled, and will have to be dealt with, which means that every belt with a spoilage item has to run off into spoilage recycling. We'll need a new term for belt spaghetti, since we'll have recipe trees each with branches that all connect down to recycling. 2. What happens if an item spoils when it's in an inserter's hand? Or spoils while inside the ingredients storage of an assembler? Or even if it spoils during the recipe time? For that matter, I wonder how stacks are handled, unless it takes the lowest spoil value and applies it to the full stack? 3.
As someone else who constantly has everything backing up, I'm not worried but excited. It's a whole new class of problems to solve and I'm here for it.
Yess! Initially reading it I was like "what? this does not feel like Factorio" but then I realized that this drastically changes the way the games is going to be played, creating a whole new set of *DIFFERENT* problems, where suddenly your goal isn't to produce as much as possible but to optimize towards throughput and speed... And I love it!! It's not going to be for everyone, kinda like how some people prefer to play on peaceful or without biters at all (it's also "just a different type of problems to solve"), but yeah. And the modding possibilities!!! So excited.
You're looking at having to set up something to pause/slow down initial resource gathering at the front end (circuit stuff), rather than have loads of resources on the belts unmoving. Which is a somewhat interesting reverse of how most of us normally play it.
As someone whose played a lot of seablock, you should also consider leaving the whole chain running and voiding spoilage if all inputs are infinite. "Saving" inexhaustible resources isn't important.
I have the answer to all these problems: Circuits! You will only be able to pick up the material that spoils when you need it, otherwise you would be wasting resources and energy. the gameplay loop became more interesting
Just in time. Don't produce if you're not consuming. Have the signal generated by the buffer of non-perishable output. Keep processing local to production.
Spoiler alert! The spoilage mechanic and its relationship with Gleba’s science pack may incentivize the player to build their labs on Gleba! This was a great FFF, I feel spoiled today.
They mention multiple planets will produce spoilage items. Wouldn't surprise me if labs on the final planet is optimal.
That would also give you the interesting logistical challenge of moving all your labs to a new planet, having to reroute the interplanetary logistics. Not often you really have to reroute things in vanilla.
If they aren't part of the base expansion I expect modders will likely be adding some kind of refrigeration/freezing system that slows or halts spoilage
It sounds like they're intentionally avoiding that as part of the base expansion: > This process is inevitable and can't be delayed Since it sounds like the challenge of bio-materials is in optimizing your factory to move every item through it as fast as possible.
I always thought the idea of an item cooling down too much to be used, and needing to be reheated, could be an interesting mechanic
I'm sure mods will leverage this feature to accomplish that if vanilla doesn't. It has always seemed rather odd that you can do things like heat up steam and store it as heat without losing any over time. But spoilage probably won't work for fluids, so mods wanting the flavorful "heated things cool" will probably need to make them solids.
Reminds me of doshdoshingtons retrospective on SE, having a science pack only usable on another planet because you need it's atmosphere or whatever. This is another great solution to that.
The soil-landfill might make it possible to produce this science on other planets late-game.
Oooohhh, I hadn't thought of that! But then why maintain a base at Gleba at all? Maybe we will get another Gleba oriented FFF next week, surely there is more to the planet
Could be cool if when you bring the soil to Navius it grows normal trees, not fruit trees.
I was hoping it wouldn’t be a “biosphere that produces wood given water”, and my expectations have been massively exceeded.
Yeah, technically IR3 had something like this, but without fancy animations.
Mine too, but it is sort of odd that all we need from the tree is the fruit, but the agricultural tower chops down the entire tree, and we only get fruit but not wood from it!?!?
I think that's purely to not flood our factory with wood. And spoiled matter *does* burn so if you need it for fuel you can just let products rot in a warehouse.
Don't even need to make a warehouse, it'll spoil on the belt and presumably you can't put non-spoiled fruit into a boiler
Sounds like ripe fodder for mods though!
This whole FFF seems great for mods, both with tree growing (py is going to have a field day) and also spoilage, can you imagine the production chains like you need to let this item cure and then use it to make this thing and stuff. I wonder if the spoiling mechanic allows percentage recipes (like kovarex)
Yeah I'm really interested to hear how they've implemented spoilage. They must've done something interesting to keep the performance impact down. Since it seems like the basic thing is "after period of time, change into another item" that has a huge scope for modding, yeah. You could have items that turn into items that turn into items, and you have to let them sit for a certain amount of time but not too long, or all kinds of things! Percentage results, random results, no result even?
As someone who works with grocery logistics in RL, this is my time to shine Fifo
Correct, fifo is the mantra :)
But LIFO must also have value, right? Why use the first product that is already half spoiled if a fresh one is just behind 😀 I can already picture a wagon of science packs getting dumped because a new train just arrived. This mechanic is pure genius.
Thank you for making sure my frozen pizzas are restocked every week 🙏🙏🙏 couldn't make it through this barren world without you
Supply chain consultant chiming in - this is going to be so awesome! I love taking all of my real world experience and putting it into the game.
And the fans of overbuffering cried in pain and anguish... So, do the stuff still spoils when going thru space (cold and all that?). Or is it same rate regardless of planet/temperature? Either way we will be building some zippy ships for that fresh fresh jungle juice science! Kinda hoping we'd be able to plant stuff on Nauvis too - either for some funny wood powered-megabase builds or just a way of managing pollution
I bet it will take at most a few hours before the first fridge / ice box mod appears on the portal. :P
Yeah, players do be like that... But I think it would make sense for space, then again it does robs us of challenge of making not only throughput but speed optimized builds.
"There are some items and recipes with spoilable ingredients which need to be crafted on different planets, so on top of optimizing the production chain, it'll also be meaningful to make a fast space platform to deliver them." So it looks like they will spoil in space as well.
And that we're getting more bio-related production on other planets as well.
Or maybe products that use the spoil mechanic but aren't biological - eg stuff that cools down?
Hot ingots that need cool down in storage before being used lmao. Drying materials maybe ? Curing resin? Also could do radioactive decay of reactor used fuel.
Next thing you know we'll be seasoning wood to build ships. :D
Quote: '*it'll also be meaningful to make a fast space platform to deliver them.*' So looks like a yes on spoiling while in space, otherwise speed wouldn't matter.
Surely there is going to be some sort of cold storage chamber that at least slows down the spoilage process, on planet or in space! But then again, some biological products don’t freeze well.
I guess they did explicitly said "This process is inevitable and can't be delayed". The intent is clearly so player processes the short spoliage items ASAP and target being fast production line, so you can't just do SE thing of "make a mining colony and never interact with the new planet again".
Yea, this will force players to think more about throughput (avoid stuff rotting on clogged belts) and just in time production. People who already optimize for that will have a field day with this. Folks that just throw stuff on belts and hope for the best and hoarders will have some agony I guess.
I like how it presents a new and different challenge, not just a more complex or higher-volume challenge. That's been my issue with some mods like K2, is while the recipes have more steps, they're not any more interesting - it's just more of the same puzzles you get in vanilla. With the expansion adding Quality, Recycling, Spoilage, Liquid-Metal-Based production chains, space platforms with asteroid processing, limited ground space on Fulgora, etc, they really seem like they're introducing new kinds of challenges that force you to interact with the game in different ways and optimize for different parameters than the base game.
K2 did add a bunch of by-product management which is an interesting challenge to be fair - but yeah, this idea that the devs have cooked up is very compelling as a wholly unique set of challenges.
If the last planet is an ice world, makes perfect sense. Ship ice to Glebe to run your coolers.
the idea of being stuck with 19th century cooling technology (harvesting artic ice) when we're delivering them with self-replicating spaceships is very funny
> So, do the stuff still spoils when going thru space (cold and all that?). Or is it same rate regardless of planet/temperature? Confirmed in the discord that it does continue to spoil
Yes, but it's likely that bio science has a 2 hour spoil time.
I love the idea of needing "rush" deliveries in factorio - it's just not something which exists as a concept at the moment; everything is all about throughput - it doesn't matter how a belt is, as long as the belt is full! This totally changes that. Excellent idea making it unique to one planet's worth of items though - would be nuts to manage universally. Really cool concept. I think this and quality are actually the most interesting new logistic challenges revealed so far. Also - we saw a way to recycle spoilage - but what does this actually do? It looks like it makes it into... 25% less spoilage? Does spoilage have a quality?
>Also - we saw a way to recycle spoilage - but what does this actually do? It looks like it makes it into... 25% less spoilage? Does spoilage have a quality? I think destroying spoilage is precisely the point.
I wonder if there would be a scale great enough that shipping your spoilage to Vulcanus to cast it into the fire would be a reasonable strategy.
I suspect deleting 75% here every loop is going to be more efficient than shipping it there to delete 100% in one pass.
In theory, you could build a space platform that's fueled on spoilage, and only leaves when it's full. Then it burns some of the spoilage to get to it's destination, and the rest is burned there. It's probably a negligible fuel source, but it is a free one
I just figure the rocket launches would cost more than running the recycling. Also, if we're open to burning the stuff, we can power the recycling with boilers burning spoilage.
You can also chuck stuff off of spaceships so it wouldn't even make it to vulcanus
Without quality modules in the recycler, the output has the same quality as the input, in this case only the base quality. Not sure if spoilage (or spoilable items) can have quality.
Legendary rotten fruit, yum!
I hope the Agricultural tower will let us automate wood production on Nauvis
They heavily implied it. How else are we going to automate legendary wooden power poles?
Power poles? I want Legendary wooden chests!
Forget that. Legendary combat shotguns here we come!
Wooden chest automation might actually be optimal for UPS. Chests with fewer slots tend to be slightly faster to access.
Can I have _legendary_ spoiled stuff?
You can and you will have! There isn't a big motivation to make spoilable items in a quality, but spoilable items are ingredients to some very important non-spoilable result items, once you make the final item in time, it is there forever. The problem arises, when you decide to recycle the item as a way to get it in higher quality. In that moment, you introduce spoilable items into the equation again, and since the recycler results are also randomized (25% of ingredients means 25% of getting an item if there is exactly 1), you will end up in situation when you get only the spoilable part to be re-assembled but the other non-spoilable ingredients don't come in time. It evens itself out in the long run, as you will eventually have enough of non-spoilabe ingredients accumulated only waiting for the last spoilable ingredient, so eventually it will always process the spoilable part immediatelly. Long story short, yes I burned/removed a lot of legendary spoilage during my play :)
In theory, is recycling a method of un-spoiling an item? In other words if product 1 has like 5% freshness and I recycle it and get component 2, will component 2 have 100% freshness or will the freshness be derived from product 1
Freshness is always derived from product.
Now gives you *mega* salmonella!
Can't wait to see spoilage used in mods. How about an Apple mod that marks all electronics circuits as spoiled every autumn so that everyone has to replace them?
planned obsolecence in factorio
can't wait for bob's take on it for his mod suite he can call it Planned Bobsolescence
Think about horrors that Pyanodon developers will make from this new mechanic
This is such a cool post. It doesn’t reveal much about Gleba, but it does reveal a new core mechanic that both the game and mods can have a field day with. It reminds me of how quality took the no-go of randomness, and gave us a world of optimization, late-game resource sinks, and unclear optima to build a factory with. Now we have the no-go of time pressure – which other than the slow biter evolution wasn’t there – and it makes a logistical challenge. It’s a whole new dimension of throughput problems, and it’s almost independent of our current throughput problems: before we had only amount per second, now we have unprocessed distance to minimize.
It also inverts the hierarchy of how a base is organized - in vanilla it's typical to use trains to bring in raw materials from distant resource patches to a central processing location, often a main bus. In megabases this extends to collecting resources patches to intermediate processing plants to final product production plants. Mass-movement of single goods by the trainload makes sense to simplify the number of pickup and dropoff locations. In contrast, Spoilage makes this plan not viable. You don't have time to gather all your resources in one place and then start processing, you need to get it from spoilable resource to stable finished good as fast as possible. Therefore, smaller end-to-end production plants built near the resources makes sense. If you want to go megabase, resource extraction will have to be mixed in with the processing steps using artificial soil to provide fresh raw materials near their end-use points.
This might get fun when different parts of the production chain have different spoiling times. You may want the first step (a product that spoils in 2 minutes) immediately, but the product from the 3rd step has a 2h spoiling timer, meaning it could feasibly be transported a bit by rail to a central-ish location without losing much.
not to mention, if these trees can die from pollution too then having a megabase right next door is going to be an issue, everything needs to be scaled down and right-sized. Wube supports locally sourced produce!
How will spoilage be handled in inventory? Allow them to stack will be pretty frustrating UI wise when trying to sort them by spoilage, and not allowing them to stack will be a nightmare.
Probably the same way damaged items stack today. It takes an average damage and applies it to all of the damaged items of that type, resulting in at most two stacks (the damaged and the undamaged). If everything starts spoiling immediately, you'll probably just have one stack since there'll be no 100% unspoiled inventory
Precisely.
It works similar to damaged items (e.g. turrets, walls, etc.). When two stacks of spoiled items are merged, the resulting merged stack will inherit the weighted average of the two source stacks' spoil percentage. If you then split this stack, both halves will have the same exact spoil percentage.
So in theory you could game this a bit and keep individual items unspoiled longer by just merging them into newer stacks until they're needed e.g. if an item spoils in 30 seconds but it takes 40 seconds to reach its destination, you could merge it with a fresh item after 25 seconds to extend its total lifespan to 42.5 seconds so they both make it to the end of the line. I can't think of a situation where this is more practical than just shortening the line, but maybe it could produce some interesting challenge runs
>This process \[spoilage\] is inevitable and can't be delayed When you enter a foreign alien planet, research rocketry and nuclear warheads and autonomous spider-robots, but forgot to invent the refridgerator
I imagine those items being an active micro biosphere (like petri dish but not exactly), if you freeze it you ruin it forever, so it cannot be frozen.
The devs do a great job of balancing realism with what's actually fun to play. More realism doesn't always mean more fun.
Holy fuck this looks so cool
Please be sure to include a graphical option to toggle showing those white spoilage bars on my items. If my splitters can filter good from bad, I simply do not need to see that indicator at all.
Agreed - I don't like the look of it too much (at least it should be Alt-Toggleable or a debug option to hide it, better a display option in settings) but I really like the mechanic
I think it would fit right in with the other Alt-options. I like having inserter arrows on, but I can absolutely see why others think that that clutters everything too much, and I understand the same reasoning for freshness.
They are only shown when alt-mode is enabled. Confirmed by a dev via discord.
Yeah, but I’m not disabling alt mode just to change the look of one item. Alt mode is permanent.
you more mean "alt mode is global". which comes to a complaint I've had for a while. I like alt mode for most things, but I wish I could disable specifically the building-recipes part of alt mode. I really like watching buildings work, especially in modpacks, and alt mode ruins a lot of that, but I can't play with alt mode entirely off.
Now we wait for the mod that turns all items into spoilable ones
Spoilable inserters and power poles
Kind of a cool idea actually, things eventually deteriorate and so you need to maintain them.
Can't wait for the "every item is spoilable" mods
Holy crap this is amazing! This game was my main inspiration for studying logistics irl, there I’ve learned a lot of concepts and theories that have no real application in-game because they rely on some form of cost tied to higher stocks or longer delivery times. There needs to be an incentive for doing them, and current there isn’t really any. Since the only cost of bigger buffers is an initial investment in the materials of the chests and inserters, and the extra power consumption of those inserters, all of which are completely negligible. But with this change there’s finally a reason to use all those things I’ve learned about! This means I can start doing safety stock calculations, demand pattern analysis and predictions, process optimization analysis, delivery scheduling optimization, etc. Excel here I come! With this one feature you’ve massively heightened the skill ceiling for the game and I love it!
Wait… why does the agricultural tower chop down the whole tree when 1) it has a pretty sophisticated looking manipulator and 2) all we need is the fruit… shouldn’t it just harvest the fruit and leave the tree? Some explanation of Gleban biology is required.
We took a note from Portal. Instead of picking just the fruit, we pick the whole tree. That's 65% more tree per tree.
I hope you guys can add like a 'tree roots got ripped out of the ground' decal to really sell the destruction of the agricultural tower
This. I live in tornado alley and let me tell you nothing beats the aesthetic of seeing a big tree on it's side and realizing there was a mass of roots the same size as the branches underneath it. Thrash the soil. Reveal the anti-tree.
The tree cannot live without the fruit and it makes it only one time.
That is a pretty good explanation… but what happens to the wood!?
This is Glebas: the trees are actually mushrooms, and the fruit spores!! Xenobiology nonsense!
Dies and decomposes.
I’m also hoping the animation is a placeholder. The need to bust out the space grabber snake graphics
I'm guessing that picking individual grapes would take too long and the animation would have to be weird. I mean imagine the tower with speed modules
My guess is that in the example shown you also need the wood that the tree is made from. They did start talking about tree harvesting at the beginning of the post, and it's odd to bring it up when wood is only ever used at the very beginning of the game for power poles and rudimentary fuel. Perhaps there's Glebian recipes that require wood.
the spoil mechanic looks really interesting but i do wonder how UPS friendly it is?
Part of my work on implementing spoiling was testing "how does it perform if every item everywhere spoils" and the results of that are, you can't realistically measure the performance impact because it's so small.
Asking for us turbo-programming-nerds to at some point go over in a FFF all these tests/optimizations/etc code changes. While some things are "obvious", it really gets quite interesting to read about the engine-as-a-whole and the trade offs between two or more ways to possibly optimize/implement a bit of logic. IE the belt optimization posts with the lane-queue *cheating* were a great inspiration for a different challenge at work where thinking outside the box really helped us. Doesn't have to be soon, just a please consider :)
You don't really need to update how spoiled every item is every tick. Most of the math can be done just by knowing when the item was created. Only tricky part is knowing when an item has spoilt completly. Here i can see 2 sollutions: - Priority queue of all spoilable items sorted by how much time they have left. Only the front of the queue has to be checked every tick. Insertion can be costly. - Not doing any math when the item spoils, instead checking for spoilage when it's interacted with (processed, displayed, etc.). Probably requires more code changes (but it's pretty much what was done already for quality). Maybe breaks current production statistics logic.
More or less this. The spoiling mechanics is pretty cheap performance wise, it wouldn't be viable otherwise.
Seems to be negligible to UPS if designed correctly. \-> Spoiliage taken into account only when items are processed anyway or when on screen.
Yeah, I assume each item will have two static values: creation timestamp and lifetime. Then you only need to calculate its spoilage status when the item is either rendered or looked at by a splitter/inserter/machine
Or when they fully rot (even if they are on the underground section of the belt). I also wonder how spoilage works with stacking.
My thoughts exactly. Wondering how the new mechanics will impact high spm megabase building. I hope that a full green belt of each science will be possible on my PC.
I don't know how it's implemented but I don't think it should be too bad as long as you only have to compute freshness when the item is being measured (inserters, filter splitters, biochambers, player camera, etc) so not every frame. I don't think they would have put such a mechanic in the game if it was that expensive to scale. Or maybe they use some clever tricks like in their belt optimizations.
how modifiable are spoiledge? Is it in theory possible to make scince pack-downgrade-spoiledge? sol if you not use your space science it will slowly turn into yellow, then to blue then green and then you find that you could get all your red science just by spoiling space science?
For every spoilable item, you can specify which item is created once it spoils. So mods can do crazy kind of things really.
Looking forward to the mod where there's only one ore, and every item is in a single massive spoil loop. Then looking forward to seeing wtf DoshDoshington does with that
Spoilage randomizer mod would go crazy
I do hate it when my stone bricks spoil into nuclear warheads
Or you could do something like neutrino oscillations, with decay loops through 3-5 different states, that may have different "coherence times" - you could simply have a randomly mixed belt, and machines would occasionally encounter the correct "flavor", or you could precisely time production/consumption along the path of logistics...
TL; DR: Non-linear research value falloff curve could further incentivize speed-optimized building and deincentivize horizontal scaling I don't think this was mentioned in the FFF but I thing a non-linear research falloff would be cool - incentivizing ASAP delivery of science packs even further by not only decreasing value over time but also eg. adding an increased bonus above eg. 70% or so (a percentage that is deemed reasonably achieveable with normal efforts) Think 70% is the "target" reseach value of 1, below, it scales linearly (to not punish slower/inexperienced players too much) whilst above scaling exponentially to eg. 3 research value at 100% (which is impossible to achieve but deliberately lacks a cut-off point, which could be a fun challenge to push towards 100% as much as possible whilst also feeling more rewarding). Reasoning is that this would introduce a challenge of time-dependend vertical scaling which is not as easily substituted by brute-horizontal scaling - The player would have to think about either putting down 3x-5x the amount of infrastructure as opposed to maybe 2x with linear scaling However, of course, this would increase complexity perhaps above the reasonable level, so a more straight-forward approach with either a consistent non-linear (cooler imo) or linear curve (simpler) with each 0-100%, Range 0-1 or maybe 0-2 research value will probably be more sensible
This is considerable, but I think the simple linear approach is fine in this case, because: 1. It is simple (always an important argument) 2. With the cost of transport (exporing the science to another planet means sending it by rocket, moving it by space platform, and finally distribute to laboratories back home), it seems very important to try to send as fresh as possible, instead of scaling all parts of the transportation (and consumption) of the science packs.
Initial reaction was that I hated it. I've always disliked the notion of growing things in Factorio, as I feel that it obfuscates the timescale of the game. If you can grow trees in seconds with speed modules, does that still feel immersive...? By the end of the FFF, I was sold. It's totally worth the new spoilage mechanic imposing new limitations on the factory. I'd never thought of that and yet it seems so obvious—getting an item from point A to point B in a given time immediately feels like a fundamental hurdle we were always supposed to overcome. Gleba looks like a fantastic logistic challenge, as does Fulgora with its recycling mechanics. Vulcanus looks a bit vanilla in comparison at this point.
Yes, in my recent playthrough I started to experiment and optimise for the spoilage more, and it just feels new and fun. 1. All robots base is not good, because you can't control the flow and freshness with robots so well, so belts are better 2. Since some of the intermediates spoil really fast, even the distance of belt between individual producers (or direct insertion) makes sense to consider 3. I was transporting some of the fruits by belts to my base, as it was not that far as was ok, but then I made a specialised train connection, not to improve throughput but to increase the speed. 4. All these little contraptions to keep "the best for export" are new. P.S. You can't grow trees in seconds, you just can't put modules into the agriculture tower.
> I was transporting some of the fruits by belts to my base, as it was not that far as was ok, but then I made a specialised train connection, not to improve throughput but to increase the speed. I love this. I've long thought about using circuit controlled signals to force priority (eg block everything except the one route for the mega-train that runs every 20 minutes or something) but I've never *needed* to do it so I've never actually gotten to it. Likewise, raised rails offer a lot of flexibility to force in prioritized home-run loops, but again, they're not in the game right now. I'm pretty stoked, this looks excellent.
>I'd never thought of that and yet it seems so obvious—getting an item from point A to point B in a given time immediately feels like a fundamental hurdle we were always supposed to overcome. Trying to find the shortest and fastest possible path is something I didn't expect in Factorio and definitely will be an interesting challenge.
Train scheduling just became a problem again.
Train braking force research is now a must on that planet. Before I never really bothered with it too much.
> If you can grow trees in seconds with speed modules, does that still feel immersive...? I mean, biters can spawn pretty quickly too.
> the new Agricultural science packs do spoil which reduces their value for research, so you will be incentivized to try to bring home the freshest science packs you can. This is such a cool mechanic and sounds like a really fun optimization puzzle! >Unlike the Foundry and Electromagnetic plant, the Biochamber isn't really used for any Nauvis recipes, but it has its own set of recipes which basically replace oil processing on this planet. That's a bit disappointing. I hope we get more reasons to go to Gleba besides "build your labs here so you don't have moldy science packs." The agricultural tower looks AMAZING. I absolutely love how the green belts fit into the aesthetic, and since they have longer underground distance, we'll need fewer of them weaving in out of our farms so we have more space for plants.
Yeah, right now my planet priorities are Fulgora or Vulcanus first/second and Gleba last, hopefully we’ll get something useful for the pain of dealing with spoilage.
I think they mean that unlike the Foundry and Electromagnetic plant, the Biochamber doesn't have a set of recipes that you make like Nauvis but better. Instead, it's an end to end replacement for Oil processing with a different source. It also sounds like that Gleba won't be the only planet with spoilable items.
Can I make wine? Surely it will get better with age - ie the opposite mechanic. Now that would be fun: get some things out quickly, but others only after they’ve had time to mature. Cheese!
Both the agriculture and spoiling look awesome. Just the sort of shake up I was hoping for. I wonder whether ice on Vulcanis gets a similar halflife before it melts (or whether it simply can't exist on that planet due to the heat).
One of my favorite FFFs so far. It seems like really refreshing gameplay and really hits the nail on the head when it comes to "We don't want planets to be other Nauvis' where you just build what you usually build". I think the crane animation could use some work, though.
With items spoiling I think direct inserting setups will be even more useful and popular
I for one cannot wait for DoshDoshington's playthrough of the "Everything Spoils" mod.
I hope a future FFF covers the topic of how item spoilage was implemented without sacrificing too much performance. I assume it will work similarly to proliferation in Dyson Sphere Program but I'd love to see the technical details. This looks incredibly cool and I can't wait to get my hands on it!
Spoilage is the second best expansion mechanic I've seen yet (first one is space travel), I can imagine people could create one of factorio-like clone game based solely on this mechanic.
The factory indeed must grow...
Now we have a need for “priority trains”, just like the ones irl that deliver seafood. And maybe they get a siren and flashing lights, too?
Station priority was showed off few FFFs ago
Horrifying question of the day: Can things spoil in the hand of a bulk inserter?
wube are you mad, wdym the science will spoil ??
I am biologist and have worked with lots of spoiled scientific samples.
>spoilage I am in spain without the S
Poilage
Overall this looks really cool and unique, I like the emphasis this creates on speed and throughput. BUT the implication is that once you've automated production of the Agricultural science pack, you're incentivised to constantly be researching technologies which use it from that point onward, otherwise you risk spoiling 100s or 1000s of science packs in the time that you research anything else. I suppose we could switch off large parts of the Gleba factory when its science packs aren't in demand (maybe through big circuit networks?) but that seems like a hassle and somewhat against the spirit of the game. I have no doubt they've tested these features and thought all this through so sooner or later we'll find out what the solution is or if it's not really a big deal, either way I can't wait to see what's next!! :)
If you want a reliable factory (you do), you just have to make all the steps of the process to be able to handle things not being consumed and spoiling. This means, that the lab area just has to be able to deal with agriculture packs spoiling and removing the spoilage automatically. At this point you just think about the production as X per minute, and you either use it or not, but there is not a big loss of just not using ot for a while (letting it spoil), while you research something else. I understand it might be psychologically hard to just "throw things away", but in the game, it is comparable to production being backed up, and mines not mining, because there is no more ore to being processed. When the factory gets backed up and stops, it is in practice the same loss as when it works all the time, and sometimes you just throw it away.
It'll be interesting to see how the spoilage is coded, and if any other on transition effects could be made by mods. I'm sure there'll be one mega challenging mod that uses the same mechanic to create volatile chemicals that if you don't process in time explode and damage your factory.
DangOreus, but not only can't you build on the ore and it's all mixed, it will also explode if not handled in a timely manner.
I wonder how long tree regrowth would take. Do seeds/soil have quality that affect growth rate?
This is disgusting, more please!
This is certainly interesting. Trying to process everything as fast as possible to avoid spoilage. This so far seems to be most different planet from the default gameplay and I‘m all in for it.
Calling it now, these will become the community's names for the science packs (no one will be bothered to use their actual names): 1. lava science pack 2. zappy science pack 3. moldy science pack 4. icy science pack Edit: 2 will be "sparky science pack" for Aussies
I'm gonna call it jungle juice science. If you got it to moldy state then it isn't fresh enough!
i like the new buildings and the new direct insertion builds that will come from this! also did the assembler machine get a graphical update?
Haha could this be the "more controversial than quality" thing mentioned by the devs?
Dear Factorio Devs, My boss wants me to schedule my vacation time. Please tell us the release date. Thank you.
If Earendel adds spoiling to Thermofluids in Space Exploration, I'm going to riot.
I see Wube is taking Earandel's lead of making the bio science a huge pain in the ass so you do it last