Speculations

[tardy quarry]

well, idk

they clearly have a skeleton for how they gonna release the fffs

[late sentinel]

fair

the idea of seasons I think comes after that though

It's more of a taxiconomy idea of the FFFs

IE we are just classifying them into good groups

[timid crescent]

Nah seasons make sense.
S1: FFF#001 - 365
Specials: FFF#366 - 372
S2: FFF#373 - present

[tardy quarry]

one thing for sure is that we’re in SA season now

[late sentinel]

there have been a few months that would make me doubt that

[weary widget]

I think we're getting back into the swing of things

its not like release is THAT far away

[late sentinel]

I'm sure last week's FFF has you convinced of that.

[weary widget]

just the fact its 4 months left according to the #1 guy behind wube, the content is going to be revealed sooner than later

it feels just like yesterday we hit FFF #400, and that was nearly 4 months ago. #416 is this friday, with another ~16 to go until late october

[hybrid briar]

vs. , fight!

(but realistically it's all perspective)

[late sentinel]

can't wait for august when the game comes out

[hybrid briar]

if the thumbnail was cryptically suggesting a possible date that could be another hint

though I think if that's the intent it would be a date range

but, still, could be misdirection

[tropic basin]

what are the numbers? 10, 20, 24, 27?

can't make that a date range, only one of the numbers could be a month

[late sentinel]

depending on endianneness and vertical/horizontal

[weary widget]

kovarex has been the most accurate, unambiguous dev to listen to since the beginning. I don't think he has mislead or misredirected with troll statements once. he said late October at the latest, so I definitely think that could be the estimated release window

[tropic basin]

I also don't think they're gonna put a hint at the release date in an FFF. Not Wubes styles to play stupid games.

[weary widget]

maybe, maybe not. I'm just saying it fits in with what he directly said

[plain ermine]

That's why you are not

[late sentinel]

that's clever JG

It will come out in august. I will not fall for such tricks.

[tropic basin]

It's more than not trolling or not misdirecting us. The release date is really sensible information. You don't mess around with such things.

And that of course includes public statements such as "October at the latest". Unless something goes wrong, the expansion is going to be out by October.

[hybrid briar]

people underestimate the potential propagation of their words all the time

[tropic basin]

I think this Discord server does a pretty good job of reminding the devs about that :)

[hybrid briar]

one big piranha tank :P

[tropic basin]

The release estimation of "around a year from now" is in two months. At this point it's reasonable to expect either a release date or a postponement announcement somewhat soon.

[weary widget]

it could've been klonan or kovarex, I'm mixing up statements from who said what, but its been said (not verbatim) things are still on track, and also some stuff can move to 2.1 if releasing on time becomes an issue

[hybrid briar]

makes sense

I'm expecting release date announcement around august myself

[weary widget]

yeah I could see that

wube announced 1.0 release date 2 1/2 months before release

[late sentinel]

🦈

[misty falcon]

What's speculated for this Friday? Project Waifu?

I wonder if Raiguard has a highlighter on "Project Waifu" 😄

[late sentinel]

you said 'raiguard' anyways so

[misty falcon]

Oh he popped in 😄

[late sentinel]

if you say 'raiguard' then 'raiguard' will appear

that's how it works

[misty falcon]

And if I say "beetlejuice" x3 ?

Stop pinging the dev haha

It's like crying wolf

[late sentinel]

as mr kid says, it is opt in / opt out

[misty falcon]

Yea, I always avoid pinging manager-trainee unless it's something I actually want to ask

[hybrid briar]

I think it's also possible to ignore users via the bot

[misty falcon]

I don't want them to ignore me 😦

[late sentinel]

he may have me on ignored then, he said to not avoid saying his name, so I have not avoided it.

[hybrid briar]

eh? that just means not dancing around it I'd expect

sometimes people try to be less rude by avoiding referring to someone by name but that's actually more underhanded

[late sentinel]

#friday-facts message

[hybrid briar]

and mileage varies :P

hopefully he knows about the blocking feature in it

[late sentinel]

most of the time I say his name it is not even a question

While I still have the impulse to not say it - it does feel like basically an @ ping - they explicitly requested not to dance around it.

[late sentinel]

@hybrid briar check this out

[hybrid briar]

yeah I saw it lol

[sand saddle]

That was last weeks tho, did we get a new one for this week yet?

[late sentinel]

this week is raiguard's FFF.

[sand saddle]

yeah but I mean has JG provided a pre-release emoji transcript?

[plain ermine]

As to my knowledge I havent

[late sentinel]

Can't confirm anything in this economy lol

[tardy quarry]

JG can u prepare a post-release emoji transcript?

[plain ermine]

No

[tardy quarry]

[hybrid briar]

says no, posts fluid slurping anyway

[misty falcon]

Who had fluids on their board?

[weary widget]

#friday-facts message this madman

[indigo fog]

I mean, does it count if I've been consistently believing in a fluid overhaul for the past 6+ months?

[sand saddle]

No

[weary widget]

@cobalt blaze I predict this will be #2 to quality on your chart

[cobalt blaze]

lol

[wet cosmos]

What hasnt been worked on by now, we got some things to belt, trains, bots, beacons and now fluids, if we done with all the big things wouldnt that be a good cue to get more new content or even nearing the release? oh right we havent heard about enemies/ai things yet theres likely gonna be smth

[weary widget]

regardless of when the FFF is, just based on the fact every major aspect of the game is getting improved/reworked, I could seriously see a combat overhaul for SA

[wet cosmos]

well we already know rocket turret and targeting priorities, aside from that there needs to be new enemies on some planets definitely, maybe fulgora will have lightning typa things come from under the oil lol

[misty falcon]

At this stage, they might even give us a calculator. Almost everything they said that won't happen so far happened.

Also even distribution and/or squeakthrough, but they'll do it smart, like an automatic jump button or whatever, which can let us scale cliffs

Also swimming, even though they specifically said "no swimming"

[sand saddle]

nothing like a refreshing dip in the oil lakes of fulgora

[misty falcon]

Fulgora lakes are shallow

[sand saddle]

harder to drown that way

[misty falcon]

Hell, Aquilo might give us a water vehicle

[sand saddle]

boatorio

[agile river]

finally, buoyancy operated aquatic transport

[misty falcon]

Oh buoy!

[stray wharf]

To be completely fair to WUBE, they probably meant it when they said it. It's just that sometimes, people at WUBE just... do things.

Belt stacking is stupid... until someone just made it work one day.

No fluid rework... oh, here's this mysterious commit.

Beacons aren't changing... hey, we have some code that can change beacons.

[hybrid briar]

"To further incentivize using fewer beacons, you'll be able to upcycle (overclock) t3 modules, but they will decay back to t3 modules and need recalibration periodically"

[errant crest]

And you need to bring them to fulgora's lighting storm to overclock - weird branching rails and insane amount of rockets and roboports now all makes sense

[misty falcon]

Rai said he wants to add a matrix solver for rate calculator, to make it much more useful. I doubt it will happen, but then again - fluid rework.

[tardy quarry]

now I wonder if we can adjust pump feed rate

[late sentinel]

The question is what exactly even is pump feed rate

I suppose they just always request 12k/t?

[tardy quarry]

12k/s?

I think it might be useful to have a speed valve to ensure u don’t feed more than u can afford into a session

[cobalt blaze]

it earned the #5 spot

1. Quality
2. Spoils to Agriculture
3. Putting things on top of other things
4. Trash to Treasure
5. Fluids 2.0

[tardy quarry]

I guess u can just read a tank and enable pump when buffer is high enough

[late sentinel]

so far right?

IE the others count the whole week right?

[cobalt blaze]

no, these are just the day of the annoucement

[late sentinel]

Hmm. I'm surprised it was so low.

[cobalt blaze]

its pretty close. 2-5 all are all between 5k and 5.8k

#7 (Train control improvements) is all the way down at 4k

[late sentinel]

Much more normal than I expected. What was quality?

[cobalt blaze]

Fluids 2.0 just got over the 5k line

Quality was 8.3k

[late sentinel]

Quality is a real standout in the world of 5ks

Do you think the #space-age effect explains any of this?

I don't actually see much discussion in there for this one.

[cobalt blaze]

i've considered tracking both channels

only 500 or so messages in ther today though, its not a big factor

On Spoils to agriculture day it had 1.8k messages

[tropic basin]

Quality was both the first major feature that was announced and has nontrivial effects for factory designs.

The spoilage mechanic behaves a lot more tame than quality.

[cobalt blaze]

most importantly, quality had silly names that everyone hated

[plain ermine]

I can't figure out how to add silly names to new fluid system

[cobalt blaze]

lol

let me try

[crimson bough]

Do not drink the silly water

[cobalt blaze]

call fluid capacity "hunger" because empty pipes are hungry for fluid
call units of fluid "cars"
call the flow rate "drift" because things that go fast drift like in inital D
call fluid tanks "streets"
call pipes "love"

then you can say "connect the world with love, we need more hunger to get the cars drfiting"

[tropic basin]

full fluid systems therefore have full hunger, not wanting anymore fluid
that's indeed silly

[plain ermine]

But the players don't see those names during the gameplay and even if they do they just ignore those

[late sentinel]

Yeah- seems contrived

[weary widget]

very cool, the top 5 are indeed pretty close (minus quality)

[leaden socket]

might need to pulse it with circuits

But I still want pumps to be adjustable

[leaden socket]

But you can probably add silly names to spoilage system

[errant crest]

second part this friday
or part 3

[dreamy eagle]

I'd say something related to massive amounts of fluid, since fluid 2.0 was last week.

[errant crest]

might have several liquids - different colored ponds looks like something to pump

[weary widget]

more benefits for going to would certainly be nice. we definitely got left hanging with that one

[misty falcon]

I predict something small. Maybe a precursor to enemies

[tardy quarry]

my money is on more qol

or technical

[tropic basin]

If we want to predict "release date FFF" for a couple weeks in a row, we should start with it now

[tardy quarry]

but I do hope to see more benefits from

[weary widget]

I think as we get closer to release the cadence is going to change to purely SA/new content, unless there is some groundbreaking optimization FFF or something of that sort

[tardy quarry]

and I think we’re not close enough yet

perhaps after the Aquilo reveal we will be in the hype zone

[weary widget]

agreed, might be another month or two before its nonstop content

[crystal dune]

Forget content, let's try to predict the qol features

[viscid ferry]

A better blueprint editor

[weary widget]

your guess is as good as mine lol

[dull grove]

The only thing left to heavily optimize is train pathing

ehh

Beating A* is very difficult

the only thing I could think of is pre-calculating and storing every route when a new station/signal gets placed.

So pathing gets O(1) but save game becomes O(n^2)

You can do some reading here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9511118/is-a-the-best-pathfinding-algorithm
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm

[errant crest]

if you move from finding the best path to good enough path - it's quite easy and noticeably faster

[dull grove]

My solution would utilize Djikstra & storing solutions since the amount of space required should be negligible. A* is what they currently use. My point is that it's doubtful they'll find another algorithm with better performance than A* while still being best path.

[stray wharf]

That would also help deal with the performance disparity of angled rails versus cardinal rails. Angled rails collide with more tiles, so people often get told to use them sparingly.

[wanton igloo]

As that FFF says, it's what they used in 0.17 and before

Indeed

[dull grove]

Hmm... Didn't expect the hitbox check to be the most expensive since it should be O(1).

[wanton igloo]

Rotated hitboxes get harder

And O(1) is still expensive if you do a ton of it :P

This is also why orthogonal rails are more efficient than diagonal rails, and why placing rails over ore is bad for UPS

1: non-rotating fluid boxes and 2: collision checks with ores

[dull grove]

Maybe porting the Code to C if Lua has an API for it will help performance

[wanton igloo]

wuh?

What code?

[dull grove]

hitbox check

[wanton igloo]

Those are done by the engine

The only Lua code being ran during gameplay is mod code, at least in Freeplay

[dull grove]

I see. Don't know all that much about Factorio's backend

So the hitbox check has to account for players, stuck trains, biters and not correctly signalled intersections

The last one seems the most difficult to solve IMO. Maybe they bruteforce it? so that all intersections 1-1 are are correctly signalled? That way you could change the rail code to be an enable/disable hitbox check for trains

[dull grove]

Let me elaborate: the only thing which strictly necessitates the tickbased collision checks are 1) wrongly signalled intersections which cause the collision of moving trains.
2) stuck trains won't allow collisions because the segment is already blocked by them.
3) biters and players can be solved via an enable/disable function for rail segments via checking if a segment is in the players chunk or in the 8 chunks around it. Update the chunks checked when the player moves to the next chunk. Same goes for biters.

If a train enters an enabled segment the train checks its collision every tick

else it doesn't

It should also be possible to create an algorithm evaluating if a train network has valid signalling which prevents train-based collisions to verify this.

[tardy quarry]

enhanced alt mode, right click the alt button to open the UI to configure which details are always on/off and which details are toggled by alt key

or let it have its own section in the option menu

[crystal dune]

One thing I would specifically like to see from that is an option to constantly see rail blocks regardless of what I'm holding

Though maybe that's just because I've been making train blueprints for a while now

[weary widget]

+1, and on that note, constantly seeing roboport network range would be nice too when building stuff with your personal roboports

I've adopted the habit of holding a decon planner whenever I'm building out huge solar arrays just to see my coverage

[tardy quarry]

I’ve used to use radar view to see the bot range

[weary widget]

same, but what I'm proposing would be useful when you need to see it updated as you're running around. my solar/accumulator BPs don't have roboports which was meant to save UPS, but its more legwork to put them up, which is when its nice to see when your covered area needs more time, or you can move a bit more to another part of the BP

[tardy quarry]

I guess we will be mostly using remote view in SA

[indigo fog]

I wonder what will be tomorrow

[vivid turret]

Fluids 3.0

[tawny gulch]

Pain

[agile river]

wow we're getting bread in factorio

[tardy quarry]

alt mode 2.0

[tropic basin]

Is that another acronym?

[crystal dune]

pBiter aDating iSimulator n

[tawny gulch]

People Always Icomplain Nomatterwhatwedowithfluids

[vivid turret]

Players Always Irritated Nevertheless

[fringe verge]

Poor raiguard getting so much flack as people spend a whole week trying to reinvent the broken wheel we used to have

[tawny gulch]

The new system is mildly overpowered but I'll take it over what we had before

I still want to find a way to make it more interesting, re-introduce sensible limits, etc - but I only have so many brain cells and expertise, and so much time before release.

[fringe verge]

Yeah, if we could have fun design challenges as well as predictable/clear/learnable by new players, then we'd already have that after this many years

[tawny gulch]

Fluid simulations are the kind of thing that you would write a PhD thesis for.

[fringe verge]

Gotta save something for ambitious post 2.0 or 3.0 features

It was the right call to fight the inertia and cull the non-sacred sick cow

There's plenty of ways we can provide constructive feedback, and suggestions for features in development

But for some things, like this, we're just far too outside the factorio codebase, haven't spent years seeing the inside of the fluid code, and haven't seen the holistic changes made to 2.0 and space age

so we don't know what the hell we're talking about and gotta trust the devs have considered a considerable number of solutions

I'm excited for finally hearing about combat/enemies, or the treasures gleba has to incentivise us going there

[late sentinel]

I've been thinking a lot about reasonable ways to do this, but have began to feel that there might be some emergent charm to fluids being 'infinite' in flow. It makes some interesting high-level decisions with logistics.

For example, it is better to transport iron as a fluid to your destination instead of as plates - so there is a really big logistical advantage and you can use the 'fluid sections' of your base as high-throughput zones.

[stray wharf]

The thing is, that's going to require quite a lot of buffering. The larger your cross-base pipeline is, the more buffering you need.

Because fluids are so dense, and you're probably going to have a train network anyway, a 1:1 or 1:2 train carrying molten metal is likely going to be fine.

Cross-base fluid pipes for infinite fluids (water on Nauvis, lava on Vulcanus) can be more appealing. Though in the latter case, it may not matter, since you're probably going to need actual lava pits to dispose of unneeded stone anyway.

[leaden socket]

Train collision optimization

[leaden socket]

Train stations and the wagon will also create buffers; suppose you have 1 wagon + 1 tank on each station, that's 75k fluids = 750 underground pipes = 3750 tiles, which is quite long

[stray wharf]

It's not as long as you might think. If you're doing point-to-point pipes, that it may not be that much buffering. But if you're just putting pipes into a block base the way rails go into them, then you're going to have a lot more buffering than you actually need.

Also, each station only need one tank of buffer. It may have two tanks, but it won't call for another train until that tank is drained. So that's just 25k per station (provider or requester).

That being said, if you're using molten metal, you're going to have quite a few requesters, since anything that needs iron plate directly has to get it through molten metals.

[leaden socket]

I agree putting pipe bus into rail grid BP will cause some problems. This might need some thought to deal with...

I'm not sure about the effect of having multiple requester/provider stations. This means more buffer in both pipe bus and train design. I guess pipe bus will suffer less in this case.

For mega scale, when a single 1-1 train for molten metal is not enough, it's certainly time for a fluid bus.

[stray wharf]

At end-game productivity, one wagon of molten iron is enough to make 62,500 plates. That's enough plates to make 171,875 green circuits (with the EMP). So for every 1 fluid wagon, you can create over 21 cargo wagons of green circuits.

I think 1-1 trains of molten iron are going to be fine for a long time 😉

[late sentinel]

The thing is, that's going to require quite a lot of buffering. The larger your cross-base pipeline is, the more buffering you need.
What does this even mean

This is not a real problem as far as I can tell, the pipes themselves have a buffer, so naturally the buffer will just get larger.

I don't see why it will require a lot of buffering though.

[stray wharf]

Remember: in the new fluid system, the ability to extract fluid is metered by how full the fluid system is, percentage wise. Every pipe added means you need more fluid to maintain a certain output pressure. So every pipe increases the amount of buffering you need to maintain throughput. So if pipes are integrated into your blocks, then every block is going to increase the amount of buffering you need to have.

[vivid turret]

You could nullify throughput worries with pumps, but the buffer still fills up when demand slows or stops.
And... I don't care if it does.

[tardy quarry]

doesn’t matter that much for me. if each pipe needs 100 fluids for infinite throughput, I would like to pay.

[stray wharf]

Pumps may be faster than other sources, but metering still happens to their throughput.

[late sentinel]

Calculate how many pipes of fluid fits in a fluid wagon.

I think it’s 250, which is quite a few pipes already.

[late sentinel]

i don’t really see this ‘buffering problem’ being a big deal

It’s a big enough deal that you should avoid tanks, but not a big enough one to use trains instead

[stray wharf]

Considering how few trains you'll save by doing this, I'd rather use that space for less train-dense materials, like petrol.

[misty falcon]

Speculations for tmrw?

[crystal dune]

The creative process behind the long awaited plastic bar resprite

[late sentinel]

My goal is not to save trains, though.

[stray wharf]

I can't think of anything else you'd save for molten metals specifically. They're so item-dense that I can't imagine a scenario where even a 1-1 train would have throughput issues. And if that were to crop up, 1-2 trains would deal with that issue just fine.

So if you're not saving train traffic, why bother with this massive series of pipes?

[vivid turret]

You don't need a massive series of pipes, you just need the Omnipipe™
(Still haven't decided if the all-in-one fluid network is actually practical, but it's an interesting enough concept that i'll probably give it a shot)

[late sentinel]

Impractical or not, you forget that the omnipipe is awesome

[vivid turret]

I don't forget

[late sentinel]

I think you are imagining a train-based base, but many bases only use trains for ores. In those bases it makes a ton of sense to have a fluid distributor for plates.

Their alternative is tons of plate belts

for these bases throwing down an iron pipe along their bus is an insanely large upgrade for very minimal cost.

[vivid turret]

Depends if you consider the need to put foundries everywhere a 'minimal cost'

[stray wharf]

So you would have trains going to the mines carrying calcite?

[crystal dune]

That seems to be at least a possibility

[weary widget]

thats my plan but having a centralized location for it as the mines get further out

[crystal dune]

Unlike in vanilla where plates are only 2x denser than ore, molten metal is really, really dense. It may honestly be worth the hassle, in some cases

[late sentinel]

I’m doing that in either case!

[weary widget]

I've posted this a few times before, but it minimizes train traffic around your base w/ ores

[stray wharf]

I prefer not to traffic in ores. Since I use block-based designs, I just make plate locally at the mine itself. In SA, I'll be making molten metal instead.

[weary widget]

yeah comparing its density to raw ore, its a no brainer

[late sentinel]

Also viable, I wish we knew the ratio of BMD to foundry better.

If the ratio is close, I see no reason to do it your way.

[weary widget]

provided you're only moving calcite/liquid metal longer distances, thats a good choice as well

[late sentinel]

The benefit of yours is not having to rebuild the processing part

[weary widget]

personally I like centralized builds so I can get the most mileage out of expensive setups (quality/beacon stuff), which I will most definitely be doing a lot of

[late sentinel]

That’s a benefit I forgot to consider!

Mine is certainly better if you have no limits on cost

Which is a much more realistic expectation in 2.0 than in SA

[weary widget]

yeah yours is better suited later endgame/postgame

at some point (assuming your objective is to go big) your focus shifts from cost to optimization

[late sentinel]

yes, but I didn’t consider that yours was better for anything but avoiding rebuilding

[misty falcon]

Wrong channel for this conversation?

[weary widget]

sure I'll move to SA and paste my response

[timid crescent]

I was reminded while rewatching Dosh's Hellworld ™️ video that some of the enemies in rampant factions show as white on the map, further convincing me that the white squares on the Fulgora map are enemies on the dense scrap piles.

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-399-fulgora-mapgen.png

[stray wharf]

While that may be, we realized that those white squares seem to be hand-drawn. They're of different sizes, and some of the rectangles are rounded. They look like they were drawn to cover something up.

What and why is unclear.

[timid crescent]

I would expect it to be the same as what causes the roboports in this map image to be of different shapes and sizes as well

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-399-fulgora-train-network.png

Just seems to be a quirk of the map and/or the way they take the screenshots

The pixel coordinates wouldn't always scale perfectly to the entity positions and sizes.

[barren oasis]

Fluid Mechanics was my favourite module while studying mathematics. I was going to take the advanced module the following year, but everyone from the year above said it was impossibly difficult and scared me off...
Looking back, I definitely should have taken it - not that I used any of that in my current job 🤣

[timid crescent]

Since Raiguard has expressed some intention to try, any speculation/ideas about how the new fluid system (a single fluid box for connected pipes/tanks) could be made more interesting?

[late sentinel]

a network-wide io limit

[timid crescent]

A nice and simple idea, how could it be communicated to a player?

Probably through the pipe/network UI, where you flush contents

[late sentinel]

Interestingly that idea is still the same performance complexity

[timid crescent]

I guess the question then is what a reasonable I/O limit is, and if/how pumps should interact with this limit

[timid crescent]

I worry it would have very unintuitive results on the top end of throughput though.

E.g. if the limit is 3000, but a single machine produces 900, and another machine needs 2900, how do you properly balance that out?

[misty falcon]

Big network = Big buffer = Need pumps to split into sections. Good enough for me

[timid crescent]

I don't think the massive buffers are quite enough of a drawback for big networks. Pipe buffers are low visibility, so you'd need to know it's an issue for it to be a disincentive.

[stray wharf]

If there was some limit on a single fluid segment's throughput, it would probably be separate limits for inputs and outputs. That is, it could be 3000 fluid in, 3000 fluid out. So if you've capped the input limit, it doesn't affect the output limit.

[timid crescent]

Yes that's what I was assuming, but the issue I'm proposing is some setup that requires you to take the output of one machine and split it into multiple networks reliably.

If some hard limit applies, it would be frustrating if it was low, and it wouldn't matter if it was high... except when it does so it just becomes frustrating again.

[stray wharf]

The deeper question is this: what problem are you trying to solve? What builds do you want to work and which ones do you want to stop?

A limit of, say, 20,000 or so really only stops people from building planet-wide fluid networks. A limit of 12,000 starts impacting nuclear plants (especially if quality doesn't result in hotter steam generation), though 12,000 just means you have to actually take some care not to overburden a single pipe.

A limit of 2,000 starts affecting high-quality, highly-beaconed setups, such that you may not be able to have more than 4-5 such machines attached to the same fluid system.

That being said, a hard limit like this comes with a relatively easy way to tell people what the problem is: change the color of the pipes or something. If there's more fluid trying to enter the system, make the entire pipe segment red or something.

[timid crescent]

Any number / break point you choose will be okay for some people and not okay for others. I don't think a system limit is quite the solution because of that.

Plus a fairly intuitive solution of running a parallel pipeline along the 'bottlenecked' section wouldn't work, it would just make the single segment larger.

You'd need to run the parallel pipe and split the network

Whether that's desirable gameplay or not I can't be sure.

[stray wharf]

It's not supposed to be "okay" for everyone. The question is whether it creates fun gameplay and interesting designs. Is it fun gameplay to have people build base-wide fluid networks that are superior to trains, or do you want that to not work? How much thought do you want people to give fluid throughput in nuclear plants? How much care should people take in extremely fast fluid processing setups?

[timid crescent]

Personally I think it's more fun without such a limit as it means I can route my pipes in a way that looks nice (what I find fun about pipes) without needing to concern myself with throughput constraints.
I do agree that the lack of throughput constrains can be considered a problem, especially when such throughput limitations were a part of designed challenges in mods.

[mint berry]

The new one seems great and I think the trade-offs chosen were the right ones.

[timid crescent]

Having a hard cap per segment feels like too blunt of a solution.

I think a cap would work better if there were multiple tiers of pipes with increasing limits, but that just hides the issue imo.

Pipes of different tiers would probably not be able to connect to each other under this system

Not only does it only push the issue further out, it adds in the issue of needing the additional tiers, with all the trade-offs that brings with it.

[misty falcon]

Do remember that the limit is per machine.

With pre-rocket vanilla stuff, you're unlikely to need even 10% fullness

[timid crescent]

We're talking about a hypothetical where there is a limit per segment

[misty falcon]

Ah I see... but then we're just back to 1.1

[timid crescent]

Not quite, you'd get similar behaviours when you reach that limit, but it would be demonstrably easier to troubleshoot

Probably not that fun thought, in my opinion

[timid crescent]

^

[timid crescent]

Initial point of topic

[tropic basin]

The idea of the new algorithm is to be boring. Spicing it up kinda goes against why it exists.

You can do some minor changes such as buffing pumps pumping from tanks, but nothing like IO limits.

iirc Raiguard said that a single machine in the FFF builds does 3250 fluid/s or something.

[timid crescent]

I agree, however there's possible room for some level of complexity to make it more interesting.

The possibility does seem to shrink the more it is discussed though haha

[tropic basin]

actually 6300 /s
#friday-facts message

[timid crescent]

That's the whole setup, not a single machine

[tropic basin]

I can't read

If you like the idea to connect each Chemplant to a different pipe network to achieve full throughput, you can just as well not update to keep the 1.1 fluid algorithm.

[timid crescent]

Needing a different pipe for each plant/output is interesting in isolation, but a slog when required across all (late game) setups

[tropic basin]

Yup. Exactly the reason the new algorithm is what it is.

[timid crescent]

Hence I don't think limiting segment I/O is a good solution to "zero complexity"

I somewhat expect a different solution to loading fluid trains to be implemented instead of the pump-tank exception, as it's quite abusable if you know it exists.

Fluid wagons load/unload ridiculously quickly as is. Slowing it down a lot would be warranted imo.

It would give a good purpose for quality pumps too.

[tropic basin]

It shouldn't be too hard to do. Pumps near tracks have a different sprite, so they're aware that they're different.
Could rate-limit train-pumps I guess.

Pumps (and consumers) drain speed depends on fullness of the source network. That would slow them down if it applied to fluid wagons.

[tardy quarry]

what if trains are buffed to have higher capacity

[mint berry]

Any guesses on what today's FFF will be about?

Devs are not allowed to guess because that's cheating.

[dreamy eagle]

I'd say something which requires the new fluid throughput

[mint berry]

Cooking mini-games in the squishy jungle! Sounds interesting. It could be used to befriend the natives.

[late sentinel]

Arguably devs are not allowed to post in this channel as they cannot speculate :P

So anything they say would be off topic...

[misty falcon]

They can speculate on what we'll write

[plain ermine]

I bet yall won't write that todays FFF is going to be about belts

[misty falcon]

Last week we had a fluid rework... maybe today it's a belt and inserter rework?

[serene sage]

todays FFF is going to be about belts

[plain ermine]

[timid crescent]

I could see inventories being reworked to make inserter logic faster

[late sentinel]

next level meta gaming. This is what I come here for.

[misty falcon]

Imho chests should always be sorted, optimized down to a dict

Many factory games do that

That said most factory games aren't as good as the big F

[sand saddle]

You fool, you fell right into his trap. Now your guess is sure to be wrong!

[serene sage]

tbh giving the player more inventory slots makes sense, and another tier of Toolbelt research is a reasonable way to do that

[keen hound]

i've suggested something like this before, but apparently chests are actually fairly well optimized and hard to speed up because of hardware aspects

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=568087#p568087

apparently it has to do with the contents of the chest fitting in cache and simple iteration being really fast

a plain dictionary might be faster, but a half measure probably wouldn't be

[olive seal]

Might also be a teaser for a combat fff

[dreamy eagle]

Might've been pain to develop and implement. Or a logistic puzzle that most will consider to be pain.

I don't believe the latter is probable

[tardy quarry]

technical fff?

[misty falcon]

likely

There's never "big" FFFs when I'm home for day

[misty falcon]

We saw some belts

[crystal dune]

Aquilo and endgame science pack colours leaked

[tropic basin]

a million SPM - without Clusterio ... wtf

[tropic basin]

I predict relase date FFF for next week

[misty falcon]

Why would you predict something so unpredictable

Speculation: End game science is a rubber duck.

[tardy quarry]

other game sub-systems

[timid crescent]

Dark blue/navy and black!

[tropic basin]

Rocket Silo, Landing Pad, Space Platform tiles, , and everything else you can build on it.

"spacefill"

[plain ermine]

void fill

[dreamy eagle]

"This void here has nothing in it! And I took that personally."

[weary widget]

good catch

so dark blue and black

[dull grove]

don't we already have that? We can make a space-ship with input/output on the same planet. So it doesn't need thrusters and can be expanded indefinitely.

[narrow vale]

I predict...
uh...
AI tanks/vehicles?
Or...
Steam Locomotives.

[weary widget]

aside from the obvious next week, with big news posts such as these we could very well get previews/hints of other future and upcoming features and content

I'm excited

[tropic basin]

previews/hints of other future and upcoming features and content
That has been the program for months. The boss is here to talk business.

[weary widget]

I mean to a larger extent, not very vague one liners and stuff

kovarex comes with the goods

[broken aurora]

We could try to predict the release date.

I'm guessing the 11th October.

[serene sage]

I'm guessing July 5th.

[hybrid briar]

22nd Oct

[late sentinel]

~11th oct would be my guess

[hybrid briar]

I'd be surprised if they did a friday release but then again they do have good test systems sooo

[late sentinel]

will not be exactly oct 11

the date I expect it to be is around there, but not there

the distibution has a hole in it at oct 11

because friday

[tropic basin]

At most 2 months from the release date FFF.

Hehe, there's also this:

Thyme (Hulk Inserter) — 19/06/2024 19:21
The release estimation of "around a year from now" is in two months. At this point it's reasonable to expect either a release date or a postponement announcement somewhat soon.

[broken aurora]

The release date will be announced in next weeks FFF, according to this wekks FFF.

[tropic basin]

Yes, and my prediction for the release date is "at most 2 months from the release date FFF".

[dreamy eagle]

Hmm. Could be 3 if Wube has their summer vacations before launch

At least I think they'll have their summer vacations

[misty falcon]

We're at Season 3, but there would be Season 4 for Aquilo and other things

It's very likely we'll get Aquilo 2 on release or even a week later

[tropic basin]

I hope we don't get an Aquilo FFF. Leave some mystery for us to discover ourselves.

that probably also means I need to stay away from this discord server for a while

[tardy quarry]

if they will announce the release date next week, I suspect there will be more dev state showcase, and perhaps a fff roadmap toward release

[misty falcon]

The post-endgame pack will only be shown like 2 weeks after release I'd think

[vivid turret]

There's no point to revealing things after release.

[stray wharf]

They might talk about design decisions they took in making the end-game stuff, but it wouldn't be framed as a "reveal".

[weary widget]

everything will probably be in the factorio wiki the day of the release

[tardy quarry]

there’s nothing left to reveal after release

[indigo fog]

sure, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't

I know I'm not good or fast enough to reach Aquilo within a week of release

(for starters, I likely won't be playing it everyday, as Sep-Oct is a very big season at work and I won't have a lot of time)

[tardy quarry]

it’s easy enough to just read the tech tree or play editor mode

oh actually, I wonder if there will be editor 2.0

[tropic basin]

There's also Factoripedia ..

must play with my eyes closed

[misty falcon]

FPedia must have a toggle for researched and unresearched

[fringe verge]

I'm excited not just for reveals, but behind the scenes and insight into their design and development process

They might take a break after release, but I'd still love to hear more about the things we don't know now, but will then

[late sentinel]

what changes do you want in it?

[misty falcon]

More stuff like EE had

They already have Rai

[tawny gulch]

There's always things I would like to do... and then what I can actually accomplish in a limited amount of time. 😅

[late sentinel]

control + f "pipe-to-ground" "underground-pipe" <enter>

[tawny gulch]

Lol

[late sentinel]

as funny as it is I am not actually joking :P

[wanton igloo]

I am pretty sure I recently randomly got a mod replacing the name when using the mod search, but now I seem to be completely unable to find it lol

[tardy quarry]

like saving the quick bars and view location?

[weary widget]

having an inline build and test area while your game runs is really nice

[crystal dune]

The existence of “pipe to ground” implies the existence of “pipe from ground”…

[serene sage]

according to the principle of relativity, whether the pipe is going to or coming from the ground is a matter of perspective, and both interpretations are valid and consistent with the laws of physics.

[silk cave]

I speculate that I will enjoy 2.0 and the dlc at release.

[modern wedge]

Next week we get a release date is the week after.
This will not happen but i cna dream.

[silk cave]

It be perfect timing for me if that was the case

Lots of things I want to do this fall.

[modern wedge]

I'd prefer to be outside this summer, but I want it now.

[silk cave]

It's kind of packed, but releasing it in the summer time I can no life it.

[narrow vale]

I predict...
Uh...
U h...
S h i p p e.

[late sentinel]

What does that even mean

[crimson bough]

🚀

[plain ermine]

how did you know

[silk cave]

So talking about speculation lol. Think release date announcement comes Friday or you think it be a special day. Might even have a trailer or something.

[misty falcon]

Teaser maybe

[stray wharf]

That's a good point: what exactly do you release in addition to a release date announcement?

It's been a month since the Gleba reveal that still used placeholder assets. And while a month of focused work is a long time, Gleba still may not be ready visually for a full trailer release. So I'm guessing there won't be a full-on trailer.

[weary widget]

honestly, I'd be content with just more screenshots and videos of SA builds. the ones from a few days ago of the endgame stuff are A+

[silk cave]

I be just happy with early access released the second the announcement comes out 😉 Nothing big.

[dull grove]

There will be a full on trailer (most likely next week) and good trailers aren't supposed to show everything anyway.

Either that or we get to see an aquilo sneak peek

[cobalt blaze]

When do we think the Space Age release date will be? (revealed next week)

1️⃣ July
2️⃣ August
3️⃣ September
4️⃣ October
5️⃣ November
6️⃣ December
7️⃣ 2025

[cobalt blaze]

2 people think it will be out in july lets gooo

[silk cave]

Why would anyone want it in oct 😉

[cobalt blaze]

what do you mean?

[silk cave]

2 people want it in oct

So if it comes out early we delay their ability to play till oct 😉

[fossil hawk]

What does 🇴 mean? Today?

[cobalt blaze]

no clue why someone voted 0 lol

[crystal dune]

Spage actually came out yesterday we were all too busy speculating the release date to notice

Unfortunate 😔

[tropic basin]

sabotaging the survey

[tropic basin]

survey asks when we think the release is, not when we want the release to happen.
The obvious answer to the latter question is "now".

[dull grove]

Can't recommend Spage. I found the dating simulation quite dissapointing .

[hybrid briar]

sometimes reasonable expectations of reality get confused with desires and vise versa

[silk cave]

I know was it via interview with kovarex? Oct was prob going be the date. That is why I need to change it to July and do everything possible to pretend I never heard about Oct. Maybe I will start a religion and spread it through through the world that there is No October 😉

[tropic basin]

The estimation a year ago was "around August". In the interview he said "October at the latest". Neither statement is a fixed date.

[pearl solar]

I had been speculating (since Vulcanus fff) that they wouldn't show anything enemy-related before release to keep a surprise. This statement in the latest fff is giving me doubts: "Gleba enemy (to be shown later)"

[dreamy eagle]

I think they'll show something. Probably a general "Enemies of the Space Age" or something like that. I still think they'll keep Aquilo in the dark. And that they'll do Aquilo FFFs after launch.

[viscid ferry]

When we know the release date and the amount of FFF's left, we can speculate even harder

[tardy quarry]

I still think they’ll not hide any major part of SA (enemies or Aquilo) before release

[crystal dune]

I mean it’s not like the fffs we see are showing EVERYTHING

[tardy quarry]

not every detail, yes

but surely they’re not hiding the main concepts and elements

[toxic merlin]

Next one will give the release date. Just a hunch.

[misty falcon]

How could you predict such an outrageous claim

[tropic basin]

Are you replying with that one line to all instances of that same joke?

[olive seal]

I mean klonan pretty much confirmed that there will be a part 3 fff for each planet at some point

#friday-facts message

[tropic basin]

Yes, and I expect them to be clumped together before release.

[olive seal]

That would make lots of sense

Hopefully that will be soon

[tropic basin]

That's 4 FFFs to cover the mid-planets and space platform. Then a release date FFF and a release FFF. Would place us at 09. August at the earliest.

[weary widget]

now the question is- will part 3 become before or after aquilo announcement

[olive seal]

Fine by me, probably for the better as before that I'll be finishing my master thesis anyway and having the space age launch before that would almost definitely negatively impact my grade

[tropic basin]

I'd say before Aquilo, but I was assuming no Aquilo FFF(s). If we get those as well, that would push the earliest possible release back 2-3 weeks.

[olive seal]

I really like the idea of leaving some stuff out until release, and it makes more sense to leave out a bit of everything (e.g. a whole planet) as opposed to everything in a narrow subject (enemies come to mind, probably in the planet part 3 fffs). So by that logic we're probably getting the part 3 fffs before aquilo

[misty falcon]

I speculate they will do "part 1" of Aquilo, but not part (or after release), and don't talk about the post-endgame pack

[red crow]

When we know the release date we know the numbers of upcoming fff, hope we see some enemies too 😎

[tropic basin]

You convinced me that I want a peak into the world of Aquilo.
Still don't want to know what we're going to discover there though.

[weary widget]

don't worry, I'm sure Wube will do that 2nd part for you lol

[tropic basin]

noooo!

[spice yew]

Here's hoping we get a new lab that can make it easier to send 12 belts to/from

~12 different science packs

[misty falcon]

I mean, it makes sense, a 3-4 module lab... but will it be interesting to play with?

[dull grove]

Sushi-ing belts is easier than before. So you kinda got that.

[weary widget]

I would say so. if you're stuck using the same 3x3 lab, feeding it all 12 science packs and dealing with , there will be 1-2 "right ways" that everyone will do and that will be that. with something a little larger, you have more design creativity

[misty falcon]

Also you'd want

[spice yew]

I'm just thinking of the new player perspective, I can belt weave and do various things to do it, but a new player is going to just throw up their hands and do bots

[weary widget]

and with lab prod a thing, having 4 module labs as an endgame thing isn't as overpowered as it would be in 1.1

[spice yew]

plus i think the lab could use at least a makeover, it's probably the oldest building in factorio

[misty falcon]

The increased size for more though

At high lab prod, you're better off with speeds

[weary widget]

yeah and with the beacon rework, with 16 or whatever around a bigger lab, you'll only be benefiting from some crazy expensive setup anyway

[tropic basin]

I have seen boskids 8 beacon lab that handles spoilage, I don't think there's any wiggle room left. (other than sushi and not using beacons ofc)

[spice yew]

yea it seems like a lot to ask for a new player outside of just throw bots at it

[late sentinel]

I don't think the design space being narrow is neccesarily a bad thing

it's more of a challenge, less room for creativity. That's fine sometimes.

[stray wharf]

The main thing I don't like about a new lab building is that the only reason to have it is that it's physically bigger. I feel like something's wrong with that.

[weary widget]

it could always have a faster base speed and/or base prod and offsetting it with much greater power consumption. pretty much in line with how foundry/EMP fit in with their basic counterparts

[stray wharf]

The Foundry isn't a large furnace with better stats; the molten metal stuff is what makes it interesting. The BMD can do belt stacking along with having better stats. The recycler is a whole new thing, as are the Ag tower and the Biochamber.

Of the known new production buildings, the only one that's "that thing, but with better stats" is the EMP. And while the things it can do are really important, I'd rather have buildings that are more than that.

[weary widget]

yeah it wasn't a 1:1 comparison; looking at the output, its doing x thing but faster and more efficiently, which doesn't apply to any of the new specialized machines (recycler, etc). going back to your original point 15 min ago, I don't know what else a lab could do to make it more attractive to use outside of base speed or built in productivity, outside of some novel/outside the box new mechanic. at its core it consumes science packs. you can either make it done in a more favorable way for the player, or you have to redefine what that building can do.

[timid crescent]

The EMP is interesting as well because it's the only 4x4 building (so far), giving it offset pipe inputs and an odd size to combine with other buildings. We also know it has fluid passthrough which is super cool.

[stray wharf]

I was about to ask what recipes the EMP has that use fluids besides blue circuits, but then I remembered that basically all the holmium stuff uses fluids in one way or another. Even the science pack has two fluids.

[late sentinel]

Yeah, which is so new.

Idk who it was, but someone here was saying they hope SA gives love to the other oils, and not just petro - and I think they'll be happy.

[stray wharf]

It's kind of an outgrowth of wanting to ensure that players know how to do the new oil processing stuff on the planet. The Foundry takes lubricant, which forces a player to engage with steam generation and coal liquefaction, but since basic liquefaction apparently only gives heavy oil, they don't have to do cracking yet. Superconducting wire takes light oil, which forces a player to extract water from ice and do cracking. Etc.

[cobalt blaze]

people arguing over how to deliver science to labs with belts

bot users looking here like

[hybrid briar]

I might end up using both heh

[cobalt blaze]

"finally the one use case bots have left!"

[hybrid briar]

belts for half of them, bots for the other half, what could go wrong

"them" being the packs, to be clear

[serene sage]

direct insertion from trains

[late sentinel]

nothing could go wrong, but it just kinda doesn't make much sense

[weary widget]

not a terrible idea in all fairness, if you don't feel like weaving belts to accommodate all 12 of them (plus purging )

[cobalt blaze]

another idea is sushi

[lament basin]

I feel like there is a good chance that the release date lands this month

However October does seem like a valid assessment as well

I recall Gleba’s FFF stating that some aspects of it weren’t finished

And that wasn’t too long ago

[tardy quarry]

I’d use bots for and belts for everything else

[late sentinel]

I'm just going to bite the bullet and use bots for science

I already basically do

but if I had to do hyrbid, that is how I would do it yes

because in the ideal case - bots would never move

[tardy quarry]

fun fact, u are potentially dealing with 1M spoilage per minute if u have a 1M SPM base

[shrewd citrus]

slightly less due to how research productivity works in SA

still a bonkers number

[late sentinel]

SPM is measured at the packs, not labs

[shrewd citrus]

for 1.1 yes, but in 2.0 the production tab shows effective science after prod

[late sentinel]

That's a new measurement

Probably also going to be called SPM, which is problematic

[shrewd citrus]

I think most people will switch, since even in 1.1 the value is "wrong"

as in, a research costing 1000 science will be made with less than 1000 science packs due to lab prod

[late sentinel]

SPM is about measuring base size

[shrewd citrus]

yes

in 1.1 produced science is tracked because that's the only thing we can track

[late sentinel]

That's not the entire reason though. We're smart enough to multiply by 1.2.

The reason is that arbitrary lab prod doesn't really measure science well.

At least, it does not measure science numbers for the purposes we have, (comparing bases)

[tardy quarry]

unless the lab prod research has finite levels

otherwise the SPM defined by research produced will depend on how long u spend on researching the infinite lab prod

I think its the same reason why people use SPM as a metric in 1.1, instead of using mining prod level

[hybrid briar]

oh right I keep forgetting the additional productivity techs. . .

the fluid ratio shifting is going to drive so many people batty

and by fluid I mean shifting over time

[tropic basin]

There's no guarantee in 1.1 that science packs consumed * 1.2 equals the science produced. Forget a Productivity Module and it's slightly less.
2.0 has a metric for that, actually measuring science produced.

[misty falcon]

Prod tech is infinite but very expensive

[tardy quarry]

I would be surprised if this weeks fff gives a fff roadmap until release

[dreamy eagle]

Hmm, it would change the speculations quite a bit. Do they want that?

[crystal dune]

The other interpretation is just as valid, though

[weary widget]

that would be really nice, but they've mastered leaving us hanging almost every FFF so thats prob not happening lol

[tardy quarry]

I do wonder what fff content fits the release date the most

[weary widget]

are you referring to tomorrow, or the FFF around the time SA launches?

[tardy quarry]

the release date announcement fff

<48hrs to find out

[stray wharf]

It is an interesting question as to what the rest of that FFF will be. What do you talk about when you know all everyone wants to see is the one sentence revealing the date?

[weary widget]

the good thing is kovarex will most likely be the one writing it, and given he's the boss/co-founder, he is under no pressure to not reveal unknown content/mechanics before officially knowing about it through some dedicated FFF, which thankfully he's done a lot of these past months 😎

so whether its pictures or videos of SA stuff, I'm pretty confident we're going to see new content

whether we understand what it is or not is another story

[tardy quarry]

it could be SA dev fff part 2

[tropic basin]

I would like that. Also need to know whether Kovarex is beyond 1M spm by now (or will be when SA is released).

[viscid ferry]

Like when he decided to drop the beacon bombshell and then headed out again

[tropic basin]

He didn't head out. He was locked up ..

[stray wharf]

Well, it isn't clear that he intended to leak that. His posts didn't call out the beacons being different. They just happened to show identifiable evidence of beacons not working like in vanilla.

[tropic basin]

He also didn't decide to leak. He wanted to show off his speedy stuff.

[weary widget]

we all benefit from 's recklessness

[tropic basin]

The official story also says the beacon FFF was planned and it was a happy little coincidence.

[hexed chasm]

After my 2 pinpoint predictions my 3rd one has failed, I was not possibly anticipated dev diary.
My prediction was #friday-facts message
However now technical part goes down to almost 0%, it will be a new cool feature / building from SA.

[cobalt blaze]

Will there be a trailer along with the SpAge release date in tomorrow's FFF?

✅ Yes
❌ No

[late sentinel]

you cannot call it spage

[agile river]

what would you call it instead

[hybrid briar]

wording unclear, date release date announced or on the actual date? If the former... ❌

[cobalt blaze]

question is about tomorrow's FFF. edited!

[cobalt blaze]

whats wrong with spage?

[misty falcon]

Call a spage a spage.

[wanton igloo]

You could go with spaage too

[misty falcon]

it is what it is

[wanton igloo]

spe

[weary widget]

we don't know enough for that to happen, unless they agree "screw it, we'll show them everything and they'll learn about it officially for the next few months of FFFs"

[late sentinel]

think the space age music FFF

[hybrid briar]

they learned very early on during early access that a trailer can cause a huge spike in sales

releasing the trailer before it's available would be a waste

[misty falcon]

Correct

The trailer will be released when the game is available for buying, on release or preorder

[late sentinel]

I believe that is correct.

[weary widget]

the closest thing I see us getting is trailer v0.5 just for the FFF for the fun of it like what Dylan said. show stuff we know about, tease a few more unknown things

[late sentinel]

I change my vote, ❌

a teaser kinda like satisfactory's pre-release teaser

[weary widget]

[viscid ferry]

That does make a lot of sense. No use in creating a hype spike now if it can't lead to a spike in dlc sales

Unless the store page goes up tomorrow with a pre-release, but I don't think that's going to happen

[cobalt blaze]

im not sure about that .... pretty much every game's marketing team releases trailers before the game is out. they do it for a reason

factorio 1.0 wasnt really a "release" ... the game was already out. the marketing enviroment for spage is different

[hybrid briar]

yeah they want to know how much additional marketing budget might be needed or warranted

Factorio doesn't operate that way afaik

plus they probably have art to polish up before a final trailer

[tardy quarry]

I would be very happy if we get a trailer fff

[tardy quarry]

well tbh I don’t expect there will be trailer this week based on how much WIP graphics there are

[indigo fog]

me either, but I'd love some sneak peeks at some random things

[stray wharf]

To be completely fair, it's been over a month since the Gleba reveal. A lot can happen graphically in a month.

[agile river]

i was gonna say I wouldn't mind a retrospective on spage development but then I remembered that's what they did last week

[tropic basin]

Yeah, doesn't make sense to have another look at the past. Todays FFF will obv be about the future.

[timid crescent]

"Last week we talked about what we've done, this week we'll talk about what we've got left"
"Also heres the release date"

[tropic basin]

#friday-facts listed a couple "more on that later" topics they still need to get back to

[weary widget]

I haven't been keeping track but it seems like some variation of that has been said in at least half of the FFFs lol

[tropic basin]

I hope they keep their word on last weeks FFF

[mint berry]

"Release your thoughts in the usual places"

[serene sage]

"We are happy to announce that Factorio: Space Age will be released ."

[tardy quarry]

There is one more building typically combined with foundry and electromagnetic plants, which will be covered later.

I wonder if we will see it today

or it is the Aquilo machine?

humm also we haven’t seen the belt recipes in foundry, will they make those recipes require molten iron instead of plates/gears? They did change the LDS foundry recipe to require molten metals iirc

[weary widget]

15 FFFs until release

[tawny snow]

sooo... space science in space is its own item?

[misty falcon]

Interesting!!!

[misty falcon]

#friday-facts message
Bug apparently

[weary widget]

restating here as well- new gameplay pics on steam page https://store.steampowered.com/app/645390/Factorio_Space_Age/

Steam

Factorio: Space Age

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.Space platformsThe backbone of planetary logistics and the first foray into space. Space platfor...

Release Date

To be announced

▶ Play video

[crystal dune]

Oh phew

[tropic basin]

New Shells. I predicted (wished for) a railgun turret as 4th tier turret, so this might be the ammo for it?

[crystal dune]

Very pink…

That was my first thought as well

[weary widget]

whatever they are, they don't look like they're messing around lol

[misty falcon]

Which means shell turret in addition to rocket turret?

[tropic basin]

There's definitely a 4th tier turret, one of the FFFs "leaked" it.

[dreamy eagle]

"Tank cannon turret" would be fitting because of the tank having... a tank cannon.
That sounded better in my head.

[misty falcon]

It's you..... headcannon

[tropic basin]

looks turret-ish

[tardy quarry]

new carbon graphics

[tropic basin]

bestagons

[misty falcon]

Could be foundations

[tropic basin]

I want to tile my base with them

literally unplayable
screenshot 8/15 on the steam page of the DLC

[crystal dune]

We saw them on Gleba though

[tropic basin]

Screenshot 13/15:
Carbon hexagons and tungsten or make steel tungsten beams, which is needed for Metallurgic Science.
One of the other things involved is the orange liquid that comes from the right of the screenshot.

Third ingredient is whatever the cut-off ASMs in the bottom make from Carbon and Tungsten Ore + whatever unshown input.

[tardy quarry]

pretty sure its carbon

also copper confirmed

[tropic basin]

This looks weird, Gleba enemy?

[tropic basin]

Yeah, if it "combines" with tungsten, it's defo Carbon.
Tungsten Carbide has only 2 ingredients

[crystal dune]

However, combining tungsten ore with carbon in a foundry seems to yield tungsten beams, not carbide

[tardy quarry]

carbon fiber and carbon

[crystal dune]

Also yet another sighting of artillery on Vulcanus...

Also that suspicious / belt gives more credence to the one T3 module per planet theory

[tropic basin]

The proper name for steel ingame is "Steel Plate", yet uses a beam shaped icon.

[crystal dune]

Speaking of which, they seem to also require molten iron as an ingredient to make. How interesting...

[tropic basin]

Isn't molten iron the blue one?

yes, was confusing metal science with tungsten (carbide) foundries

[timid crescent]

The purple beam is almost certainly a placeholder

[crystal dune]

Possible metallurgic science pack recipe: Tungsten beams, molten copper, tungsten carbide

[tardy quarry]

same silo recipe probably

concrete + LDS…? Could it be the space platform tile recipe

[tropic basin]

Concrete isn't really a space worthy material.

[crystal dune]

It’s actually the elusive high density structure…

[tardy quarry]

landing pad capsule?

[crystal dune]

I assumed so

Slowing itself down with the thruster

[misty falcon]

Yup

[tardy quarry]

tungsten ore + carbon + molten iron = tungsten steel?

tungsten ore + carbon in assembler = tungsten carbide, tungsten steel + tungsten carbide + molten copper = metallurgic science?

[hybrid briar]

err, what's the difference between tungsten steel and tungsten carbide? isn't steel basically iron carbide?

[tropic basin]

Tungsten carbide is usually made by sintering, which does not require you to heat it to the melting point. Plausible to make it in an ASM imho.

[hybrid briar]

is tungsten steel an iron/tungsten/carbon alloy?

[tardy quarry]

it does take molten iron

[hybrid briar]

neat

[tardy quarry]

tungsten carbide seems to be an assembler recipe

as u need tungsten carbide to make foundry

[tropic basin]

But it needs tungsten as input, not tungsten ore. More precisely, tungsten and carbon as fine powder. So the realism argument goes out the window

[tardy quarry]

I wonder if u make carbon from coal

we know we can make coal from carbon

[tropic basin]

We can make coal from carbon, sulfur and water.

jinx

It would create a recipe cycle, even if there's some resources that are lost (e.g. sulfur, water)

[tardy quarry]

I wonder if u cook coal in electric furnaces to get carbon

also I wonder if that means u can convert sulfur and water into coal using a loop

without any coal or carbon input

[tropic basin]

Which is why recipe cycles are potentially problematic.

[tardy quarry]

technically sulfur came from oil processing which is also related to coal

[viscid ferry]

This might be very off topic right now, but i just noticed this looking back at the Abstract wiring FFF. Do we know what this is?

[tropic basin]

The Discharge Defense Remote
https://wiki.factorio.com/Discharge_defense_remote

[viscid ferry]

Oh yeah that's totally right

I guess I haven't used it enough to recognize it

[crystal dune]

Tungsteel

[weary widget]

I think this is definitely the point where the pace of the FFFs will pick up, and will showcase increasingly more impressive things

[tardy quarry]

tbh we still have 15 fffs, I would expect Aquilo reveal after at least 5 more fffs, then we will have about 5-7 fff full of content reveal

[tropic basin]

An enigmatic 5th planet - promises some of the most unique gameplay but it remains shrouded in mystery. It's the furthest planet from the sun so it's dark and cold.
I read that as "won't cover that in FFFs"

If it gets covered, it will be shortly before the release.

[tawny snow]

"Most unique gameplay" is a big statement, considering fulgora & gleba

[stray wharf]

I really hope they don't do something lame like Frostpunk-esque stuff.

[tropic basin]

Fulgora has an inverted crafting tree, Aquilo has none

[stray wharf]

"Build all of your stuff next to heat pipes" is just too similar to "build all of your stuff next to lightning collectors."

[tropic basin]

That is way too lame of a concept for Wube imho.

It adds overhead that's the same for all buildings.

[tardy quarry]

I read that as “will be covered later”

[weary widget]

it would be cool to have a planet that is always night, or at least dark enough to require lighting, which would give it a cool aesthetic

I just wonder to what degree basic materials will need to be transported in to aquilo, since they said its possible to trap yourself there

[tardy quarry]

and they literally said

to be revealed

[late sentinel]

that could mean 'at release' though, pepperbox

I know we're just here for the FFFs :P

[tardy quarry]

it would be a trolling if it really means that

I would word it like “for u to explore yourself” if I don’t intend to reveal it before release

and I don’t expect they hide all of them until release

[weary widget]

yeah its definitely worded in a way that implies it will be in an FFF

if it was otherwise, they'd state it as such, or not bring it up at all

[tardy quarry]

I think has short enough day cycle to be treated as permanent night

u probably want lights here

[late sentinel]

Aquilo should never be bright realistiically, but idk if they will go with that

[tardy quarry]

I think dark only means less solar, not necessarily means visually dark

[weary widget]

or it doesn't scale proportionately at least- ie, solar being 4x less efficient makes the planet 4x darker. it can just be dark enough during daytime to illustrate its distance and encourage lighting

[fossil hawk]

Does anybody else think that the brain plants have creep? Like K2 or starcraft creep? In the two pictures on steam it appears that the pink stuff goes over different tile sets. I did a cursory search in the discord if anyone mentioned it, but haven't read all the comments.

blue and orange here looks like its on landfill in the first pick but in this one the pink creep is in the same orange box without landfill

yellow boxes look like dead enemies almost, like decoritives

[late sentinel]

tentacle thing looks to close to rocket to me

I'd want that deoncstructed

maybe it's there for a reason

[fossil hawk]

yeah, maybe. Obviously we'll find out soon, but seems strange. People have mentioned the dead things in the bottom left but hadn't seen anyone talk about the rest.

[tardy quarry]

perhaps they just force built the BP and didn’t bother cleaning the lucky trees

[hybrid briar]

or maybe it's a still frame of something mid-attack from underground

[tropic basin]

Pluto is surprisingly brightly lit. There's a website where you can calculate when your place is as bright as Pluto is. I knew that our eyes sensitivity is on a log10 scale, but I was not prepared for how bright it still was.

[late sentinel]

TIL!

that makes sense though

[hybrid briar]

well now you're making me wonder how much of a difference there is between night and day on pluto

[tardy quarry]

I’m thinking if this is a late game thruster which u can place anywhere on the space platform. It looks like a tall building and with cleaner exhaust

[late sentinel]

if this is accurate this looks how I imagine

[late sentinel]

hmm I imediately thought that was a rocket turret

but uppon closer inspection, no

that may be an aquilo thing

[hybrid briar]

I thought it was some sort of drill, like maybe through the ice on aquilo

[tardy quarry]

it is probably a space platform building as its next to asteroid catcher and thrusters

[hybrid briar]

ah, a drill for asteroids

[tardy quarry]

my money is on ion thruster

[late sentinel]

what are those weird bullets?

blue blue?

[tardy quarry]

the base doesn’t look like a turret, more like a fixture to the platform floor

[late sentinel]

are they maybe antimatter related?

[stray wharf]

But it swivels. What's the point of that if the platform can only move in one direction?

[hybrid briar]

blue shells? probably upgraded tank rounds of some description

[tropic basin]

Night is probably still dark. Like properly dark, not "european night" dark.

[fossil hawk]

It kinda does look like a sci-fi impulse drive. Might make sense to be able to power the Space platforms via just electricity rather than burning fuels, or to have some kind of upgrade to make them more efficient/fast

[tardy quarry]

tbh it doesn’t look like it siwels

[hybrid briar]

they didn't want to go the impulse drive star trek style with tractor beams though

[tardy quarry]

does not look like rotating parts

[hybrid briar]

it looks like it's emitting lightning

the rotation could be in between the lower and upper sphere

[fossil hawk]

I mean maybe not intially, but Fulgora is kind of an advanced dead civilization that you could pull tech from. Honestly there has to be some kind of ramp up in tech for whatever the new end goal is, whether that's a bigger interstellar spaceship or what

[plain ermine]

no, its an icon

[late sentinel]

why did you guys put tech icons on the belts :/

I mean there were for sure real items to show off

[fossil hawk]

It's a tech icon of an entity that's a turret or a thruster?

[stray wharf]

It doesn't look securely attached enough for a thruster either. That's certainly not how I would design a thruster that only pushed in one direction.

[late sentinel]

pov: you are JG, earendel just sent you 'concept art' and said get to work

[tardy quarry]

the structure is much thicker below the hole

and they could have less thrust force than the conventional thrust, with advantage of can be placed anywhere

[stray wharf]

That's not the part I'd be concerned about breaking. All of the thrust pushes against that elevated part the ball sits on. That's not good, and you would only do that if it had to rotate.

[tropic basin]

If you were to stand on the surface of Pluto at noon, the Sun would be 1/900 the brightness it is here on Earth, or about 300 times as bright as our full moon.
From: https://science.nasa.gov/dwarf-planets/pluto/facts/
Calculated your Pluto time (time of day where it's as bright as on Pluto):
https://science.nasa.gov/dwarf-planets/pluto/plutotime/

[fossil hawk]

Sure but honestly think rule of cool applies here. It looks like a thruster, it probably isn't drawn to be realistic just look advanced

[late sentinel]

i think it's not a thruster

[fossil hawk]

Fair chance. But looking at it right next to the chemical engine, it has similarities. Thought it was a turret initially but less sold on that now; plasma cutter/miner seems more plausible than turret.

[tardy quarry]

yeah I also thought its a turret as a first impression, but more I look at it the more I think its like an ion emitter

[late sentinel]

yeah

I think we don't know

[tardy quarry]

initially I thought it would be pointless to have a thruster mk2, but things are different if:

1. the new thruster is a tall building, so it doesn’t need to be at the platform rear, and perhaps u can have multiple rows of them if the exhaust is light.
2. they consume power instead of fuel, which increases water consumption (assuming nuclear) free up iron and carbon consumption for ammo production.

[tropic basin]

1. is difficult to translate into the game, but
2. absolutely makes sense

[tardy quarry]

oh! and maybe ion stream need copper

so it would be copper + power

[weary widget]

another strange item from the steam pics

[late sentinel]

what's that thing below the pipe?!

I think the belt is lds

[weary widget]

full pic it came from

[misty falcon]

We have no idea, but it's next to the pad

[late sentinel]

that's LDS for sure, but that thing under the pipe is weird

next to, but not clearly connected by any means

[misty falcon]

I also find it interesting the capsule animation falls to a container rather than the hub, but that may be just graphics for things to look nice

[weary widget]

not sure if I'm seeing things that aren't there, but it almost looks like arms and legs on that thing

it looks like some kind of robot

[misty falcon]

Maybe it's a dock for a robot

[late sentinel]

that's kinda how it looks

looks like a combat robot deployer thing of sorts

[misty falcon]

Why next to pad? Or just as a leak

[weary widget]

it might be to counter some new kind of enemy

[crystal dune]

Whatever it is, I think it has the landing pad item icon inside it

[misty falcon]

Ohh it's a circuit monitor?

Not circuit though

[tardy quarry]

avatar station

[weary widget]

I'd assume something with that important of a role would have a larger more impressive looking structure

its almost as if its deliberately meant not to draw too much attention to it if you spam 30 of them down somewhere

[crystal dune]

Forum user caught this

It seems to indicate that cargo bays on the ground can actually be accessed by inserters

[misty falcon]

hmm... we know that on the platform they can't be... but seems like on the ground they can?

Would completely solve the throughput issue some people raised

Would be interesting if inserters can only pull items out

[crystal dune]

That’s pretty much a requirement

Otherwise this would lead to some really bad unintended shenanigans

[misty falcon]

exactly 😄

Good catch

[tardy quarry]

just noticed that the lid opens when capsule lands

[crystal dune]

Oh that’s cute

[leaden socket]

Yeah, using them as long chests will eliminate a lot of challenges

[viscid ferry]

That's very nice, so still infinite throughput despite having one landing pad

Also interesting that the cargo bays receive capsules themselves

[crystal dune]

Tbf it was already infinite via bots

[viscid ferry]

true

[viscid ferry]

I'm assuming that that afterburner effect is very WIP

[misty falcon]

Assuming space for

[stray wharf]

Apparently, they [added in a throughput thing](#space-age message). A landing pad can only get so many drops in a unit of time. I assume this goes for its cargo bays too, so adding more means adding more throughput to the pad as a whole.

[misty falcon]

yea that's a weird one. I speculating it's linear with the amount of cargo bays

[stray wharf]

It's interesting in that it adds a throughput limit, but one that it gives you the tools to solve. Similar to how one landing pad had an output throughput limit based on the space around it and bot limitations, but now that you can output from the bays directly, the limit is under your control.

I'm curious as to how it works though. Does each bay have its own cargo types? Or are they just all pulling from the same storage space?

[misty falcon]

See me building cargo-bay city blocks

(I won't, but it's possible)

[hybrid briar]

elevated rail probably can't cross the cargo pads though can they?

and it's not like there are two different types of cargo pad, one that allows landing and one that doesn't

[stray wharf]

That would be an interesting limitation. You have this block that's expanding in order to get more throughput, but you can't expand past your rails.

[crystal dune]

You could just leave occasional holes in the blob

And put the supports there

[stray wharf]

That wouldn't work; if the cargo bays are considered "tall", you can't put elevated rails over them at all. And bays must be connected to the landing pad or to other bays connected to the landing pad (recursively).

[crystal dune]

Oh, I didn’t know that first part

[hybrid briar]

probably best to main [train] bus I/O it so you don't box it in

[misty falcon]

Almost certain they are tall

Because of the dropped capsules

[ripe gyro]

The expansion will release in 1716590.0 light-megamiles

The expansion will release in 1236.9 galactic picoyears

[narrow vale]

Breh

[wanton igloo]

Huge success

[late sentinel]

@vital jetty the bot is correct though :)

[ripe gyro]

The expansion will release in 7.606 fortnights

[wanton igloo]

This might actually be the most useful unit lol

[late sentinel]

7.606 fortnights might even be too readable.

[ripe gyro]

The expansion will release in 15334506.7 inserter swings

[late sentinel]

probably my favorite one

[wanton igloo]

Closest competitor being the mars days one

[late sentinel]

thanks for making this speckled :) I didn’t think I would get to see ‘my idea’ made so soon

[ripe gyro]

The expansion will release in 25.9 express belt map traversals

[late sentinel]

that’s an interesting one. I thought the map was a lot bigger than that. You sure of this one?

[wanton igloo]

An express belt moves at 5.625 tiles/second, so to traverse the 2 million tile map it takes 355555 seconds. There are about 9158000 seconds to go until release, 9158000/355555 = 25.75

That's 4 days 2 hours 45 minutes 55 seconds to traverse the map by express belt

+faq expansion || has a countdown

[ripe gyro]

Expansion

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.

The expansion will release October 21st 2024 (<t:1729504800:R>), for a price of $35.00. For more details, see FFF 418

[wanton igloo]

Actually that gave me an idea... Just a moment

+faq expansion| || @vital jetty Better?

[ripe gyro]

Expansion

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.

The expansion will release October 21st 2024 (<t:1729504800:R>), for a price of $35.00. For more details, see FFF 418

Countdown: 106 days until release

[late sentinel]

What’s different

[wanton igloo]

Expansion countdown

Calculated and tacked onto the FAQ entry when the command is used, so it's always up to date

[late sentinel]

I see it

Why not embed that on the date?

I think discord date formatting lets you do days

[wanton igloo]

Nope

I've actually removed the timestamp from the FAQ itself

+faq expansion

[ripe gyro]

Expansion

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.

The expansion will release October 21st 2024, for a price of $35.00. For more details, see FFF 418

Countdown: 106 days until release

[wanton igloo]

More nuanced answer: only when the date is less than a month and more than a day away

[late sentinel]

That answer sucks

[wanton igloo]

<t:1722213360:R> <t:1722990960:R> <t:1725064560:R>

[tropic basin]

what atrocious format is that? leading zero for the seconds, no leading zero for the hours?

[tardy quarry]

I need a bot for Spoil Age

[wanton igloo]

What's it do?

[late sentinel]

Every item spoils.

[tardy quarry]

I wonder what happens when an item spoils in construction bots cargo

[late sentinel]

I almost bet they haven't thought of that yet.

[tardy quarry]

also what happens when a spoilable item being queued for handcrafting

[late sentinel]

only the modding api will know

[ripe gyro]

The expansion will release in 1706077.7 light-megamiles

[viscid ferry]

I don't know if this has been noticed before, but the teaser enemy and the brain plants we saw look a lot alike:

The enemy doesn't look like it would "stomp" though

[crystal dune]

Stompers eat red fruit, s eat brain fruit

[wanton igloo]

I would not be surprised if looks very different in the final result

It really feels like a Gleba thing, and we know Gleba has had some massive changes during development

[crystal dune]

But if it looks like Gleba now, and Gleba looked different then, then at that time it wouldn't have looked like Gleba

Honestly the brain guy to me is a clean 50/50 between a Gleba enemy that eats brainfruit and an Aquilo enemy that lives in the ocean beneath the icy crust

[misty falcon]

Speculation/hope, because there are so many of these questions on reddit:

• A better indication when "cannot connect system with different fluids"
• More leniency for pumps for fluid wagons
• A helper for "No path" i.e. something that shows if there's a blockage because of signals
• Better indication when an inserter stops when there's "enough" items in target

[tropic basin]

Assuming buildings don't spoil, no issue when en route to the ghost.
When deconstructing stuff, they could either re-reoute to the next spoilage chest, or not care because it makes no difference when spoilage could appear it the destination chest from stuff spoiling. Needs to be taken care of by the player either way.

[misty falcon]

Building items can spoil if you set them to

[tropic basin]

Construction bots job changes from construction something to desposing of spoilage, as if it had emptied a buildings inventory for deconstruction.
Another bot gets the original construction job assigned (or the same bot, with the improved algorithm)

[leaden socket]

There are already cursed mod ideas that make every item spoil

I think these mods can appear very soon after SA is released

Maybe we will see multiple versions of "All items spoil" on day 1

[olive seal]

I was alteady quite sure it's a space enemy, but now looking at it again I've noticed that it shoots out some sort of gas, which makes lots of sense as propulsion for a space enemy

I've also just seen the water drops on it for the first time, so maybe it is on Gleba

[cobalt blaze]

we do?

[crystal dune]

It was originally a jungle planet with 12 growable plants instead of 2

[cobalt blaze]

oh oops, I was thinking of the ice planet. yeah I remember now

[crystal dune]

And it was named Bacchus

[tropic basin]

*Bwuhuo

[wild sluice]

Can everything spoil into pipes

[tardy quarry]

pipes can also spoil into pipes

[wet cosmos]

a bit far fetched and only maybe fits the topic but I've wondered what will be after 2.0, (ofc a break) but in long terms if they will stay at the style of making optional extensions like we have with elevated rails / space age

[crystal dune]

Probably only if they get really good ideas

Keep in mind that space was always part of the vision of the game, they wanted to implement it in 1.0 but realized it would be too much work and left it for later

So it's not like they went "Ok we're done with factorio let's give it an expansion"

[stray wharf]

They already have a list of tasks for a 2.1 that couldn't make the 2.0 launch window.

[tropic basin]

yeah, such as a fluid overhaul

[cobalt blaze]

they will disband and return the money to the shareholders

[errant crest]

time travel expansion - explore before it became barren desert, steal technology from future sentient funguses from
colony builder expansion - invite of all kinds, species and timelines to your colonies, provide them with food and shelter - and they will boost your factories to unprecedented heights
Realm of Chaos expansion - assemble your space platforms fleet to invade warped and twisted Empyrean, cleave through hordes of demons to claim The Throne of Skulls, what was always rightfully yours

[wet cosmos]

true, ive always had the part in mind of having crashed on the planet and the goal being to get home/a new ship to continue travelling, but it never got to that, not sure if that might become the end of space age tho making a new ship to continue travelling on whatever path the engineer was on

[wet cosmos]

finding enough archeological clues to reconstruct things or just other ancient technology stuff would be cool,
or yea if new/other planets finding remnants of fellow engineers or even them themself would be cool but finding live ones seems a bit weird as u cant expect it really to have an ai capable of building a good base, meanwhile small task like mine ore would be dissapointing
love the last idea also making a base to support an invasion on another empire, just like an expansion creep

[wet cosmos]

I seem to have missed those damn

[stray wharf]

Raiguard just mentioned that he had a list; he didn't say what was on it.

[late sentinel]

raiguard mentioned that?

I haven't seen that, but I have seen others mention it. Mind linking?

[crystal dune]

Factorio CD 😭😭😭

Nauvis good future and bad future

Except in this game, industry winning is the good future

[serene sage]

another reason turret type matters: some enemies will be able to outrun some types of ammo

[tropic basin]

I don't think so. Laser and Projectile damage is instant, so enemies outrunning them means outrunning the turret turn speed. Which is probably the same for all turrets and crazy fast.

[serene sage]

but rocket, flamethrower, and hypothetical shell turrets aren't instant.

also that was in response to the above Sonic the Hedgehog reference

[tropic basin]

rockets are homing, so they may not hit instantly, but they are going to hit

[serene sage]

assuming the target moves slower than a rocket

[tropic basin]

flamethrower is not designed to hit the target

I hope they do. Rockets not being able to hit their target would be a problem 😅

[serene sage]

sure. but I was responding to CiberCider's Sonic the Hedgehog reference, implying the possibility of Sonic being an enemy in the expansion, and how to circumvent the speed he is known for

[tropic basin]

yeah, I didn't get the reference because I didn't watch the movie. Was looking for it after you mentioned it, but ..

[serene sage]

I haven't seen the movie either. "Factorio CD" is a reference to the video game Sonic CD, which presumably involves time travel and an industrialized Bad Future.

[tropic basin]

not aware of that either 😆

[serene sage]

entirely fair

[plain ermine]

the dankest timeline

[sand saddle]

maybe frenemies

[quiet marsh]

I hope it's Gleba part 3, we largely only got details on spoilage in the last one without letting us know what benefits we actually get for going to Gleba

[tardy quarry]

Gleba most likely has rocket turrets

also we don’t know what are the Vulcanus and Fulgora planetary science unlocks

those will be planet part3

and probably won’t be revealed this week

[crystal dune]

Wow, when we get to 10 fffs left, we will be able to realistically start expecting planet part 3s…

Crazy to think about

[viscid ferry]

I feel like i've already seen a full expansion's worth but we still have to see Aquilo aswell

[crystal dune]

And the win condition and endgame science

[tardy quarry]

I can only imagine a stationary platform in Aquilo orbit for win conditions and the post endgame science

[crystal dune]

My prediction is that it will be quite similar to the 1.1 win condition

Except in 1.1 you leave the planet, while in SA you will leave the solar system

[tawny snow]

maybe orbital assembly of a mothership?

[quiet marsh]

We don't, and I'm looking forward to finding out, but at the least we know what their trigger techs are and what they do, so at the very least we know what the advantages are to at least visiting those planets. For Gleba, the bio chamber apparently doesn't work on any Nauvis recipes, so we don't know at all what rewards there are for visiting

[tardy quarry]

we also know the trigger techs on Gleba, which is biochamber and agriculture tower. The only difference is that they don’t seem to have use outside Gleba.

Gleba may just have no rewards from just trigger tech

apparently there’s a lot more new toys to be revealed so I don’t mind to wait a bit more

[shrewd citrus]

they don't use Nauvis recipes

we're definitely planting trees and fermenting apples

[tropic basin]

uh, Cider!

not using Nauvis recipes != being useless outside Bwuhuo

[dreamy eagle]

I don't understand where the claim "biochamber is useless outside Gleba" comes from. That was not the statement Wube made, unless I've missed a dev comment somewhere.

Also, we know less about Gleba than we know about Vulcanus and Fulgora, due to the fleshy part of Gleba being still in the dark (for us)

[tropic basin]

projecting ideas and jumping to conclusions

lots of people thought exclusive recipes means "unlocked on that planet" rather than "exclusive to that planet"

[dreamy eagle]

That as well. I kinda like that as well that the green belts have to be made on Vulcanus for example

[tropic basin]

me too

But I don't think I'll like manually squeezing stuff between cliffs.
I hope printing down blueprints is still viable between bots and unlocking landfill++

[crystal dune]

You called?

[crystal dune]

Imo, the specific wording of “unlike the foundry and electromagnetic plant” is the cause

Because the foundry has its own recipes too

[leaden socket]

Predictive aiming can have problems with walls and dragon teeth walls

I think adding predictive aiming to flamers will cause problems, either it's too UPS intensive, or so stupid that they hit friendly stuctures protected behind walls

[crystal dune]

I predict biter dating simulator reveal this week

[plain ermine]

[leaden socket]

Well, maybe the predictive aim algorithm can 'steal' data from the pathing algorithm of the biter

The biter already knows where it's going, just let the flamer read that

[hybrid briar]

the biter knows where it is? >_>

it is sad that the predictive aiming caused too much grief to leave enabled

[agile river]

the biter knows where it is because it knows where it isnt

[tropic basin]

There was predictive aiming? (I'm sort of new here, only started with 1.1)

technical term is deflection shooting

[leaden socket]

No, we're just proposing adding predictive aiming to flamer turrets

Current laser and gun turrets are both instant, so none have predictive aiming

Biter worms do have predictive aiming, but a player can easily dodge that

[tropic basin]

it is sad that the predictive aiming caused too much grief to leave enabled
This line implies that deflection shooting was a thing at one point.

[leaden socket]

What's deflection shooting?

[tropic basin]

the technical term for what you call "predictive aiming"
Not sure about the translation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflection_(ballistics)

[leaden socket]

Oh I see

[tropic basin]

Pretty sure it would decrease effectiveness of Flamers.

Biters aren't moving in straight paths. Unlike Rickon Stark.

[timid crescent]

Put here for speculation purposes: #friday-facts message

My initial thoughts are that it's a new entity that acts as a sort of "waypoint" for spidertrons.

You could then place them along a wall, set up interrupts with multiple stops, and have spiders periodically patrol your walls and repair them.

Assuming this, it would be a decent candidate for "interrupt in interrupt" as you would need to send a spidertron to resupply depending on how you have it set up.

This could all be wrong though, drawing a lot of conclusions from a single entity in one screenshot

[mint berry]

Cool theory and it does not sound too crazy

[dreamy eagle]

Oh so the small image looks like the placeholder landing pad?

[timid crescent]

Yes, my though is that it's an icon/signal/item used to identify the "waypoint"

In this case they chose the landing pad as the identifier because it's next to the landing pad.

It's possible this is completely wrong and it means something completely different, and I'm interested in hearing what other people think it could be

[dreamy eagle]

At least to me, it being a waypoint sounds probable

Another option would be some sort of logibot importance area. Since the landing pad is logibot accessible. It could "force" some part of the logibot population to remain in the vicinity.
I do not think this option is likely though

[tropic basin]

Don't have time to look it up, but the Spidertron remote got renamed to RTS tool, no?
I think there were hints about more than improved usability.
Something like physicl waypoints sounds very plausible to me.

[timid crescent]

Yes, it is the RTS tool. It does make specific mentions to spidertrons in the tooltip however.

[timid crescent]

Unlikely, you can already set "roboport requests" for bots to remain topped up in a roboport (FFF#374)

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-374-robot-requests-gui.png

[stray wharf]

Physical waypoints sound suspiciously like train stops to me. Also, the icon itself doesn't appear to be a Spidertron. So if this is a waypoint, it may not be limited to just being for Spidertrons.

Perhaps there are different kinds of such points with different meanings. This one means "load from landing pad".

[timid crescent]

The icon appears to be a landing pad item/signal

I suspect you can change it somehow.

I find spidertron waypoints somewhat compelling as well as it gives your expensive mobile buddies something to do when you're not manually directing them

Which would be most of the time as you can realistically only direct one planet at a time

[tardy quarry]

not against the idea but it would still not make use of interrupt in interrupt, because for resupply purposes regular interrupts just works?

[timid crescent]

Yeah it probably would, I was a little eager to find a connection where it would be useful.

[leaden socket]

That's what I say about a basic implementation would make them too stupid

If they can steal data from the biter pathing algorithm, then they can avoid this problem

[tropic basin]

You can't just ask your enemy for intel.

Well, you can, but won't get an answer.

would also be suboptimal if biters repath, which can happen a lot, no?

[leaden socket]

Yes they can repath a lot

[tropic basin]

quick way to set everything on fire, including your CPU

[misty falcon]

So....... what's tmrw?

[misty falcon]

btw what do you think was under the ? Maybe stuff?

[stray wharf]

The first set come between roboports and circuit stuff. It could be that new combinator, or it could be higher quality roboports. What is the usual sort order for those items?

The last set of wires are all after some spent UFCs, so they are pretty low in the sort order of items.