Factory Town 2 Brainstorm

[mental jay]

rn I'm just chilling out in VC playing FT

but if you want I can show you ANNO. I'd have to re-install it though

[plush garden]

Depleting resources is something I dig personally in a game, it forces you to expand but that's very agressive to a chill playstyle

After all

The factory must grow

[mental jay]

That is also a conundrum you must face in ANNO as well. They solve it by having this tech called "drill bits", which replenishes a mine's mineral deposit volume over time. There's cheaper ones you can develop from the laboratory but have to be done rather often. More expensive ones that basically make an island's deposits bottomless such that you won't have to worry about it for a while. So I'd say: blended approach. Short-term: expansion. Long-term: sustainability, either via recycling or renewing the old sources.

[river kraken]

Infinite / regenerating minerals could be an bonus that players select when expanding to a new island. So if players want infinite minerals they can have that, but they give up a slot for some other potentially good island bonus

[mental jay]

sure, but what about the old islands? Or I guess... re-roll the islands or have an option to demolish islands???

[river kraken]

Also down for adding alchemy to generate ores. Another option is trading posts / trading ships that provide ore if you run out

[mental jay]

just as in real life, islands can be created as well as lost at the will of a volcano.

[mental jay]

oh I absolutely love that. There was a game called "Towns" that I enjoyed, basically a demake of minecraft from an RTS/citybuilder perspective. But the devs abandoned it. They never fully fleshed out the commerce feature, but what I wanted to do with my city was make it a commerce town that didn't have to dedicate swathes of land for cultivating enough food, just focus on industry.

[plush garden]

Prestige-like system asking volcano to erupt on an island giving it highly fertile grounds due to rich soil 🧠

lose current island layout in the process

[mental jay]

essentially what I was asking for

you get new islands but your map is clogged with old ones that no longer suit your needs

what then?

[plush garden]

Are the islands at variable distances between each other btw?

Like are we gonna have bridges and boats

[river kraken]

I'll probably have each island occupy some square area of territory, but within that square the bounds are variable. You can terraform to some extent but there will be sections of bedrock that you can't terraform. This prevents 100% flattening the ground or linking up different islands

I don't strictly need to have each island boundary be a square section, I'd just need to think more about managing odd-shaped chunks on a potentially infinite map

[mental jay]

One thing I noticed with FT1: using any scaffold outside of wood is basically meaningless

If you want to give meaning to this I'd suggest some system where higher quality material = more max height

[river kraken]

@mental jay In this game I want to introduce the idea of 'foundation' blocks. They can only be built on terrain, or on other foundation blocks. And buildings can only be built on terrain or foundations. This prevents the weird situation where you can have buildings floating on empty scaffolds. So I could have a similar hierarchy for other scaffolds. e.g. "Belts can be built on wood scaffolds, but wood scaffolds can't have an empty block beneath it. Metal scaffolds though can have empty space beneath them."

[mental jay]

sounds good

[plush garden]

The scaffolding look was kind of fun though

[mental jay]

yeah that sounds right

metal below then wood on top

or some even stronger material

since you now have a hierarchy system for scaffolding why not "magical scaffolds" if you wanna go triple-decker

Also yes, selective tech tree will be a huge improvement

FT1 has the tech in layers

to get omnipipes which would be a huge upgrade to layout, I would just jump tech levels

some players self-impose a challenge to increase the production quotas to advance tech levels by a massive muliplier by like x100

which more or less necessitates mastering the current layer before moving to the next one

[plush garden]

krastorio players

[river kraken]

@mental jay sorry, can you clarify 'selective tech tree'?

[mental jay]

my bad I just used fancy terms to differentiate the concepts

just "tech tree". that's it. Opposed to the FT1 "tech levels" system

where if I want omnipipes, I should advance up the pipe tech branch

[river kraken]

ah right

[mental jay]

but try to design it so that if I diversify my tech it makes getting up each next level easier

I certainly can hyper-specialize so I can get omni-pipes right away

but it will cost me

right now there's basically no cost

I just have to slam through the current level's production requirements, unlock the next, repeat until I get the tech I want

[patent kite]

@river kraken when might we see something in action (gifs/short vids).

[plush garden]

[river kraken]

@patent kite I'll try to post more stuff! I have something neat going on with the underground pipes that I want to show off, but there's some visual edge cases I want to solve first

I'm planning for an official announcement before end of year. That's when I'll put the 'coming soon' page up on Steam, and then when I'm posting / sharing dev log stuff more widely I can capture and redirect interest to that coming soon page

So in some ways I'm saving the 'good stuff' for then

[patent kite]

👍

[river kraken]

Also I have hired @plush garden again to do 3D models and what I've seen so far looks incredible

[patent kite]

nice!!

[weak hull]

This is what Kubifaktorium has. Finite resources per map but previous levels provide gold and you can buy/sell anything.

[weak hull]

You could make a hex based map and then move each corner a random amount around a fixed point. There's a similar thing in Northgard.

[plush garden]

Changing the grid cell shape sounds like a fundamental element, there’s no way you could do it without having to redo the entire game

[round shell]

Nah but square grid local and hex grid global doesn't sound bad either

[river kraken]

@weak hull I like your idea to have hexagon-shaped regions with one island per hexagon (while still using square units for individual world tiles)

[river kraken]

So here's some progress on the underground pipe editing system

• Hit G to enter underground view
• Camera applies transparency to all above-ground objects, beings rendering underground objects
• Cursor snaps to position directly below terrain (but this can be adjusted with PageUp or PageDown)
• Drag to place path, inlet and outlet connectors are automatically added if pipe path begins or ends directly underneath a building
• Also note, the pool of water near the water pump slowly depletes

[patent kite]

that is pretty awesome!!

and... BOUNCY PEOPLE!!!!

[river kraken]

Here's a video of editing a longer path. PageUp and PageDown changes the cursor height and creates an 'anchor', allowing you to create extended pipe segments. This also shows the ability to freely transition between aboveground and underground

@patent kite haha yeah and nevermind the ghostly bouncing water bucket. I need to do some extra trickery to get held items to not render in that view

[patent kite]

man, that is really cool!

i would be nice if belts would be that easy to create ups and downs too.

Messing with the frames was always a bit annoying to me.

especially if you were just 1 to low and had to redo it.

[river kraken]

Pipe construction has an easy way to add these automatic anchors because you only move the cursor up when you want the pipe to go directly up. In FT1 pageUp changes the target height of the block, but then the path planner 'solver' calculates how to ramp up the belt path to reach that height. But from that point, you can still drag the elevated belt around and the belt path will adjust. In other words, the player may not want an anchor at the moment they are adjusting the belt height

But I could imagine adding a new hotkey that is simply 'add anchor'

[patent kite]

that goes back to the "semi-smart" belt building system we discussed a few days ago.

or there could be a vertical lift option for the belts. 1 to 2 tiles bigs and just goes up however high it is set.

[autumn fable]

I think the original Factory Town showed how item pipes are a better fit for 3D space than conveyor belts. In other 3D factory games like Satisfactory and Foundry you have to clumsily switch between a "horizontal belt" item and a "vertical belt" item (e.g. an elevator) while in Factory Town with pipes you just have one pipe and choose whether you want to build on a horizontal or vertical plane.

[weak hull]

Make it left click. Then left clicking on an anchor should complete the belt effectively making it double click to complete a belt.

[river kraken]

@weak hull that could work. Maybe as an option people can turn on, because my hunch is having an action 'stuck' like that to a the cursor could frustrate new players

[weak hull]

Do the option that is least effort and fix it if it becomes a problem.

Too many programmers try to solve problems that aren't directly in front of them. This is often wasted time.

[mental jay]

"A solution looking for a problem".
I have many ideas. I wrote them down to avoid losing them. But the first thing I will do before pursuing them is: find a Subject Matter Expert in the fields those ideas deal with. And ask them: "is something already in development that fixes this issue?"

Trust me. It ain't just programmers. It's engineers in general. Conditioned to solve problems. So it goes into overdrive where they solve problems where problems don't exist.

[violet skiff]

A list with filters on locations would be helpful. For example, i have 100 mines on my immense map and i want to see all coal mines and i could go on site when clicking on the desired mine. I am losing lots of time finding where do i produce a product or find a barn where my bricks are located, for example.

[spring narwhal]

The downside is that the flow is so slow that it isn't enough for a large town, and nowhere near enough for mana processing.

[mental jay]

Two pipes

When I have a steam generator, I branch a pipe for each of the 8 outer squares

[spring narwhal]

I've used a pipe on all 8 squares and still not had enough flow on advanced settings.

[mental jay]

uhh. damn

which use was that?

[spring narwhal]

Mostly it's an issue for pumping out ether or medicines.

If there were an Omnitemple upgrade for fluid pipes they would probably be mostly fine. But, I end up doing as many fluid pipes as I can along with several trains with tankers.

[patent kite]

The only time i have been able to get to mana usage in FT1 was when it was newly added. I haven't been able to get that far in a very long time.

i'll admit i get bored with having to manage all the different types of resources in the mid game that i don't get past it.

[placid trout]

I'm about a million years late to this convo, but AFAIK, Factorio uses Deterministic Lockstep for all the factory objects - meaning that the game is effectively turn-based, and the game doesn't progress until each connected client has submitted their moves. If one player lags, the server pauses until that player catches up.

When a player joins, the game pauses, saves, sends that save to the person joining, that client loads the game, and then the game unpauses for everyone. Then, the game is deterministic (given the same random seed, which is part of the "save" that got sent over), there's no need to synchronize most objects after that. Given the same inputs, both clients will perform the same simulation, and the lockstep protocol ensures that the inputs are the same on all clients.

Factorio has extra complications for player avatars and (especially) vehicles that can crash into power poles and stuff, which have to be synchronized using a separate system whose consequences are then merged into the lockstep simulation, but FT doesn't have any of those.

[weak hull]

Your info is a little outdated, but still mostly correct. The game no longer pauses when someone joins, instead the new player runs the simulation at maximum speed until they catch up to the point everyone else is at since time will have moved on from when they downloaded the save. When a client is experiencing a large amount of latency, the simulation guesses what's about to happen and then corrects itself with any deviation from that guess, except in combat which has strict no latency mode rules. Vehicles have a special exception in latency mode as well but I can't remember much of the details. It's all in their FFFs.

[patent kite]

@river kraken any new fun info for us this week?

[river kraken]

@patent kite Hmm, probably nothing that feels super interesting but can at least share what I'm working through right now!

So one thing I'm trying to sort out is how recipes / item filters / item request priorities / sellable items all work together in a cohesive way. There's a couple different scenarios and I'd like them all to work in a standardized and intuitive way.

So one example is a building like the Volcano, which has a list of items it automatically wants because they're needed to unlock some new research. So by default, it shows a list of these items. (It also shows a list of workers assigned to the building and what they are currently doing)

You can set priorities for these items, so that workers will try to get those first

But there is a complication. The Volcano can accept any item (to earn Favor Points, or even just to store items there for use later on in construction). So I also need to let the player pick from a wider range of items, and probably set a storage limit on those too. (e.g. "As a high priority, try to keep 1000 rail tiles in the Volcano"

There's also regular production buildings. They should have a prioritizable list of their inputs, so the workers at those buildings know which items to deliver

And, there's storage buildings. In FT1 they have an item filter, but I feel like in FT2 instead you should be configuring an item 'request', just like how the Volcano works. So you'd say "I want this Barn to hold 400 coconuts and 100 bananas", and the inventory would auto-configure to hold those items

And, there's market buildings which in FT2 can both produce and sell items. (I felt it there was some weird redundancy to have a building like "Juice Press" to make juice and then another one "Juice Bar" that sells them. So you just make and sell juice at one location). But this potentially complicates the UI. You'll have a list of recipes to pick from, but then potentially you also want to add some items to sell that are not made there directly. Conversely, maybe you want one of your juice bars to ONLY make the juice and a different one to ONLY sell the juice. The player needs a way to specify this without being buried in menus and checkboxes

The other major task I'm working on now is to nail down exactly how the Avatar interaction mode is going to work. It was straightforward enough to get a little person walking around, and it has its own inventory, and pops up a UI when next to a tree or building if you want to harvest or deliver an item. But as always, the devil's in the details.

• What happens if your avatar is pointing at a building, but you highlight and select a different building with your mouse?
• When building something in Avatar mode, does it revert back to the classic overhead view? Should it switch back when construction completed?
• If the player is controlling the avatar but hits the hotkey that toggles the underground view, should it temporarily steal control from the avatar?
• If the avatar runs out of items when building, should it default to use the global / volcano inventory? Or, should the Avatar only be allowed to create 'construction pits' which need items physically delivered to them before construction is complete? But then what about blocky structures like scaffolds, they can't really use construction pits...
• How does the player switch between avatar / overhead modes? How do the hotkeys change based on whether the player is in avatar mode, overhead mode, or some hybrid in-between?

I do still really like the idea of avatar mode, because especially now that you're not issuing direct commands to workers, it's very helpful to make a one-off delivery to temporarily boost production of an item. But there's definitely a lot of downstream complications

[river kraken]

The Construction Pits are another thing I gotta think about. So I really like the idea that at the beginning of the game, you need to physically bring materials to a location for the building to be completed. It prevents the problem that you can't afford a building, because you can just put down a pit and the items will be delivered as they become available. The fact that workers can automatically / flexibly supply these items is nice - you don't need to create temporary belts or rails or anything.

It solves the problem of deciding which inventory the construction items should be pulled from (avatar, or global), because it doesn't actually cost anything when you place it. All the items are simply delivered later.

But there are big drawbacks, like slowing down the flow of the game. Like if you are placing a Harvester Hut, you probably immediately want to specify which items it should target. But as soon as you place it, it's not a harvester hut - it's a construction pit. So you can't apply that filter until later, at which time you've moved on to other things.

As mentioned above, it's not consistent with how structures like paths are placed because those should probably be built immediately.

And it's also awkward because I want buildings to be freely movable, so that means the optimal strategy is placing your construction pits in a central area until they are complete, then you move the finished building to its destination. That sounds horrible to me

One option to say is 'if you have enough supplies, then the building is created instantly, otherwise it starts as a construction pit'. Or, 'if the Avatar is creating a building it starts as a construction pit, but if you're building from the global overhead view then they're placed instantly'. Or, everything starts as a construction pit but the volcano magically sends all the necessary items to the pit whenever possible.

[frank ibex]

Re construction pits: in Timberborn you can adjust the building settings while a building is still under construction while paths (but not stairs) are built instantly.

[river kraken]

@frank ibex yeah that's what I'll probably have to do

In Timberborn can you freely move buildings?

[patent kite]

I don't remember being able to.

is the Avatar piece going to be required for playing or more of a "if you want to"/"novelty" piece?

[mental jay]

On one hand the way coding works is that once code is laid down, it often becomes excruciatingly difficult to change.

But in my experience that only happens if you wish to implement a completely new feature. Small adjustments to a core feature are not that hard.

Possible ways you can accomplish what you state as problems is to have the option to specify the targets as soon as you set the construction pit.

As for "freely moveable", that is an issue I saw that made FT1 "too easy" in a way. Why not allow for "reconstruction"? I.e. specify where the building is to be moved, and a new construction pit is placed at the new location. The workers then transport the items needed for the original building to the construction pit, thus "moving" it.

[river kraken]

@patent kite I'm trying to build things so that 'avatar' and 'overhead' mode are two separate, optional ways to play the game. You'll probably have to start the game in avatar mode for a few minutes just to get the story going (wake up the volcano), but after that you should be able to play in classic overhead mode the rest of the way.

There will probably be times where you really want to move a few items around manually, so in that case you'd jump into avatar mode to do that. But then you could go back to overhead.

An example in my test map: I built a Workshop that is constructing Chutes, but they're just sitting in the workshop inventory. I could have workers deliver them to the Volcano so they are in the global inventory, but it was easier to just walk over with my character, pick them up in my personal inventory, and construct them where i wanted them

I know a lot of players of FT1 will want to just use overhead mode and that's fine, it's also personally what I prefer. It's nice to move around quickly and not have to avoid buildings.

I'm also trying to picture this as a game you might play on the Steam Deck or heck even a console. With a joystick, it's probably more intuitive to walk a character around and interact that way.

So the model I'm picturing is that it's up to player preference and input context, in the same way that using controller or keyboard is up to player preference

[river kraken]

@patent kite Are you asking because you would really prefer the overhead / classic mode?

[frank ibex]

No, only deconstruct and reconstruct (with some loss of materials).

[patent kite]

I was mostly asking just to understand the intent behind the effort. I am personally not very fond of first person play unless the world is very detailed and emmersive (I don't play FPS and the MMO's i play are always over the shoulder). I was never able to get the hang of satisfactory or Foundry, though i had some success in Dyson Sphere Program which was over the shoulder (eventually trying to see stuff got to annoying with all the clutter).

So i'm probably not the best person to speak to the avatar concept unless you want to try to build it in a way that seems more inviting to non-first person player.

[river kraken]

@patent kite I think you're the best person to ask, because I don't want to do anything that turns away people that played FT1!

I don't think there's a lot of value in a over-the-shoulder approach, it would get cluttered very quickly (like this). Though, there is some fun novelty in a first-person view if you're riding trains or something. But probably not a mode players would use for any building or managing.

When I'm talking Avatar mode, It's really just a different overhead view that follows a character you control, like this:

[patent kite]

@river kraken oh got it, so it is kind of similar to taking over a worker just you aren't taking over a worker. you create a temporary "worker" that is you?

how is this character controlled? WASD or mouse clicking? you had mentioned how to interact with objects and buildings while in avatar mode, I can see why you might be stumped on how to handle which object to interact with. Have you played Luma Island? I think it would give you some really good ideas AND it is steamdeck approved.

The gist is, your avatar is facing direction X. it will highlight the cell directly in from of you if there is something you can interact with using the current tool you are holding. if there isn't something to interact with (either with that tool or it is just empty) then it checks the cells to the left and right of X for the same conditions.

So in your world, a player would walk up to a building and select an interaction key that would then pull a menu of options based on certain conditions (am i holding wood and looking at a lumber mill? then bring up the deposit lumber option). Or the player is facing some trees, left clicking just automatically starts cutting the tree for wood.

Etc.

As a side note, i could actually see that as been pretty fun to do. one pit fall i would say to think about is the player zooming their avatar around the map to quickly do stuff instead of "running" from place to place but also, how do i put my avatar down where I'm looking so i don't have to run everywhere all the time (maybe a delay timer where if the avatar is dismissed and summoned within X seconds, it reappears where it disappeared. but after X seconds if would appear where the mouse cursor is (ro something like that)).

[river kraken]

Right now the Avatar is controlled by WASD. So it feels very much like you're moving the camera around. I've got things wired up so that when you walk up to a building, a little context menu appears. (It currently obscures the avatar, but they're in front of the blue-highlighted lumber mill)

The 'Take' and 'Give' items are defaulted to items that the buildings needs and that you have in your personal inventory hotbar. In the example above, the lumber mill wants Wood, which the player doesn't have, so it defaults to the item they are currently carrying (Stone). So most of the time, it just automatically populates relevant items without you having to switch. But there is a scenario where the building offers multiple items, and the player needs to cycle between those - I haven't built that solution yet

Currently the player needs to physically walk everywhere, but my plan is to add upgrades unlock with Volcano Favor Points that let you fly or something. In the meantime maybe you can build a train track and ride on a train where you need to go! Or, you'll physically build a bridge to the next island and walk across it. My guess is those kinds of limitations will actually be pretty fun to work around

With the caveat that you can always enter Overhead mode at ANY time if you just need to look at or manage other locations

Assuming I build in multiplayer, then it adds a really nice motivation to have a second player running around. They can physically be on a separate island moving items manually, which you can't do with just one player

[patent kite]

so 2 questions...

1. when i reactive the avatar, does it reactivate where it was last used or at the cursor/center of screen/something like that.
2. how are you handling giving/taking multiple of the same object? select the item to give or take and then click repeatedly to take 1 or more at a time? or will the player need to enter and amount to transfer?

[river kraken]

@patent kite The avatar stays put when you're in global overhead mode. There's a UI button (and will be a hotkey) for returning control back to the avatar

For multiple items, you can just hold down the interaction button and the task will repeat. The task will speed up significantly for 'repeats'. The idea is you should be able to relatively quickly transfer a stack of items if that's what you want to do

Repeat harvesting speeds up too, but not as much as repeat pick up / drop off.

[patent kite]

cool, can't wait to see it in action!

[weak hull]

No, but you can in Autonauts. With that game it actually encourages you to build a construction yard and move buildings out of it, but that's because the robots can only build in predefined areas. You can move that area around with a signpost though so either approach works. You can only carry a handful of items yourself so getting the robots to do it is faster and encouraged.

[weak hull]

I think most of these questions can only be answered through playtesting.

[patent kite]

@river kraken in the screenshots i see lamps, does this mean there will some amount of beutifying available?

[patent kite]

what would be really cool is to do something like Tiny Glade where as paths are placed down, the game randomly adds a bit a scenery to it.

[weak hull]

I'm not sure how I feel about the volcano storing items for global building. To me, chuck into volcano is equivalent to destroy this item forever.

[river kraken]

@patent kite Yeah I'm hoping to make decor play more of a role in this game. Like if you have decor and lighting near where your workers are walking, their energy will last longer, or they get happiness bonus points. Currently, when nighttime falls the stamina meter for each worker starts falling faster. So maybe if they are on well-lit paths the stamina won't fall so far so they can work longer

@weak hull Yeah I get there's a bit of a disconnect there - chucking items into a volcano feels like it should destroy it. I feel like the gameplay benefits of having a giant entity that acts as an infinite item sink, rewards you for any and all items you give it, but also acts like a global inventory if you need to create a bunch of rails / belts at a later date, is too great to pass up. So my in-game explanation will be "It's magic". My gut is that this won't be too hard for players to accept...it's a giant googly-eyed talking volcano, so we're not going for hyper-realism here

Let's say, the volcano can magically re-constitute items

It's probably worth calling this inconsistency out with some cheeky in-game dialogue between the player and the volcano

Player: Wait, you're giving me this item back? How did it not get destroyed in all the lava?
Volcano: 🤷

[frank ibex]

"A wizard did it"

[weak hull]

I think it might create a bit of a disconnect. There's no reason to store building materials, you just chuck it all into the volcano or the marketplace. But then if you want workers to build stuff, you have to store some of it around town for them to access. IDK, maybe I'm missing a piece of the puzzle and or it will play out differently than in my head.

[river kraken]

@weak hull I'm picturing the case where you're building a big train track track somewhere remotely on the map. I don't want to require this to be constructed by workers - it should plop down immediately just like in FT1. But it does need to consume resources. The question then is, where do those resources come from?

I could have logic that all structures like that just require spending currency you've earned over time. But I got the sense players really wanted the placement of a train track to require producing and consuming a train track tile. So, that means physical items do need to be kept somewhere and then consumed immediately on demand

The Barns / shared Town Center storage in FT1 felt like a bad solution. It requires creating buffer barns all over the place, and it's not immediately clear which building the items should be taken from or refunded to.

The idea with the volcano is there is one central repository for all shared items. And you're supposed to be feeding it tons of items anyways, so the two goals of 'build up shared storage for construction' and 'feed volcano for progression' work together

[mental jay]

@river kraken I just want to say I appreciate the fact that you're being open and communicative with community feedback and suggestions w/ FT2's design. I'm also following Rise of Industry, which is less true indie, more "Triple I", which is what I call indie studios under the banner of a smaller publisher. Their design process doesn't take feedback for valid reasons given their situation, but it's all the more reason to appreciate small-time indie devs like you ❤️

[slender laurel]

you get the items back from the volcano by chipping the congealed lava off them

the only item that gets treated differently is lava buckets

[weak hull]

I see two options that don't involve the volcano. You add resources to a station which just magically builds the tracks you've placed as it receives resources. Or you have a train that builds tracks as it goes which you have to load up with resources like any other train.

[weak hull]

Yeah, I understand that. It feels like whatever bonus you get from feeding it those items should then be taken away if you use them.

Actually, what's stopping the player from building a bunch of stuff and re-feeding that to the volcano to double dip on bonuses?

[river kraken]

@weak hull Once an object like a rail tile is in the volcano, it can only be used for building. If you build with it, then destroy it, the refunded items go right back to the volcano. It never again becomes a 'movable' object like what comes out of a production building

You can't withdraw items from the volcano with a grabber

[weak hull]

OK, so things that are built from the volcano and things built by workers are treated completely separately?

Won't that also lead to confusion?

[river kraken]

@weak hull Possibly! I'll keep an open mind to see if there is a solution with better tradeoffs. But I think the proposed system will work pretty intuitively in practice. (TBD more playtesting.) But here's a way to think of it: There are three states for items:

• Physically in the world (e.g. in a building's storage, on a belt, carried by a worker)
• In your Avatar's inventory
• In the Volcano's inventory

If it's physically in the world, the workers can interact with it. Your avatar can collect items out of buildings, and take them off belts. The Volcano is stationary, so it can't just pick up items as it chooses. They must be delivered!

If your Avatar is carrying an item, you can deposit them into buildings, into the Volcano, and build with them. Basically, it's a worker you control.

Once items are delivered to the Volcano, you get Favor Points and they are added to the 'global' inventory. They can't be withdrawn by normal means (belts) or by your Avatar, and will never again exist as physical items that move around on belts. They're like inside the UI at this point. You can build anywhere with any item delivered to the volcano. Any refunds from destroyed structures go back to the Volcano.

So, it's not like you'll have 'world' and 'volcano' items moving around on the same conveyor belt. Once they're in the Volcano, they'll only ever appear in menus

Am realizing one complication: If you construct something with your avatar, and then destroy it, the items will be 'teleported' to the Volcano via a refund. You won't get favor points (those only are earned at the moment they are physically delivered to the volcano). But, there is the advantage of freeing up space in the Avatar's inventory if they are building materials...

They can't be refunded to the Avatar because then you could exploit this by delivering the same items multiple times to the Volcano

It could be that players should just always have an option of magically sending their items to the Volcano. (or maybe that's an upgrade you earn at some point). But then it becomes a hugely advantageous way to deliver items, especially once you're working on distant islands. It avoids the whole need of creating transportation networks to deliver items to the volcano

Unless you don't earn Favor Points when teleporting items. But now, we're getting into what feels like arbitrary rule territory that I'm trying to avoid

[frank ibex]

Earn less points when teleporting as a cost?

[river kraken]

True, could balance it that way. Still, it's a complication that I'd need to teach

Another way to avoid this is to decide that you don't get refunds when destroying buildings. Then there's no teleporting

[frank ibex]

Could add the explanation for the cost when you unlock that feature.

[river kraken]

I feel like it would create this unpleasant tension...players know they could always teleport an item, so the 'lazy-but-boring' option is viable. Let's say there's a really distant island or some really spaghetti section of base that produces a high-value item. Why try to re-organize or build a long efficient train, when the player could just pop over there every 10 minutes and teleport everything? Sure you get 50% benefit (or whatever) but it's better than trying to rebuild everything

I forget the exact quote but there's this idea that players will often try to find the minimum effort strategy to solve a problem. So the minimum effort strategy better be interesting, or the game will get tedious

So even the possibility of teleporting items will probably cause this tedious behavior to emerge as a dominant strategy

But, riffing on the idea a little more. I can imagine that once the player has tons of islands, trying to build a belt or rail line back to the single volcano could become annoying and repetitive. So there could be a late-game building that teleports items. I'm not actually worried in this case, because it avoids the need for the player to physically navigate around to each item and pick up items and teleport them individually. So it's not the teleportation per se that bothers me, the problem is having a strong incentive to do repetitive teleportation chores with your avatar

[frank ibex]

Mini volcanos to teleport to the big one? Or just a building teleporting to another building?

[river kraken]

Mini volcanoes is a good idea! Especially since the main volcano creates these new islands by erupting. I had pictured a giant ball of lava falling from the sky, into the ocean and forming a land mass. But either the lava could erupt from the water (more realistic I guess haha) or just mini volcanoes appear. What if they are like little baby volcanoes with big googly eyes!

I had been picturing a magical teleportation building, but that baby volcano idea might be more fun

[frank ibex]

(the player upgrade would be, of course, 'pocket volcano')

[river kraken]

I was thinking they would form automatically in the center of any newly created islands. Like a fixed dropoff location

But, if mini volcanoes always spawn on new islands, then the player never needs to build transportation back to the center island, which feels like a bit of a bummer. So perhaps pocket volcano is the answer

[frank ibex]

You could limit how many mini volcanos the player can 'build', similar to the town center limit.

[river kraken]

Yeah they could be good milestone rewards, cost lots of Favor Points, but adds a huge advantage. You'll want to be very strategic about where you put them!

[violet skiff]

All i hope is that FT2 won't be too much complicated or either too much easy ...

[river kraken]

Me too! want to hit the sweet spot. I talk a lot about 'simplifying' but it's not that I want to make the game casual, I just want to avoid some unnecessary complications that FT1 had. I want it to be 'smoother', not necessarily 'easier'

[patent kite]

you could make the volcano its own island that can only have movers on it (no buildings). this way you can have lots of inputs (like ports or train stations) that all feed into the volcano.

personally not a fan of the teleporting idea as ya, that would be to easy.

[river kraken]

Looping back a bit to the construction inventory question, because there are problems with it besides the teleportation issue.

So my current idea is the Avatar has an inventory and can build locally with it. So let's say there's a building that makes conveyor belts. You can walk over, pick up the belts, and then place them nearby as a working belt...without having to deliver them to the Volcano first. But this has edge cases:

• If you run out of belts, does the game automatically fall back to using belts from global inventory?
• If so, is it possible to build a UI that cleanly and clearly shows combination of "Avatar Inventory" and "Global Inventory" so you know you have, say, 50 total belts to build with?
• The game also needs a 'Global Construction' mode that strictly uses items from global inventory. Would need to avoid confusion about which mode a player is in
• If the avatar builds a belt, and then destroys it, that means the belt is teleported into global inventory. This might feel like items disappear that should be available locally

None of these are impossible to solve, but it still feels like arbitrary complications

So, spitballing here to find solutions. What if there's no separate global construction inventory? Everything that is built in the world must be held by the Avatar. I can easily make avatar storage infinite or near-infinite, so that's not a big problem. But, the player would need to constantly collect building materials. That's annoying. But, I could add a system where the worker units act like Factorio drones and physically deliver items to the Avatar if they fall below a certain threshold.

One downside is I lose the nice benefit that players can easily stockpile construction materials at the Volcano. In this model, items in the Volcano are permanently consumed. This means the player needs to create and maintain their own stockpiles of rails, belts, chutes, planks, stone, etc. Maybe this is not actually a downside - maybe that's a fun challenge to solve?

Another option - all construction is done with coins earned through normal economic activity. Physically holding a rail or belt does nothing. In fact, maybe the game world can't produce individual rails or belts. They are created instantly, at the place you choose, if you spend coins. And they are vaporized back into coins when destroyed. This is kind of like how you can't build a 'lumber mill' and hold it in your inventory. It's either at the location, or it's converted back to raw materials. It's just in this case, it applies to all buildable structures, and the only material is a global currency.

This does feel a bit too far in the casual / simplified direction though

Yet another option is - the Avatar is just a passive observer for the fun of wandering around the map. Has no inventory, can't build or harvest or deliver anything. The only inventory is global inventory. This moves it back to FT1 territory. The 'shared inventory' of barns felt weird, but it did work. Maybe in this case there's no shared barn inventory, but instead you have pocket volcanoes that contribute to global inventory.

(Let me know if you have gut reactions to any of these proposals)

[frank ibex]

If the player has inventory, can they 'handcraft'?

[river kraken]

Hadn't thought of that honestly. Probably if the only inventory is the avatar's inventory, it would be really helpful if they could

Downside is I can imagine the game starting to feel quite a bit like Factorio if I go down that road. I mean, it's a fantastic game but I want to avoid the situation where it feels like I'm cloning chunks of it

[frank ibex]

Understandable

[river kraken]

The big differentiator about FT, and FT2 in particular, is going to be the living town that builds up around all your activities. Leaning into this, then the idea that townspeople would hand-deliver you any construction materials you want could be the solution that is convenient without feeling broken or OP

On a related note - I'm currently working on a system that lets you configure 'Worker Requests'. This is a UI panel that lets you specify which items should be hand-delivered by workers. This is separate from inventory, because maybe you have a barn that is being automatically delivered coconuts, but not bananas - therefore you want the workers to only deliver bananas. The default mode is that all recipe inputs and storage filters are automatically created as active worker requests (following the 'it just works' principle). But you can override this if needed.

This system could be exactly what is used to tell the game that your avatar would like 100 rail tiles and 50 belts in its inventory, and nearby workers will collect items and bring them to you if you fall below those levels.

Buildings have a line in their config panel that lets you choose how many workers should be dedicated to supplying items to it (basically, filling those worker requests). The avatar itself could have one of these lines, so you can choose how many workers should be following you around, delivering items you choose. Like a group of followers. That might actually be pretty fun!

[autumn fable]

I really prefer the idea that construction is done from a single global inventory instead of a player inventory unless it's something like Factorio where a huge amount of work is put into "gamifying" construction mechanics with things like robot logistics

I can also see some benefit to having a single central volcano instead of each island having its own mini-volcano as it creates a reason for a network of boats, trains, and airships carrying items all over the map

[patent kite]

here is a thought, I personally am a fan of global inventories. But i'm also a fan of moving masses of raw materials.

So what if refined products can be delivered to the island's town hall to be added a global inventory, but raw materials have to be transported. The player building something in either mode (avatar/god) would consume either a finished product if they have one or the refined pieces if they don't (maybe there would be a "build time" after laying something down if you use refine materials instead of finished products)?

[weak hull]

I know you want to distance yourself from other games but there's a reason certain mechanics are popular. No creative truly comes up with something new. Everything is built upon someone else's creation. But good media puts it together in new ways. DotA doesn't have anything new, you fight monsters for experience/gold, your character levels up, you can add points to certain skills, you can buy items at a shop. Sounds pretty RPG like. But then you add in the fact that that it's team based PvP and matches are around 40 mins. That's new. And then you have Deadlock which takes the DotA formula and adds first person shooting elements like aiming and variable hit boxes to it.

Personally, I like to play colony sims to see the workers moving stuff around the map and building things on their own. I'm just a benevolent observer who also gives direction. Banished, Timberborn, Dorf Fortress, Gnomoria etc all do this really well. But when it comes to crafting items it's 100% workers top to bottom. Workers move stuff around, workers use the craft benches / buildings to make stuff. I like to play factory games for kinda the same reason (watching stuff move around and transform into other stuff) but with an added puzzle element to it. Factory Town 2 has the opportunity to hit a niche market between factory games and colony sim games by replacing that entirely worker based system with automated factories and I believe that's what FT1 was trying to achieve. Kubifaktorium is an example of one such merger of factory and colony sim and the only one I can think of besides FT.

So don't be afraid of borrowing stuff from either genre, the fact that you're merging genres like this is enough to stand out.

The way I imagine it working is you place a construction zone. This has certain raw resource requirements such as planks, cogs, ingots etc and generates work orders for them. This is the same work order queue that buildings/craft benches use to request resources. Workers can then place stuff in the construction zone and then build it. When placing the construction zone it automatically adds any resources it needs from your inventory. If all of the needed resources are added this way it also instantly builds. God mode building could work the same way without automatically adding resources. Eventually, craft benches will be replaced by automatic buildings that don't require workers. Workers moving stuff around is replaced by conveyor belts. They can just sit back and relax, which could be another requirement rather than just material needs.

[river kraken]

@weak hull I think I could be convinced to stick to construction pits for buildings, but I'm still hung up on potential problems when using actual worker construction for paths and bridges. Trying to figure out pathfinding for a bridge that is under construction feels like it could be a nightmare, or what if the player builds some floaty blocks that are simply not accessible by workers? I guess I could just say that floaty blocks are not possible, unless the player is building in God mode. But that just brings back the original problem of having separate building modes and separate inventories.

[weak hull]

Have the building run the pathfinding algorithm and if it can't find a worker it raises an error. Bridges in Timberborn are built from one end, the worker just stands in the adjacent tile to build it. But bridges in that game count as a single block.

[patent kite]

@river kraken what did you think of my idea above?

[river kraken]

@patent kite To make sure I understand right, you're saying that a building or path structure could be built with raw materials in-place (by the avatar, or by workers), but if you have a finished product (like a 'conveyor belt' item) you can just place it down wherever, instantly?

[patent kite]

I was speaking more toward the inventory management aspect vs the actual building once something is placed down.

I think it would add an interesting dynamic to not have to manage the bajillion sub-parts to make a final item but you still have to manage building the subparts.

[river kraken]

@patent kite Ok so it's more like: you can teleport finished goods but not raw materials?

[patent kite]

ya

[river kraken]

@patent kite It's an interesting idea! I agree that setting up supply lines for massive throughput of raw materials is more appealing than micromanaging a large number of small throughput belts. I'll keep it in mind for balancing stuff once the game is up and running.

I could enforce this by saying something like an OmniPipe could only fit premium / refined goods. But it might be a little cleaner and less arbitrary to just ensure that the 'teleportation' option just has a lower rate of transmission. That would make it impractical for moving 100 planks a second. But it moving 1 fancy jewelry every second would be very useful.

On the other hand, the fact that worker populations are now much more flexible could take a lot of pain out of managing high variety, low throughput situations. Let's say you have a train station that wants to load 10 finished products for delivery to the volcano. In FT1, you'd need to manually configure 10 individual worker routes or try to fit 10 belts to input to that train station. Now, you would just say "10 workers should supply this Train Station" and they will seek out nearby sources for the item and deliver whatever is necessary.

So I think in the endgame you wouldn't need 100 belts feeding into the volcano, you'd have just 4-5 major rail loops that collect a variety of finished goods and deliver them.

[river kraken]

Had a new idea for construction / inventory management:

• Whenever the player creates a new building, a construction pit is created. Whenever they create a new structure, a ghostly/temporary placeholder version is created.
• If the avatar has construction items in their local inventory, and is within range of the building or structure, items from their inventory will fly over to the target and help complete its construction. This works even for things floating in the sky - you just have to be nearby.
• If the volcano has sufficient items in its inventory, it will also fly items over to the construction area and potentially complete it. The range of this ability is probably subject to some upgrade / leveling progression.
• Otherwise, nearby workers will attempt to complete the building or path if they can reach it and don't have another job.
• The player can choose which items they want stocked in their inventory, and unoccupied workers will try to supply those items by bringing them to the player.
• Refunded items go to the volcano, but no favor points are earned.

Benefits:

• You can plan your layout without worrying about resources.
• If you have the resources, building can be nearly instantaneous.
• There's no confusion about which inventory you're building from - it's the avatar's inventory. However, volcano can supply as a backup for convenience.
• Teleporting items to volcano does not act as an exploit
• Good incentive for creating and managing stockpiles of specific items

[frank ibex]

Sounds good.

[round shell]

Just an idea about the range of the volcano: small volcanoes with the same properties as the original one. You can send them items as the main one and they also have a smaller supplying range of building materials. It's all the same volcano but with extra holes (I think they're called chimneys?). Of course this is limited, upgradable amount, maybe they're natural, idk

[river kraken]

@round shell Yeah, the pocket volcanoes could be good range extenders! Kind of fits the 'pylon' idea that has been kicking around for a while. Maybe slightly slower to deposit items, but could build stuff quickly. This meets my other goal that building should be kind of a manual exercise at the very beginning of the game, but by the end it's mostly automatic and done from shared inventory.

[frank ibex]

If the volcano has sufficient items in its inventory, it will also fly items over to the construction area
This could be shown as an eruption blasting the materials to the construction site. Not sure what the avatar version would look like.

[round shell]

Thrown by hand

[river kraken]

@frank ibex yeah either that, or I'm thinking like carrier pigeon or something

In general I love the idea of carrier pigeons replacing the function of Factorio drones

Maybe the player also has to build & maintain aviaries to keep these pigeons working

[weak hull]

I like this idea, but I still don't like the idea of throwing stuff into the volcano that you can use later. Could you separate the two inputs? Some stuff goes into volcano and is eaten, some stuff goes into volcano and is stored. Only the eaten stuff gives favour. Maybe the storage input is at the base and the offering input is the top?

[river kraken]

@weak hull Just curious, is the reason you don't like re-using stuff thrown into the volcano because it feels like it breaks rules of logic, or that it would cause problems for game balance or usability?

I can see both ways, just trying to make sure I understand your perspective

[weak hull]

Rules of logic mostly, but a bit of all three.
Balance is the least affected as it would only be an issue when players find an exploit. Like marking something for deconstruction and then cancelling it which accidentally removes the status of if it's gained favour or not. Or stacking items with mixed favour states. If you go with that sort of approach.
Usability it could be confusing to have items added to the volcano one way produce favour but when added another way, they don't. For example, if you build something from your own inventory but then deconstruct it and those items go to the volcano, they were never used to gain favour and players can feel cheated when finding that out.

Lots of these automation games don't have a global inventory. Autonauts, Kubifaktorium, Factorio, etc don't have one and they're perfectly workable. I think it's a fun challenge honestly, as long as overcoming that challenge isn't painful. Satisfactory and Odd Sparks have a global inventory that can be used for building and they both work in similar ways. They're unlocked later in the tech tree and require you to place a specific building that allows it's contents to be used in construction. This is a one way trip for the items, deconstructing things puts the items in your inventory. Both games also build things from raw materials, ie, you don't have to make a carpenter's building before placing it, you just add wood and a saw to a building site. If you're planning on going the Factorio route where you have to make a building item that you then place in the world, this might not work as well.

I'm not saying this is the only way of doing a global construction inventory but it might be the case that they've had to solve some problems that you nor I are aware of.

[autumn fable]

There are a bunch of ways of solving the double counting issue

1. The simplest would just be "buildings can only be built from the volcano inventory". Oddly enough I think that this might be the most intuitive solution for new players, because it eliminates all edge cases and is a model used in genres like RTS.
2. For a more complex system, lets say adding 10 wood to the volcano so it reads 10/10 (available wood/total wood, with available used for construction and total used for favor calculation). I build a lumber yard using 5 wood from my personal inventory. The volcano now reads 10/15, and if I deconstruct the lumber yard will read 15/15. Getting items into the volcano by building and deconstructing is cheating a little in the player's favor, but doesn't seem like it affects the balance when you can just set up a train that drops hundreds of items in every minute.

I think the only noticeable problem with the original FT's construction system is the "where do refunded materials go" edge case and that overall it's significantly more user-friendly than games like Satisfactory, DSP, and Foundry where construction requires a lot of inventory micromanagement

[river kraken]

Thanks both! Updated proposal:

• Everything is built from avatar inventory, workers, or delivery pigeons
• Everything deposited into the volcano is gone forever
• Later in game you get to build magical Shared Inventory boxes that deposit items directly into avatar's inventory. Potential exploit is this allows you to teleport items across the map, but that is limited because you have to be physically near the destination and the convenience of these limited teleportations is probably a huge user-friendly benefit.
• These inventory boxes can be easily used as buffers when supplying items to the volcano - conveyor belt first tries to deliver there, if player inventory is full, continues along the belt into the volcano.
• Delivery pigeons can take items out of designated storage areas and deliver to buildings or to the avatar based on requested items
• Refunded items go back into player inventory or into little crates you can pick up later. (does not go to volcano)

I think this allows for: good early game challenges of physically delivering items, late game convenience when building at larger scales, avoids dual-inventory confusion, allows construction of placeholder blocks and buildings immediately even if you don't have the resources

[weak hull]

Sounds workable to me, ship it!

And thank you for considering feedback at this early stage. It's much harder to change things later.

[patent kite]

@river kraken any thoughts on when you might want some playtest feedback?

[river kraken]

@patent kite still prob 1-2 months away. Some basic stuff like 'starting a new game' are not built yet. For the past few months I've just been working off a single FT1 save file that I modified to work for FT2

[patent kite]

But, what if... and hear me out now... what if I wanted to play it sooner? 😛

[brave magnet]

I like the tropical theme and the volcano idea a lot!
I would recommend using at least a few established tropes to give new players something familiar to quickly understand.
Having precise control over trains' routes in FT1 is something I really enjoy about it. In a way, you almost have an inversion of other factory games' tech trees. Other games start out with extremely specific routes using conveyor belts and then open up with pathfinding trains. FT1 was the opposite.

[mental jay]

@river kraken oh yeah. How's modding finna be in FT2? Amazing feat if you can pull that off. Custom mechanics that can be shared in multiplayer lobbies.

[spring narwhal]

More modding would be nice. Some people have suggested some cool things. A grain elevator and screws have been suggested. FT definitely makes vertical building less than ideal.

More uses for rotational energy, and perhaps windmills, would be nice too.

[spring narwhal]

If I understand correctly, FT2 has flowing water. Flowing water has historically been used to provide rotational energy. It would be great to also use that.

[mental jay]

I have some experience building moddable systems. There's a discord bot I was part of the dev team for called "RPGBot". I pioneered a system called the "Dynamic Combat System" which allowed users to develop their own custom mechanics. It is present in the current iteration of the bot, "RPForge", in the form of their "scripting" system.

[river kraken]

I dunno, I feel like the amount of time I spent adding rule sets etc into FT1 didn't really translate into that much extra content for players? Maybe it just wasn't visible to me, but at least from looking through the Steam Workshop there's 5 custom scenarios, 10 'rule sets', and the rest are save files / starting maps. For sure, the modding capabilities weren't all that powerful or user-friendly but generally if there's a real demand for modding, players will find a way. And it just didn't seem like there was the demand for sinking the extra dev time into these features

[mental jay]

Was it an issue of too much work or not enough expertise?

I will not lie, modding is dicey. As you're basically giving players some level of direct control over the mechanics. It's really easy to overthink what you haven't come up with.

So I totally get the sentiment "not worth the effort".

Again, I've done it before on a smaller scale. At the high-level end you're just creating a customization screen for some variant of an already existing mechanic. If you go super low-level, you are basically creating a scripting language for your game.

And at this point, I suspect there's still things I do not know. I also used to do XCOM2 modding. Those were the days.

[spring narwhal]

I like the advanced ruleset. I have tried some of the others, but stuck with advanced, though I change out the maps.

[mental jay]

Where can I access those? I didn't even know you could tool w/ the "rulesets"

[spring narwhal]

It's built-in. It's in the menus when you start a new game.

[mental jay]

Let me take a quick look

[spring narwhal]

There are also sets that eliminate various transportation methods in favor of forcing you to rely on another type, and one that limits workers per building to force you to build more buildings rather than assign five workers

[mental jay]

AHH

I SEE IT

interesting....

Welp. @river kraken you inadvertently created a mental health monitoring tool. If I can play FT w/o caffeine nor stimulants, that means my dopamine detox is done. 😛

[river kraken]

@mental jay ooh a whole new healthcare market to tap into!

[mental jay]

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

YOU GOT IT BOSS

[river kraken]

Re: work vs. expertise question, it's a bit of both. I don't have experience integrating a compiled exe with custom scripts that would affect gameplay and not just adjust values here and there. I felt that 99% of what people wanted to 'mod' were really just new items and maybe change some balance rules, so I built those capabilities in as a rule set. If there was overwhelming demand for fully scriptable behaviors then I was going to look into it, but didn't seem like there was that level of demand

I think some flexible rule sets in FT2 will probably fit the bill as well. If there's a really good idea for a custom building or new behavior, then I'd just add it myself

[mental jay]

ahh. Yeah. I will attest to that last part: you are basically setting up a custom compiler within your own game.

That's basically how most custom-moddable games work. A custom sandboxed script that basically lets the players code their own unique game elements

your game would basically compile their script file into an instruction block, then invoke your own game's functions based on those blocks.

just study how compilers work and you've done like 80% of knowing how to make your game moddable basically

[spring narwhal]

I think a lot of modability comes from scripting much of your code in Lua or similar, so modder code runs alongside yours, with hooks to load it.

That being said, I don't have game dev experience beyond playing briefly with Godot.

[quaint ruin]

the problem I see is what are you modding that is changing the game after all if you look at factorio's mods the most popular ones are actually rule sets in disguise and yes they change the game alot, angels being one I can think on the top of my head, py another mod that is actually a rule set, ok brave new world was not a rule set as such but in a game that is not a first person nor a third person game how do you get something very similar to work in factory town?

[weak hull]

This is the hard way of doing things. There's no need for a custom script, just import either C# (Space Engineers) or Lua (Factorio) or some other scripting language (python is my fave), cut off the functions that could be exploited like anything that accesses the file system or internet and you're good.

[mental jay]

Yeah sorry I missed that detail. That's totally valid. What I meant by "custom" is "have your own keywords". It is far easier to borrow something pre-sandboxed like Lua for the syntax but then add your own keywords for FT-specific modding. XCOM2 modding, for instance, branches off UnrealScript.

[weak hull]

Ah, then I misunderstood you. All G

[spring narwhal]

How's progress going? I hope the new year is treating you well!

[river kraken]

@spring narwhal Great! Been reworking more of the key systems and very happy with how things are going. For example:

• The player chooses which crops / trees should grow on which tile
• The player can manually plant / cultivate them with their avatar, or you can build a Farm or Forester nearby and the assigned workers will perform that automatically
• Workers at nearby Harvester Huts will harvest the crops and drop them back off at the huts
• Some crops (like berry bushes) automatically regrow, but some (like trees) require re-planting. And all crops benefit from a 'Cultivate' action, performed by farmers or foresters

The system feels very natural and it's fun watching the workers walk out and plant / cultivate crops

I have some fun new stuff but saving it for when I'm ready for a proper announcement

But yeah everything is full steam ahead and still feeling great about how things are shaping up

Things seem to be falling into place in really nice ways, whereas in FT1 I felt like I was constantly trying to get square pegs through round holes

[mental jay]

@river kraken oh good to know you're still working on it. How much thought have you put on multiplayer or not?

[mental jay]

That was exactly how I described that time when I was trying to wire USD to my Russian friend many years ago before that thing that happened

[river kraken]

@mental jay I'm still focusing on nailing down the core gameplay, so I haven't spent any time yet looking into multiplayer issues

[half flint]

You did a fantastic job. New items is awesome and allows another dimension. WIth customized recipes, it's easy to add some complexity to the supply chains. Problem is when those items aren't on the global, and have to be stored in containers or lost, it loses some appeal for certain things like "Labor" a concept someone was trying out. That and no adding techs or modifying their requirements. It's really close. I just don't think enough people know about this game to get into the modding. It is such a satisfying game in its genre of supply chain. There's so many items out-of-the-box, that I added more costs to all the recipes to cost previous resources to really force the players to supply their populace with all those items in order to go to the next tier.

[patent kite]

Are you planning to have tons of different items that can be produced like in FT1?

[river kraken]

@half flint I hadn't thought about the problem of allowing 'global' items, so basically you'd need the ability for some mods to stack on top of each other? Like one person makes a mod "Here's 50 new items" and someone else can make a different mod that makes lots of new recipes using those same items?

@patent kite yeah I've got a lot more items this time around, mostly in the food, drink & clothing department. Baked goods, desserts, coffee, chocolate stuff, frozen drinks & treats

I'm not going to have the same pressure to make 'all of the items all of the time', and the flexibility of having workers deliver items instead of needing a belt for each item type should make it easier to handle a wide variety

My goal is that each island will have some unique resources, so players will supply the island with whichever items are most convenient to make, and that satisfy the unmet needs of that island

Another convenience is that workers can purchase / consume items directly from the producing building. So you won't necessarily need to transport all the items to central markets

[patent kite]

ok i'm glad they are going to be easier to manage. that was one i thing I didn't enjoy in FT1. too many things needed to be created and transported.

[river kraken]

agreed

[weak hull]

Will the central markets give a bonus of some kind to items sold there?

[river kraken]

@weak hull I haven't 100% decided on that. I'm leaning towards the idea that there's no penalty for workers picking up consumable items directly from production buildings. Logistically, it can be a pain to try and get all items to markets, there aren't always really good alignments of which items should be sold in which building, and maybe some items won't have a specific market where you can sell it because they're in a special category. So adding any mechanic that makes players feel penalized for not using markets hits some friction

My plan is to add some configuration options per-building (and maybe even per-item, if needed) that lets players decide if the items in a building can be 1) consumed by workers, 2) distributed by workers to other production buildings, 3) both, or 4) neither.

Markets will default to 1, storage buildings will default to 2, production buildings will default to 3

So if you don't want workers to pick up planks from your lumber mill, because you need them as ingredients, you just change this setting

[weak hull]

Is there some incentive to use markets then?

[river kraken]

@weak hull yeah, they have more item slots than a typical storage building. So workers can do more shopping with a single stop. It's advantageous to have centralized distribution so workers don't need to spend as much time traveling to get consumables. That said, their role is definitely diminished compared to FT1

[river kraken]

In FT1 the idea of rotational power was pretty underdeveloped, but it'll be a key feature in this game. So I've now got Windmills, Water Wheels, Steam Turbines, and Electric Motors that all generate rotational power. You can feed that directly into a building, or use a Drive Shaft to move the rotational power around (above or below-ground).

Rotational power can be used to run Water Pumps, Electric Generators, or provide a big speed boost to Food Mills and Lumber Mills. The electricity will be required to run things like refrigerators (to make ice) or machine shops.

I don't think I will require rotational power to run conveyor belts, but I am toying with the idea, as long as rotational power isn't too hard to manage. Maybe it will just provide a boost?

[spring narwhal]

I like the boost idea.t

I also thought mechanical rails were pointless in the original game. They weren't part of the upgrade cycle and it was better to work around the need than to make them.

[mental jay]

I did find a use, as it allowed for multi-level cart tracks. Cart tracks are rather high bandwidth dedicated transportation pipelines for raw resources. The tracks can carry multiple resources if you use the right blocks and settings to route the resources correctly.

But in the end: you're right. Huge headache to deal with. And I remember only needing to set up like 2 elevated cart track systems.

[spring narwhal]

It's easier just to connect different tracks with silos rather than setup mechanical rails.

[mental jay]

I don't quite get what you just said in detail but the general idea of "tracks", "silos", and "connect them" makes some amount of sense.

I need to try that but a screenshot of what you mean would be much appreciated.

[spring narwhal]

Instead of having sloping tracks, you end the one level at a silo. That silo takes the items and passes them to carts on a different elevation track.

-------|
|_______

Like that.

[mental jay]

huh... ooooh

huh. Right. The silo spans 3 levels

[spring narwhal]

Right.

[mental jay]

i.e. enough levels that one will pass under the other

I forgot that. Thanks

[spring narwhal]

You're welcome.

If it's not a single item type you'll want a bar instead.

Or train station.

[mental jay]

wut is a bar lmao

like a "bar" of silos?

[spring narwhal]

Sorry, a barn.

[mental jay]

oooh

yeah I use that more often than silos for my high-output solutions

cuz of the surface area

funny enough b/c of the way FT1 works, surface area is far more important more often than capacity

[mental jay]

@river kraken just wanna point this out. For a lot of situations I ran into where the solution would only demand the capacity of a silo, surface area needs often ended up demanding a barn

so you may want to create some sort of "loading dock" mechanic. What I would imagine is something like a silo that feeds into some central silo w/ omnipipes. But as it goes: omnipipes are locked behind tech level 8 in FT1. Kinda annoying to me IMO given how useful they are. sadge 😭

I hope you're not too far into the dev to think about that. Pretty sure it can be done w/ pre-existing development. What occurs to me is a "graduated omnipipe" tech system. Something like starting w/ omnipipes limited to a length of 10, for instance.

[river kraken]

@mental jay Sure, can you give me a more concrete example?

[mental jay]

Alright then lemme load up my townfile I have not touched for a long time

[river kraken]

ty, this will help me make sure I build the correct solution

[mental jay]

absolutely 🫡 . You cannot fix the problems in my life but you can certainly fix FT2.

Ok so see that? That is my industry town high-output setup

notice how a lot of the intermediary points are barns

that is not very efficient in terms of space overall

but it is (as far as I know) the most efficient solution to allow for high output

belts are very slow compared to just "slap a caravan there and have them yeet the stuff back and forth"

in order to make it fit optimally, I need to have barns. As far as capacity is concerned a silo would do

but in order to let the solution fit congruently w/ maximal output, I used barns

there are many other similar cases. Really I only need storage space for one item so I'd use a silo. But because I have many transport units that need it, a silo will cause them to clog. Often permanently if the silo depletes itself.

Omnipipes would help a lot since it would effectively allow me to branch the delivery space

but the entire tech is locked up at a high tech level this save hasn't gotten to yet

let me show you a town where pipes have made it a slight bit cleaner

artistry town. I circled two barns in blue. Very important. I will show you why.

the pipes allow me to be more flexible in the arrangement

far more flexible. As in I would really love the omnipipes at all

even like 5 length max omnipipes

That also illustrates another issue

Since pipe connectors are in or out or In-N-Out

You basically must use a barn for any sort of solution that involves pipes

A silo only has one spot

Barn has 9

Effectively 8 given the pipe layer is 2d

[river kraken]

@mental jay So lets see, your goal with this setup is to move these production inputs and outputs around as fast as possible, because you are producing and consuming them faster than you can move them around?

[mental jay]

Yes

High need. So the bottleneck becomes transportation

[river kraken]

Two things that might help that in FT2: I've added some capabilities for buildings to directly output into another, based on where it's facing. For instance, this furnace outputs 'heat' directly into the Steam Boiler (please forgive the re-used assets for now)

My intention right now is to only use that for special items like Heat, Electricity, Steam, and Rotational Power - things that can't be put on a normal conveyor belt or picked up by a worker. But the tech is easy to expand. So maybe that's something I'll consider adding later, or maybe it's an upgrade, or whatever

The second thing, which is planned and not done yet, is you can upgrade a building to expand the types of recipes it can run. So in your case, maybe the Forge can run some of the Machine Shop recipes. This means more of the production chain can be done in one location, without having to move items around

[mental jay]

Sounds good. Thanks.

[mental jay]

I forgive you 🙏

[spring narwhal]

This is true, silos don't work if in and out are both a silo.

[spring narwhal]

No more trains hauling cars full of steam? 😄

[spring narwhal]

Does the system still functionally penalize multiple production in one building?

[river kraken]

@spring narwhal Each building has a set number of recipe slots. You can upgrade the building to run faster, or to have more recipe slots. But running multiple recipes won't slow other recipes down

[spring narwhal]

That seems like a nice improvement. It would add some variety to the game.

[river kraken]

yeah and I fixed the 'round-robin' problem where one recipe would hog all the ingredients

[mental jay]

@river kraken oh yeah have you considered that scenario I just presented where the literal fastest way to transport things without pipes is a caravan in a 1 width gap?

[river kraken]

@mental jay sure, and I guess I was saying that FT2 should give you some options that will hopefully make that kinda cheese not necessary

[mental jay]

Alr. Feel free to pass 'em over if you want input. I was about to default to my tendency to thoughtdump until I read in a bit and realized I might've done that already and forgot to consider you've already put in a ton of thought.

You're the captain of this ship. I'm just here for the ride. Carry on 🫡

[river kraken]

So I'm struggling a bit with naming and wanted to just do an informal poll. Here's the options I'm considering:

"Factory Town Paradise": Not as obvious it's a sequel, might make people think it's more of a spinoff like Factory Town Idle was
"Factory Town 2: Paradise": A bit of a mouthful, and maybe implies that it's DLC?
"Factory Town 2": Gets the point across, but lacks the extra flavor that you'd get from the 'paradise' subtitle

Any strong feelings here?

[weak hull]

Lots of games have subtitles without being a DLC. My vote is for B or C.

Autonauts made a second stand alone game called Autonauts vs Piratebots. But it's not really a sequel and more of a spin off.

[spring narwhal]

B or C.

[round shell]

I'd go with B or C, probably like B better

[mental jay]

I would say hard to say b/c from what I've heard about the design, it's not a sequel and there'd be merit to playing both in the future.

[river kraken]

@mental jay FWIW I am considering this to be a sequel

I'm curious, what factors make you think that it's not a sequel? I want to make sure my messaging / framing of this game is correct

[mental jay]

To be fair just nothing more than what you told me a while back about the design where FT2 is different enough from FT1 such that you can play both and not really lose much on either.

If it is a sequel, I vote C

[stiff ibex]

Risk of Rain 2 is a pretty big twist on RoR1 (2d-> 3d etc...) and I don't think anyone feels like it has the wrong name. Sometimes the simple answer is the best one

[mental jay]

knowing that this is cheese, I will redesign my towns to not do that

[weak hull]

Same with Helldivers for that matter.

[ancient wolf]

Does it need to be an exact named sequel? What about "Factory Paradise"?

[river kraken]

@ancient wolf Interesting thought, but I want to keep the "Factory Town" as part of the name, kind of like a franchise type thing

[river kraken]

Curved belts

Also, rafter supports

[chilly marsh]

Space Engineers 2 was just released. But they had about a dozen or so DLC's with the first one

[chilly marsh]

I was building a bridge yesterday and thinking that i needed more support looking structures. Well done!

[mental jay]

@river kraken I also cheesed this by completely flattening the terrain.

I should start over honestly

My playthrough was so much cheese

Not to mention there's a suggested ruleset where you multiply the production needs of each tech level by something ridiculous

Which forces you to embrace that tech level rather than skip

[river kraken]

My plan is to add a 'bedrock' layer beneath the terrain that prevents flattening it below some minimum value. Plus, the area between islands will not be terraformable

Note the bedrock will be a few layers beneath most of the ground, so you will be able to flatten to some extent, but totally flat won't be possible (in the vanilla game at least)

[mental jay]

I could legit raise the ground above the bedrock and let that be "ground level"

[river kraken]

🤔

[mental jay]

I'm gonna restart my playthrough of FT1 w/o this sort of cheese

but yeah, just trying to point out some alternate perspectives

[river kraken]

haha no this is helpful, I hadn't thought of that

Though, it'll be tricky sending items between islands if they are all on giant cliffs

[mental jay]

I would just get creative in a way

you can terraform IRL, in a sense

but it takes a lot of work to literally flatten a mountain

and you gotta put the resulting dirt/gravel somewhere

to fill in a pit elsewhere? Sure, I guess.

Which takes more work

and then you're subject to the whims of nature

[river kraken]

I can make the coin cost go up the more you are changing from baseline

[mental jay]

did you fill in a river? Watch the water spill all over the place and now you have a huge case of erosion

that would probably work ngl

I mean I can't see any further than right now

but small adjustments would be ok and cost effective from what I can imagine

you would just be carving out a small ramp to deliver goods

or maybe a small platform to put a harbor

but mass terraformation where you can flatten the whole map? Wouldn't be possible

or just highly impractical

if you wanted to earn enough red coins to play god or smth

[river kraken]

String lights, waterfalls, tiki torches

[round shell]

About the terraforming, DSP has a "soil currency." If you lower a higher terrain, you earn soil. You use soil to fill canyons and flatten the ground.

With this you might still be able to do plateaus but maybe not that high.

Btw, need vertical belts/elevators!!

[river kraken]

What's cooler, 🇦 catapults or 🇧 giant slingshots?

[spring narwhal]

As I was reading this came to mind just before I read it.tt

[spring narwhal]

But also, frustrating terrain takes away from some of the enjoyment as well. I play on advanced rules with simpler terrain because I don't want to terraform much, and little rolling hills are unworkable. Part of that is the underground system that you've said is no longer 2d in FT2 though.

[river kraken]

@spring narwhal So you're saying you like to play on flat terrain mostly because of how difficult it is otherwise to connect stuff to the underground layer?

[spring narwhal]

Not flat, but not where everything has to be built out on blocks or terraformed.

But yes, the underground layer makes it more challenging. In advanced with the high throughout liquid and mana needs especially.

[weak hull]

🇨 Trebuchet

[weak hull]

Nah, not needed. Let people put in lots of effort for lots of reward. Making it really punishing on top of fiddly doesn't seem worth it.

[stiff ibex]

Cities skylines also does the terrain thing. What players end up doing is just building a huge mountain off in the distance to dump soil.

If you want to make terraforming more involved in the gameplay loop, i would argue you have to add a building with workers that maybe generate a terraforming specific coin / soil

Otherwise i would just leave it as is or you can adjust the coin cost based on the difference in height / slope from each adjacent tile.

[frank ibex]

a building with workers that maybe generate a terraforming specific coin / soil
That's what timberborn does.

[river kraken]

Hmm, so in FT2 you deliver items to the volcano in exchange for Favor Points. Mostly you spend them on unlocking new tech, but you can also upgrade things like your character's harvest speed. Maybe also you can spend favor points to grant yourself some terraforming 'budget'

So it can be technically unlimited, but it has an opportunity cost (you have to forego other progression temporarily since you spent the favor points on terraforming)

[autumn fable]

One way of handling terraforming might be to gate it via technology. Let's say that at map generation every tile is given a height, e.g. 0 is sea level and 50 is the highest mountains. Terraforming is free (meaning the player can experiment without wasting resources) but changes to the z-level are limited by the level of their terraforming technology. For instance:
Terraforming 0: The player starts here, meaning terraforming doesn't need to be dumped on the player in the beginning
Terraforming 2: Unlocked via a wood/stone age tech. This allows the player to flatten out rolling hills or make small terraces in the side of hills
Terraforming 4: Unlocked via a metal age tech, allows for removing (or creating) large hills
Terraforming 6: Unlocked via a industrial age tech
Terraforming 8: Unlocked via a magic age tech
Terraforming X: Infinite (to the max z-level) research which allows the player to eventually flatten mountains. Can be disabled in the map settings if the player isn't intended to have that power.

[spring narwhal]

It's been a few weeks. Can we get an update, @river kraken ?

I'm excited to try this. I would be glad to pay in advance once that's a thing.

[river kraken]

@spring narwhal @mental jay Sure - been working on getting some more 3D assets into the game, and the 2D store art is finished. Need a few more 3D assets completed so I could make the trailer. Once that's done I'll launch the 'coming soon' store page and officially announce the game! So maybe one more week until that is ready.

[mental jay]

HYPE

[river kraken]

I can't wait to have the Coming Soon page ready, because then I can post much more frequent status updates. That way if the updates generate attention, I can direct people to the store page so they can wishlist the game

saving the ammo until I can make the best use of it

But here's a sample screenshot at least. You can see I've still got the old house model in there, but that will be fixed up soon. Yesterday I added the ability to have all that little foliage you see

Some other details to note: the grass is neatly cut around straight borders, so it doesn't overlap in an ugly way like it used to. The road meshes are curved and extrude a bit from the ground. There's a waterfall on a cliff that is dynamically generated whenever a water trench flows over a steep drop. The grass and beach terrain tiles have a nice curved border instead of harsh squares

I haven't updated the player models yet, but I did give them tropical shirts

A fair amount of time was spent trying to get the tracking camera to work well in the trailer scene. I had to manage the camera movement plus its look target moving over time, in coordination with music and moving units. All that info had to be written in a format I could save & load so I could make and preserve adjustments while the game was running. This screenshot shows the 'spline' that controls the camera. Lot of effort for like 15 seconds of video! But should be worth it

Ooh, also I added logic that dynamically draws sagging rope+log bridges based on the distance from start to finish. When the workers cross over it, their walking height matches the sag arc

And I'm trying to make more physical items use actual 3D meshes. Don't know if I can get it that way for all of them, but we'll see

[spring narwhal]

It looks great. You can tell a lot of work went into it.

[river kraken]

Thanks! Worth noting a lot of the work is under the hood, since I need to be able to draw so many meshes efficiently. Besides the buildings, nothing you're looking at are traditional unity GameObjects. The grass, terrain, belts, items, foliage are controlled by a custom system where I supply a mesh and material, and a big list of positions / rotations that are updated only when necessary.

I had to build my own terrain system from scratch, too. The default system was too limited and in particular would draw cliffs at odd angles (the triangles in the terrain mesh had a forced orientation). It couldn't do the blending I wanted either. So now I run a little calculation on each block to determine a 'key' based on its terrain type and its four corner heights, I use that key to look up the correct quad mesh that I need (and procedurally generate it if it's missing), and then it adds itself to the list of positions to draw using that quad.

Additional 'decals' like the blending strips are added on top of that.

So every terrain block is its own quad, drawn using mesh instancing. It's super fast at drawing and at updating.

[mental jay]

No moar cheese?

I haven't had time to do over my FT1 play w/ no cheese

[spring narwhal]

But do workers flex the bridge? 😮

[river kraken]

@spring narwhal haven't added that yet : ) good idea though

[fluid oasis]

curious to see the differences from version 1... Since others game in the genre has been released since...

[grave creek]

hello how is everyone today

[chilly marsh]

CONGRATULATIONS @river kraken !!!

[river kraken]

ty ty

[brave wigeon]

I remember the discussions on this topic back then when it started. The friendly volcano immediately brought the memories back 😄
Congratz on being one milestone closer to actual release.
Edit: Wishlisted.

[chilly marsh]

Already added to my wishlist 🙂

i.e. going to buy it later

[river kraken]

@chilly marsh thank you! Plus wishlists help Valve know people are interested and it gives the game more visibility

[chilly marsh]

@brisk escarp should know about this too.

[marsh plume]

very cool to see what you've made so far, is flowing water going to be part of the logistics? I remember seeing some video from a melon farm irl and they just dropped the melons into a stream.

[vivid depot]

I recognize some of those features from the early brainstorming

The volcano mostly xD

[brisk escarp]

Thanks @chilly marsh for tagging me. Added to the wishlist, Can Not Wait!!!

[chilly marsh]

I've watched a lot of your videos ST and I've learned quite a lot using your techniques.

[spring narwhal]

Drop something in the water on a raft or in a barrel and watch it flow downstream!

Replaced by boats that flow faster downstream and can go upstream later.

Maybe magic powered later, so they hover over the water.

[river kraken]

@marsh plume I could probably do something like that! The game calculates volumetric water flow so I could know the direction of water movement

[marsh plume]

ohh very cool

[spring narwhal]

It looks great. I really liked the video.

When early access?

[hazy oxide]

I'm in.

[river kraken]

@spring narwhal I don't have a solid date at this point! Lots of work still to do before it's playable. My guess is late 2025, maybe early 2026. I also don't know if I'll do Early Access or just launch as 1.0, will see how things go

[lime socket]

Early access would give you great user feedback and allow you to make changes if necessary (similar to how it went down for factory town/idle)

Also, just realized i joined here back in 2019.. time sure does fly.

[river kraken]

@lime socket Very true, and I've liked using Early Access in the past. I do think this time around I have a better sense of how the game is going to work, so I may not need quite as much feedback on direction. Maybe I'll do a Steam Playtesting phase instead? Because I definitely could use info on usability / bug reports / tutorial stuff when the time is ready

[lime socket]

Not a bad idea. The play testing feature has come a long way.

You should add in some strange easter-egg achievements that are undocumented and found by accident. Thing's people wouldn't run into by normal gameplay. (like maybe sacrificing a worker to the volcano) lol.

If possible ^ lol

If there's a place for it in the game, and it makes sense to do so.

[spring narwhal]

I would be happy to be a play tester. But, I'm fine with paying for it in advance too. Whatever works best for you.

[chilly marsh]

I'm great at finding bugs! Sign me up. I helped you find the bug that you fixed in 2.2.7

[molten mantle]

Can i translate the game for ptbr? im a brazilian translator

@river kraken

[river kraken]

@molten mantle hi! Sure, I'd welcome any help with that

[molten mantle]

when can we work together?

[river kraken]

Send me a PM

[round shell]

I can help with Spanish after Easter.

Btw Erik, where is my egg laying cow? Don't keep it in bluesky hahah

[oblique tusk]

I just want to say I am SO SO excited for Factory Town 2! Factory Town is one of my favourite games of all time and everything I saw in the trailer looks incredible!!

[river kraken]

@oblique tusk thanks 🙂 : )

[azure plaza]

I do not know, but have you considered to make the game voxel based? (Just the buildings and items) Iam thinking about the new game Lay of the Lands or Kubifaktorium. I think the modding possibility would be endless and so easy to create them. Which could give the game all the time new content. 😄 I just wanna share this thought 😄

[river kraken]

@azure plaza That was kinda the direction I was aiming for with FT1, but I think FT2 is going in the direction of less square and less pixel art, more rounded & natural (but still a little geometric). There's a number of games that have the voxel-y look locked down now, so I think I want something more unique

[azure plaza]

What programs are you using to create the buildings for FT2?

When i played FT1 i really wanna mod it. But i did not know how to create buildings. In the same time i played kubifaktorium and this game made modding incredible easy. So i created a whole mod over 2 years. Why iam telling this is. If you can make modding easy i think you would get more content mods. I just checked FT1 Modding and i still can not figure out how to create new buildings.

[river kraken]

@azure plaza I believe my artist is using blender

I'm not sure I ever added a good way to add new building models in FT1, you could write new recipes and such for existing buildings but not create new buildings

[azure plaza]

So far i really like the artstyle

[river kraken]

I'd imagine that if I add code to add your own buildings, then it would be able to use models from any program in .fbx or .obj format

what program did you use to make buildings for kubifaktorium?

[azure plaza]

ah right. Cause i just saw this feature mentioned in a really old update news 😄

[river kraken]

maybe I forgot haha

thought it was just recipes & items

[azure plaza]

The programm called Magica Voxel and i could create a new building in like 10 minutes 😄

[river kraken]

what format does it export in?

[azure plaza]

.vox

it was/is incredible easy. Everybody could create mods in minutes.

Are you planning to allow new buildings in FT2 via Modding ? Like new blender models?

[river kraken]

@azure plaza I'm actually not sure. As far as I can tell, there wasn't a huge amount of mods created for Factory Town 1 using the in-game scripting tools, considering how much work it took to build the tools into the game. It might have been a chicken-and-egg kind of situation - as in, if the modding support was better, maybe more mods would have been created? So I'm going into FT2 with the idea I'm going to invest more time building and polishing the vanilla game, and if there's interest, then I'll spend more time on the modding stuff. Might be a post-launch update. Or maybe, if I can see there's a huge interest in the game before launch (like 100K wishlists) then I'll commit the effort up-front

[azure plaza]

Sounds fair 🙂

[signal trellis]

One of the pet peeves I had in FT1 was that the tooltips only showed on some of the menu items. Trying to find out what gives purple coins is really difficult. It doesn't even list that information in the item dictionary

Trains would be really useful if hovering the front train showed the contents of the whole train, too

[signal trellis]

In FT2, could you make signage for pipes point "up" on the screen? It helps envision the direction of the pipes

[signal trellis]

For FT2 it'd be good if there was a way to have a way of negating signals. i.e. !coal_train could apply to everything except the coal_train signal - though it might need some other sort of logic, because that wouldn't combine too well.

[frank ibex]

That is already possible in the tags.

!A,B is (not A) OR (B)

[signal trellis]

WOW! Thanks @frank ibex

is there an AND?

[frank ibex]

Not within a single block.

(you can make something like it using multiple blocks if you really want/need that)
(if you have filters or blockers you can switch to the other and negate every tag to get an AND version, I think [would need an example to test it])

[signal trellis]

Thanks! I was looking specifically for doing that sort of logic in the stations, rails etc. I can do it with rail controls etc, it's just less compact

[signal trellis]

It'd be cool if we could paste items over other items in FT2 (by subtracting the items that already exist from the copy/pasted items)