#factorio space exploration

[samueldays]

Sam Reviews: Factorio Space Exploration

That's Space Exploration the factorio mod (played v0.6), not Space Age the factorio expansion coming soon. I have finally completed SE with the cooperation of two friends across 300+ hours, I don't think I would have bothered to finish on my own, but it was a fine reason to hang out and chat. I had fun, but it was very irregular fun between good bits (spaceships!!) and facepalm bits.

It's A Scale Challenge

Space Exploration is a scale challenge, and I lead with this because I find the documentation misleading. On the Getting Started SE wiki page, which is also linked from the SE mod page, it says:

Space Exploration is mostly a complexity challenge and not a scale challenge. It's completely possible to beat the game with only 20SPM, unless you play with a science multiplier. But it'll still be hard!

Similar descriptions abound. However, Space Exploration has individual technologies mandatory for victory that cost more to research than the entire tech tree of the base game up to and including the Rocket victory research.

It's even worse than that sounds.

"Cost more" can be calculated in a quick and dirty way that vanilla Factorio's Rocket Silo victory tech costs 1000 sets of science packs to research.

Its prerequisite Rocket Control Unit costs 300, and so on back down to basic Automation technology costing merely 10, all of which add up to 5750 in total.

Space Exploration has a mandatory 6400-cost tech, some 5000s, a 4000 and a 3200, several 2000-cost techs used as filler in an already overpriced and bloated tech tree, and a 8000-cost (max spaceship size) that's theoretically optional but avoiding it requires you to play Tetris with your size-constrained spaceship layout.

But the numbers are not directly comparable, and the more detailed count makes Space Exploration look even worse. "5750 sets" vanilla includes several early technologies where the set is a subset, even one single science pack, it costs 50 of [Automation Science] for basic technology and gradually fills out to the Rocket Silo costing 1000 of [Automation, Logistics, Chemical, Utility, Production Science] which is a set of 5.

Space Exploration, meanwhile:

Which is 5000 of a set that's twice as large as the largest in basegame, so more like a 10K victory tech compared to the 1K victory tech in basegame.

But that number still isn't a direct comparison, because the multi-striped science packs in there are high tier packs whose ingredients include lower tier science packs that also need to be produced. Deep Space Science 4 (the black stripes) is made with various input resources + a DSS3 pack, which is made with more input resources + a DSS2 pack, and so on. If you count the fifteen intermediate science packs, it's something like a 25K victory tech compared to the 1K in basegame.

There's numerous techs like this. If you ever play Space Exploration, I advise you to slice a zero off everything. Set the tech cost multiplier to one-tenth. It is severely padded.

Pretty Cool Spaceships

Spaceships are of course the big draw of Space Exploration, though they come pretty late in the game, and before them there's two other methods of moving stuff between planets: Cargo rockets and railguns.

The rockets are very fuel-hungry to launch and also "consume" most of their ingredient parts as stages. The delivery railguns can't move fragile objects or players, and are same-solar-system only. (They double as expensive interplanetary weapons!) Spaceships are reusable as long as you keep them refueled, and much more fuel-efficient, as well as being able to mount laser/gun turrets for defense if landing on a hostile planet. You can even put artillery in a spaceship, which my team used to create a very short-distance-hop spaceship that was more like a suborbital bomber/mobile artillery platform for clearing the hostile fauna off our home planet.

Eventually you get spaceships to transport stuff at custom speed and scale between planets, with the ability to build and design your own. Then, the ability to set spaceship automation with docking clamps and the circuit network, and can give a spaceship instructions amounting to "go to planet X and wait until your onboard storage has 40K Cryonite, go to planet Y and wait until your onboard storage has 0 Cryonite and your fuel tank is refilled". It's the Factorio experience of automating stuff you were manually handling before, but at the much larger scale of interplanetary transport.

Here is my mini-spaceship for personal transport between planets, used to go over and tinker with things, has a few chests but doesn't take bulk cargo:

The side notch is to help me align the refueling underground pipes.

The Mod Maker Is A Control Freak

In the base game you have the opportunity to research Logistics Robots, small flying drones that carry items around for you, making automated transport more convenient so you no longer have to weave together transport belts, underground belts, railroad tracks and other physically connected means of item movement in the infamous "belt spaghetti".

Space Exploration comes with a mandatory dependency on the Robot Attrition mod, which makes logistics robots randomly collide and explode destructively if you're using more than 50 of them. (There's more than 50 item types in SE, so you will want far more than 50 logistics robots.) You can't not include this other mod when playing Space Exploration. There is a game setting which looks like it disables robot attrition, but it actually only disables robot attrition in the starting zone.

"Surely there's another mod which restores robot functionality?" you might ask, since Factorio has a lot of mods. Not that I could find, possibly because Space Exploration is distributed under a "no modding my mod any further" licence, formally the Factorio Mod Limited Distribution Only Licence.

You may make alterations for your own private personal use only. You are not allowed to distribute any content from the mod, or anything altered or derived from this mod with the following exception: You may post partial modified sections of this mod in Earendel's discord https://discord.gg/ymjUVMv for the purpose of providing bug fixes or enhancements.

Binding or not, I think that's an amazingly dick move for your Cool Spaceships mod to degrade some unrelated basegame functionality and tell people they aren't allowed to post a modmod which restores that functionality.

In other control freakery, Space Exploration is flagged as incompatible with infinite resource supply/non-depleting ore patch mods for Factorio, because the SE modder feels it would ruin the intended balance of his mod. It's flagged as incompatible with teleportation mods, to force you to use rocket/spaceship transport. It's flagged as incompatible with waterfill mods to prevent you digging wells where the modder wants to enforce a logistic challenge of delivering water in barrels. It's even flagged as incompatible with some mods that change the stack size of some items, because the modder wants to ensure you are inventory-constrained and pay for logistics.

Bizarrely contrary to the spirit of modding, if you ask me, trying to enforce that the mod is played the specific way one person wants you to play it.

Padding, Filler, and Bloat

It's not just the tech tree that suffers this, it's many aspects of the mod, and I'm going to list enough of them to make this post feel ironically padded.

In regular Factorio, when you put a drill on an iron ore patch, it produces iron ore, which you put in a Furnace to smelt into iron plates.

In Space Exploration, when you put a drill on an iridite ore patch, it produces iridite ore, which you put in a Pulverizer to crush into... a random mix of crushed iridium, stone (waste byproduct), and iridite ore that you have to feed back into the pulverizer and try to crush again.

To me this is something I shouldn't have to interact with in Factorio, it should be pre-automated below my notice. If an input ore is not properly crushed in the crushing machine, the crushing machine should keep crushing it until it's crushed, rather than demanding extra player attention to its one job. Reeeee. I have no interest in my factory's machines having what is effectively a random failure chance at doing their job. There is no upgrade tech or better machine which gets rid of that random failure chance.

It might have been interesting with one processing step whose unique gimmick is a failure chance and a need to filter-loop the output back onto the input, but Space Exploration recycles this recycle gimmick over and over again to pad out different processing steps with "do it again".

-

Speaking of random failure chances...

In regular Factorio, the "science packs" are kinda high-level abstractions. You put together a pair of engines, several electronic circuits, and a handful of sulphur to create "Chemical science", which could be taken to vaguely represent a process of destructively testing or consuming something and measuring it.

In Space Exploration, the advanced sciences are data-driven, which is a cool idea. For example you put together plates of iron, copper, stone, plastic, concrete and iridite with a blank data card to create "Tensile strength data" and recycleable scrap, then you use the data card in another recipe to create "Material science" and also outputs "Junk data card" representing data you've already analyzed and can't learn more from, and then you put the junk data card into a spacecomputer to erase the contents and get back a blank data card again.

It's a neat abstract representation of science involving data collection and material testing, with a reusable computer component and am expended material component, and it's undermined by the fact that erasing junk data has a 30% failure rate. That's the chance that the Super-Engineer Protagonist, with nuclear reactors and supercooled computers, will somehow fail to turn a Junk Data Card into a Blank Data Card and will instead break the card. So the data cards are in practice still expended consumables; you'll need to produce millions of them.

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In regular Factorio, the various grades and kinds of steel (high carbon, low carbon, stainless, etc) are abstracted into a single "Steel plate" item which has many different uses. Storage chests, trains, power poles, handgrenades, armorplating, automation robots all use the same Steel Plate as ingredient.

This design holds true across the game: items represent broad classes of a material, also machines are multipurpose and an "Assembler" machine can be set to make gears, wire, pipes, or other stuff by configuration. One Assembler turns iron plates into gears. The next Assembler combines gears and more plates into engines. The next Assembler combines engines and more gears into transport belts.

In Space Exploration, there's several machines which only have one use, and there's even items which have less than one use.

The only thing the Xray Observation Telescope does is produce Xray Observation Frame items, the only use for Xray Observation Frame is processing into Xray Observation Data, and the only use for Xray Observation Data is combining it with Microwave Observation Data, Infrared Observation Data etc. to produce Astrometric Science. That's also the sole use for those other Observation Datas. All the different wavelength telescopes, the different observation data items, and the different observation data frame items collectively serve one purpose when put together, so I count them as having a fractional use each. Someone call an editor, fucking cut these.

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In regular Factorio, drills on a copper patch produce 1 Copper Ore per production cycle, which smelts into 1 Copper Plate.

In Space Exploration, drills on a beryl patch produce 1 Beryl Ore per production cycle, and 20 Beryl Ore smelts into 1 Beryllium plate.

(both ratios can be improved somewhat with Productivity Modules in your furnaces)

Which brings me back to the extremely overcosted science packs, because that blue-striped Astronomic Science Pack that you need 5000 of for the rocket victory? Its cost in raw materials for a set of 8 looks like this:

displaying 580 beryl plates instead of the 5800 ore needed, 725 per pack, plus some more for the data cards that don't calculate raw material correctly, adding yet another multiplier layer of bloated tech cost. I am infuriated by whoever wrote "not a scale challenge" on the Scale Challenge Mod which asks you to mine millions of ore to research a single technology.

Arcospheres

I have another post on these, so I'll keep it short: There is a type of special item necessary to win the game, which are only available in limited supply, which you can permanently lose by accident or bad luck.

The available supply is several times larger than what's needed to win, so I wasn't actually threatened by this, but I dislike it on principle.

Also, they're spoiler-enforced by the control freak modder who keeps the helpful information off the official discord, wiki, and mod page.

Verdict: Thumbs Down

I was suckered into this partly because I believed the "not a scale challenge" advertisement when my friend group was considering what to play next, and I regret it. Halfway through we felt it starting to drag, but we were having fun and community and spite so we powered through. This is a reason I have emphasised the bloat so much in my review. This mod really, really needs an editor to cut down numbers and cut out items and simplify processes so you can get to the Fun Spaceships part without so many Mine Literally Million Ore part.

[thetechtalker]

Factorio space exploration in detail 2023

Factorio space exploration is the popular mod for the game "Factorio" It is an expansion mod that dramatically expands Factorio's gameplay by introducing Factorio space exploration aspects. Please keep in mind that the mod may have received upgrades or changes The following are some of the most important features and traits commonly found in the "Factorio: Space Exploration" mod:

Factorio Space Exploration:

The mode adds another frontier for players to explore: space. This includes launching rockets into space, building space stations, and colonizing other celestial worlds. Players can conduct space exploration, which unlocks new technologies and features to improve their space exploration capabilities.

Celestial bodies:

The mode brings planets, moons, and other celestial bodies for players to see. Each of these locales has its own features and restrictions.

Orbital Logistics:

Manage space transportation, such as interplanetary logistics and housing related to orbital structures.

Satellites and Telescopes:

Mod introduces the concept of using satellites and telescopes to observe and communicate with distant planets and their environment

Space Warfare:

Protect your space assets from potential conflict invaders. Spaceship: Build spaceships for your space adventure, each with their own tasks and capabilities. Please keep in mind that mod content and features may change over time due to updates and community input. If you want to try out Factorio Space Exploration I suggest visiting the Factorio Mod Portal or the mod's official page on the Factorio forums for the most up-to-date information and updates. Before installing any mod, make sure it is compatible with your current version of Factorio.

What is factorio game

Wube Software developed and distributed "Factorio," a real-time strategy game. It was released in early format in 2016 and will be formally released in 2020. It can be played on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS and Linux In "Factorio," players assume the character of an engineer who has crashed-landed on an alien planet. The major goal is to construct and operate automated factories capable of producing increasingly complex items. Players begin with basic resources such as iron ore and copper, which they must mine, process, and refine to build various objects and equipment. Read the full article

[hyenagamer]

so since pY is incredibly difficult

we decided a while back to go back and retry the other overhaul mods we either got bored of or skipped(so Krastorio 2(doing this one now), Angels and Bobs(gonna do a seablock run once I finish SE), and Space Exploration)

Well we looked in the announcements channel of the pY discord server and

Man, we are dreading eventually doing a pY playthrough

[yiffweed]

Spaghetti from today's stream that allows us to launch satellites into orbit and collect yellow science

[gudamor]

Factorio expansion planned for one year for now. It's Space Exploration but different, featuring Earendel explaining the difference

[atomic188]

Factorio - Space Exploration / Krastorio - Full Mods/ep11

[theemitter]

FactorioのSpace Exploration MODで遊んでます

[isabellajack1]

Navigating Factorio Space Exploration Expansion

[estavionpira]

So what Tinker rating would the Factorio engineer have? Massively broad, focus on automation, but needs to set everything up manually so no risk of a replicating threat a la machine army. Thinking 6 or 7 just because of the sheer variety of potential tinkertech. If we're counting the Space Exploration engineer then that increases to an 8 or 9.

[alexanderwales]

Game Review: Factorio: Space Age (pt 1)

Factorio is my favorite game of all time. I played it very early on, then periodically after that. When I started, the graphics were much uglier, there was no nuclear power, biters dropped little purple orbs you needed to use in science, ninety percent of the current QoL was missing, and it was still one of my favorite games.

Before the Space Age expansion, I had ~1200 hours in the game, partly because it was my go-to game when I was a stay-at-home dad and my son was napping beside me on the couch. I've played not only vanilla Factorio, but a lot of overhaul and other mods. These are the overhaul mods that I've finished:

Bobs

Bobs + Angels

128k

Krastorio 2

Space Exploration

Exotic Industries

Freight Forwarding

Additionally, I made it to the terraforming stage of Nullius and py science 2 of Pyanodon's, but didn't finish either of them. This is all for context, where I'm coming from in this review. I have no idea what it's like for a new player, but my guess is that it feels complex as all hell.

The Space Age expansion expands the game by adding in 4.5 new planets (Vulcanus, Fulgora, Gleba, Aquilo, and space itself) as well as a major-but-optional mechanic, quality. I'm dividing up this review along those lines, which is the natural way to do it, but in theory all these things are meant to work in harmony with each other, so I'll be trying to take that into consideration. Spoilers will follow in each section, but the Factoriopedia has everything right from the start, and the devs consider it a game that does not actually have spoilers, so take that as you will.

In my opinion, the real spoilers are the designs for things you build along the way, but there will also be some screenshots of those.

The Same Old Early Game

You start on Nauvis with a crashed ship, a pickaxe, and abundant mineral deposits. If you're new to the game, red science and green science can easily take 20 hours to figure out, particularly if you're playing with biters on. For me, it was about two hours to build designs that I have built maybe dozens of times before. The basic furnace stack that handles incoming iron, copper, and stone has not changed, and will not change.

If I consider the basic gameplay of Factorio to be the design and decision process, then there's no gameplay here. Each entity needs to be placed by hand, and you can make rows of things by running up and down, but still ... it felt like a slog to me, and this is the first ~4 hours of Space Age, assuming you're going moderately fast and making a beeline to bots.

Once you have bots, it gets much less tedious, and you can start slapping down blueprints, expanding the base as rapidly as the machines can turn raw materials into finished buildings. There are a few differences from the base game, including terrain generation, some stuff with trains, science checkpointing ... but it'll all be well familiar to veterans, and in my opinion, is pretty skippable. I set up walls to keep the biters out, trains to supply the variety of turrets on the wall, solar and nuclear, and outposts for as much resources as I would need for the next few dozen hours, then made my first space platform and began the actual expansion stuff.

Space!

Space platforms are created by launching a starter pack up, which you can then send materials to. Bots aren't allowed in space, and your character isn't either, and it seems to me that a lot of the game design was built around wanting the player to grab resources from out of space and do some complicated belting to keep everything organized and prevent it from locking up. There are no chests allowed in space, and the only thing that acts as a container is the central hub of the platform, of which you can have only one. This means that if you want storage, you have to route everything through this big warehouse, and it gets complicated the more you have items going in and out.

I would say that generally I think this works from a gameplay perspective, but there are a few things that are needlessly obtuse or unfriendly, getting in the way of the platform design stuff that's supposed to be the star of the show. One of them is definitely "automatically request materials for construction", which will send up an entire stack of something you only need one of. This is an issue in the early game, assuming you didn't overprepare on Nauvis to have a base with ~20 rockets per minute. Frontloading this difficulty, which becomes less serious later, is bad design, and you end up having to manually go through rocket loading to not waste enormous amounts of resources.

(The easiest way I've found to do this is to make a blueprint of the ship, click "add section" on logistics to make it a logistics group, set a requester chest to that logistics group, then unselect that logistics group once everything is there, then use an inserter to feed that stuff into a rocket and manually launch it every time it's full, and even that sort of sucks, because the blueprint makes a logistics group that will have the hub and extra platform in it, and holy hell is none of this intuitive or friendly, why could they not just have coded it so that rockets would auto-combine things into groups?)

Going slightly out of sequence here, but I'll talk about the space stuff all at once here. Over the course of normal play, I think the intent is that you design approximately five ships:

A space science ship that sits in orbit, collecting materials from asteroids and doing bare minimum processing on them to turn them into space science, which gets sent back down to the labs. I made one very early on and then didn't ever have much cause to touch it again, except to send up some better assemblers and slightly expand it with no major changes.

An inner planets ship with chemical plants, engines, furnaces, and an ammo assembler that feeds turrets to shoot down asteroids, which the grabber arms then take chunks of for the materials to run the chemical plants and be made into ammo. (I dubbed this the Dart-class, pictured below is the SS Christopher Wren.)

An Aquilo ship with rocket turrets to shoot down the larger asteroids that the normal turrets have problems with. This requires advanced asteroid processing to get sulfur and coal synthesis to make coal, which gets made into explosives to make rockets. Probably at the same time you're switching over to advanced fuel processing with calcite. (I dubbed this the Jacknape-class, pictured below is the SS John Napier.)

An outside the system ship with rail guns to shoot down the largest asteroids. This requires making rail gun ammo, which needs steel and copper wire, and to power all that you're probably not going to use solar, which gets much worse out at the edge, so likely you'll be doing nuclear or fusion. (I used a lightly modified Jacknape-class for this, though it would have been better to do a full redesign.)

A shattered planet ship that is capable of harvesting promethium, which I have not actually made yet, but requires scaling up even more.

Overall, I found the increasing complexity of designs to be very pleasing, even if it sometimes felt a little bit forced. Not having bots I can maybe understand, but not having chests felt like a very blatant design decision rather than something that came about naturally from considering space and what it means, especially since the belts still work. Designing the SS John Napier was one of my favorite parts of the entirety of Space Age, partly because it was so constrained, and I knew that my individual decisions were creating individual problems of my own making.

I will say that space is where Factorio shows its limitations far more than elsewhere. In programming terms, Factorio uses something called a "surface", and each planet is its own surface, as is each ship. Surfaces cannot interact with each other, and in the mods I've tried where they do (more than just hooking up inputs and outputs) it's always been a bit jank. Still, this means that there are a lot of things that cannot be done:

Docking one ship to another

Having a ship land on a planet

Having a ship have any verticality to it

The ships also look a little ... well, bad. They look like a bunch of things have been placed on a flat slab, especially when they get larger. This can be helped a little bit by adding walls around the ship, but it doesn't help much, and there's no aerodynamic consideration, so the ideal design is probably a big box of some kind, and the space platform that everything is built on looks even less ship-like than everything else. The exception is the engines, which look awesome, but I don't think having one element look really cool makes up for the rest looking a bit weird.

Funny enough, the Space Exploration mod actually does do some of the things that these ships don't do, like docking, landing on a planet, etc. It was a bit jank there too, but it did kind of sort of work. And those ships needed to take aerodynamics into consideration, though I can't remember what the formula was like, and it was pretty opaque.

I do not need to have the entirety of Kerbal Space Program inside of Factorio, but I do think there are a lot of things that are neat about space that they just decided not to touch. The planets are in static positions, always the same distance from each other, and there's no need to worry about launch windows or delta-V or gravity slingshots or light-speed communication delays any of the other cool rocketry things. Some of that would be a nightmare to implement, other things would probably not be very fun, but it feels like there was a lot left on the floor.

It's interesting that spaceships in this game are self-sufficient by nature, gathering materials from asteroids and never needing resupply. It's also interesting that there are two basic modes for ships, in-flight and in-orbit, with different considerations for defense and production, though I don't think they ended up doing all that much with this distinction. If spaceships could land on planets, you could have three distinctions, and if they could be flying through interstellar asteroid-less space you could have four, and I think that would be cool, but the focus of Space Age is mostly on the new planets, not on the spaceships.

It's at this point that I've realized that this review is going to be very long, so I'm splitting it into parts. The four planets will be the next part, but before I wrap this up, I can talk about one of the other things that came with the expansion: quality.

What Quality is Quality?

I would say that of the 140 hours that Space Age took me, about 30 hours were spent messing around with the "quality" mechanic, and of those, most were "wasted" in the sense that they did not meaningfully make a better factory, even if I enjoyed the process.

Quality divides almost everything in the game into tiers, with higher tiers having better features, which depend on the specific building or product. Resource extractors do less resource drain. Production buildings get better crafting speed. Weapons get better range. Some things get faster and require more power for that speed, while others get speed without needing more power.

There are a few sticking points with quality.

One of them is that machines cannot use a quality product if they're not set for a recipe that requires it, meaning that an "uncommon" gear cannot take the place of a common gear. I assume that this was either an engine limitation or a deliberate challenge for the players, but either way, I don't like it. Quality does kind of make sense, since it's something that exists within real world manufacturing, where parts need to be within certain tolerances, but it wouldn't be the case that a gear that's inside a narrower band couldn't be used for purpose that's in a wider band. Factorio is the wrong game to be making real world comparisons for, but the argument is that an uncommon gear shouldn't be enough to gum up the works.

One of my plans for quality was to "skim" quality parts. The last machines in a stack of assemblers would be given quality modules, and of the thousands that they made, a few would be high enough quality that they could go into a chest, and that chest would be used for making personal equipment and spaceship parts, where they potentially make the most difference. At a certain point, I misconfigured one of these setups, and some quality gears got on the belt, which gummed up the entire factory and required me to clean several lines and restart a bunch of processing. This is a skill issue, yes, but it's an unpleasant complication of quality generally.

Quality comes from quality modules, and in general, the modules are a matter of trade-offs, whether you want more speed, more efficiency, or to make the most of materials. Quality ... well, quality is an enormous complication. You can't simply put in machines. You need entirely new setups for it, and even skimming feels like kind of a weird and gross way of doing things.

Here's how I wish it worked: You put quality modules into machines, and they can make quality things at a set chance. Those products can go down the line and be used in any recipe that requires lower or equal quality. Uncommon gears and chips would get consumed by machines that make normal quality engines or whatever. This would instantly solve at least half of my frustrations, but it would also be simpler, and not so much of a challenge.

How it works now is that you either silo away all qualities from each other, or you engage some kind of recyclotron that attempts a craft and instantly junks it if it's not quality. This is one of my tileabale parameterized recyclotrons:

Blue chests request normal quality materials, machines make the base product, anything not at the desired quality gets recycled, materials go on the belt to be made into more of the desired thing. There are some circuit conditions set up, one to shut down the machines if the desired number of quality machines have been made, and another to set the inserters to only pull from the chest if there are no materials on the sushi belt.

I think this is interesting, but if this is all quality is, then the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Before building my final ship, I set up full quality on Fulgora, at a place isolated from the main base. It separated out every item at every tier, then used roboports to put things together. It was more interesting than the recyclotron, with better/faster/cheaper results, but still kind of meh, and I kept wondering why I was spending all this time trying to make a chemical plant that was twice as good when I could have built a second chemical plant for half the cost.

My other major gripe with quality is that it makes blueprinting a pain in the butt. First, because the speeds of machines are different, which throws off ratios, but second, because if I want my machines to be of the best quality available, there's no way to easily do that. What I want is to have a tool where I drag across a bunch of machines and say "upgrade these in accordance with the highest quality in the logistics network", but what I have to do instead is count the number of each type of machine, then manually go through and replace them, and if I do this, then I have to manually go upgrade machines as more become available, and this means that I can't just copy sections of the factory to duplicate them, because they'll be at a mishmash of quality on buildings. I spent a lot of time fiddling with the upgrade planner, which I didn't enjoy.

The Fulgora setup, at endgame, is currently making the legendary quality modules necessary to make the legendary quality modules necessary to make legendary quality buildings of all kinds. I think pouring enormous resources into that makes for a megabase, but mixed quality faces lots of usability concerns, and I think of all the approaches (skimming, recyclotron, mass sorting) the recyclotron is the one that I'm most likely to end up actually using in future playthroughs.

Which is to say that I think quality as a mechanic is one or two steps away from being good, as much as the rewards do often feel worthwhile. The puzzle of quality has not, for me, been a highlight.

In the next part of the review: the four planets.

[e17omm]

shooting my shot because I'm not really familiar with what your fav game genres are buuuuuut I remember you posting about what seemed like a card game? so what would you say about Wingspan?

I'll get it out of the way now before I go ranting about my favorite games and their genres because its all over the place.

I havent played Wingspan, so I just quickly googled what it was.

I think I would be interested in it if it was a digital game and probably if it was more complex. Its something I'd be willing to try, but I dont think its something that I would play a lot, even if it was on PC. (This is without ever trying it or seeing how its played, just reading about it)

Balatro is the card game you're talking about. Its a rouge-like deckbuilding poker game.

Now, for my favorite games and their genres:

The games I like and their genres dont match at all.

Factorio: top-down, automation base building game.

Helldivers 2: 3rd-person PvE coop extraction horde shooter.

Subnautica: open world survival 1st-person game.

Outer Wilds: mystery space exploration puzzle knowledge-based-progression game.

Haydee: hardcore metroidvania puzzle game.

Honkai Impact 3rd: stage-based action hack'n'slash game.

NieR Automata: open-world action hack'n'slash game.

Frostpunk 2: morality citybuilder survival game.

Neon White: 1st person parkour shooting speedrunning game.

Slay the Spire: action rougelike deckbuilder game.

Vampire Survivors and HoloCure: reverse-bullet hell games.

Now, if I just pick the games I would consider my favorites, rather than the ones I like and play, we get:

Subnautica, Factorio, Helldivers 2, Outer Wilds, Frostpunk 2, Hollow Knight, and NieR Automata.

Survival open world, automation basebuilder, action horde shooter, exploration puzzle, survival citybuilder, puzzle/action metroidvania, and action open world hack'n'slash.

Its all over the place. I dont have a specific genre that I like: I just like games.

And my favorite games, I've played them A LOT.

I "only" have 835 hours in Factorio (which is going to skyrocket once the Space Age DLC comes out in 14 days.) (800 hours is also considered not that much for this crack addiction of a game)

I have 640 hours in Subnautica. Subnautica. Its a 2km X 2km map! A normal playthrough takes like 10 to 20 hours! I know this game so well that I have to mod it to be extremely grindy just so I can enjoy it for longer!

I have 340 hours in NieR Automata. That's a story-driven game! There's 60 hours of content with the DLC!

I have 536 hours in Helldivers 2. That game came out on February 8 this year and I bought it on the 11th of March!

Oh my god I forgot about Persona 5 Royal. Just add turn-based action dungeon-crawler life-sim to the list of genres I like. Oh yeah I also got 467 hours in P5R.

I already have 290 hours in Slay the Spire and I got that game on the 10th of July!

I love these games so much and I can likely go pretty in-depth about why I like them, but I already feel like Im ranting for way too long on this ask that is more or less just asking if I've tried Wingspan.

Again, No, I haven't played Wingspan - but it looks like a game I'd be willing to try if I stayed the night and you pulled it out.

But if you want to know more about any specific one of my favorite games, please send in asks about it and I'd be happy to explain why I like them.

Edit: I forgot about Signalis.

Hey you wanna know about eldrich space lesbians living in a dystopian regime?

[samueldays]

Factorio Space Exploration: Arcosphere Cookbook with explanations

I found the arcosphere puzzle intriguing but poorly explained and clunky, and when looking for advice I found a lot of other frustrated people who were brute-forcing the puzzle, using giant combinator fields, and/or copying entire solution blocks from other people's blueprints. I have further complaints, like the strict spoiler policy and the F:SE wiki deliberately avoiding this info, so I'm going to talk about arcospheres and try to make this be something like the reference I wanted. I will try to explain principles, not just solve, to help people understand. This will be long, and have colored diagrams.

Contributing to my frustration is that Arcospheres are a finite*, accidentally losable resource that are required for victory. On the Cruelty Scale from interactive fiction, Arcospheres put Space Exploration somewhere around Nasty. Having a spoiler policy on top of this is rude!

So. When you first get spaceballs, they are bland grey. You can get some from looting ancient ruins and the Interburbul game on other planets, but the main source is from the deep void, by launching arcosphere collectors from deep space asteroid fields. These have diminishing returns, so start with about 5 from each field. Make sure to launch the collector, not the arcosphere, I've seen one guy lose his spheres that way because he was outputting silo spheres into the same container that collectors were loading from, and the loader loaded arcospheres instead.

Then you put them through Arcosphere Polarization. This takes in 4 grey balls and puts out a set of 4 colored arcospheres: either [Lambda, Zeta, Epsilon, Gamma] or [Xi, Theta, Phi, Omega]. Do some of both recipes to get all 8 types. A machine set to run continuously will randomly flip between them - this comes up later - but you can manually set it for your first few spaceballs.

Arcospheres are unusual in that they're not consumed like most ingredients in Factorio, instead they are merely transformed between the different polarities. The recipe for a Naquium Tesseract takes in 3 arcospheres [Lambda, Xi, Zeta] and outputs 3 arcospheres [Theta, Epsilon, Phi].

Productivity modules are banned here, naturally.

*Finite: Arcospheres are hard to produce, with arcosphere collection from space having logarithmically diminishing returns, which means at some point it would take a lifetime of play to get another set. Make sure to keep them well protected from biters, meteor strikes, spaceship landings, and so on.

Since the full names are heck to diagram and the greek letters are heck to type, I'm going to refer to the 8 polarizations by their English-language initials: L, X, Z, T, E, P, G, O. That's the order the items are sorted ingame, don't blame me.

Next it's useful to visualize the various arcosphere folds and transforms. Since there's 8 of them, we can map them to the corners of a cube, and a cube is relatively simple to diagram as two squares. I will label the corners in semi-clockwise order, which makes several of the folds easier to visualize the patterns for, and color them correspondingly. Starting with the Arcosphere Polarization, you can see it produces either inner (LZEG) or outer (XTPO) spheres.

Next is the Arcosphere Inversion basic recipes, it would be a nuisance to memorize exactly which four invert, but with the diagram...

...it's swapping the diagonals. Inversion is invertible.

Then there's 8 kinds of basic Arcosphere Folding. The first one is [LO] -> [XT] and we can think of this as X-centric. Each fold is centered on a corner: it takes in the "previous" (counterclockwise) and the parallell sphere, outputs the chosen corner and the "next" (clockwise) sphere. Each fold takes one inner and one outer sphere, outputs either two inner or two outer. Here's the X-centered and the L-centered fold.

Here's all eight of them in a block. Stare at it, feel the patterns.

With this, I find it much easier to think about recipes in terms of "I have..." and "I need..." when I know they move sorta-clockwise, and are output in adjacent pairs.

Also, each column as presented forms a combination to build from. If you have [OL,XG] you can run the two leftmost recipes and output [XT,LZ]. Reorder these and it's [LXGO] -> [LXZT]. We have used LX as a catalyst to turn GO into ZT.

This generalizes by rotation. If you have one of the half-diagonals such as [LX], [ZT], [EP] or [GO], you can convert it into the opposite half-diagonal this way. This is the 1st combination recipe.

Here's what this looks like in practice in Factorio, with the pair from the fourth column that combines [GP]->[OX] and [EO]->[GL], with a net result of [EP] -> [LX].

[EP] comes in at left, is taken up by the first set of filter inserters. [GO] is a catalyst, passed between the two gravimetrics machines indefinitely. [LX] is output to the right.

In addition to turning a half-diagonal-pair into its opposite with 2 catalyst spheres, any two of a single polarity can be turned into their opposite with 1 catalyst. (Opposite corner cubewise, so L becomes P, not E.) This is the 2nd combination recipe.

You may want to copy the Eight Folds diagram to use as a reference for the individual steps here. Starting with for example two Lambda, we use an Omega as a catalyst, and perform the following folds, converting the pair marked in brackets at each step.

L [L O] [L T] X E [Z X] [E T] P O P P

And here's that built in Factorio:

Place an [O]mega catalyst in the upper left machine once the very first time, then insert many L in top chest. They will be converted to P, and the O catalyst returned to upper left after each pass.

The topmost filter inserters from the L chest are wired to take only when (Lambda > 1) to ensure even splits in my demo, you could use a splitter belt or something else for the same effect. The middle red long inserter uses a nonobvious Factorio feature: when pointing into a machine, inserters will only take ingredients needed in that machine's recipe, so it will only take the E and not the Z from the top-right machine to the lower-left machine.

The full set of 8 opposite-corner chains:

Now we've got the Inversion recipe that switches full diagonals of 4, turning a diagonally adjacent pair into the other half of the diagonal, and turning a single ball into its opposite corner, and. That leaves one more building block of useful folding combinations:

Turning an opposite-corner pair into the other two on its long diagonal. This phrase sounds clunky even to me, so here's the visual: starting with a bunch of L, generate LP, and from there XLEP.

The [LP] -> [XE] transform is accomplished with only one catalyst ball, but needs more balls to be converted. You need to start with LLPP, and use T as catalyst into XXEE, with subelements of [LP]->EE and [LP]->[XX]. This is the 3rd combination recipe.

The specific steps: [TL] P E [ZP] EE G and then use that G as intermediate catalyst for [GP] L X [OL] XX T giving you the T back.

This takes a little bit of sorting input to build the machines. Factorio build with similar 4-machine shape to the above, note again the wired inserters set to (L>1) and (P>1), can be replaced with belt splitters or other method of even distribution. The whole system can be rotated and rearranged. Think of this as a Lego-like toolkit, not a definitive solution. (That's why I'm posting diagrams, not blueprints.)

Place a single catalyst T in the top-left [LT] machine to start, and the system will turn sets of [LLPP] into [XXEE], returning the T.

The four sets of this are: T as catalyst to turn [LLPP] into [XXEE] O as catalyst to turn [XXEE] into [LLPP] P as catalyst to turn [ZZOO] into [GGTT] X as catalyst to turn [GGTT] into [ZZOO].

Let's revisit the diagram.

Starting from a bucket of one single arcosphere such as L, you now have the steps and components to:

Turn it into the opposite corner. (-> LP)

Turn those opposites into the rest of the diagonal. (-> XLEP)

Invert the diagonal. (-> OGZT)

Turn two diagonally adjacent balls into the opposite diagonal. (OG < - > ZT.)

and the rotations of these.

Combining these steps now gets you from any ball to any other ball, in sufficient quantities. For example, if you're running the Naquium Processor recipe that outputs five Lambdas, and you want to turn your stack of L into E:

L -> LP with opposite-corner LP -> XE with on-diagonal X -> E with opposite-corner.

With the building-block theory done for converting arcospheres, let's look at productive recipes featuring spaceballs. I'll start with the first data card from Deep Space Science 3: Space Folding Data.

The recipe for this card comes in two flavors: each takes Naquium Plate, Significant Data, -273C Thermofluid, and arcospheres [LX]. One flavor outputs ZT, and the other flavor outputs EP as our arcospheres. You can manually choose which the first time, but Factorio is all about the automation, and a machine set to automake Space Folding data may randomly swap between recipes each time a crafting has completed! So you need to plan for getting a mix of ZTEP out, unpredictably. Let's consult the diagram again. White for input, but grey and black for the two sets of output.

Well the EP is easy: just convert it back to LX, using a set of OG as catalysts.

The ZT output is a little harder. Convert half of it to OG (using a set of EP as catalysts) giving you the OGZT diagonal, then invert that into XLEP. Then filter the XL back into the data card maker, and and the EP can convert to XL.

How this might look in practice, zoomed out and labeled:

Zoomed in and cropped so it's easier to see filter settings:

Tracing the path through this system, start with the machine on the right. Insert some LX. If it comes out as EP, it takes the upper belt leftwards, and gets converted back into LX, easy peasy.

If it comes out as ZT, the two lower filters put that onto belts, and split them so that some ZT goes to become OG at the bottom, while the other ZT goes to join the fresh OG in the OGZT inversion machine on the left.

Space Warping Data is very similar and straightforward. You input [EP], get out OG and/or ZT, you convert as necessary until you have an OGZT set to turn into XLEP, and turn the extra XL into EP.

Space Dilation Data is a little harder. You input [ZO], and get out either LL or PP. Conditional wires on your inserters start to be useful here, as does having more arcospheres for a buffer when the random number generator is streaky. Hope for LLPP; but plan to convert LLLL or PPPP into LLPP. Turn some of the LP into XE, then a whole XLEP diagonal inverts to OGZT, and GT can be converted into OZ.

Space Injection Data gets tricky. You input [GT] and get out either ZZ or EE. For the first time, these aren't on the same diagonal. Oh well.

When you get Z, convert half of it to O with opposite-corner, then ZO to GT.

When you get E, convert half of it to X with opposite-corner, then convert half of the resulting EX mix to LP, giving you a full diagonal. Invert the XLEP diagonal to OGZT, and then convert OZ to GT. This requires five sets of folding combination machines, and it sprawls quite a bit and wants a large buffer of extra spheres.

I will note one more data card later in tech tree: Wormhole Data, [LZEG] -> [XTPO]. No randomization here.

This is a sneaky recipe, because the diagonal steps described above can be used but it gets much larger than necessary because they're a poor fit.

Notice instead how this takes inners and produces outers. What turns outers back into inners? The basic Arcosphere Foldings.

Produce a set of XTPO, and keep a spare set of LZEG as a catalyst. Run the lower four basic foldings from the Arcosphere Folding block once each, like [XG]->[LZ], producing [LZ]+[ZE]+[EG]+[GL], or two sets of LZEG.

For the other recipes, like Naquium Tesseract, hopefully these visualizations and combinations have helped you understand what's going on and how to build your own design from parts. Or you can download someone else's solved blueprint. You don't need to bash your head against a wall of obfuscated math to play with spaceships.

You are welcome to copy, annotate, share and edit this guide as you like.

[thesassymarquess]

Factorio Space Age: Gleba

Since I recently reblogged a post about Gleba, I figured I should go into more depth about it. In a week or two when I graduate I’ll go into more detail about it, but I’ve probably spent the most time of the expansion on Gleba, exploring things like Quality, the circuit network changes, and sushi belts. I admit some of the tech I learned on Gleba ended up being essential for a later rebuild of Fulgora & stuff I learned on space platforms went to Aquilo, and then what I learned there got brought back to space.

Regardless I figured I could share some of the overall lessons I learned on Gleba & beyond during the DLC that helped me “master” Gleba.

-Identifying where spoilage & freshness matters

There’s a total of about 13 items that can spoil, and they spoil into one of six things: iron and copper ores, spoilage, and enemies. As you want iron/copper ores, we can ignore spoilage here, they become the thing you want typically so except in the production loop, this is a good thing. For spoilage, it’s an item, and you should generally assume anything that stores a spoilable item in it, is going to at some point have spoilage in it, and it will need to be removed. EVERYTHING, including things like biolabs. Lastly enemies, they don’t leave behind items so you don’t need to clean out the machines, but you probably don’t want them wandering around, so you likely want some defense to kill them if they show up. They can wreck havoc on things like space platforms or power plants if they get there, but generally they’re more a nuisance than a threat, so long as you don’t let a massive amount spoil at once… (Most I did was let 100 biter eggs spoil in a chest surrounded by lasers. Didn’t even notice it happened).

So clean up spoilage, and handle “Hazmats” (eggs & spawners) with military or disposal methods (pentapod eggs can be burned & biter eggs mulched into nutrients). Another tip for the Hazmats is to not store them in chests unless necessary (rocket silo loading), and to not put them in assemblers/biochambers unless they are the only missing item. I seriously recommend setting agricultural egg inserters to hand size 1 & to only insert if they have bioflux. (Wire the biochamber to the inserter, use read contents & enable/disable). It might slow down your science slightly but it does make it so you don’t need turrets by the science area.

Spoilage itself can be easily disposed of by either converting it inefficiently into nutrients, or burning it in a heating tower. Personally I use nutrient crafting as a spoilage upcycling system to produce high quality spoilage for efficiency modules, or high quality carbon for coal synthesis w/ asteroid mining for the matching sulfur. (I.e it’s a supplement for Legendary plastic for red circuits and LDS shuffling…)

As for where freshness matters, it actually only matters in a few places. Not all recipes do actually inherit their freshness from their parents (bacteria & pentapod eggs are top of my mind, but I think Fish also don’t), nor does freshness matter if the finished product isn’t spoilable. Ultimately freshness only really matters in the items directly connected to lime (agricultural) science as it’s the ONLY item in game that freshness impacts how useful it is. 5% fresh bioflux will feed a biter nest, as will 5% nutrients a biochamber & so on. Freshness only really matters if you need to move something or if it’s for lime science. So generally with that in mind you can send all your near rotten fruit and other spoilables for producing things like ore, rocket fuel, plastic, lubricant, sulfur or carbon fiber.

Another key idea is “shelf-stability”. You generally want to move raw fruit, bioflux & lime science around because they have long shelf lives. You don’t want to move jelly, mash, or nutrients around because of their short shelf life. It’s much easier to move jellynut, yumako, or bioflux instead and all of them are more space efficient to move as well.

-The Spores, Simplicity, & Quality triad

From what I found it is impossible to create a base that is simple, spore-efficient, & produces quality. At best you can do two, and I suspect it is genuinely impossible to do all three because of how they interact.

So I suppose I should define what I mean by these things. Spore efficiency is basically a measure of how much of the fruit products you make turn into spoilage. A more spore efficient base has less products rot. Why? Because the less products that rot, by definition, the more of your harvest WAS used for production rather than was wasted. While spoilage has its own uses, it isn’t ideal for most production in your base, unless you plan on mass producing only coal. Simplicity is how much of a headache setting everything up is. The more circuit conditions, belt priority shenanigans, and other complexities in the build, the less simple it is. And quality production, I mean large scale quality production, which usually relies on inter-step processing to roll up the products.

But wait you might be asking yourself, this implies it’s possible to build a quality base that’s easy without it being a major headache? Yes! Quality lime science is arguably one of the easiest sciences to produce in quality, only truly rivaled by the easy of quality space science in the late game! My first rocket silo of lime science was 1k rare science. This is because pentapod eggs are a catalytic recipe that can take quality modules, and so rolling up a high quality egg once is super easy, and then you just need to keep feeding it with high quality nutrients… which comes from bioflux, the other item you want to raise in quality! And you can even use a spoilage upcycler to supplement this to prevent the eggs from going off. I’ll show off a surprisingly easy to design base for producing rare quality science in the early Gleba game sometime later when I show off some Gleba designs.

However I do need to point out that the triad does inherently conflict. Trying to reduce spoilage amounts by simply reducing fruit in caused quality to stall. Trying to get quality up again caused it to become more complex, making a newer less-complex design required me to gut quality… you have to decide WHAT you value going in.

So for my MP base I decided I would cut quality, and focus on spore efficiency, as I wanted to produce the most science with the least spores, as I couldn’t rely on Tesla Turrets from Fulgora to protect me.

-Spore efficiency maximization

One of the best ways to actually improve spore efficiency is to start at the fruit production itself. Every second a raw fruit is waiting around, it is getting one step closer to rotting. Why harvest if you don’t need to? Keeping planting going without harvesting is simple if you keep in mind that agricultural towers prefer to plant first, then harvest. So if you wire the tower to anything, and set it to output inventory & only work when seeds > 0, it will only work when it has seeds in it, and will prefer planting first. Which means it will only harvest if there are no plantable spots and you put seeds in. Which means you can control harvesting by controlling when an inserter loads seeds in. So have the inserter only put seeds in when you need more fruit (you can use a circuit condition, like fruit less than 50 (one harvest) to determine when to start a harvest and load seeds in one at a time, if this is your only condition, you’ll probably produce 2-4 stacks at a time depending on your inserters).

Likewise… if you control when you process the raw fruit into jelly/mash then you can again further reduce spoilage. You can use a similar method to the harvest, but by turning off the biochambers for those lines. This reduces fruit usage, which will decrease tower usage & spore output… yet since you only produce the jelly/mash when needed, the assembly line shouldn’t actually slow down. What might happen though is that your power production dips because you’re not burning as much spoilage.

Well that’s a very easy fix. Gleba has the CHEAPEST rocket fuel recipe in the game, especially if you look at the fuel values of its ingredients. It is the ONLY power positive rocket fuel recipe in the game without productivity, and it has a default 50% bonus to it too! Literally no other rocket fuel recipe can get that bonus except the base recipe which requires exported biochambers to Nauvis! (Or Fulgora technically, but why would you do that? Oil is free there) Which is its own nightmare. So you can actually just burn rocket fuel for power in a heating tower! Which has a 250% fuel efficiency, meaning 100 Mj of chemical energy (one rocket fuel) becomes 250 MJ of electrical power! Excluding startup costs for the heating towers.

Well I’d recommend against burning all your rocket fuel because that’d just gobble it all up, but what you can do is measure the temperatures of your heating towers, and if they drop below a certain threshold (I recommend at least 600 degrees) to feed in rocket fuel.

Since I hooked up this failsafe to my power plant the only blackout I had was when I accidentally burned all my yumako seeds and stalled the entire factory, and it took almost an hour for it to begin to get close to a brownout, and it hadn’t when I found out the problem (I had an alarm if the power plant went critically cold (all towers below 600 degrees), so I could intervene before power goes out)

How you decide to reduce spoilage from here is up to you. I decided on my second run to just dead end belts and extract spoilage rather than run them all to the incinerator, so that lines could just pull half rotted mash/jelly for things like lube and ore. Only bioflux has a flowthrough section, and I overbuilt lime science & eggs so it never backs up there either (I’d much rather have rotting lime science than make half rotten lime science)

-Finally… solving the “How do I load my freshest items into a rocket?”

This is much easier than people think. It takes 2 chests, a logistics provider of some flavor (I use red) & a steel chest (wood/iron would work too). I then place the chests a tile apart, and have the inserter wired to the logistics chest. It’s set that if I have more than my desired storage amount (usually one rocket’s worth, sometimes two rockets) it grabs the MOST SPOILED item from the provider and puts it into the steel chest. This removes the item from the logistics network (and the rocket silo therefore) which will turn the inserter back off if the chest no longer has more than enough for the rocket launches requested & reduces the average spoil time of the chest. This is key. The individual items are still spoiling, I’m not managing to magically remove spoilage, but I am reducing the average spoil amount. When a rocket comes, it takes the items from the provider chest and it will gradually fill up again. Since only the freshest 1k items are typically available, this means I always load the freshest items I have. I could then feed in some items back from that “rotting chest” if I wanted to, but I find it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’d rather just produce a fresh 1k usually… I might play around with feeding it back in, but I only do this with science… extracted bioflux in this system gets fed into production elsewhere, instead of into a secondary chest. The whole point of the chest was just to act as a large storage vessel for composing science to spoilage.

Anyways, as someone who actually liked Gleba I talked about everything I can without getting into the specifics of like… how to build Gleba with bots, belts or trains… which I would love to cover at some point, because I do think there are too many content creators out there that don’t do Gleba justice… (Looking at Nilaus… I died inside when I saw he just plopped down a bot-base and a parameterized biochamber mall essentially. Dosh likewise also disappointed me on his OG Space Age run with his Gleba (import based) and Fulgora (bot based). I did love Doc Jade’s nightmare scrap train Fulgora though. He understood that the most fun can be had in the creativity of a solution, not necessarily the efficiency)

[sigmaleph]

taking opinions: what major modpack should i use in my next factorio playthrough?

default option rn is space exploration

[yiffweed]

In today's stream we put together the level 3 space sciences. This was a seven hour adventure, though a decent chunk of that was spent waiting on autosave (the save is now 278 MB).

For the most part it was like level 2. Each of the four science types had four data cards. At the end data cards, catalogues, insight, and ultimately science were about the same, to the point that I started with a copy-paste of the level 2 final area. The biggest difficulties were finding space to run belts through everything.

Astronomic science was definitely my favorite of the four this time. In level 1 we developed 3 colors of data, while levels 2 and 3 each added 2 colors, giving a nice rainbow of 7 colors going into a machine.

Biological was also nice as we now have three colors of Biomass to work with.

Both Astronomic and Biological have also finished off the rainbow and Biomass respectively; we do not get to extend them in level 4.

[gudamor]

Proud that the spaghetti my friend and I made got featured in the Factorio Space Exploration mod's download page.

Hopefully someday Covid 2 gives us time to finish the game.