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I "just" (160+ hours in) started a play through of space exploration at the recommendation of an HN comment. Super excited to see an official expansion that add

I "just" (160+ hours in) started a play through of space exploration at the recommendation of an HN comment. Super excited to see an official expansion that adds this kind of thing! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561847 My ideas list for interesting Factorio challenges (apropos of nothing): - Products with a shelf life (must be consumed within 15 minutes or it turns into a "waste" product) - Products with "refrigeration" (e.g. an item which must not exist outside of a temperature-controlled chest for more than 5 minutes at a time) - Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it was consumed) - Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and extracts resources). The screenshot seems to imply that some kind of spaceship will exist, perhaps this is coming.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
On the animation it looks like that robotic arms are pulling in (and sorting) asteroid chunks, which are then crushed, and the metal smelted, rock discarded, and also there seems to be ice that is used to cool the engines !
- ArtWomb 3y ago
  You neglected to mention the machine gun turrets shattering large asteroids into manageable chunks! Art style here reminds me of classic Metal Slug ;)
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Oh yeah or the various asteroid breaking games ! :D
dotnet00 3y ago
You could look into Seablock and some of the related mods (iirc Angels and Bob's mod packs) which add some of those sorts of complexities. IIRC some things can require charcoal filters, in which case you have to build the filter frame and filter, get it to the machine that needs it, then recover, replace and regenerate the used filter. Another fun challenge is "feedback", where a later step in a production line produces as waste something you can consume at an earlier stage.
- Akronymus 3y ago
  For me, nothing beats angelbobs + the angel industry settings for the science and component overhauls.
pphysch 3y ago
> Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it was consumed) Not sure how interesting this would be. There is already coal, and Factorio is all about large-scale automation, so whether coal lasts for 10 recipes or has a 10% chance of being consumed on each recipe is almost irrelevant.
adamwong246 3y ago
It's basically impossible to track individual items in that way. Ask me how I know!
- CGamesPlay 3y ago
  How do you know? I imagine that two useful tools would be belt sorters and inserters that filtered by a configurable shelf life threshold.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Maybe the issue there might be that if every unit of a certain thing has a shelf life, you can't just treat the item as a count. Each item becomes unique and so you have to track each one's state as well as define rules about the shelf life. Like, what happens to its shelf life while in a train? Can the items at slightly different points in their shelf life be stacked? etc Of course it's a solvable thing, but it maybe that would be too heavy on the game when scaling up to large factories.
  - adamwong246 3y ago
    It's a consequence of the underlying engine. The base engine approximates a lot of things in a way that destroys the distinction between multiple items. This is the secret to Factorio's huge scale- it doesn't model each individual item but rather models them from a "macro scale".
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    No, OP means that if individual item has a shelf life attribute attached to it, it'll bring down performance when it's thousands or more on the field.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      It's more that the good performance is mandatory. You don't have the option to do that.
Arnavion 3y ago
>Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and extracts resources). https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 is sort of that, though the focus is specifically on rushing to do as much as possible before the factory inevitably moves to a new location.
Dylan16807 3y ago
Shelf life and refrigeration just seem like they'd be a normal assembly line but more annoying to fix if it gets stalled. And I'm not sure if better catalyst support would be very noticeable. Mobile factories are a good thing.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

On the animation it looks like that robotic arms are pulling in (and sorting) asteroid chunks, which are then crushed, and the metal smelted, rock discarded, and also there seems to be ice that is used to cool the engines !

ArtWomb 3y ago
You neglected to mention the machine gun turrets shattering large asteroids into manageable chunks! Art style here reminds me of classic Metal Slug ;)
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Oh yeah or the various asteroid breaking games ! :D

dotnet00 3y ago

You could look into Seablock and some of the related mods (iirc Angels and Bob's mod packs) which add some of those sorts of complexities. IIRC some things can require charcoal filters, in which case you have to build the filter frame and filter, get it to the machine that needs it, then recover, replace and regenerate the used filter. Another fun challenge is "feedback", where a later step in a production line produces as waste something you can consume at an earlier stage.

Akronymus 3y ago
For me, nothing beats angelbobs + the angel industry settings for the science and component overhauls.

pphysch 3y ago

> Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it was consumed) Not sure how interesting this would be. There is already coal, and Factorio is all about large-scale automation, so whether coal lasts for 10 recipes or has a 10% chance of being consumed on each recipe is almost irrelevant.

adamwong246 3y ago

It's basically impossible to track individual items in that way. Ask me how I know!

CGamesPlay 3y ago
How do you know? I imagine that two useful tools would be belt sorters and inserters that filtered by a configurable shelf life threshold.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Maybe the issue there might be that if every unit of a certain thing has a shelf life, you can't just treat the item as a count. Each item becomes unique and so you have to track each one's state as well as define rules about the shelf life. Like, what happens to its shelf life while in a train? Can the items at slightly different points in their shelf life be stacked? etc Of course it's a solvable thing, but it maybe that would be too heavy on the game when scaling up to large factories.
- adamwong246 3y ago
  It's a consequence of the underlying engine. The base engine approximates a lot of things in a way that destroys the distinction between multiple items. This is the secret to Factorio's huge scale- it doesn't model each individual item but rather models them from a "macro scale".
- fendy3002 3y ago
  No, OP means that if individual item has a shelf life attribute attached to it, it'll bring down performance when it's thousands or more on the field.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    It's more that the good performance is mandatory. You don't have the option to do that.

Arnavion 3y ago

>Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and extracts resources). https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 is sort of that, though the focus is specifically on rushing to do as much as possible before the factory inevitably moves to a new location.

Dylan16807 3y ago

Shelf life and refrigeration just seem like they'd be a normal assembly line but more annoying to fix if it gets stalled. And I'm not sure if better catalyst support would be very noticeable. Mobile factories are a good thing.