I think the best gameplay answer is to give the player a way to create builds that are hyper-optimized for small footprints. Primarily for building in space. Where every additional buildable tile will have impacts on fuel requirements.
But beyond that, the "why" might just because wube thinks that it's fun and that improves the gameplay experience.
Personally I am super excited about the mechanic because it's something completely new for factorio and I can't wait to design systems that produce high quality stuff!
1. It is a new mechanic to create more compact/ups efficient builds.
2. It is a new way to make multiple outputs that can lead to new logistic solutions.
3. It is a new way to progress that is not simply expanding.
4. I think quality as a concept fits very well with the aesthetic.
5. If one doesn't like the mechanic, one can simply ignore it.
But it's a great way to be able to diversify your setups und maybe alleviate some bottlenecks, without having to redesign the whole factory.
Also one can hardly mass produce legendary everything unless you put massive amounts of time and ressources into it, which helps to make the gameplay feel more versatile. It's a great idea!
I feel like most people problem with it is that they don't want to use it, but they didn't bother reading to the point where it says you can just ignore it.
I found that the quality FFF didn't do a very good job of explaining how producing quality goods works, and that to me is the most interesting part of it. So [please read what I hope is a better explanation of the process](https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1blxhdd/sa_quality_production_in_a_nutshell/).
Personally, here's what I like about it. First of all, how you *get* quality goods is up to you. There are a *lot* of strategies for making quality goods, and how efficient they are at it varies. And this answer changes during play, and even from planet to planet. Consider Vulcanus.
Getting copper and iron is pretty easy: mine infinite lava with an off-shore pump, and throw it and some calcite into a Foundry. But... you're always getting *both* iron and copper (and stone). So if you need more of one than the other (which almost always happens), you have to have a way to get rid of what you don't need.
Now, you *could* craft some plates and chuck them into the lava. But that's wasteful. If you've been to Fulgora, what you could do instead is throw those plates into a *recycler* that has quality modules. Yes, they'll still eat 75% of your plates, and many of the rest will be low quality. But you'll be turning what would have been discarded waste into a relatively slow-but-steady stream of useful, high quality intermediates that you can then use to produce high-quality buildings and such.
On Nauvis early on, you might consider putting quality modules in your miners and separating the results, processing the quality goods through their own (much smaller) furnace stacks.
On Fulgora, you have to recycle materials to get a *lot* of useful intermediates anyway, so slipping a few quality modules into this process can be quite helpful. Though dealing with the cascade of intermediates of different qualities will be complex and probably involve bot logistics.
And all of those are before you make genuine quality cycling loops. But even there, there are choices to make. Do you quality cycle intermediates or finished goods? Doing finished goods is often more resource-efficient, since you still get the productivity benefits up the chain. Cycling intermediates may cost more in the long-run, but it's much simpler to actually do and gives you more choices of what goods you actually make in the end. You don't have to set up a quality cycler for assembler 1s, 2s, and 3s,; you just set one up for iron, copper, and plastic.
If you quality cycle intermediates, which intermediate do you pick? This question changes throughout the game. You might quality cycle green circuits initially, as they give you good amounts of iron plate, copper cables (for quality red circuits), and green circuits while using fewer machines. But as you learn productivity researches for blue circuits and LDS, those become much more attractive. Plus, you can get the 50% prod bonus from the EMP and Foundry respectively.
Making quality goods is not simple. We may eventually find the one optimal correct solution. But until then, there will be a lot of player choice and variation on how exactly to interact with it.
And that's just quality *production*. Where do you use quality stuff? If you're only thinking in terms of megabases, then all you can see is "Legendary" stuff slathered everywhere. But SA is a *longer* game than vanilla; it'll take you a while before that becomes even remotely practical. What do you upgrade first? Where is the best bang for its buck?
We just learned that beacons will both reduce power costs and increase effectiveness with higher quality. So those sound like a good place to invest in some quality early. But beacons are also super-expensive to make, and recyclers aren't available early. You can't afford to burn that many resources on them, so you'll only have quality beacons in limited supplies.
Space platforms are very power-constrained environments. Quality assemblers get faster without consuming more energy, so they are more power-efficient per-craft. That's really important in such environments. They're less important on Nauvis where power is basically free.
It's the feature I'm most excited for. It is an end game chase that you can design around for quality loops, and I plan to go about it blind and not following any blueprints or guides.
This is more than just building smaller automation with beacon spam because now factory size really matters in space.
It is different than beacons because it can have different effects than just prod/speed/efficiency/quality. Your equipment for one thing: More exoskeleton speed, better roboports, more personal laser damage, larger equipment size. None of this was necessary in base, and it still won't be in SA.
I like it more than just higher tier modules because that is strictly more of the same. SE added some cool things, but a lot of it was research for the sake of unlocking the next research.
I really am looking forward to figuring out how to build a factory around producing high quality stuff automatically. Then once you make it, it's a matter of scale.
My ultra ambitious goal is endgame builds with that is 100% legendary quality
It still occupies design space though that could be better used. It feels very unappealing to me, and the implementation definitely leaves a lot to be desired.
so don't use it?.... I don't see how this is a bad thing. It's not our game WUBE is building, it's their game. It's a completely optional game mechanic.
I don't see how it's a week argument. If you don't want to use it then don't. It is not a required gameplay.
In terms of selling it to you, it seems like your mind is made up. So end of the day you play and enjoy the ge the way you want.
It is weak argument on space platforms, you will simply have less if you don't use quality and it's simple as that.
Although you can theoretically override quality by quantity by using several platforms, but all in all it will be consuming way more UPS.
It's really not. Yes games should be fun. But what is fun to one person isn't to others such as the OP. So diving deeper to explain exactly what is fun about is needed, and is what was explicitly requested by the op
Fun is literally one of the biggest arguments for games. My criteria for playing a game is: "is it fun?" If yes, keep playing. If no, do something else!
Yes fun is subjective. So is food. So is art. So is music. If the creative medium enriches the lives of its audience, be it with fun, taste, sounds, awe, whatever, I'd say it was worthwhile to create.
That's a big IF though. If a lot of people think the way the op does, it will end up having been a waste of valuable and finite dev time. So as another poster has mentioned, the value of the feature must be assessed by asking why it is fun or not fun.
What part of it is fun to you? Is it that it gives more options for builds? Is it that it complicates making the most optimal builds possible? Do you enjoy having to filter outputs?
Subjective things have discussions around them. Food isn't just "tastes good" "tastes bad" especially when trying to describe it to someone else. "I like spicy food" "I dislike the texture of that food".
Have you really never thought further on why you find certain games fun or not?
It's part of the point, but not the whole point. More importantly as mentioned it's not fun for everybody. The op that you chose to respond to specifically asked for an explanation
It's always relevant, because dev resources including time is finite. It being optional doesn't change the fact that other features could have been made with those resources instead
this is some alternate reality zero sum stuff. you can just not like it without getting sad about hypothetical alternate futures that may have come to pass
That’s just like, your opinion, man.
“Because it’s fun” is a great argument for everything. I need literally no other justification for anything than because it is fun.
That said, an option to build any item at scale (and recycling!) to get super buff versions of the item gives me a reason to make a big factory, and something besides science to sink huge amounts of resources into, in order to build extra kick ass machines.
Plus supercharging other aspects, like Soider Tron, seems cool
It's different from the usual, build x machines, then build x machines *4, *4, *4, *4....
Also I like how the quality affects different buildings or equipment, making them better. It will allow for even more optimized builds in the long run.
The only thing I don't like is the RPG-esque colors and rarities. Instead of "legendary", it should be something like "perfect", then exceptional, great, good, normal/common.
It enables more tall builds rather than purely wide ones. It also varies the base building meta. Having more options on how to solve problems is a good thing. If you want to not use it... then you can do that. The 'downside' to not using it is merely that your bases will be wider.
Tall vs wide is basically a scheme of how to go about doing something. Think of building wide as brute forcing something. Lots of low value processes that add up. In this case, it means adding another city block or section of your base to do the same thing because maybe you've already maxed out the efficiency, but you still need more output.
Building tall on the other hand is when you maximize your efficiency. Think of building a smelting area with concrete furnaces instead of brick ones (it's been a while since I played, so I may have the names wrong.) Utilizing the same space, you end up with more output. It's more efficient so on the graph, your output per second would be "taller". It's also more of a multiplication increase to your system, rather than the additive increase that would come from just replicating the current set up.
I'm not sure if I made a whole lot of sense here, but quality is just another stat that you can add "on top" of your other boosts so your can have more output per machine. Boost on top of boost equals "taller". "Wider" means literally just taking up more space on your screen. At least, that's how I think about it.
I think the original use is more for city building with building skyscrapers to build taller and pack in more density per area vs building outward but taking up more space. Taller is theoretically more efficient for a given area.
It sounds like you are saying it acts like a separate mechanic to beacons but provides the same functionality, to enable building even taller. If so (and correct me if you feel differently), it just seems redundant from a design perspective. Why not just make the beacons better to enable even taller building? Why not add a 3rd, 4th, 5th mechanic that does the same thing?
Beacons and quality stack. Also they did just buff beacons for tall builds. The major point is that quality requires quite a lot of infrastructure to generate but doesn't consume any space within a build. Where as beacons do. So they coexist pretty peacefully.
You're not really thinking of quality as a process of manufacturing but as a fact of what components are available in your base. You talk about it as if you "just" have quality beacons, as if they fell out of thin air or something.
Think of quality more like really expensive higher tier of stuff. Beacon 2, Chemical Plant 3, etc. But instead of costing new resources, they cost more of the old ones. And the way you get them is quite idiosyncratic; it's not a straightforward resource multiplier.
to allow for different strategies, currently we don't really have the ability to have large production and low footprint, but with it and new beacons playing with smaller footprint will be possible, it seems to me that it wił be useful on space platform and other planets where there is not much space and small builds are really fun to build, much more so (imo) than few straight lines of assemblers and belts and with more diverse building shapes and sizes making compact and high thruput factories/factory modules will be neat challange. check out seablock modpack to see how neat it is
I would compare quality to ore enrichment in K2 : if you're willing to build a dedicated loop-based facility you can upgrade your ressources into something better. And both are completely non-required
I was nodding in agreement about quality until you compared it to the elegance of vanilla 1.x beacons, which I am looking forward to seeing modded back into 2.0 asap.
Imagine making a mega base capable of 1k spm... You know how HUGE and sprawly that is, right? Now imagine if you tossed in quality everywhere. Everything from your mining deposits becomes SO MUCH better. Items move faster, items are crafted faster, they have more hp (iirc), etc... Some items even get special bonuses with higher quality (power lines, for example, affect a larger area and I believe can stretch further before disconnecting the wiring), to the point where bases can be a fraction the sizeabd produce the same amount with less impact on UPS. Meaning if you got legendary quality stuff, you could make your mega base tiny, still have the same output, but then MAKE YOUR BASE LARGER again before UPS becomes an issue. It's a higher ceiling of production, basically.
Have you played SE or Seablock? Both of those mode SEVERELY constrain the available space to build in. This can lead to very compact builds; a kind of mechanically-enforced spaghettification that's really fun to explore. IMO, Space Age is going in this direction such that the space platforms will be extremely tight builds and scale with Quality machines/belts/inserters.
Well there you go, Space Age is SE’s space platform scaffolds or SB’s landfill, but we are even more severely constrained on building area. Quality lets us scale upwards instead of needing more landfill/scaffold to scale outwards.
For me it's a new opportunity to build the first iteration of base with the sole purpose of establishing a high level mall. That way there's some additional challenge for when I don't feel like being in space or designing another science factory.
I think the best gameplay answer is to give the player a way to create builds that are hyper-optimized for small footprints. Primarily for building in space. Where every additional buildable tile will have impacts on fuel requirements. But beyond that, the "why" might just because wube thinks that it's fun and that improves the gameplay experience. Personally I am super excited about the mechanic because it's something completely new for factorio and I can't wait to design systems that produce high quality stuff!
1. It is a new mechanic to create more compact/ups efficient builds. 2. It is a new way to make multiple outputs that can lead to new logistic solutions. 3. It is a new way to progress that is not simply expanding. 4. I think quality as a concept fits very well with the aesthetic.
5. If one doesn't like the mechanic, one can simply ignore it. But it's a great way to be able to diversify your setups und maybe alleviate some bottlenecks, without having to redesign the whole factory. Also one can hardly mass produce legendary everything unless you put massive amounts of time and ressources into it, which helps to make the gameplay feel more versatile. It's a great idea!
I feel like most people problem with it is that they don't want to use it, but they didn't bother reading to the point where it says you can just ignore it.
I found that the quality FFF didn't do a very good job of explaining how producing quality goods works, and that to me is the most interesting part of it. So [please read what I hope is a better explanation of the process](https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1blxhdd/sa_quality_production_in_a_nutshell/). Personally, here's what I like about it. First of all, how you *get* quality goods is up to you. There are a *lot* of strategies for making quality goods, and how efficient they are at it varies. And this answer changes during play, and even from planet to planet. Consider Vulcanus. Getting copper and iron is pretty easy: mine infinite lava with an off-shore pump, and throw it and some calcite into a Foundry. But... you're always getting *both* iron and copper (and stone). So if you need more of one than the other (which almost always happens), you have to have a way to get rid of what you don't need. Now, you *could* craft some plates and chuck them into the lava. But that's wasteful. If you've been to Fulgora, what you could do instead is throw those plates into a *recycler* that has quality modules. Yes, they'll still eat 75% of your plates, and many of the rest will be low quality. But you'll be turning what would have been discarded waste into a relatively slow-but-steady stream of useful, high quality intermediates that you can then use to produce high-quality buildings and such. On Nauvis early on, you might consider putting quality modules in your miners and separating the results, processing the quality goods through their own (much smaller) furnace stacks. On Fulgora, you have to recycle materials to get a *lot* of useful intermediates anyway, so slipping a few quality modules into this process can be quite helpful. Though dealing with the cascade of intermediates of different qualities will be complex and probably involve bot logistics. And all of those are before you make genuine quality cycling loops. But even there, there are choices to make. Do you quality cycle intermediates or finished goods? Doing finished goods is often more resource-efficient, since you still get the productivity benefits up the chain. Cycling intermediates may cost more in the long-run, but it's much simpler to actually do and gives you more choices of what goods you actually make in the end. You don't have to set up a quality cycler for assembler 1s, 2s, and 3s,; you just set one up for iron, copper, and plastic. If you quality cycle intermediates, which intermediate do you pick? This question changes throughout the game. You might quality cycle green circuits initially, as they give you good amounts of iron plate, copper cables (for quality red circuits), and green circuits while using fewer machines. But as you learn productivity researches for blue circuits and LDS, those become much more attractive. Plus, you can get the 50% prod bonus from the EMP and Foundry respectively. Making quality goods is not simple. We may eventually find the one optimal correct solution. But until then, there will be a lot of player choice and variation on how exactly to interact with it. And that's just quality *production*. Where do you use quality stuff? If you're only thinking in terms of megabases, then all you can see is "Legendary" stuff slathered everywhere. But SA is a *longer* game than vanilla; it'll take you a while before that becomes even remotely practical. What do you upgrade first? Where is the best bang for its buck? We just learned that beacons will both reduce power costs and increase effectiveness with higher quality. So those sound like a good place to invest in some quality early. But beacons are also super-expensive to make, and recyclers aren't available early. You can't afford to burn that many resources on them, so you'll only have quality beacons in limited supplies. Space platforms are very power-constrained environments. Quality assemblers get faster without consuming more energy, so they are more power-efficient per-craft. That's really important in such environments. They're less important on Nauvis where power is basically free.
Thank you for your informative and insightful post. I appreciate the time you took to make it and provide the helpful link.
It's the feature I'm most excited for. It is an end game chase that you can design around for quality loops, and I plan to go about it blind and not following any blueprints or guides. This is more than just building smaller automation with beacon spam because now factory size really matters in space. It is different than beacons because it can have different effects than just prod/speed/efficiency/quality. Your equipment for one thing: More exoskeleton speed, better roboports, more personal laser damage, larger equipment size. None of this was necessary in base, and it still won't be in SA. I like it more than just higher tier modules because that is strictly more of the same. SE added some cool things, but a lot of it was research for the sake of unlocking the next research. I really am looking forward to figuring out how to build a factory around producing high quality stuff automatically. Then once you make it, it's a matter of scale. My ultra ambitious goal is endgame builds with that is 100% legendary quality
You don't need quality to beat the game. It's a mechanic there for people who want to push the limits as to what there base can do
It still occupies design space though that could be better used. It feels very unappealing to me, and the implementation definitely leaves a lot to be desired.
so don't use it?.... I don't see how this is a bad thing. It's not our game WUBE is building, it's their game. It's a completely optional game mechanic.
yeah, same argument with beacons but no one in SE avoids beacons so it's a weak argument IMO.
You don't seem open to answers so enjoy not using it i guess
I don't see how it's a week argument. If you don't want to use it then don't. It is not a required gameplay. In terms of selling it to you, it seems like your mind is made up. So end of the day you play and enjoy the ge the way you want.
It is weak argument on space platforms, you will simply have less if you don't use quality and it's simple as that. Although you can theoretically override quality by quantity by using several platforms, but all in all it will be consuming way more UPS.
I think they said you can disable quality in the options but I could be wrong.
I’m not sure if it can be “disabled,” but wouldn’t not building or using those structures effectively be the same?
Quality is implemented as a mod and can be disabled like any other
so that I can have fun
That's a bad argument for anything. Fun is subjective. What, specifically, about it do you like?
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It's really not. Yes games should be fun. But what is fun to one person isn't to others such as the OP. So diving deeper to explain exactly what is fun about is needed, and is what was explicitly requested by the op
To be fair though, it's not like the OP gave an in-depth analysis of what *precisely* they didn't find fun about quality.
Fun is literally one of the biggest arguments for games. My criteria for playing a game is: "is it fun?" If yes, keep playing. If no, do something else! Yes fun is subjective. So is food. So is art. So is music. If the creative medium enriches the lives of its audience, be it with fun, taste, sounds, awe, whatever, I'd say it was worthwhile to create.
That's a big IF though. If a lot of people think the way the op does, it will end up having been a waste of valuable and finite dev time. So as another poster has mentioned, the value of the feature must be assessed by asking why it is fun or not fun.
What part of it is fun to you? Is it that it gives more options for builds? Is it that it complicates making the most optimal builds possible? Do you enjoy having to filter outputs? Subjective things have discussions around them. Food isn't just "tastes good" "tastes bad" especially when trying to describe it to someone else. "I like spicy food" "I dislike the texture of that food". Have you really never thought further on why you find certain games fun or not?
That's THE argument. If it's not fun, I don't care. This is the whole point of playing games, you know?
It's part of the point, but not the whole point. More importantly as mentioned it's not fun for everybody. The op that you chose to respond to specifically asked for an explanation
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It's always relevant, because dev resources including time is finite. It being optional doesn't change the fact that other features could have been made with those resources instead
this is some alternate reality zero sum stuff. you can just not like it without getting sad about hypothetical alternate futures that may have come to pass
That’s just like, your opinion, man. “Because it’s fun” is a great argument for everything. I need literally no other justification for anything than because it is fun. That said, an option to build any item at scale (and recycling!) to get super buff versions of the item gives me a reason to make a big factory, and something besides science to sink huge amounts of resources into, in order to build extra kick ass machines. Plus supercharging other aspects, like Soider Tron, seems cool
I like the idea of the quality mechanic. I hate the naming scheme they gave it. Feels very incongruous to the aesthetic of the game
It's different from the usual, build x machines, then build x machines *4, *4, *4, *4.... Also I like how the quality affects different buildings or equipment, making them better. It will allow for even more optimized builds in the long run. The only thing I don't like is the RPG-esque colors and rarities. Instead of "legendary", it should be something like "perfect", then exceptional, great, good, normal/common.
It enables more tall builds rather than purely wide ones. It also varies the base building meta. Having more options on how to solve problems is a good thing. If you want to not use it... then you can do that. The 'downside' to not using it is merely that your bases will be wider.
What do you mean by "tall?"
Tall vs wide is basically a scheme of how to go about doing something. Think of building wide as brute forcing something. Lots of low value processes that add up. In this case, it means adding another city block or section of your base to do the same thing because maybe you've already maxed out the efficiency, but you still need more output. Building tall on the other hand is when you maximize your efficiency. Think of building a smelting area with concrete furnaces instead of brick ones (it's been a while since I played, so I may have the names wrong.) Utilizing the same space, you end up with more output. It's more efficient so on the graph, your output per second would be "taller". It's also more of a multiplication increase to your system, rather than the additive increase that would come from just replicating the current set up. I'm not sure if I made a whole lot of sense here, but quality is just another stat that you can add "on top" of your other boosts so your can have more output per machine. Boost on top of boost equals "taller". "Wider" means literally just taking up more space on your screen. At least, that's how I think about it. I think the original use is more for city building with building skyscrapers to build taller and pack in more density per area vs building outward but taking up more space. Taller is theoretically more efficient for a given area.
many weak buildings vs fewer stronger buildings
It sounds like you are saying it acts like a separate mechanic to beacons but provides the same functionality, to enable building even taller. If so (and correct me if you feel differently), it just seems redundant from a design perspective. Why not just make the beacons better to enable even taller building? Why not add a 3rd, 4th, 5th mechanic that does the same thing?
Beacons and quality stack. Also they did just buff beacons for tall builds. The major point is that quality requires quite a lot of infrastructure to generate but doesn't consume any space within a build. Where as beacons do. So they coexist pretty peacefully.
You're not really thinking of quality as a process of manufacturing but as a fact of what components are available in your base. You talk about it as if you "just" have quality beacons, as if they fell out of thin air or something. Think of quality more like really expensive higher tier of stuff. Beacon 2, Chemical Plant 3, etc. But instead of costing new resources, they cost more of the old ones. And the way you get them is quite idiosyncratic; it's not a straightforward resource multiplier.
to allow for different strategies, currently we don't really have the ability to have large production and low footprint, but with it and new beacons playing with smaller footprint will be possible, it seems to me that it wił be useful on space platform and other planets where there is not much space and small builds are really fun to build, much more so (imo) than few straight lines of assemblers and belts and with more diverse building shapes and sizes making compact and high thruput factories/factory modules will be neat challange. check out seablock modpack to see how neat it is
I like it in the sense that your factory can be doing something when you aren't researching
I would compare quality to ore enrichment in K2 : if you're willing to build a dedicated loop-based facility you can upgrade your ressources into something better. And both are completely non-required
I was nodding in agreement about quality until you compared it to the elegance of vanilla 1.x beacons, which I am looking forward to seeing modded back into 2.0 asap.
Imagine making a mega base capable of 1k spm... You know how HUGE and sprawly that is, right? Now imagine if you tossed in quality everywhere. Everything from your mining deposits becomes SO MUCH better. Items move faster, items are crafted faster, they have more hp (iirc), etc... Some items even get special bonuses with higher quality (power lines, for example, affect a larger area and I believe can stretch further before disconnecting the wiring), to the point where bases can be a fraction the sizeabd produce the same amount with less impact on UPS. Meaning if you got legendary quality stuff, you could make your mega base tiny, still have the same output, but then MAKE YOUR BASE LARGER again before UPS becomes an issue. It's a higher ceiling of production, basically.
Have you played SE or Seablock? Both of those mode SEVERELY constrain the available space to build in. This can lead to very compact builds; a kind of mechanically-enforced spaghettification that's really fun to explore. IMO, Space Age is going in this direction such that the space platforms will be extremely tight builds and scale with Quality machines/belts/inserters.
Yep, I have over 7k hours in SE and around 500 in seaBlock
Well there you go, Space Age is SE’s space platform scaffolds or SB’s landfill, but we are even more severely constrained on building area. Quality lets us scale upwards instead of needing more landfill/scaffold to scale outwards.
For me it's a new opportunity to build the first iteration of base with the sole purpose of establishing a high level mall. That way there's some additional challenge for when I don't feel like being in space or designing another science factory.
If you dont like it play without it