observations after maxing out victor / x-ray

[VladK02]

1. Game is very laggy when large amount of machines are on the field. This needs optimization, heavy optimization.
2. Scanner / Finder of ores and stuff is useless at the moment. Range too short, doesnt find secrets.
3. Finding secrets - I havent found every single unlockable. Leave more clues around please, or ways to find them.
4. Inserters lag behind the crafting tier. That is, the fast inserter cant quite keep up. And the filter inserter - the most important one - is a measly 30 speed. The green stack inserter needs to be availiable sooner, OR there must be a way to permanently upgrade the red / yellow inserters. Filter inserter needs to be buffed by a lot.
5. As others mentioned, there are no sinks for 'waste' materials. Be it plant matter, or blue extract, or limestone - your options now are to convert it to compact form, and let it sit forever. Which is okay, a crate of bricks will take many hours to fill, but those bricks must be availiable sooner in the tech tree. In the beginning, all you do is dig and store plant matter. I had 12-14 boxes of plant matter at a point in time. Which, again, not a big deal, there is plenty of room for crates, but still.
6. Digger cant really dig sloped tunnels. Its hard. Give us mode to cut at 45 degree angles in a 5x9 or whatever configurations.
7. Monorails are nice, but if you need to move product in bulk - like, say, plants - the inserters arent cutting it. Whole complex issue really. To cut down on lag, you need to spread out. So you make a plant farm on the other end of the map. A serious plant farm, 72 yellow and 72 blue plants, plus everything else like threshers. How to bring it over? Monorail. BUT - stack and filter inserters cant cut it for multiple products, so you either build multiple monorails (which is silly across victor map - doable, but a lot of cutting) - or you accept that on exit of the monorail you will have like a line of 20-30 filter inserters, filtering exit products back into the main belt. Which, again - lag.
8. decorative stuff like concrete walls should be availiable from level 1, it should cost limestone and some iron, and when fully enclosed, the machines inside the concrete rooms should not generate lag or be rendered. In fact one of the older games solved the lag issue this way - they made factory rooms separate instances. So you built a room, placed a door, and whatever inside game counted as a separate level, and it was not rendered - and you could place input and output ports on the outside of the room on the wall, and if you came into the door, it would take a little bit to render the factory floor, and it would unload the main world. Clunky, but it worked.
9. explosive charges should be blasting a 3x3 tunnel, as alternative to digging. Also, detonate button is very small, one mouse movement and you lose it.
10. Give us digger fuel to speed up digging by obscene amounts. For mid game, let me dig out a factory room quickly. i dont care how much such fuel would cost, as long as it buffed my 12x12 dig speed by, i dont know, 1000%. I would absolutely dig further, and cut on lag, if it was faster.
11. There should be a fully enclosed transport belt - move product fast, like in a tube, but also to cut down on rendering lag of all those ingots. Not a monorail, but for factory floor. Rendering thousands of ingots on conveyors is hard on the cpu.
12.Lights. i need better lights. something that goes on the ceiling, and is BRIGHT. Able to illuminate a serious room. Wall lights, those baloon light things, all trash. Not bright enough for large rooms. And get in the way of belts, machines.
13. Game needs standard collection of sorters, filters, priority splitters, mergers, etc. for the belts.
14. Game needs bigger storage boxes. 2 exits per side is not enough. 4x4, or even 8x8, would be great.
15. Core composers. In the beginning, it was not clear to me what they do. It is still not clear to me why I have to stack cores. Seems un-necessary. Its so limiting, too. There is only 1 place where you can do it efficiently on the entire map - by the freight elevator, with lots of vertical clearance. And having 6-9-12 composers, which is what you need to unlock all the techs and run a decent bonus - having that many composers on that open bit of terrain totally ruins the view in the end, with all you see is towers of cores. Silly. Composers should not build towers; composers should 'eat' the cores, up to a set limit. And once they are full, they can display a nice hologram on their surface or something, as a base decoration, so you dont hide the composers underground.
16. Power. tier 1 crank generators, 150 kw? Its a joke, right? There is not that many water bodies, you know. Why do i have to cover all my pretty rivers in machines? 1 its lag, 2 its ugly, 3 they get in the way of you running around exploring. So, generators must be upped to 300-500 kw; water wheels are nice, but let me have land-based crank turner that takes fuel (hello plant sink!). So i can do the sensible thing, burry my powerplant deep underground, feed it biocubes, and never have to look at ugly waterwheels again.
17. Powercables need to be a lot longer, and not get in the way of running. And its still easier to throw factory floors everywhere you go, to be honest. By end game, i had one giant floor grid from lima to x-ray. Cables too cluncky.

There is more, but i feel like these are main points. lag, cant find all the upgrades, inserters suck, no sinks, powerplants suck.

[Fenix]

mk2 cranks are 1200 kw each... Yeah the Mk1 are laughably low at 150 kw... but once you replace them with mk2s, it doesn't matter.

as for KIndlevine extract and Shivertorn Extract, and Plant matter Fiber too... they output at the same rate, so dumping these into making Mining Charges is the way to go... so those shouldn't be an issue... which leave only Plant matter... and I found the best way to get rid of it is Dirt to clay, and toss the clay in a blast smelter...

Inserters need a tech speed upgrade for sure

The Mining Charge is directional, if you didn't notice, It blasts farther out away from the yellow disk in the center, and the Blast size is fine as is. the only thing I would change is the press E to detonate needs to be always available if within a short distance of the charge....

Also you only ever need one core composer (yeah I know the game gives you 2 for free)
when it stops at the top, just move the composer over 8 to 10 spaces...
Core Size needs to be reduced from 2m x 2m x 2m to 1m x 1m x 1m

[VladK02]

Originally posted by Fenix:

Also you only ever need one core composer (yeah I know the game gives you 2 for free)
when it stops at the top, just move the composer over 8 to 10 spaces...
Core Size needs to be reduced from 2m x 2m x 2m to 1m x 1m x 1m

Yes but this is terrible. You want to babysit the composer every 10 minutes?

What you do is build 10 of them somewhere far, far away (to save on lag)....Set up a factory for red and blue cores - doesnt have to be fast or efficient - and let it crank out cores in perpetuity. One belt feeding all of them.

The question is where to set this up. Few good spots with serious vertical clearance are protected zones I think.

[Fenix]

Originally posted by VladK02:

Yes but this is terrible. You want to babysit the composer every 10 minutes?

More like 10 hours... (ok it's like 3 hours, actually) before I need to move it, not really a big deal
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3132680017

[Teknomek]

Filter stack inserters are due in next update per the roadmap

[MetalSpaceDust]

I agree with most of that. Plus we need upgrade in place. Which is coming.

[Razdan]

I also miss some things from other games like boxes stacking, and inserters handing product to another insterter with no belt in between needed.

Your post gave me the idea to try and make room for full tower expansion in limited space. Near Victor I just went in game and dug out the area above the towers easily, just had to get the scaffolding up there. The tower started expanding and I built a permanent skywalk to maintain the roof, or build a high up factory.

[Luna Wildpawe]

Yeah I'm not even done with the game and I already hate core/composer game mechanic. It's a neat idea at first, but putting aside the performance issues caused, they are such a pain to deal with.

Why implement a way to manage the tedium of placing each core manually, but still require me to deconstruct them all manually if/when I need to move them? I want the option to remove them as well when moving the composer.

Also cores don't spread out when hitting a ceiling so you have to either dig out the ceiling directly above it to make room, or move the composer to start yet another stack.

Add to that the sheer number of cores required to unlock technologies and what started as an interesting concept becomes such a headache that I avoid dealing with it as much as possible. The performance hit they cause is just the icing on this "good in theory, bad in practice" cake.

[Soylent]

Originally posted by Fenix:

Originally posted by VladK02:

Yes but this is terrible. You want to babysit the composer every 10 minutes?

More like 10 hours... (ok it's like 3 hours, actually) before I need to move it, not really a big deal
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3132680017

I didn't even realize you can delete the composers while leaving the core tower

[satibel]

for monorail, you can use the compressed recipes to cut down on bulk for a few things.