Reclaiming Technology

[SkittleKicks Plays]

One of the things I feel is lacking in Factorio is the ability to disassemble and reclaim the components used to build things. This is especially useful when you are upgrading drills, inserters and so on. Another benefit is if you made too many of one item, well it would be nice to disassemble and reclaim those parts for another use. It feels like tech just gets wasted as you upgrade. Why have wasted technology in a chest or in your inventory when you could reclaim and reuse.

[Fel]

There are mods for that, since enough people agree with you.
There are not that many things that are not ingredients for more advanced things and just end up being "dead stock" in vanilla either.

Anyway, they have announced something similar to that for the space expansion they are working on, somewhat related to the whole "quality" thing introduced there via a module.

[SkittleKicks Plays]

The problem with mods is they can destabilize the game as it gets updated, and a lot of times mods become useless when the developer decides to quit updating them for the game. I've experienced this a lot in games like ATS, Cities: Skylines, and Minecraft. Games that I heavily mod.

I do understand your point of view in that very little in the base game (currently) has much benefit to reclaim tech for other things. Though the technology tree indicates that many items share the same types items (circuit boards for example) and you need those base items to upgrade to the next stage. So really if a reclaim system was baked into the vanilla game it would be great. DLCs are fine, but not everyone is going to go that route.

Certainly it would not hurt to have a feature like that.

[Fel]

The base game is more or less "complete" as it is, they have made some changes for version 2.0 (free update that should come roughly around the same time as the expansion) but it won't make big changes overall.

For mods, it shouldn't really be an issue for factorio because you can always get the old version of the game to continue your save if you want to do so.
Unlike the games you have cited, factorio is a game where you start a new map a lot more often, rather than playing on the same map for years.

The mods are also not on a poor excuse of a mod platform like steam's workshop but instead on a website made and owned by the devs, which you can also access from the game.
You can pick a specific version of the mod instead of being forced to always have the latest one (which screwed me over in cities skylines when a mod was changed or even removed and steam forced those changes on me).

Another thing going for this game's mods is that they are essentially text files and images, meaning that it is a lot easier to "update" (or at least "fix") small mods.

We also pretty much know that there won't be any big update before 2.0 and the expansion, which are unlikely to come out before august, so that's plenty of time to play your map (and perhaps more than one).


Another thing about recycling is that currently machines need recipes to do something, recycling would mean doubling the amount of recipes in the game, and you would probably want to put exceptions around uranium refining.
It would also pretty much break as soon as you throw in mods, since there are plenty that have several recipes making the same item (with different ingredients or ratios).
You might think "let the mods worry about this" but modding support has been pretty big from the devs up to this point, going as far as adding functions for modders as well as fixing bugs in the code that only matter with mods.


TL;DR: Unlikely to be added in vanilla, up to you on if you want it enough to use a mod or not.

[Shurenai]

Pretty much the only things that aren't useful in some capacity down the line is the starting burner tech; The burner drills, burner inserters, wooden/iron chests.... That's pretty much it, tbh. There is precious little that gets made after like, 2 hours into a game, that has no useful purpose down the line.

And burner inserters arguably have a use feeding steam engines.

Yellow inserters upgrade into most of the other inserter types; And most of the other inserter types are not direct replacements of eachother but built for different purposes; You wouldnt want to use stack inserters for literally everything, for example.

Assembly machines upgrade into the next tier- You need A1 to make A2, and A2 to make A3.

Almost anything you make 'too much of' will inevitably be of use a few hours down the line...

Plus the only way to balance such a thing is to not have a 100% return rate of spent materials- So you're inevitably incentivized to not use it unless you really have to... Heck, The time spent setting up a way to disassemble your tech itself could be spent conquering and setting up a new mine which will bring in WAY more materials, so...kindof a waste to begin with?


That all said, The coming expansion will include recyclers, so.. That will likely essentially cover what you're asking. But it's not going to be part of the vanilla game, it is expansion content.

[GunRunner89X]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Pretty much the only things that aren't useful in some capacity down the line is the starting burner tech; The burner drills, burner inserters, wooden/iron chests.... That's pretty much it, tbh. There is precious little that gets made after like, 2 hours into a game, that has no useful purpose down the line.

And burner inserters arguably have a use feeding steam engines.

Yellow inserters upgrade into most of the other inserter types; And most of the other inserter types are not direct replacements of eachother but built for different purposes; You wouldnt want to use stack inserters for literally everything, for example.

Assembly machines upgrade into the next tier- You need A1 to make A2, and A2 to make A3.

Almost anything you make 'too much of' will inevitably be of use a few hours down the line...

Plus the only way to balance such a thing is to not have a 100% return rate of spent materials- So you're inevitably incentivized to not use it unless you really have to... Heck, The time spent setting up a way to disassemble your tech itself could be spent conquering and setting up a new mine which will bring in WAY more materials, so...kindof a waste to begin with?


That all said, The coming expansion will include recyclers, so.. That will likely essentially cover what you're asking. But it's not going to be part of the vanilla game, it is expansion content.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel the furnaces should 'feed' into each other, i.e. stone furnace being necessary for the steel one, the steel one being needed for the electric one. At least then you could recycle old furnaces? Maybe have 2 different recipes for the steel and electric furnaces; one requiring the previous furnace version and then less new materials, whereas if you crafted them without the previous furnaces, then they would require more of the new materials. Something like that maybe?

[ChillCore]

to ease your mind about modding ... Factorio does not use workshop ... no 'Cities forced BS'
and no 'popular-modpack-launcher-minecraft-shenaningans-crap'


you can have multiple installs ... and while doing so .... just make a copy of your currently-working-perfectly-fine-version to see what updates do .... both engine and mods ... if you don't like what you see ... delete the fodder


zip files dowloaded from their website are stand alone by default <<< see config files

[schnappkatze]

Originally posted by GunRunner89X:

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel the furnaces should 'feed' into each other, i.e. stone furnace being necessary for the steel one, the steel one being needed for the electric one. At least then you could recycle old furnaces? Maybe have 2 different recipes for the steel and electric furnaces; one requiring the previous furnace version and then less new materials, whereas if you crafted them without the previous furnaces, then they would require more of the new materials. Something like that maybe?

I absolutely get your feeling, I also like it when I can use stuff up perfectly and not have it either sit around in chests or have to destroy it. But what you describe is a rather complicated solution (I think no product in Factorio has 2 different recipes) for a pretty tiny problem. The resources that you lose when you finally shoot the chest with the outdated buildings in it are less than a few seconds of your factory at that point, so balance wise it just doesn't matter.

I look forward to the recycler in Space Age, so I don't feel like I wasted resources, but it is a small early game issue. You could also turn all the stone furnaces into boilers. They also have rather limited uses in the middle and late game, but at least they are not a dead end - maybe at some point you will really, really go into coal liquefaction and need a hundred boilers for it.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by schnappkatze:

Originally posted by GunRunner89X:

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel the furnaces should 'feed' into each other, i.e. stone furnace being necessary for the steel one, the steel one being needed for the electric one. At least then you could recycle old furnaces? Maybe have 2 different recipes for the steel and electric furnaces; one requiring the previous furnace version and then less new materials, whereas if you crafted them without the previous furnaces, then they would require more of the new materials. Something like that maybe?

I absolutely get your feeling, I also like it when I can use stuff up perfectly and not have it either sit around in chests or have to destroy it. But what you describe is a rather complicated solution (I think no product in Factorio has 2 different recipes) for a pretty tiny problem. The resources that you lose when you finally shoot the chest with the outdated buildings in it are less than a few seconds of your factory at that point, so balance wise it just doesn't matter.

I look forward to the recycler in Space Age, so I don't feel like I wasted resources, but it is a small early game issue. You could also turn all the stone furnaces into boilers. They also have rather limited uses in the middle and late game, but at least they are not a dead end - maybe at some point you will really, really go into coal liquefaction and need a hundred boilers for it.

I use coal liquefaction all the time. I have a plant set up to do nothing but bring coal in and plastic out, and a plant set up to bring coal in and explosives out. There's still a lot of stuff left over, old armors, extra furnaces (stone and steel), extra starter power poles, extra pistols, burner mining drills, and burner inserters.

Over a megabase run (or even a single rocket launch) those items are not a very large amount of what you processed. If you don't want to feel that you wasted those things, any item that is a structure can be used as a lower health wall and replaced with actual walls after they are destroyed.

[shadain597]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

If you don't want to feel that you wasted those things, any item that is a structure can be used as a lower health wall and replaced with actual walls after they are destroyed.

I feel like this is an underrated use for stone furnaces in particular. Because they cost just 5 raw stone for a 2x2 structure, vs 5 bricks for a 1x1 wall, they can be a "poor man's" dragon's teeth. With 90% fire resistance they won't immediately die to flamethrower damage, but if used with gun/laser turrets they can slow down the biters and give the turrets more shooting time. Especially at the start, when there aren't any spitters, having a few furnaces that the biters have to walk around can make the difference between a pristine turret and one that has been nibbled on.

[puschit]

What Shurenai said, pretty much everything can and will be reused at some point, there is hardly ever something like "too much" in factorio. The only items you really don't need later are things like burner miners but you'll have them in so low numbers and they cost so few resources that it's really not worth going through the trouble of recycling them. I mean, just look at the scale of things. Remember the first time you had a crate full of copper? Later in and you'll have an entire train full of copper. Some expansions later and you'll produce trainfuls of copper every second.

[Pr0wn]

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375

[AlexMBrennan]

But what you describe is a rather complicated solution (I think no product in Factorio has 2 different recipes) for a pretty tiny problem.

I am sorry but have you never played with mods? Having multiple recipes for items is very common (e.g. angelbob's various iron ore recipes), and there is no reason the base game couldn't do the same thing.

Pretty much the only things that aren't useful in some capacity down the line is the starting burner tech

What are you going to do with your steam engines once you unlock nuclear power? What are you going to with your steel furnaces once you unlock electric furnaces that can use modules?

[OldWhovian]

Originally posted by SkittleKicks Plays:

The problem with mods is they can destabilize the game as it gets updated, and a lot of times mods become useless when the developer decides to quit updating them for the game. I've experienced this a lot in games like ATS, Cities: Skylines, and Minecraft. Games that I heavily mod.

I do understand your point of view in that very little in the base game (currently) has much benefit to reclaim tech for other things. Though the technology tree indicates that many items share the same types items (circuit boards for example) and you need those base items to upgrade to the next stage. So really if a reclaim system was baked into the vanilla game it would be great. DLCs are fine, but not everyone is going to go that route.

Certainly it would not hurt to have a feature like that.

I pretty much exclusively play with mods at this point for Factorio and I never have issues. They're worth taking a look at and Factorio's modding support is literally the best there is in gaming.

[schnappkatze]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

But what you describe is a rather complicated solution (I think no product in Factorio has 2 different recipes) for a pretty tiny problem.

I am sorry but have you never played with mods? Having multiple recipes for items is very common (e.g. angelbob's various iron ore recipes), and there is no reason the base game couldn't do the same thing.

I am sorry, but I didn't say that it is impossible, just that it is "rather complicated", compared to the miniscule problem it might solve.

[Chindraba]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

But what you describe is a rather complicated solution (I think no product in Factorio has 2 different recipes) for a pretty tiny problem.

I am sorry but have you never played with mods? Having multiple recipes for items is very common (e.g. angelbob's various iron ore recipes), and there is no reason the base game couldn't do the same thing.

Pretty much the only things that aren't useful in some capacity down the line is the starting burner tech

What are you going to do with your steam engines once you unlock nuclear power? What are you going to with your steel furnaces once you unlock electric furnaces that can use modules?

I'm sorry, but I don't play with overhaul mods. The ability to recycle products is able to be added by mods. If any given modder wants to include recycling they can, no need to wait for the expansion or to have it once it does release.

Check out the Reverse Factory[mods.factorio.com] mod, which handles recycling now, in 1.1, and has since version 0.13.

The concept of recycling has been available in that mod since Aug. 2016, 4 years before the "Release" of Factorio from EA, now 3 years and 6 months ago. As the devs are adding recycling to Space Age, and not to the 2.0 update, I'm left to conclude that they don't see recylcing as important, or perhaps not even 'proper' for the puzzles of the base game. Perhaps the idea is to better manage the early use of items without future potential. In my current game, after having achieved the 90-min train achievement I have 1 burner mining drill in inventory and none in service. I have 50 stone furnaces in service - which will soon be reduced by half, and an additional 63 in inventory. Most, if not all, will become boilers, since I'm not allergic to steam power, and I'll end up with very few early game resources "wasted" on items I cannot use. This has not always been the case as some games I've had hundreds of burner drills stashed in boxes never to be used again. The game can be a challenge of resource management. So, manage the resources.

Or, if recycling is mandatory for your play style, get a mod which does have it.