SPOILAGE will spoil my fun

[cfteague2]

HI all, just read the FFF today.

I have to say, the spoilage mechanic looks interesting for some other people

BUT for me, I HATE IT. I want to be clear, it is an UN-FUN idea. Please, Please, Please, make it configurable so that I can control the spoilage timer to something ludicrious (not days, centuries!)


First, I play factorio at a snails pace compared to most players. In vanilla factorio, my "speedrun" is about 10 weeks, to launch a rocket.

It sounds like the spoilage mechanic will basically punish casual players, while being a near-meaningless speed bump for hardcore players. Which then makes me think that the devs will tune it to make it happen super-fast, so that the hard core players experience the mechanic. but that would totally wreck it for slow, casual players who build "just barely good enough" factories.


Second, the entire concept is anti-gaming. I play games for a feeling of progression, a feeling of accomplishment. For example, in games, you do something, and you build up your strength, or your agility, etc. In real life, you need to practice regularly, or your abilities decay. But in games, once you gain something, you never lose it. You dont grow old and die in games. Your stuff doesnt vanish in games.

To me, this is an important part of the gaming fantasy, and the spoilage mechanic being discussed, is directly contrary to it.


I respect that my view is probably a minority. I dont want the devs to give up on the idea. I just want to be able turn it off on my game, or at least have some kind of slider where I can reduce its impact so that the spoilage happens at a glacial pace.

Thank you
-CFTeague2

[juliejayne]

It is as you say an UN-fun idea. At least in Factorio. In Factorio I want to build stuff. The Devs seem to have lost the plot.

If I want spoilage I have many town/city builders or survival games to choose from.

[Nonotorious]

I don't understand the point of a bio planet at this point, what resources can it give that we don't get from the rest? Bio fuel? Food?
Spoilage also sucks, are we carting in resources to make refrigerators?

[Maltsi]

You guys are overreacting. The only thing spoiling timer will do is prevent you from stockpiling them in masses, why would you do that in the first place? There is literally zero reason to stockpile anything besides structures needed to build the factory.

[Fel]

I personally think it impacts "hardcore" players more than casual.

As a casual player, all you have to do is keep the production on a small enough scale that you can realistically process the items.
As long as you don't harvest more than you can process, it doesn't really matter if you harvest way less than your capacity.
It just means that you want to under-produce rather than over-produce like you would for other production chains, leaving belts mostly empty instead of mostly full.
Handling spoilt items wouldn't be too hard either, making items loop around rather than just sit on a belt, with a splitter filtering spoilt items out is all you would really need.

It does mean handling those products differently of course, but the whole idea behind the expansion is to offer different challenges to the player rather than just adding more items and technologies with the exact same mechanics.
So far, space platforms and every planet they showed have their own challenge for you to deal with

For players more concerned about efficiency and such (so-called "hardcore") it would be a fairly significant challenge instead to maximize the production while minimizing the losses from spoilage.
It would probably be a welcome challenge since it is a completely different one from what the rest of the game offers though.



As for it being "anti-gaming", there are a large amount of games that put setbacks to your progression.
Dying in many action games that don't force you to load a save tends to force you to go back to a place that managed to kill you while being weaker in order to grab your items back.
Otherwise, they can weaken your character (usually temporarily like lowering a stat but allowing you to train it back up normally) or take some form of currency from you (souls and humanity in souls games for example).

In most settlements or factory simulators, various random event can cause great damage to what you have as well.
Even in factorio, dying means respawning with next to nothing, potentially quite far from where you were as well.
When enemies manage to breach your defenses, they can cause quite a bit of damage to your factory, setting you back quite a bit in the process.

Games are filled with mechanics that set you back in some way already, not sure how spoilage is somehow a deal-breaker in terms of progression.


That doesn't mean I especially like the spoilage either, but we have not been given enough informations to know everything about it either.
For example, the base game has enemies, they can be rather annoying to some players but they can be configured through a variety of settings, including completely removing them.

It is not such a stretch to think that you could affect spoilage though map settings as well.
After all, the last animated scene shown in the FFF shows a factory with no spoilage bars on any of the items so perhaps it will be possible to turn that off.
EDIT: the FFF already mentions that some of the items take a significant amount of time to decay like 2 hours.

[Nonotorious]

Originally posted by Maltsi:

You guys are overreacting. The only thing spoiling timer will do is prevent you from stockpiling them in masses, why would you do that in the first place? There is literally zero reason to stockpile anything besides structures needed to build the factory.

Yes but set aside the spoilage, what does the planet provide? Is there a new energy source or something? You obviously already have most if not all recipes unlocked when you get there.
As for spoilage it's just another annoying timer mechanic the same as other games, so far the only 'timer' we have had is evolution, but for the most part you can ignore it. Idk if there's a point to it in a game like this.

[Maltsi]

Originally posted by Nonotorious:

Originally posted by Maltsi:

You guys are overreacting. The only thing spoiling timer will do is prevent you from stockpiling them in masses, why would you do that in the first place? There is literally zero reason to stockpile anything besides structures needed to build the factory.

Yes but set aside the spoilage, what does the planet provide? Is there a new energy source or something? You obviously already have most if not all recipes unlocked when you get there.
As for spoilage it's just another annoying timer mechanic the same as other games, so far the only 'timer' we have had is evolution, but for the most part you can ignore it. Idk if there's a point to it in a game like this.

The thing that planet will provide is a research bottle. There could be of course more than that, but they did says that the planet special machine is indeed only for that planet, unlike the other planets special machines which can also be used in nauvis. i don't see the need to have more than that to be honest.

The resource you need to get those spoiling materials (trees) seems to be infinite, so i still don't see any issues with spoiling time. As fel above said, it will only make your belts to be empty instead of full when not producing anything. No differences gameplay wise.

They had to come up with something thats different from other planets, and i think this fits just fine for that.

Edit* Maybe the bio science is similar to Space exploration? meaning that they mostly unlock character specific buffs like +health, inventory size, speed etc.

[Fel]

One of the animated stuff shows the production of plastic, we can definitely expect some form of fuel (spoilage seems to be a form of biofuel but there should also be some more potent form of processed fuel that doesn't spoil like methane gas), possibly some biological weaponry.

The devs are definitely leaving us on a cliffhanger on what we can expect to produce from those plants, hopefully there will be some fun toys among them.

[vts6482]

Whilst I'm hoping to see new crafting mechanics (and associated challenges) in the expansion, this one comes across as rather bland. Seems like it will just need a bit of trial-and-error to find ratios that minimise/eliminate spoilage; not a problem but not particularly exciting either.

The need to transport perishables between planets is the aspect that has the potential to be annoying if they go too crazy with the timers... (note the FFF doesn't discuss stacking of perishable items either)

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by Nonotorious:

Yes but set aside the spoilage, what does the planet provide? Is there a new energy source or something? You obviously already have most if not all recipes unlocked when you get there.

You won't.

The rocket is at the end of the vanilla game, but with the Space Age mod loaded, it's going to be more in the early-mid stages of the game: something you unlock with blue science, and something much less expensive to build. And, I believe, blue science will be the highest technology you will be able to produce without leaving the planet.

And as I understand, you can choose your first off-world destination to be of the three new planets we've learned about so far.

If nothing else, what you get from the new planet is the planet-specific research pack, and progression to the final planet will be locked behind that.

[Nonotorious]

Originally posted by Maltsi:

Edit* Maybe the bio science is similar to Space exploration? meaning that they mostly unlock character specific buffs like +health, inventory size, speed etc.

Now buffing stuff i can get behind, that's a good point.

[LASci]

I kind of feel you, since 99% of the time your factory is just in idle mode while you're building something else out. But on the other hand presumably there will be automated ways to deal with spoilage. And besides, spoilage is already in the base game. It's called idle power consumption. At least if you use anything that isn't solar.

[kremlin]

Keep your gaming fantasy out of video games.

[Ferox_Stormdragon]

i suspect that spoilage reduction techs will be added that require the new science packs, then again to reduce spoilage to it's minimum you just need to make sure that the processing machines are as close as possible.

[Hedning]

Spoilage can definitely be an interesting mechanic for factorio. And it does not matter how fast you are. It should be an obstacle forcing efficient production chains, not force you to be fast constructing that chain.

If for example an iron ore takes 1 minute to spoil all you have to do is make sure the belt from the miner to the smelter is shorter than 1 minute.

This is a game about automation. Spoilage will affect your automated production chain. It won't require you to be fast. Your belts, assemblers and inserters are doing the work. They are the ones having to work fast, not you.

Spoilage improves the quality of the base. It would wreck inefficient bus bases and make people have to actually think about how they set up their chains. Right now if a machine is idle it doesn't matter. You can build a horribly inefficient factory where only 5% of your assemblers are working at any one time and it looks like your bus is full, but the minute you start producing something and the assemblers are starting up you find out that your 4 full belts of green circuits are actually only 25% of one belt and you have almost no green circuit production.

[ReBootXD]

Originally posted by Hedning:

If for example an iron ore takes 1 minute to spoil all you have to do is make sure the belt from the miner to the smelter is shorter than 1 minute.

I don’t understand how iron ore (or other non-biological materials) would spoil. I suppose it could rust, but that would take alot of time.

I like the concept of spoilage, but I feel like it should only apply to specific materials.