Why is there no comprehensive tutorial for Circuitry or Parameters?

[Goobs]

I figured 2.0 would come with better built-in tutorials or guides, but what we have right now is not something I would describe as even scratching the surface. I don't mean to paint the game in a negative light, as I have been really enjoying the expansion so far, but I seriously feel like the game could really use a real tutorial to explain and guide players starting out into the swing of things, showing us how stuff works more in depth.
Is such a thing too much to ask for? There are new planets each with their own gimmicks, and as for Gleba, which I feel is the most annoying of the planets to work with due to spoilage being added, could really use something like a tutorial the most.
Why does the game not have a sufficient tutorial for new players? Trial and error is fine up to a point, but when someone is REALLY stuck, it really shouldn't be their responsibility to sift through out-dated videos for demonstrations on how stuff works inside the game.
Factorio I feel could really really use a better Tutorial.

[Glyph]

Gleba has a tutorial. In fact it has two: the planet briefing and the agriculture primer. You're supposed to experiment and learn past that.

[Goobs]

Originally posted by Glyph:

Gleba has a tutorial. In fact it has two: the planet briefing and the agriculture primer. You're supposed to experiment and learn past that.

Neither of those can really be considered a tutorial. First of all, explanations and descriptions only take you so far. Yes, the game asks that you experiment and of course I've done that and so have many others, but none of this constitutes a satisfying start to what can be a very complex planet. Secondly, I am talking about the overall pace of the game. From start to finish you're expected to learn everything yourself. You're missing the point. I'm talking about an actual exercise where you can learn step by step how things work together so you can get the bigger picture easier and more clearly.
I knew there would be a post like yours that thinks it has all the answers while providing none. Even many of the youtube guides skim over a lot of basic things because they assume you know everything already. The game could really stand to provide basic tutorials beyond the surface level stuff that doesn't go through the more interconnected parts of the game. As of right now there's nothing to help a player understand how things work together holistically outside of 'Just play around with it lol'.

[god bless you]

For space age, you can find more on youtube.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by Prisoner:

Originally posted by Glyph:

Gleba has a tutorial. In fact it has two: the planet briefing and the agriculture primer. You're supposed to experiment and learn past that.

Neither of those can really be considered a tutorial. First of all, explanations and descriptions only take you so far. Yes, the game asks that you experiment and of course I've done that and so have many others, but none of this constitutes a satisfying start to what can be a very complex planet. Secondly, I am talking about the overall pace of the game. From start to finish you're expected to learn everything yourself. You're missing the point. I'm talking about an actual exercise where you can learn step by step how things work together so you can get the bigger picture easier and more clearly.
I knew there would be a post like yours that thinks it has all the answers while providing none. Even many of the youtube guides skim over a lot of basic things because they assume you know everything already. The game could really stand to provide basic tutorials beyond the surface level stuff that doesn't go through the more interconnected parts of the game. As of right now there's nothing to help a player understand how things work together holistically outside of 'Just play around with it lol'.

The issue is it's a lot like minecraft redstone. Beyond explaining the component parts, there isn't a whole lot of tutorialing that is reasonable to do in game- They can't give you an entire set of Compsci courses like compsci 101, 202, 303, 404, just so that you understand what to do and how to use the pieces.

With factorio circuitry you can, like minecraft redstone, make whole ass computational processors- a gpu, a cpu, a set of ram, a display, etc. People have done some insane stuff with it. You literally have the building blocks of modern computers, of any electrical device.

And for the low level stuff, If they tell you exactly how to use it to solve the problems at hand, then why require it to solve the problem anyway, just make it function that way as default because you've given the user the answer already.

You've been given the pieces and a basic how-to, Experiment, trial and error. Puzzle your way through it like you did with figuring out your first automated science.

[jkund17]

My friends and I have thought this thought as well. As it's a shame, but the game is taking a minecraft approach. Where the player needs to figure it out. But with as gamer with limited time. It can be annoying to spend my whole limited time just testing things out.

[Khaylain]

Circuits and such is generally not needed, and it's literally just logic. Teaching people to use logic is not the responsibility of the game.

[Chindraba]

I'm going to go off a cliff here, but a "comprehensive tutorial for Circuitry or Parameters" is impossible to produce without resorting to Doctoral Thesis levels of information. All that can be done is to make examples of some of what can be done. That is best done at the basic level.
Two extreme examples of what can be done with circuits are:

playing full music with the factory (with printed lyrics included)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtA0chzLac

and running a different game inside the factory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bAuP0gO5pc

How much of that, or the thousands of other possibilities, could be included in any concise tutorial? It'd mandatory for a 'comprehensive' tutorial. The circuit network components are nothing more than simple building blocks - what you do with them is the key. Parameters for prints is nearly the same. Just some pieces to work with, what can be done with them is beyond any one person's imagination.

Edit; Glad I remembered that rendition of Daft Punk's piece. Haven't listened to it in ages. Good stuff.

[Strategic Sage]

Circuits by their very nature are open-ended. They are also, by design, not essential for accomplishing most tasks. They can't be comprehensively tutorialized in the same way that train signals, assemblers, inserters, and such can. They would have to be much more limited in scope and capabilities to satisfy the desire for such a thing.

[db48x]

Experimentation is the whole point of the game. And the new encyclopedia gives easy access to all of the important information, such as the recipes. It’s never been easier to figure things out, but the game still does require intelligence and attention to detail. If you don’t understand the mechanics simply from the descriptions in the encyclopedia, and you don’t have time to experiment, then maybe this isn’t the game for you.

[Hurkyl]

I think there are two nonobvious basic* things:

• Apparently, when some buildings both generate and use a signal, they will ignore their own contribution
  
• The memory model is that every signal is regenerated from scratch every tick

These could stand being mentioned more explicitly... but on the other hand I imagine it may be difficult to tutorialize these in a way suitable for general consumption.

*: in the sense they are somewhat fundamental

[db48x]

That’s incorrect. A combinator that uses a signal as an input and also produces the same signal always takes one whole tick before it produces the output. So an arithmetic combinator that adds one to its input can read a 42 this tick and will output a 43 next tick. On that next tick it will read the 43, add one to it, and output a 44 on the tick after that. If you loop the output of this combinator back to the input, you will create the simplest clock. It simply counts up by one every tick, so this is very easy to verify.

[Hurkyl]

I guess it wasn't clear, but my point is that the signals do not act like registers or memory cells or anything like that: there is no persistence in the wires. (although you can engineer persistence by making combinators refresh the signal every tick, e.g. by passing the input through to the output)

[Chindraba]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

I guess it wasn't clear, but my point is that the signals do not act like registers or memory cells or anything like that: there is no persistence in the wires. (although you can engineer persistence by making combinators refresh the signal every tick, e.g. by passing the input through to the output)

A related issue with the non-permanent signals, which I find difficult to even "label" is that the signals are processed in the 'now' for each wire. The latency issue is part of the problem, but another segment is that the 'logic' is per-connection rather than per-circuit. That which makes timers work also creates desync conditions for complex logic in unequal length branches. I've seen too many cases where someone has applied the idea of persistence expecting the condition to carry through a circuit with only their changes.

If it can't be coherently described, how can it be conclusively taught?