Whenever I Feel Like I Can’t Make An Idea I Really Want Work In My Story, I Just Remember That Alex

The whole team standing in front of an Adrien billboard

being collectively screwed over by canon is vld fandom culture

This is interesting coming from a post-expansion perspective. I do feel Space Age in some ways tried to approach this problem, and succeeded in some ways. Ultimately someone else pointed out very well that this isn’t a problem inherent to Factorio. It’s a problem that stems from how humans approach problem solving as a whole. We like to find one-size fits all solutions that we can apply over and over again. Ultimately what the expansion tried to do to solve this problem was to introduce new mechanics to act as new constraints. Spoilage is a constraint, constraining your throughput by time. So is Aquilo’s increase power draw for bots. Likewise Fulgora’s inverted crafting tree and Vulcanus’ lava do force you to rethink how you approach certain problems and they don’t reward a one-size fits all solution. Sure, a bot base WILL WORK for EVERY planet, but…

Spoilage will cause a lot of unnecessary bot work, and bots do NOT take freshness into account, which I think is intentional. Aquilo requires a lot of bots to get anything done in a timely fashion and they drain power like crazy too. Fulgora’s biproducts likewise introduce more jobs for bots. They end up becoming very unscalable on 3 of the worlds, and I think that’s a good thing. Ultimately it won’t stop you from just building huge bot bases on them, but it definitely works to discourage that. Each planet tends to have different optimal solutions, and we’re currently in a time where we’re free to explore those. Admittedly there’s still some of the old problem as the “LDS Shuffle” presents a new endgame homogeneity for solving the Legendary production problem, but something like it would evolve regardless. I admit… I also turned around and went to modded playthroughs after finishing the vanilla game for similar reasons. And I still am doing that, but now it’s less of to explore the fun of the base game, and more to explore new mechanics because I like seeing how people try to create their own challenges for mods. Like I’ve been meaning to do a playthrough of Ultracube myself

there's something kind of amazing about this. that you can take an obviously terrible design approach on purpose as a challenge and then on some level it turns out there's still a one-size-fits-all solution that is... maybe not 'optimal', who knows, but, highly optimised? the whole factory is in large part the same basic building block stamped one time after another. the design constraint prevents the already-existing standard solutions from working but then you find there's a new kind of standard solution, even more uniform.

and on some level you'd think that was an artefact of this run, but no. i've seen this guy's other challenge runs, like the beltless one and the all-burner one. they all end up with 'yeah turns out there's a standard solution i am just going to keep implementing over and over'.

i am reminded of what @definitelynotplanetfall was saying about how the main bus architecture and more broadly the factorio 'meta' of standard arrays for doing things means it's very easy to just take The One Tool That Solves The Problem and implement it and it feels... a bit like drudgery? idk i don't want to put words in their mouth that's the impression i got from what they were saying. and like at the time i pushed back a little because, like, i am having fun playing.

which i am, but. idk. there's something there. it seems easy sometimes to take the tools that simplify your life in this game a little too far and simplify the fun away. but at the same time it's also the case that i hate it when i grow used to a tool and it goes away, like when i started a vanilla playthrough for reasons a while back and noticed how much lacking simple things like module inserter and autodeconstruct was annoying me.

YOU JUST GOT HERE AND YOU'RE ALREADY HORNY ON MAIN?!

I uh thought of this at 1am last night

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Dimension 52

(View the other chapters here [Chapter 1][Chapter 2])

Chapter 3:

It had been a couple of months since Ford had initially landed in Ooo, Six months to be precise. His records of how long he’d been lost were kept as accurate as possible. He’d had time to meet some of the other denizens including Princess Bubblegum’s friend, Marceline the Vampire Queen. She’d visited for a bit of a prank, namely moving Bubblegum’s bed halfway across Ooo. There was the Ice King, apparently an old senile wizard who came into Bubblegum’s castle with the intent to kidnap her. Ford fought the Ice King back, knocking off the crown that was seemingly the source of his powers (Afterwards the Ice King left sulking over the fact that Princess Bubblegum apparently had a new ‘boyfriend’, a statement that left Ford quite confused for the longest amount of time.) He even ran into a pair of talking dogs named Joshua and Margret who seemed to be paranormal investigators like himself. Ford spent most of his time either training or working alongside Bubblegum on one of her recent projects, some kind of defense robot named RATTLEBALLS.

Recently he’d come to the conclusion that he wasn’t really needed in Ooo anymore, and he had more or less finished his hand-to-hand combat lessons he’d been taking. There was also the rather unnerving issue of the candy citizens that kept calling him Billy for some strange reason.  So Ford grabbed his things, including several devices he and Bubblegum had built and some food for his journey ahead. It was time for him to discuss with Bubblegum his departure from this dimension.

“Hey Peppermint Butler, where’s Princess Bubblegum?”

“She’s in her Lab currently. Do you need me to get her?”

“No, that’ll be fine, I need to talk to her myself. Thank you Peppermint Butler.”

Ford found Princess Bubblegum sitting at her lab working furiously on an invention. “Hello Princess Bubblegum.” Bubblegum silently continued to work on her invention, not really acknowledging Ford’s presence. She put down a soldering iron and picked up a screw driver sealing the case on a piece of electronics. At this point she looked up and noticed Ford’s presence.

“Hey Ford, what’s up.”

“I’m ready to go home now.”

“I understand. I figured this day was coming.” Her tone sounded off to Ford. This wasn’t her typical cheery, bubbly attitude she had.

She grabbed her device off the table, revealing a second one sitting across from it. She gave a push to her desk causing her chair to slide across the room to the Traveler’s Stone. She picked it up on the way past, smoothly exited the chair, and walked over.

“So from what I learned of the it, all you have to do it is hold it and concentrate on your destination.”

“Really? It’s that simple?”

“Yup. But before you go, take this.” She held out the little device in her hand.

“It’s an interdimensional communicator. It’s a pretty basic prototype, but it gets the job done. I’ve got another one on my desk.”

“So how does it send messages back and forth? Is it a full digital interface? I’d say my experience with these is a little behind your tech.”

“The interface is only partially digital, it just sends a physical letter through it. It’s got this dimensions address already programmed into it. All you have to do is give it something to send.”

“Any restrictions to it?”

“For one thing, anything sent has to be less than five inches wide and less than one inch thick.”

Ford looked into the sole slot on the device and noted it matched the measurements given.

“I’ll also need you to send me your current dimensional ID every time you hop to a new dimension, otherwise I won’t be able to reply.”

“Sounds pretty useful if I can get the hang of it. How do I interact with it if I need to change the settings or something? Also can it send anything that fits in it?”

“You can send anything that isn’t alive. I simply think the results would not be pretty. Other than that, size is the only factor.”

“Have you tested it yet?”

“Give me a second.”

She walked back to her desk, grabbed a folded up letter, and inserted it into her device. It continued inside the device on it’s own. After a second, the letter was gone and Ford’s device beeped out a “You’ve got D-mail.”

“Okay so now you push the button here.”

As he did so, the letter emerged from the slot in his device. It read “DMD: Dimensional Mailing Device Instructional Manual.”

“Let’s do a quick test to see if yours can send properly.”

After more than enough tests of Princess Bubblegum’s invention that may have been an excuse to spend just a bit more time together they grabbed the stone and left the lab.

“If my understanding of the Traveler’s Stone is correct being on top of the castle will be the safest location to avoid mishaps.”

A faint breeze blew by as the two of them looked down on the Candy Kingdom. The time to say goodbye had finally come. Princess Bubblegum started to hand the Stone to Ford, but after a moment’s hesitation she set the stone aside to give Ford a  well-deserved hug. Though it felt awkward and unexpected on his end Ford reciprocated the hug.

“I’ll miss you.” She whispered to him.

Ford’s face turned a shade of pink brighter than Bubblegum’s hair. He picked up the stone and a second later it floated out of his hand. After shifting into a vertical ring a glowing portal appeared inside it.

“Goodbye Princess Bubblegum.”

“Call me Bonnie.”

“Goodbye Bonnie.”

With that, Ford stepped through the portal.

“‘Aw Balls’? What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“Man, this is only the second time this has happened. Though it’s kinda weird it’s happened twice man.”

Stanford Pines stood in the middle of Prismo’s time room, with the only other object in the room being a little waste basket with a miniature basketball hoop attached. The rest of Prismo’s room was a bright yellow, except for the pink of Prismo himself. Prismo looked to be nothing more than a shadow cast upon the entire room from a higher plane of existence. Honestly Ford wasn’t exactly sure what Prismo’s true form was, but odds were good he looked more impressive than his results did.

“Okay, explain to me why when I wish to be able to go back to my home dimension, a trash can appears.”

“Well, err… I’m not exactly sure why the waste basket appears. Perhaps your true home could be in the trash.”

Prismo didn’t seem to be very sure of what was going on, but he seemed to be attempting to lighten the mood judging by his tone. However the joke was as tasteless as one of Stanley’s used to be. It had been what 11 years or so since he’d last heard a joke from Stanley. Ford felt a kind of emptiness over this reflection, but he pushed down these feelings and tried to focus on the conversation.

Prismo looked at Ford noting Ford’s complete distaste towards the joke and resumed speaking. “Ok, I’m sorry, I guess that wasn’t that funny. Look I can try to explain as much as I can, but it might be a little long. You shouldn’t need to worry too much though, since it won’t take any time in any other dimensions, which is why it’s called my time room.”

Prismo took in a deep breath and began: “So as you are well aware, there are many different dimensions and timelines and universes in the multiverse, or multidimensional space, or whatever you want to call it. My powers are limited in that I can only alter certain dimensions that are within my domain. So if say someone from the Land of Ooo comes in and wishes that say the Lich never existed, I’d alter the universe for their wish, and insert them into their new Lich-free reality. Of course there can be plural universes for dimensions, so I only change or create the relevant universe. If someone comes in and wishes to go to another Dimension entirely, the new dimension needs to be within my circle of power for me to be able to get them there. Unfortunately yours is out of bounds. I don’t even know where you’re originally from. Theoretically you might never get back.”

“Well thanks for the hope.”

“I said theoretically. You do still have residual traces of your home dimension on you, so someone could track you by the trail you’ve been leaving as you journey around. In addition you might stumble back into your home dimension on accident. Future prediction is a nasty business Ford. You never know when something good or bad might happen. You can only guess the chances that it might happen.”

“What do I do now? I don’t even know how to leave this room.”

“Well all I said was that I couldn’t quite get you home, right?”

“Are you implying that you can get me closer to home?”

“Yep, I’ll even let it be on the house for you. That way you’ve still got one wish left.”

It looked like Ford wouldn’t be back as home as easily as he thought. At least a wish and a push in the right direction would be useful.

“So where will you send me exactly?”

“You followed a certain vector in the 4th dimensional plane. I believe that I can pinpoint it, and boom, I’ll send you right back in that direction. You’ll end up closer to where you left from, but that’s really the best I can do here.”

“Okay, So about that wish…”

[Chapter 4]

in an accidental one-sided reveal

Ladybug: Adrien?

Chat Noir, detransformed: Quick, act dumb!

Adrien: Who the hell is Adrien?

Adrien, internally: Not that dumb!!!

Factorio Space Age: Gleba

Since I recently reblogged a post about Gleba, I figured I should go into more depth about it. In a week or two when I graduate I’ll go into more detail about it, but I’ve probably spent the most time of the expansion on Gleba, exploring things like Quality, the circuit network changes, and sushi belts. I admit some of the tech I learned on Gleba ended up being essential for a later rebuild of Fulgora & stuff I learned on space platforms went to Aquilo, and then what I learned there got brought back to space.

Regardless I figured I could share some of the overall lessons I learned on Gleba & beyond during the DLC that helped me “master” Gleba.

-Identifying where spoilage & freshness matters

There’s a total of about 13 items that can spoil, and they spoil into one of six things: iron and copper ores, spoilage, and enemies. As you want iron/copper ores, we can ignore spoilage here, they become the thing you want typically so except in the production loop, this is a good thing. For spoilage, it’s an item, and you should generally assume anything that stores a spoilable item in it, is going to at some point have spoilage in it, and it will need to be removed. EVERYTHING, including things like biolabs. Lastly enemies, they don’t leave behind items so you don’t need to clean out the machines, but you probably don’t want them wandering around, so you likely want some defense to kill them if they show up. They can wreck havoc on things like space platforms or power plants if they get there, but generally they’re more a nuisance than a threat, so long as you don’t let a massive amount spoil at once… (Most I did was let 100 biter eggs spoil in a chest surrounded by lasers. Didn’t even notice it happened).

So clean up spoilage, and handle “Hazmats” (eggs & spawners) with military or disposal methods (pentapod eggs can be burned & biter eggs mulched into nutrients). Another tip for the Hazmats is to not store them in chests unless necessary (rocket silo loading), and to not put them in assemblers/biochambers unless they are the only missing item. I seriously recommend setting agricultural egg inserters to hand size 1 & to only insert if they have bioflux. (Wire the biochamber to the inserter, use read contents & enable/disable). It might slow down your science slightly but it does make it so you don’t need turrets by the science area.

Spoilage itself can be easily disposed of by either converting it inefficiently into nutrients, or burning it in a heating tower. Personally I use nutrient crafting as a spoilage upcycling system to produce high quality spoilage for efficiency modules, or high quality carbon for coal synthesis w/ asteroid mining for the matching sulfur. (I.e it’s a supplement for Legendary plastic for red circuits and LDS shuffling…)

As for where freshness matters, it actually only matters in a few places. Not all recipes do actually inherit their freshness from their parents (bacteria & pentapod eggs are top of my mind, but I think Fish also don’t), nor does freshness matter if the finished product isn’t spoilable. Ultimately freshness only really matters in the items directly connected to lime (agricultural) science as it’s the ONLY item in game that freshness impacts how useful it is. 5% fresh bioflux will feed a biter nest, as will 5% nutrients a biochamber & so on. Freshness only really matters if you need to move something or if it’s for lime science. So generally with that in mind you can send all your near rotten fruit and other spoilables for producing things like ore, rocket fuel, plastic, lubricant, sulfur or carbon fiber.

Another key idea is “shelf-stability”. You generally want to move raw fruit, bioflux & lime science around because they have long shelf lives. You don’t want to move jelly, mash, or nutrients around because of their short shelf life. It’s much easier to move jellynut, yumako, or bioflux instead and all of them are more space efficient to move as well.

-The Spores, Simplicity, & Quality triad

From what I found it is impossible to create a base that is simple, spore-efficient, & produces quality. At best you can do two, and I suspect it is genuinely impossible to do all three because of how they interact.

So I suppose I should define what I mean by these things. Spore efficiency is basically a measure of how much of the fruit products you make turn into spoilage. A more spore efficient base has less products rot. Why? Because the less products that rot, by definition, the more of your harvest WAS used for production rather than was wasted. While spoilage has its own uses, it isn’t ideal for most production in your base, unless you plan on mass producing only coal. Simplicity is how much of a headache setting everything up is. The more circuit conditions, belt priority shenanigans, and other complexities in the build, the less simple it is. And quality production, I mean large scale quality production, which usually relies on inter-step processing to roll up the products.

But wait you might be asking yourself, this implies it’s possible to build a quality base that’s easy without it being a major headache? Yes! Quality lime science is arguably one of the easiest sciences to produce in quality, only truly rivaled by the easy of quality space science in the late game! My first rocket silo of lime science was 1k rare science. This is because pentapod eggs are a catalytic recipe that can take quality modules, and so rolling up a high quality egg once is super easy, and then you just need to keep feeding it with high quality nutrients… which comes from bioflux, the other item you want to raise in quality! And you can even use a spoilage upcycler to supplement this to prevent the eggs from going off. I’ll show off a surprisingly easy to design base for producing rare quality science in the early Gleba game sometime later when I show off some Gleba designs.

However I do need to point out that the triad does inherently conflict. Trying to reduce spoilage amounts by simply reducing fruit in caused quality to stall. Trying to get quality up again caused it to become more complex, making a newer less-complex design required me to gut quality… you have to decide WHAT you value going in.

So for my MP base I decided I would cut quality, and focus on spore efficiency, as I wanted to produce the most science with the least spores, as I couldn’t rely on Tesla Turrets from Fulgora to protect me.

-Spore efficiency maximization

One of the best ways to actually improve spore efficiency is to start at the fruit production itself. Every second a raw fruit is waiting around, it is getting one step closer to rotting. Why harvest if you don’t need to? Keeping planting going without harvesting is simple if you keep in mind that agricultural towers prefer to plant first, then harvest. So if you wire the tower to anything, and set it to output inventory & only work when seeds > 0, it will only work when it has seeds in it, and will prefer planting first. Which means it will only harvest if there are no plantable spots and you put seeds in. Which means you can control harvesting by controlling when an inserter loads seeds in. So have the inserter only put seeds in when you need more fruit (you can use a circuit condition, like fruit less than 50 (one harvest) to determine when to start a harvest and load seeds in one at a time, if this is your only condition, you’ll probably produce 2-4 stacks at a time depending on your inserters).

Likewise… if you control when you process the raw fruit into jelly/mash then you can again further reduce spoilage. You can use a similar method to the harvest, but by turning off the biochambers for those lines. This reduces fruit usage, which will decrease tower usage & spore output… yet since you only produce the jelly/mash when needed, the assembly line shouldn’t actually slow down. What might happen though is that your power production dips because you’re not burning as much spoilage.

Well that’s a very easy fix. Gleba has the CHEAPEST rocket fuel recipe in the game, especially if you look at the fuel values of its ingredients. It is the ONLY power positive rocket fuel recipe in the game without productivity, and it has a default 50% bonus to it too! Literally no other rocket fuel recipe can get that bonus except the base recipe which requires exported biochambers to Nauvis! (Or Fulgora technically, but why would you do that? Oil is free there) Which is its own nightmare. So you can actually just burn rocket fuel for power in a heating tower! Which has a 250% fuel efficiency, meaning 100 Mj of chemical energy (one rocket fuel) becomes 250 MJ of electrical power! Excluding startup costs for the heating towers.

Well I’d recommend against burning all your rocket fuel because that’d just gobble it all up, but what you can do is measure the temperatures of your heating towers, and if they drop below a certain threshold (I recommend at least 600 degrees) to feed in rocket fuel.

Since I hooked up this failsafe to my power plant the only blackout I had was when I accidentally burned all my yumako seeds and stalled the entire factory, and it took almost an hour for it to begin to get close to a brownout, and it hadn’t when I found out the problem (I had an alarm if the power plant went critically cold (all towers below 600 degrees), so I could intervene before power goes out)

How you decide to reduce spoilage from here is up to you. I decided on my second run to just dead end belts and extract spoilage rather than run them all to the incinerator, so that lines could just pull half rotted mash/jelly for things like lube and ore. Only bioflux has a flowthrough section, and I overbuilt lime science & eggs so it never backs up there either (I’d much rather have rotting lime science than make half rotten lime science)

-Finally… solving the “How do I load my freshest items into a rocket?”

This is much easier than people think. It takes 2 chests, a logistics provider of some flavor (I use red) & a steel chest (wood/iron would work too). I then place the chests a tile apart, and have the inserter wired to the logistics chest. It’s set that if I have more than my desired storage amount (usually one rocket’s worth, sometimes two rockets) it grabs the MOST SPOILED item from the provider and puts it into the steel chest. This removes the item from the logistics network (and the rocket silo therefore) which will turn the inserter back off if the chest no longer has more than enough for the rocket launches requested & reduces the average spoil time of the chest. This is key. The individual items are still spoiling, I’m not managing to magically remove spoilage, but I am reducing the average spoil amount. When a rocket comes, it takes the items from the provider chest and it will gradually fill up again. Since only the freshest 1k items are typically available, this means I always load the freshest items I have. I could then feed in some items back from that “rotting chest” if I wanted to, but I find it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’d rather just produce a fresh 1k usually… I might play around with feeding it back in, but I only do this with science… extracted bioflux in this system gets fed into production elsewhere, instead of into a secondary chest. The whole point of the chest was just to act as a large storage vessel for composing science to spoilage.

Anyways, as someone who actually liked Gleba I talked about everything I can without getting into the specifics of like… how to build Gleba with bots, belts or trains… which I would love to cover at some point, because I do think there are too many content creators out there that don’t do Gleba justice… (Looking at Nilaus… I died inside when I saw he just plopped down a bot-base and a parameterized biochamber mall essentially. Dosh likewise also disappointed me on his OG Space Age run with his Gleba (import based) and Fulgora (bot based). I did love Doc Jade’s nightmare scrap train Fulgora though. He understood that the most fun can be had in the creativity of a solution, not necessarily the efficiency)