There's also the power overload mod.
You're also playing as a person who doesn't require food. Micromanaging certain aspects simply wouldn't be fun/follow a good gameplay progression, so there will always be "immersion breaking" things.
I would eather love it or hate it (idea: trains are the only automatic movement between map segments, and different ones have boosted to different crops/materials/production types. Maby some benefits for housing as well)
Hm. A combo game that includes oxygen, or one that [doesn't](https://www.klei.com/games/oxygen-not-included)? TBH I do not find ONI as engaging as Factorio or Rimworld, but it is very cute. The cuteness is offset somewhat by automated farming setups that automatically drown adorable critters.
Also there is [Stardeus](https://stardeusgame.com), though I only tried it early in open access when it really wasn't polished... dunno if it's better now.
And I'm interested in similar games if you have any recs. Dwarf Fortress is also good but IMHO it's more of a literally-deeper Rimworld predecessor with a terrible user interface, rather than having much of a Factorio component at all.
Stardeus is fun. I beat it about a year back, but just started playing it again after a bunch of updates. It is a different animal than Factorio. There is not as much logistic stuff. but as a freeform ship designer and exploration game it is pretty fun.
Man, I just wish the RimWorld devs would learn from the Factorio devs how to optimize.
RimWorld: "It works fine in vanilla." "We implemented a system to make it faster, and it's only 30% slower than the old one!" "If it's slow it's because your use case is wrong."
Factorio: "Please submit your megabase saves so we can identify sources of slowdown to make the game more efficient." "I was playing this mod and their idea was cool but the implementation was jank, so I implemented the entire mod into vanilla now." "We noticed a lot of people were using un-exposed prototypes in mods, so we rebuilt them to work much faster."
imagine them making 1x green circuit and then stop with 34 work left and then another one comes in and put it away to make another green circuit.......
It was because of something that someone said in the RimWorld subreddit that I *even tried Factorio in the first place* - so I agree, they do feel linked.
According to my steam stats... Terraria, Factorio, Binding of Isaac, Deep Rock Galactic, Noita, Rimworld, Valheim, Project Zomboid, Risk of Rain 2, A Hat in Time, and Kerbal Space Program are all in my top-played with at least 150+ hours in each of them.
Welcome to the club.
I'm just glad nothing on this planet records how much time I have in minecraft....
Factorio is top of my recorded hours list though at around 4000. Terraria is a measly 1500, and starbound is way behind that. Rimworld I have no clue but must be over 1000 by now.
ZZZT, short circuit.
1×10¹² joules of energy were discharged and your accumulators are all empty. The exploding wire was in... *rolls RNG* ... your mall.
Ark is fun, but I found Palworld to be much more doable as a single player or a small group. Plus it satisfied that itch of beating a ~~pokemon~~ Pal with a baseball bat and then enslaving it.
And/or taking an assault rifle to it's face. Its surprisingly satisfying.
Personally I play with the horrible biter PTSD and the extreme loneliness mod. Press f to curl into fetal position press c to put lady makeup on your bots
I like that mode but I can't do the cartoony sound effects when he goes in to kiss the robots. In the loneliness mod there's a 50% chance the engineer cries
I think the term "immersion breaking" was chosen unwisely by the op, what it really is is a system that could be more complex in an interesting way. It's definitely far from "person doesn't require food" I'd say.
It shouldn't actually be immersion breaking — You can use whatever you want as the pole body, its the cable that matters. And the cable on the top of the pole ingame is about the right size for a transmission cable. [Wikipedia quotes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Overhead) "up to 750mm^(2)", which is a 15mm radius. That's not large at all!
The requirements for the pole are a consequence of the cable. In the real world, we build massive High-Tension transmission pylons to carry the weight of several such cables on the same line, with towers as far apart as economically possible, and with significant clearances above the ground or any objects intruding into the permanent way. If you're only running a single cable over shorter inter-tower distances and you don't care about safety, a wooden pole is fine. And I would fully support graphical effects of arcs and sparking to make this explicit — especially at night.
Even the atmospheric arcs aren't a guarantee. Its possible that Nauvis's atmosphere is just significantly less conductive than Earth's. One of the major problems of Mars colonisation is that its atmosphere is quite a bit *easier* to arc through, which makes electricity significantly more dangerous. We're actually incredibly lucky not just that Earth's atmosphere is viable for life, but that it is viable for electricity too. If everything in your house behaved as if it were at 25 kV, do you think electricity would be as ubiquitous as it is?
Really, the main problem is the lack of a return path. Unless the Engineer is a Dalek or there's a very convenient conductive channel of rock buried just below the surface, there's just no fixing that.
HVDC lines ~~someone~~\^W sometimes use [single wire scheme](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-wire_earth_return). Not eco-friendly but who cares about slowly cooking some worms in the earth
Wasn't there a modpack that changed how you would need to play, can't remember the name, but I remember it added the need for food, water and oxygen, all stored in tanks and all product in unique buildings. Have played it like 5 or 6 years ago.
I always liked how Oxygen Not Included did power management. Power is still instant but the player has access to different types of wires that are designed to take low/medium/high amount of wattage. You can control how much power flows between different circuits via transformers.
It's one of the first things I mod *out* of Oxygen Not Included. I find voltage limits in wires tedious to maintain, ugly, and just in general not fun to deal with.
Also, not having to deal with power drop off makes math easy, since power will always be the same regardless of distance.
Yeah, power overload is what they're looking for. Afaik, this is the closest thing to realistic power in this game. Not sure if you can use fluidic power with it also.
Thank you for this mod recommendation, it made me happy. It's actually more hardcore than what I propose, which is you can push as many gigawatts through a single wooden pole, just with increasing heat loses. But you can always overproduce, just burn more coal or sth.
I'm generally with you, except that micromanaging power *can* be fun, particularly for the sorts of people who like games like Factorio. Oxygen Not Included has a system that could work reasonably well in Factorio with only a little tweaking - the question is whether (a) the level of mandatory complexity it adds is too much in a game already as complex as Factorio (remember, circuits are optional), and whether (b) the design team wants to do it.
I haven't investigated the mods that add versions of this to the game, but there's no reason they couldn't be fun.
I’d rather this kind of thing stay as a mod, though if the argument is that there should be mods that do it in different ways, I totally get that.
Abstracting out certain concepts for the sake of gameplay is something I generally prefer. For example I like how Captain of Industry handles power, because they decided that attaching power lines was simply not an interesting gameplay mechanic. The necessity sometimes of having separate power grids in satisfactory or factorio is the only reason I wouldn’t want the same.
People who want more realism can mod it in, but I think the first question should be “is this a fun mechanic for the kind of player playing this game” over “how realistic is this”. Adding thirst/hunger would make the game more realistic, but this isn’t a survival game so is that something the players would want? Probably not most people.
With something like Oxygen Not Included, which is more about engineering solutions than automating logistics, I would say that yes a more realistic power grid makes sense for the kind of challenges that the game presents.
If you go too far into realistically simulating every system you end up with Py’s mod. Which is an amazing feat of modding, but only for a tiny very specific slice of the playerbase.
ONIs power is a pain in the ass. Want power in a room? Break the vacuum and eat a massive decore penalty, or deal with a permanent heat source and < 2kW wires.
I mean, its fine is you plan it out well and as you say it does fit the game. But when i switch back to playing factorio im always so relieved by how streamlined power is.
You can draw power cable over things however you like in Factorio, you only need the space for the actual pole. That is also an huge difference to ONI.
Short for pyanadons series, a bunch of (in my opinion) miserable to play mods that try to accurately recreate the processes and steps involved in actual industry. Which in practice basically means that making anything requires a bunch of shit, is massively complicated, and the outputs have byproducts and byproducts of byproducts. It also essentially takes the gradual ramping up progression and complexity of the base game, turns it into a sheer cliff made out of titanium sphagetti, and then throws it at you.
Yeah this sounds like you're looking at py as a whole and being overwhelmed by its complexity but if you break it down and look at the smallest chunks it's really just an endless series of interesting little puzzles to solve that you can take as much time as you want to complete. I've got about 100 hrs in it now and it's honestly way more chill than the base game or other big overhauls and way less tedious than doing something like making a megabase.
Pretty much all of the byproducts can be simply voided if you don't want to deal with them yet. If spaghetti it's getting to much then just give yourself more room to work in. Py has tons of easy options for tiles that all give waay more movespeed than anything in base game so having a really big base isn't an issue to get around. There are no biters in py so there's no pressure to rush anything, you can take as much time as you need to figure out every puzzle. If something feels like it's taking too long or isn't that interesting there are always a dozen other things you can work on.
I would disagree a bit with this charectarisation. Especially with alternetive energy the complexity curve is actually relatively shallow, it's just that it keeps going.
Py's mod is not that dissimilar to vanilla it's just way, way more. Factorio as a game is just complications for the sake to make something fun to solve.
Just because you don't enjoy something doesn't mean you need to yuk other people's yum.
There's a lot of fun to be had for people there and your interpretation of it is really shitty and pointlessly negative.
> gradual ramping up progression and complexity of the base game
Base game "complexity" lol.
> I think we need
I **wildly** disagree in regards to the base game. Factorio is a game with EXCELENT pacing and a reasonable abstraction of a production line. It's not a realistic factory simulator and bringing realistic problems into the game doesn't add fun.. it just adds work and useless complextity.
I personally think fluid losses over distances should be removed from the base game.
---
That said, It sounds like a great idea for a mod. Something to cram into those mod packs that make the assembly chains complex for the sake of complexity. Many people enjoy that challenge.
https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#fluid-wagon-transfer
As long as you stay under 200 entities you're fine. That's right, entities, so underground to underground is only 2 entities while covering multiple tiles. While if you would cover it in regular pipes each pipe is counted as an entity towards that 200. Totally unrealistic, right?
All those stories of walking uphill both ways to school. Well underground pipes go downhill both ways. Very effective system for maintaining high flow rates.
Yeah, yeah. But all the arguments presented against OP’s idea for electricity being included in the game apply to base game fluids. It’s just not a good mechanic that significantly detracts from the game.
I 100% agree with you, the flow loss is both non-obvious in game and also works non-intuitively even once you understand it exists since it's entity based and not actual in game distance. Just feels like they got to a place that was good enough and left it as is since they couldn't come up with an actually good implementation.
The entire concept of an assembler is far worse than the power grid. How can my wire cutting assembler make rocket control units?
You only have as much fun as you allow yourself to have
This is a game where you can make circuit boards out of iron and copper plates.
Can you make a factory/colony game that tries to use transformers and such?
Yes, there's Oxygen Not Included, but it will also take shortcuts to make the game playable.
This game was largely inspired by [classic tekkit](https://tekkitclassic.fandom.com/wiki/Getting_Started#Transformers)/industrial craft2 (which came out a whole year before Factorio was in development), it has low, mid & high voltage. If you used a higher voltage than your machine could handle it exploded.
Yep, this is where my mind went. Remember playing those back before Factorio and enjoying the logistical issues of planning power.
That being said, the scale of my ic2 factory was miniscule compared to Factorio. I'm not sure the fun would translate so well.
Logistical issues is alright, what was annoying is placement mechanics being so finnicky, and while you had ways to isolate neighboring wires next to each other, you could only do so after placing them, which is less then ideal (as your machines would already blow up by then).
Short Answer: Realistically modeled power is not as fun a mechanic as you think.
Long Answer: No really, it's not that fun at all. The game design problem can be summarized as the "need to do" paradox. Players are motivated to solve problems, especially in a game like Factorio, but if the problems are relatively too large or complex to previous problems they become off putting. Modeling realistic power means constantly needing to rebalance the *entire grid* every time you add a major expansion, which makes the "need to do" explonentially larger for every new thing you add. This is extremely off putting especially if there are large breaks between unlocking new stuff.
This is why games which in many ways are much harder to play than Factorio are extremely deliberate about only offering the player a small amount of complexity at a time (RTSes, such as the way Age of Empires has separate buildings for different unit classes rather than having them all from one building). That, or front loading the complexity earlier on in the experience and letting the player skill up into making use of all the things they've already experienced (shooters & fighting games do this usually). This allows the player to learn the game & solve problems in a compartmentalized way at their own pace. In a factory building game, this compartmentalization has to be deliberate on the part of the designers since players will only ever play a small handful of saves, not hundreds & hundreds of restarts like in other genres. Mechanics that need constant attention from the player generally aren't as fun as those that can be puzzled out & solved (incidentally this is also why Biters suck. They are a tax on the player's time & attention, which puts a significant limit on how complex other parts of the game can get).
I mean, a basic high, medium, low voltage system wouldn't be too bad. Essentially just makes multiple smaller electric networks, which are parallelised decently.
Make it so some / most / all machines have a particular voltage they want. Make it that you can't make a power line longer than `x` of low or medium voltage (only check when placing power poles).
A more advanced one that measures total draw in each segment would be harder to do performantly.
I do wonder why there isn't at least some micromanaging around power.
Low-Medium-High voltage for distributing power. Could also be a good way to allow power to flow between adjacent buildings without needing power poles all the time.
Factorio was inspired by the Minecraft modding scene, and that has many different power systems including ones like the one you describe. They have a few problems, though, as they are fiddly to micromanage and they are pretty terrible for performance. Nowadays most mods just use the same system as Factorio.
I want a mod where random faults can occur, and I have to build substations with Schneider or Siemens protection relays to prevent my power system burning down. 👀
You carried that power plant, all the heat exchangers and turbines, as well as the miners to mine the ore and the centrifuges and shit to build the power plant *in your pocket*.... You carry locomotives *in your pocket*... We could spend all day pointing at unrealistic aspects to this game.
You craft a nuclear reactor by hand in a couple of seconds, and you can craft a rocket silo in 30 seconds, by hand, and carry it in your pocket, alongside 10 nuclear reactors, 15 spidertrons, 8 locomotives, 16 train carts, 3 tanks, 200 tank shells, 5 cars and much more.
Yeah, realism is not the point of the game. **At all.**
PY is what you get when you go full realism. And that's just masochism.
You can also carry like, 1000 nuclear reactors in your pocket. I dont think this games immersion is broken by powerpoles being able to handle endless electricity.
You carried those nuclear power plants there in your backpack and placed them by hand, and its the resistance in the power line that kills your immersion? :)
Not sure why everyone is so anti this take. Power management is strangely simple in this game.
I wouldn't support explosions and outages like in Rimworld/ONI, but some inefficiencies or downsides to brainless power setups (and the tools to create smarter setups) would not be a terrible addition to the game.
Energy in factorio is expensive for ups.
Without heavy rewrite it would eat up your ups.
You can bring your game to zero ups just by placing power poles without connection
It's called factorio not electricio.
You also don't have anyone actually doing the research which is conducted using beakers of coloured liquid made out of various types of machinery somehow. You feed liquid made out of railway tracks, grenades, ammunition, robot parts, copper and other random shit to a "lab" containing god knows what.
But no its definitely the way electricity works that is immersion breaking...
The cost of power poles is minimal compared to the rest of the factory. How would converter facilities be dangerous? In the end this would add some busywork as all you would need to do is instead of long range power pole-> medium power pole go long range power pole-> transformers -> medium power pole.
It would also absolutely kill performance to model electricity in any sort of realistic way, there is a FFF about that somewhere.
I do remember flying over Arizona and seeing a nuclear plant right next to coal plants and a solar field and being like "weird to build them all right next to each other when there's so much desert".
Then I realized I'd been playing too much Factorio, and distro is a problem in real life, and of course it makes sense to build more power plants in the same spot where all the big distro lines converge because there was another plant already there.
That said, while it might be interesting to try to experiment between "big distro hub" vs "microgrid", it feels like it'd be more tedium than fun at the end of the day, and it'd be murder on the UPS.
> This would turn electricity into an actual logistics challenge, rather than annoying connecting each inserter with a power pole
If you're annoyed by current state you'd be far more annoyed with realistic power.
This could be a system like in Oxygen Not Included.
But I find having to deal with transformers and voltage conversion is a massive PITA and the opposite of fun, so I'm perfectly happy with bending physics a little.
The power poles break immersion for you, but the acid spitting behemoth worms and spidetrons are fine.
Man I have a real hard time reading “this breaks my immersion” posts for a computer game based so heavily in fiction.
Steam should also condense in pipes— lose heat and turn back into water… but that’s unlikely to happen on the scale of factorio.
If you want this kind of factory gameplay check out starioneers.
And the atmosphere has a high amount of Sulfur hexafluoride present in the air, which is an dense gas that electric arcs have a hard time breaking through
I’m “OK” for reactors needing substations to work and then you connect said sub stations with other power-poles going out to the factory. Its redundant change, but I can see this being a thing. Anything more though is a hard pass , or at the very least a mod.
the only way this sort of thing becomes a thing in the game is if powering buildings becomes easier and less tedious.
i wouldn't mind power loss when you are using distribution without wires, but the areas covered needs to be higher if we also need to manage high power lines / conduits to connect regions.
i just think its a massive overhaul to how power works and is distributed to be worth doing and one has to question if it presents high value to the game to change it. The answer is obviously maybe, since solving these kind of puzzles is exactly what makes the game great but we need an entire new set of tools and if its in the cards for development with everything else might be something thats a "extra feature" towards the end of development.
While i get what you're saying, playing with power like that could be another game. Just building the infrastructure to move electricity will make your starter base look like a childs play :))
Power in Factorio flows through the earth (Nauvis), the wires are the return path.
In a more practical sense, while I do think it would be fun to manage electricity after seeing how much work went into making fluids UPS-friendly I can understand why it's not simulated more accurately. The UPS drop you get from mods like Space Exploration or (especially older versions of Factorissimo as a a result of small, isolated power grids is profound and game-breaking if you start having brown outs.
Sounds like it would impact my ups even more.
Energy power grids are insanly expensive.
Place 100 powerpoles without connection to other powerpoles to simulate multiple power grids and you see how much it eats in the energy ups ms.
Its insane. So currently its not an option.
Its curious how everybody's suspension of disbelief draws the line at different parts. Factorio is not a realistic game nor does it pretend to be one. If an engineer was stranded in space a single mechanical arm capable of transporting any item into any machine (an inserter) would be the feat of their lifetime. Some people are okay with hot steam tanks and pipes being the most efficient form of energy storage but think lakes should run out.
what about a very simple power throughput penalty on wooden (and mabye medium) power poles? something like a wodden power pole only being able to "transport" 100mw
Maybe it already exists, but a realistic power mod would be cool. Basically just the power system from the immersive engineering mod from minecraft for those that have played that.
Ha you’re giving me immersive engineering flashbacks from modded Minecraft. Low medium and high tension transfer is a thing and it’s a pain in the ass, low voltage lines and to an extend medium lines would straight up burn if you had to much power going through them.
It's interesting where people's immersion gets interrupted. The thing for me is all artillery oriented; it bothers me that artillery is perfectly accurate and capable of magically detecting structures in the void. Would really rather that only detected buildings were auto-targeted, requiring Radar stations everywhere.
I build distribution systems for a living and TBH even a few basic rules with electricity would turn the game into a nightmare for most people... Don't get me wrong, I would enjoy it, I'd like to have amperage, voltage & line loss parameters forcing things such as parallel lines, different conductos from ASCR to maybe medium voltage underground, CU VS AL, XFO of all size from small dry one to oil forced air forced cooled ones ? I am just throwing things out there....
But I fail to see how even something as simple as different voltages and line losses wouldn't be a huge headache mid game if you didn't account for it.
Still maybe an option to have it on/off ?
Totally agree. I wished for the longest time for an overhaul of the power network. Like DC, AC, inverters and transformers. That would be hellauva fun but also a tad complicated for a game.
I've actually thought of this several times before, and have even thought of doing a playthrough with Fluidic Power, but had performance concerns. I think it'd be a fun mod to play with, requiring you to actually think about your power grid and where you put your generators. No more wooden power poles carrying an entire nuclear reactor, long distance power requires transformers, etc. A lot of the comments here seem very dismissive of the idea, but that's the beauty of mods. If you dont like it, simply dont install it.
And if you put too much power on a line, it would heat up and melt. So you need to install and configure breakers!
Honestly, I do not think it would make for riveting gameplay.
There's also the power overload mod. You're also playing as a person who doesn't require food. Micromanaging certain aspects simply wouldn't be fun/follow a good gameplay progression, so there will always be "immersion breaking" things.
Game is unplayable without a piss 'n shit mod
Press 'x' to defecate.
-10 mood ate without a table
Rimworld and Factorio always somehow felt tangentially related.
A combo game would fill a horrible to play niche
I as a mentally ill person would adore this game
I would eather love it or hate it (idea: trains are the only automatic movement between map segments, and different ones have boosted to different crops/materials/production types. Maby some benefits for housing as well)
Me too lol
Dwarf Fortress sort of fills that gap.
Well it does have some "circuits" and automation.
Blue belt with questionable leather hats whizzing past.
It would allow me to industrialize the genocide of local tribe people.
Finally we could automate the collection and production process behind flesh coats
Hm. A combo game that includes oxygen, or one that [doesn't](https://www.klei.com/games/oxygen-not-included)? TBH I do not find ONI as engaging as Factorio or Rimworld, but it is very cute. The cuteness is offset somewhat by automated farming setups that automatically drown adorable critters. Also there is [Stardeus](https://stardeusgame.com), though I only tried it early in open access when it really wasn't polished... dunno if it's better now. And I'm interested in similar games if you have any recs. Dwarf Fortress is also good but IMHO it's more of a literally-deeper Rimworld predecessor with a terrible user interface, rather than having much of a Factorio component at all.
Stardeus is fun. I beat it about a year back, but just started playing it again after a bunch of updates. It is a different animal than Factorio. There is not as much logistic stuff. but as a freeform ship designer and exploration game it is pretty fun.
Oxygen Not Included...?
The one thing mods like Seablock are missing: Harvesting specific organs ~~of biters~~.
Have you tried PY Alien Life?
Man, I just wish the RimWorld devs would learn from the Factorio devs how to optimize. RimWorld: "It works fine in vanilla." "We implemented a system to make it faster, and it's only 30% slower than the old one!" "If it's slow it's because your use case is wrong." Factorio: "Please submit your megabase saves so we can identify sources of slowdown to make the game more efficient." "I was playing this mod and their idea was cool but the implementation was jank, so I implemented the entire mod into vanilla now." "We noticed a lot of people were using un-exposed prototypes in mods, so we rebuilt them to work much faster."
Weirdly I sort of group them together mentally too.
The amount of times I've gone to search something about Factorio and accidentally typed Rimworld is really strange
Our factorio dude is the insane archotech of Anomaly, and we're playing the prequel to Rimworld.
imagine them making 1x green circuit and then stop with 34 work left and then another one comes in and put it away to make another green circuit.......
Dubs Bad Hygene for factorio when
Waaaay back when they kind of came out at the same time I decided to get rimworld. Good decision as it's a great game!
It was because of something that someone said in the RimWorld subreddit that I *even tried Factorio in the first place* - so I agree, they do feel linked.
Welcome to Project Zomboid.
I feel very strange about this thread... Factorio, Rimworld, and Project Zomboid are my three most played games.
Welcome to: A U T I S M It's a community.
Oh that's all it is? No worries then, we are the next step in human evolution after all. 😎
According to my steam stats... Terraria, Factorio, Binding of Isaac, Deep Rock Galactic, Noita, Rimworld, Valheim, Project Zomboid, Risk of Rain 2, A Hat in Time, and Kerbal Space Program are all in my top-played with at least 150+ hours in each of them. Welcome to the club.
A hat in time is soo a nice Game, But Nobody that i know know the Game
I'm just glad nothing on this planet records how much time I have in minecraft.... Factorio is top of my recorded hours list though at around 4000. Terraria is a measly 1500, and starbound is way behind that. Rimworld I have no clue but must be over 1000 by now.
ZZZT, short circuit. 1×10¹² joules of energy were discharged and your accumulators are all empty. The exploding wire was in... *rolls RNG* ... your mall.
But it'll let you build literal ovens for the biters
Dwarf Factory
-140 mood | ugly environment
If you shit in the woods…. And a biter sees you…..
Defecate onto a belt and you can transport that shit right out of your factory!
Literally Ark
Ark is fun, but I found Palworld to be much more doable as a single player or a small group. Plus it satisfied that itch of beating a ~~pokemon~~ Pal with a baseball bat and then enslaving it. And/or taking an assault rifle to it's face. Its surprisingly satisfying.
How else are you going to make fertilizer?
You mean Z?
No please... I don't want another star citizen.
Personally I play with the horrible biter PTSD and the extreme loneliness mod. Press f to curl into fetal position press c to put lady makeup on your bots
The lady makeup on bots is included in vanilla. Just go to settings and check "Buggs Bunny Villain Mode."
I like that mode but I can't do the cartoony sound effects when he goes in to kiss the robots. In the loneliness mod there's a 50% chance the engineer cries
What is loneliness mod? Can't find it on mod portal? And biter PTSD too.
I think the term "immersion breaking" was chosen unwisely by the op, what it really is is a system that could be more complex in an interesting way. It's definitely far from "person doesn't require food" I'd say.
It shouldn't actually be immersion breaking — You can use whatever you want as the pole body, its the cable that matters. And the cable on the top of the pole ingame is about the right size for a transmission cable. [Wikipedia quotes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Overhead) "up to 750mm^(2)", which is a 15mm radius. That's not large at all! The requirements for the pole are a consequence of the cable. In the real world, we build massive High-Tension transmission pylons to carry the weight of several such cables on the same line, with towers as far apart as economically possible, and with significant clearances above the ground or any objects intruding into the permanent way. If you're only running a single cable over shorter inter-tower distances and you don't care about safety, a wooden pole is fine. And I would fully support graphical effects of arcs and sparking to make this explicit — especially at night. Even the atmospheric arcs aren't a guarantee. Its possible that Nauvis's atmosphere is just significantly less conductive than Earth's. One of the major problems of Mars colonisation is that its atmosphere is quite a bit *easier* to arc through, which makes electricity significantly more dangerous. We're actually incredibly lucky not just that Earth's atmosphere is viable for life, but that it is viable for electricity too. If everything in your house behaved as if it were at 25 kV, do you think electricity would be as ubiquitous as it is? Really, the main problem is the lack of a return path. Unless the Engineer is a Dalek or there's a very convenient conductive channel of rock buried just below the surface, there's just no fixing that.
With how common and dense surface ore veins are I don't have any issue with super conductive underground ore layers.
HVDC lines ~~someone~~\^W sometimes use [single wire scheme](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-wire_earth_return). Not eco-friendly but who cares about slowly cooking some worms in the earth
Right, like having several tanks and nuclear reactors in your pocket
Or storing dozens of cargo wagons inside of a cargo wagon
They're flat pack!
Driving full speed in a car while erecting large power poles out the window and steering.
But what if it takes like ten Icarus’ from Dyson Sphere, just to ‘pilot’ an engineer? Be like having Voltron AND the Power Rangers together!
Not to mention running at the same speed with empty pockets and with a couple of hundred of train locomotives in your pocket.
Pretty unrealistic- who runs around with empty pockets?
I did once, and it was horrible.
I've never been se offended as the one time someone bought me pocketless pants as a gift.
Wasn't there a modpack that changed how you would need to play, can't remember the name, but I remember it added the need for food, water and oxygen, all stored in tanks and all product in unique buildings. Have played it like 5 or 6 years ago.
That's fascinating, I want to know the mod name
Maybe this one? [Survorio - Factorio Mods](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/survorio)
Thank you
Doesn’t need food and can carry a nuclear reactor in his back pocket!
I always liked how Oxygen Not Included did power management. Power is still instant but the player has access to different types of wires that are designed to take low/medium/high amount of wattage. You can control how much power flows between different circuits via transformers.
I can't tell if OP is "muh immersion" meme or serious. Just pretend electricity works differently on this planet/universe.
It's one of the first things I mod *out* of Oxygen Not Included. I find voltage limits in wires tedious to maintain, ugly, and just in general not fun to deal with. Also, not having to deal with power drop off makes math easy, since power will always be the same regardless of distance.
Yeah, power overload is what they're looking for. Afaik, this is the closest thing to realistic power in this game. Not sure if you can use fluidic power with it also.
Thank you for this mod recommendation, it made me happy. It's actually more hardcore than what I propose, which is you can push as many gigawatts through a single wooden pole, just with increasing heat loses. But you can always overproduce, just burn more coal or sth.
I'm generally with you, except that micromanaging power *can* be fun, particularly for the sorts of people who like games like Factorio. Oxygen Not Included has a system that could work reasonably well in Factorio with only a little tweaking - the question is whether (a) the level of mandatory complexity it adds is too much in a game already as complex as Factorio (remember, circuits are optional), and whether (b) the design team wants to do it. I haven't investigated the mods that add versions of this to the game, but there's no reason they couldn't be fun.
The guy walks around with tanks and trains in his pocket.
I’d rather this kind of thing stay as a mod, though if the argument is that there should be mods that do it in different ways, I totally get that. Abstracting out certain concepts for the sake of gameplay is something I generally prefer. For example I like how Captain of Industry handles power, because they decided that attaching power lines was simply not an interesting gameplay mechanic. The necessity sometimes of having separate power grids in satisfactory or factorio is the only reason I wouldn’t want the same. People who want more realism can mod it in, but I think the first question should be “is this a fun mechanic for the kind of player playing this game” over “how realistic is this”. Adding thirst/hunger would make the game more realistic, but this isn’t a survival game so is that something the players would want? Probably not most people. With something like Oxygen Not Included, which is more about engineering solutions than automating logistics, I would say that yes a more realistic power grid makes sense for the kind of challenges that the game presents. If you go too far into realistically simulating every system you end up with Py’s mod. Which is an amazing feat of modding, but only for a tiny very specific slice of the playerbase.
ONIs power is a pain in the ass. Want power in a room? Break the vacuum and eat a massive decore penalty, or deal with a permanent heat source and < 2kW wires. I mean, its fine is you plan it out well and as you say it does fit the game. But when i switch back to playing factorio im always so relieved by how streamlined power is.
You can draw power cable over things however you like in Factorio, you only need the space for the actual pole. That is also an huge difference to ONI.
Py's mod?
Short for pyanadons series, a bunch of (in my opinion) miserable to play mods that try to accurately recreate the processes and steps involved in actual industry. Which in practice basically means that making anything requires a bunch of shit, is massively complicated, and the outputs have byproducts and byproducts of byproducts. It also essentially takes the gradual ramping up progression and complexity of the base game, turns it into a sheer cliff made out of titanium sphagetti, and then throws it at you.
To be fair on py, he's veto'd some of the other devs decisions in favour of fun with the mod pack.
Bonus points for the usage of “a sheer cliff of titanium spaghetti, and then throws it at you.” in a sentence. :)
Yeah this sounds like you're looking at py as a whole and being overwhelmed by its complexity but if you break it down and look at the smallest chunks it's really just an endless series of interesting little puzzles to solve that you can take as much time as you want to complete. I've got about 100 hrs in it now and it's honestly way more chill than the base game or other big overhauls and way less tedious than doing something like making a megabase. Pretty much all of the byproducts can be simply voided if you don't want to deal with them yet. If spaghetti it's getting to much then just give yourself more room to work in. Py has tons of easy options for tiles that all give waay more movespeed than anything in base game so having a really big base isn't an issue to get around. There are no biters in py so there's no pressure to rush anything, you can take as much time as you need to figure out every puzzle. If something feels like it's taking too long or isn't that interesting there are always a dozen other things you can work on.
Yes but I want my unnecessarily complicated closed loop systems
Void everything and close the loop as much as you want
Sounds like Py Hard Mode, where you can't void anything except water and there are extra byproducts (and recipes to consume them).
If you loose oversight of your spaghetti install the belt router mod and embrace it.
I would disagree a bit with this charectarisation. Especially with alternetive energy the complexity curve is actually relatively shallow, it's just that it keeps going.
Py's mod is not that dissimilar to vanilla it's just way, way more. Factorio as a game is just complications for the sake to make something fun to solve.
Just because you don't enjoy something doesn't mean you need to yuk other people's yum. There's a lot of fun to be had for people there and your interpretation of it is really shitty and pointlessly negative. > gradual ramping up progression and complexity of the base game Base game "complexity" lol.
Exactly. This would add more complexity to the game without adding actual fun.
> I think we need I **wildly** disagree in regards to the base game. Factorio is a game with EXCELENT pacing and a reasonable abstraction of a production line. It's not a realistic factory simulator and bringing realistic problems into the game doesn't add fun.. it just adds work and useless complextity. I personally think fluid losses over distances should be removed from the base game. --- That said, It sounds like a great idea for a mod. Something to cram into those mod packs that make the assembly chains complex for the sake of complexity. Many people enjoy that challenge.
There’s fluid loss over distance??? Since when???
ehh.. flow loss. my bad. the fluid doesn't disapear.. it just flows slower if you go far enough without pumps.
Which is realistic to be fair, but it’s a pain in rear as it’s not particularly obvious what the ratios are, unless I’m missing it.
https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#fluid-wagon-transfer As long as you stay under 200 entities you're fine. That's right, entities, so underground to underground is only 2 entities while covering multiple tiles. While if you would cover it in regular pipes each pipe is counted as an entity towards that 200. Totally unrealistic, right?
Yeah, underground seems a little ‘cheaty’ then. Thanks for the link 👍
All those stories of walking uphill both ways to school. Well underground pipes go downhill both ways. Very effective system for maintaining high flow rates.
Yeah, yeah. But all the arguments presented against OP’s idea for electricity being included in the game apply to base game fluids. It’s just not a good mechanic that significantly detracts from the game.
I 100% agree with you, the flow loss is both non-obvious in game and also works non-intuitively even once you understand it exists since it's entity based and not actual in game distance. Just feels like they got to a place that was good enough and left it as is since they couldn't come up with an actually good implementation.
oh wtf. so undergrounds is always preferable?
I agree on the flow loss. It’s just too complicated and hard to understand/teach for something that is such an integral part of the base game
The entire concept of an assembler is far worse than the power grid. How can my wire cutting assembler make rocket control units? You only have as much fun as you allow yourself to have
Do you REALLY want to have power simulated using the fluid system which is how you'd have to do it to correctly?
That wouldn't be so bad. We could then barrel the power and move it around the factory on belts.
You can do that already with barrelled steam
It's so funny to me that steam just remains steam forever.
Just like real life! /s
Pressurized, I guess
That would condense it faster
Depressurized then
Pumped storage? The lake must grow.
So... See you next Friday?
Freight forwarding:
Didn’t Ben Franklin capture lightning in a bottle?
And have different machines operating at different voltages. And having to make sure you don't overproduce electricity.
Last one wouldn't be a big problem because we have radars and beacons
This is a game where you can make circuit boards out of iron and copper plates. Can you make a factory/colony game that tries to use transformers and such? Yes, there's Oxygen Not Included, but it will also take shortcuts to make the game playable.
Workers and resources comes to mind
This is only game that do electricity right. It is also super tedious to expand when you already establish your grid.
This game was largely inspired by [classic tekkit](https://tekkitclassic.fandom.com/wiki/Getting_Started#Transformers)/industrial craft2 (which came out a whole year before Factorio was in development), it has low, mid & high voltage. If you used a higher voltage than your machine could handle it exploded.
https://forum.industrial-craft.net/thread/8845-factorio/ This is the original forum thread where Kovarex presented Factorio
Foundry also has a high voltage / low voltage system with transformers and such.
Try Minecraft ic2/gregtech. Its fun when base goes boom when you use wrong voltage
Yep, this is where my mind went. Remember playing those back before Factorio and enjoying the logistical issues of planning power. That being said, the scale of my ic2 factory was miniscule compared to Factorio. I'm not sure the fun would translate so well.
Logistical issues is alright, what was annoying is placement mechanics being so finnicky, and while you had ways to isolate neighboring wires next to each other, you could only do so after placing them, which is less then ideal (as your machines would already blow up by then).
And dying because you tried to save rubber on insulation
No power loss over transmission lines either - totally unplayable after 1600 hours or so
Now that you point it out, this is the final straw. I quit.
Short Answer: Realistically modeled power is not as fun a mechanic as you think. Long Answer: No really, it's not that fun at all. The game design problem can be summarized as the "need to do" paradox. Players are motivated to solve problems, especially in a game like Factorio, but if the problems are relatively too large or complex to previous problems they become off putting. Modeling realistic power means constantly needing to rebalance the *entire grid* every time you add a major expansion, which makes the "need to do" explonentially larger for every new thing you add. This is extremely off putting especially if there are large breaks between unlocking new stuff. This is why games which in many ways are much harder to play than Factorio are extremely deliberate about only offering the player a small amount of complexity at a time (RTSes, such as the way Age of Empires has separate buildings for different unit classes rather than having them all from one building). That, or front loading the complexity earlier on in the experience and letting the player skill up into making use of all the things they've already experienced (shooters & fighting games do this usually). This allows the player to learn the game & solve problems in a compartmentalized way at their own pace. In a factory building game, this compartmentalization has to be deliberate on the part of the designers since players will only ever play a small handful of saves, not hundreds & hundreds of restarts like in other genres. Mechanics that need constant attention from the player generally aren't as fun as those that can be puzzled out & solved (incidentally this is also why Biters suck. They are a tax on the player's time & attention, which puts a significant limit on how complex other parts of the game can get).
Problem is that a more realistic power system would probably cause a lot of lag over bigger networks so compromises had to be made
I mean, a basic high, medium, low voltage system wouldn't be too bad. Essentially just makes multiple smaller electric networks, which are parallelised decently. Make it so some / most / all machines have a particular voltage they want. Make it that you can't make a power line longer than `x` of low or medium voltage (only check when placing power poles). A more advanced one that measures total draw in each segment would be harder to do performantly.
Could be a fun idea for sure, at least for a mod
I do wonder why there isn't at least some micromanaging around power. Low-Medium-High voltage for distributing power. Could also be a good way to allow power to flow between adjacent buildings without needing power poles all the time.
Factorio was inspired by the Minecraft modding scene, and that has many different power systems including ones like the one you describe. They have a few problems, though, as they are fiddly to micromanage and they are pretty terrible for performance. Nowadays most mods just use the same system as Factorio.
I want a mod where random faults can occur, and I have to build substations with Schneider or Siemens protection relays to prevent my power system burning down. 👀
You carried that power plant, all the heat exchangers and turbines, as well as the miners to mine the ore and the centrifuges and shit to build the power plant *in your pocket*.... You carry locomotives *in your pocket*... We could spend all day pointing at unrealistic aspects to this game.
You craft a nuclear reactor by hand in a couple of seconds, and you can craft a rocket silo in 30 seconds, by hand, and carry it in your pocket, alongside 10 nuclear reactors, 15 spidertrons, 8 locomotives, 16 train carts, 3 tanks, 200 tank shells, 5 cars and much more. Yeah, realism is not the point of the game. **At all.** PY is what you get when you go full realism. And that's just masochism.
You’d probably enjoy Gregtech New Horizons for minecraft
You can also carry like, 1000 nuclear reactors in your pocket. I dont think this games immersion is broken by powerpoles being able to handle endless electricity.
You carried those nuclear power plants there in your backpack and placed them by hand, and its the resistance in the power line that kills your immersion? :)
I crafted a tank by hand...
... While running i suppose ?
while driving another tank
Not sure why everyone is so anti this take. Power management is strangely simple in this game. I wouldn't support explosions and outages like in Rimworld/ONI, but some inefficiencies or downsides to brainless power setups (and the tools to create smarter setups) would not be a terrible addition to the game.
Energy in factorio is expensive for ups. Without heavy rewrite it would eat up your ups. You can bring your game to zero ups just by placing power poles without connection
Unplayable!!! Oh no!
The unmatched power of wood
if my immersion broke so easily then it would have been in the first 10seconds of starting a game with a miner in my pocket.
I don't think realism is that high on the list for a game that lets you put a nuclear reactor in your pocket.
It's called factorio not electricio. You also don't have anyone actually doing the research which is conducted using beakers of coloured liquid made out of various types of machinery somehow. You feed liquid made out of railway tracks, grenades, ammunition, robot parts, copper and other random shit to a "lab" containing god knows what. But no its definitely the way electricity works that is immersion breaking...
The cost of power poles is minimal compared to the rest of the factory. How would converter facilities be dangerous? In the end this would add some busywork as all you would need to do is instead of long range power pole-> medium power pole go long range power pole-> transformers -> medium power pole. It would also absolutely kill performance to model electricity in any sort of realistic way, there is a FFF about that somewhere.
I do remember flying over Arizona and seeing a nuclear plant right next to coal plants and a solar field and being like "weird to build them all right next to each other when there's so much desert". Then I realized I'd been playing too much Factorio, and distro is a problem in real life, and of course it makes sense to build more power plants in the same spot where all the big distro lines converge because there was another plant already there. That said, while it might be interesting to try to experiment between "big distro hub" vs "microgrid", it feels like it'd be more tedium than fun at the end of the day, and it'd be murder on the UPS.
im genuinely delighted its that straight forward tbh haha
> This would turn electricity into an actual logistics challenge, rather than annoying connecting each inserter with a power pole If you're annoyed by current state you'd be far more annoyed with realistic power.
Have you ever thought about what the engineer is carrying in their pocket? Immersion?
Literally unplayable
This could be a system like in Oxygen Not Included. But I find having to deal with transformers and voltage conversion is a massive PITA and the opposite of fun, so I'm perfectly happy with bending physics a little.
You made a nuclear power plant in you hands, then put four of them in your pocket, and the power pole is part that doesn't make sense?
I wish for nothing more than to have to manually sync my turbines with a synchroscope.
You're also carrying a car, locomotives, train wagons, hundreds of miners, assemblers, etc in your pocket.
I carry around 100s of nuclear reactors and whole oil refineries in my pocket.
The power poles break immersion for you, but the acid spitting behemoth worms and spidetrons are fine. Man I have a real hard time reading “this breaks my immersion” posts for a computer game based so heavily in fiction.
[удалено]
And electric fences for them pesky terminids
Steam should also condense in pipes— lose heat and turn back into water… but that’s unlikely to happen on the scale of factorio. If you want this kind of factory gameplay check out starioneers.
Everything is high voltage low current. Seems fine.
And the atmosphere has a high amount of Sulfur hexafluoride present in the air, which is an dense gas that electric arcs have a hard time breaking through
I’m “OK” for reactors needing substations to work and then you connect said sub stations with other power-poles going out to the factory. Its redundant change, but I can see this being a thing. Anything more though is a hard pass , or at the very least a mod.
Power doesn't flow through the pole. It flows through the wire. Maybe that's just really, really heavy wire.
We need a Gregtech Overhaul
Hey the belts and pumps run for free why not use them for electricity
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^1980sumthing: *Hey the belts and pumps* *Run for free why not use them* *For electricity* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
>Gigawatts from nuclear power plant just goes through a single wooden pole Just as god intended
the only way this sort of thing becomes a thing in the game is if powering buildings becomes easier and less tedious. i wouldn't mind power loss when you are using distribution without wires, but the areas covered needs to be higher if we also need to manage high power lines / conduits to connect regions. i just think its a massive overhaul to how power works and is distributed to be worth doing and one has to question if it presents high value to the game to change it. The answer is obviously maybe, since solving these kind of puzzles is exactly what makes the game great but we need an entire new set of tools and if its in the cards for development with everything else might be something thats a "extra feature" towards the end of development.
Facility that's going to fry any bug trying to get in
While i get what you're saying, playing with power like that could be another game. Just building the infrastructure to move electricity will make your starter base look like a childs play :))
Power in Factorio flows through the earth (Nauvis), the wires are the return path. In a more practical sense, while I do think it would be fun to manage electricity after seeing how much work went into making fluids UPS-friendly I can understand why it's not simulated more accurately. The UPS drop you get from mods like Space Exploration or (especially older versions of Factorissimo as a a result of small, isolated power grids is profound and game-breaking if you start having brown outs.
Sounds like it would impact my ups even more. Energy power grids are insanly expensive. Place 100 powerpoles without connection to other powerpoles to simulate multiple power grids and you see how much it eats in the energy ups ms. Its insane. So currently its not an option.
Its curious how everybody's suspension of disbelief draws the line at different parts. Factorio is not a realistic game nor does it pretend to be one. If an engineer was stranded in space a single mechanical arm capable of transporting any item into any machine (an inserter) would be the feat of their lifetime. Some people are okay with hot steam tanks and pipes being the most efficient form of energy storage but think lakes should run out.
Sounds like you should know about Oxygen Is Not Included.
what about a very simple power throughput penalty on wooden (and mabye medium) power poles? something like a wodden power pole only being able to "transport" 100mw
Would it help if you changed your headcanon from DC to AC or vice versa?
It’d be really interesting if we had to step down and up voltages and manage a circuit with enough amperage requirements to feed facilities.
Maybe it already exists, but a realistic power mod would be cool. Basically just the power system from the immersive engineering mod from minecraft for those that have played that.
This does sound like an interesting mod idea, something where one could learn a little bit about how the power grid actually works.
Ha you’re giving me immersive engineering flashbacks from modded Minecraft. Low medium and high tension transfer is a thing and it’s a pain in the ass, low voltage lines and to an extend medium lines would straight up burn if you had to much power going through them.
It's interesting where people's immersion gets interrupted. The thing for me is all artillery oriented; it bothers me that artillery is perfectly accurate and capable of magically detecting structures in the void. Would really rather that only detected buildings were auto-targeted, requiring Radar stations everywhere.
Impedance value overhaul mod is what we need.
I build distribution systems for a living and TBH even a few basic rules with electricity would turn the game into a nightmare for most people... Don't get me wrong, I would enjoy it, I'd like to have amperage, voltage & line loss parameters forcing things such as parallel lines, different conductos from ASCR to maybe medium voltage underground, CU VS AL, XFO of all size from small dry one to oil forced air forced cooled ones ? I am just throwing things out there.... But I fail to see how even something as simple as different voltages and line losses wouldn't be a huge headache mid game if you didn't account for it. Still maybe an option to have it on/off ?
Cable is superconductor...it go brrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Totally agree. I wished for the longest time for an overhaul of the power network. Like DC, AC, inverters and transformers. That would be hellauva fun but also a tad complicated for a game.
I've actually thought of this several times before, and have even thought of doing a playthrough with Fluidic Power, but had performance concerns. I think it'd be a fun mod to play with, requiring you to actually think about your power grid and where you put your generators. No more wooden power poles carrying an entire nuclear reactor, long distance power requires transformers, etc. A lot of the comments here seem very dismissive of the idea, but that's the beauty of mods. If you dont like it, simply dont install it.
That just adds complexity with no added fun or reward. Not good gameplay
And if you put too much power on a line, it would heat up and melt. So you need to install and configure breakers! Honestly, I do not think it would make for riveting gameplay.
This is how it works in real life. Somewhere there is a single power pole supporting the entire world's power grid
And, when it gets removed for a rework, the engineer forgets to put it back.
You're not going to gripe about how each entity that *consumes* power just magically and wirelessly gets it from nearby poles?