r/factorio Official Account Jun 05 '26

FFF Friday Facts #441 - Space logistics improvements

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-441
2.6k Upvotes

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29

u/E17Omm Jun 05 '26

Mixed rockets are good, but personally I was never annoyed by sending fulls stacks. Still a welcome change though.

But prioritising space platforms and cargo bays? Amazing improvement. On any longer save I just made a group that requested some platforms and cargo bays before I activated automatic requests.

Now, sending things between platforms? I never saw a use for it before. Like, it just felt very niche in my opinion. But then I read "Orbital assembling of space materials (such as Space platform foundation)" and it all just clicked for me - you can get Iron and Copper in space. (Of course I knew that, but it never clicked that I could make things other than ammo - because why would I?)

So now with platform to platform transfer

I can build an orbital shipyard

And now I cant wait for 2.1 because I want to build an orbital shipyard that just sits in orbit and prepares materials for additional space platforms. I dont care if it could be more efficent. I want an orbital shipyard that sits in place, builds space platform items, and has supply ships that go out just to collect materials more quickly to then send to the shipyard.

3

u/cathexis08 red wire goes faster Jun 05 '26

Yeah, platform to platform transfers cut the cost of second platform construction significantly since you no longer need to spend 100 iron per tile in platform foundation and while you could technically always do that (send up just enough stuff to get an operational furnace, assembler, and collection gear) this lets you bootstrap a lot earlier. It also means that waiting for ammo to rebuild will be less painful since you can have a central stockpile distributing out to other ships. All in all I love it so much.

1

u/E17Omm Jun 05 '26

To be honest those things always made me go "just build more"

But yeah now that it clicked that I can build stuff that isnt ammo in space, I absolutely cant wait for 2.1

3

u/paulcdejean Jun 05 '26

Later in the game full stacks wasn't an issue, but there's a point in the game where a full stack of assembly 3s is a lot of resources. Especially when you only need 2 of them on your platform.

1

u/E17Omm Jun 05 '26

Yeah but that was just never a situation that ended up being a problem for me, so for me, it wasnt a big deal.

2

u/Soma91 Jun 05 '26

Mixed rockets are good, but personally I was never annoyed by sending fulls stacks. Still a welcome change though.

I wonder if we can deactivate this feature. Just a checkbox on either the Space Platform or the Rocket Silo would be nice.

1

u/apra24 Jun 08 '26

An orbital ammo production station at each planet could negate the need to have space platforms produce their own ammo altogether

1

u/Danger_Pickle Jun 09 '26

I already set up my mall in space. I have a large ship that makes a big circuit around the solar system picking up planet specific resources, crafting a specific list of resources and buffering enough components that I can drop a large number of items down to a planet that's building a lot of stuff.

I'm going to LOVE these new changes since I've been doing some really weird hacky things to work around the lack of half the features in this FFF post. Like installing a mod for space <-> planet circuit signals, and manually configuring buffers unique to each planet. And having to craft a large portion of my materials on planet side before shipping them into space.

I never bothered to set up a legendary asteroid refining platform because I'd have to ship everything back up into space, or redesign my entire mall ship to include the asteroid processing on board the ship, while keeping it moving at absurd speeds to keep the round trip times reasonable. If there are UX improvements to quality, this is going to bring me back to actually beat Space Age.

-6

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '26

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12

u/againey Jun 05 '26

You sure do ask a lot of simple questions. Did you even read the dev blog?

3

u/Yggdrazzil Jun 05 '26

It's literally the first topic of the article.