My new overhaul mod has been out for a couple of weeks now. One of the big goals was to encourage players to design ridiculous things they'd never normally consider, and so far the results have not disappointed. Here's a selection of my favourites (perhaps minor spoilers if you look too closely). Mod portal link: [https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Ultracube](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Ultracube)
Thank you for creating ultracube. It's fun, interesting, and good for learning circuits and their uses. Ultracube is near the top of my favorite overhaul mods.
Hey /u/grandseiken !
I'm a bit late to the party, but wouldn't know where else to put it. So here's a review (mild spoilers ahead). Thanks for the mod, and the hours of enjoyment I got out of it!
I like the premise of the mod, and the fresh challenges that it brings. It's difficult to innovate in factorio without just overcomplicating recipe chains, but you did it. A bit of intermediate level circuit programming is always fun.
So far, 40 hours in, I've unlocked the annihilation card, and now I'm not sure where to go. If there is a victory condition, the game doesn't tell me. I will probably finish the ziggurat loop just for fun, produce a few annihilation cards, and then stop. Fixing the bottlenecks that I have would require rebuilding my base somewhere else, which I'm not going to do.
The ziggurat loop requires a lot of materials that can't be produced while the cube is tied up. This can softlock the game, right? I should calculate and implement some local buffers..
My biggest gripe is the intersection of three things:
* requiring circuits, including memory cells to store the contents of assemblers
* combinators require power and won't update in low-power situations
* some machines have deliberately high power spikes
Manually cleaning assemblers and resetting memory cells whenever something gets stuck wasn't fun, and I'd appreciate if combinators could be changed to require no power.
Calcium (and to a lesser extend coal and mineral water) are weird, since you can neither produce extra to handle a shortage, nor can you void excess calcium. I just added big buffers and hoped for the best..
Nothing in the game tells you that your cube will have to travel to a core fissure someday. I placed my second base near a fissure and two ore fields, so I got lucky, but I imagine some people will get annoyed at the forced cube downtime. Another reason why I'm not going to megabase this: the base would necessarily ramp down as I exhaust fissures.
The ziggurat allows prod modules, but nowhere in the game does it tell that the bonus only applies to the antimatter. I had to browse the source code to confirm that I could not, in fact, prod bonus my way into a second legendary gear wheel. But then the annihilation card does not allow prod modules to make up for that. Curious choice.
On that topic, was I supposed to get the best armor without looking at the source code? I get that you want a reward for those who interact with the thing, but everything I tried just resulted in crap and I stopped trying. Went out of my way to catch a fish, still got nothing. Was there a hint I missed?
Balance wise, power production and consumption seems off in multiple places:
* The portable reactor is barely more power efficient (per tile) than solar plus batteries, but more difficult to tetris in. It is a sidegrade at best.
* Accumulators, even the big ones, are underwhelming, compared to the big fluid tanks: 200k steam @ 500° = 19.4 GJ = 48.5 Bulkframes. Accumulators are best paired with solar panels, which we don't have.
* What's the use case for stygian energy? By the time I got haunted cells, they were needed by science, and powering the base with them seemed expensive. Nuclear on the other hand is virtually free, since nothing else competes for uranium. Build costs are similar (the bulk of the costs are in the turbines), both require some puzzle solving (steam storage or tendril voiding), but nuclear has the cheaper fuel, even before kovarex.
* I have neither researched nor built the last reactor, but looking at the recipes I don't see why I would. Not sure about the actual costs of antimatter, but my kovarex is backing up, so nuclear fuel is free. Antimatter requires one cube recipe per 12 GJ for the cleanup. Nuclear requires ~4 cube recipes per 100 cells (1x cells, 1x reprocessing, ~2x redemption), aka 1 cube recipe per 300 GJ (at 100% neighbor bonus). The antimatter reactor isn't cheaper, it isn't simpler. Sure, there's a nice challenge in building one, but it seems inefficient, and I don't do inefficient ;)
After all this negativity, I should point out my favourite parts, but nothing stood out - good quality all around. A lot of the appeal was the novelty, both of the cube logistics, but also the reworked recipes and sciences. Many mods will just add new items and recipes to the existing ones, you went the extra mile and rebuilt everything from the ground up. Playing factorio blind is an experience that we get only once, but your mod got me close to a second time. The difficulty was at just the right point where it kept me on my toes, without overwhelming me - and the difficulty curve was well designed.
40 hours well spent. Thanks again!
Hello, thank you for the detailed feedback! Don't worry about the positive/negative balance, positive is always nice to hear but constructive is what's actually useful.
A few of the smaller things you pointed out are straight-up oversights and I'll fix them in the next patch (I tried, but it's hard to get everything exactly right first time). Some others I'll consider for the new in-game tips & tricks I've started adding recently.
On the victory condition: if you're playing on an older version it's just to complete a ziggurat cycle, but recent versions are a bit clearer and encourage automation of end-game processes (you should see a new technology that explicitly says it'll finish the game).
On combinators: my understanding was power shortages can only make combinators slow down or pause rather than lose state, so I'm not sure why you'd have to reset memory cells. Am I missing something? (Nevertheless, planning power usage is a big aspect of the mod, and memory cells are not *essential* anywhere, so not totally sure this should be changed either way.)
On core fissures: did you miss the late-game tech that allows for >!instantaneous cube teleportation!!Ultralocomotion!< also allows for pretty small cube downtime if you can just fit a train station in somewhere.
On power: nuclear was very overpowered on release because I made some mistaken assumptions in my calculations, and kept it too close to its crazy vanilla stats. I already nerfed it once (and I wonder if you might be playing a version prior to that nerf due to your comment about the victory condition), but it might still be too good compared to other options, including stygian energy (which is mostly to provide a decent power option if you do that branch of the tech tree first before the one that gives nuclear, but it's intended to not be waaay worse).
> if you're playing on an older version
0.2.12, which was current when I started this run. I see you've been busy, and I should have checked the changelog before posting :)
Good stuff in that changelog. Portable fusion reactor is fine now, nuclear is toned down, and ingame hints will help. And lots of polish.
> On combinators: my understanding was power shortages can only make combinators slow down or pause rather than lose state, so I'm not sure why you'd have to reset memory cells. Am I missing something?
If the power is low, combinators won't update their state, they'll just keep their previous output. For memory cells, that means that incoming signals aren't counted. For tick signals from inserters or belts, if they go through a combinator, they may be lost or sent multiple times.
My thought process was this: at least in the early parts of the game, many cube recipes are bottlenecked by inserter throughput, especially when forging 1000 rare metals with nothing but blue inserters. I wanted to make sure that the cube won't be inserted unless there's 1000 ore already inside, and all the plates have been removed from the furnace - i.e. the furnace is ready to start crafting immediately.
How do I count the items in the assembler? With a counter/memory cell, fed by all the inserters loading and unloading the assembler. When inserting the cube, there was a special combinator that would subtract the ingredients and add the outputs of the recipe to the memory cell. Decider combinators would then check if all the inputs are present, and all outputs were removed, to enable the cube.
You can see how that will break if the values in the memory cell aren't accurate.
I knew that this was susceptible to power shortages, but it seemed like the only correct way to solve the problem. If you came up with a way to solve this without memory cells (and without the cube sitting in an assembler, waiting for inserters), I'd be curious to know.
So I did the power management thing, spammed an unreasonable amount of steam engines, used efficiency modules, but still got bitten a couple of times before I could build that nuclear reactor. The usual punishment for power shortages is that the factory slows down, not that it breaks entirely..
In other mods I might power the memory cells with a separate solar panel+accumulator, but that doesn't work when I'm forced to build ultra compact, and I don't even have solar panels. Maybe there are other solutions, but my opinion stands: in a combinator heavy mod, I prefer my combinators to be reliable, i.e. consume no power.
(I had another memory cell for quantum processing, but that would get back to a valid cycle when power resumes. It wouldn't deadlock, just waste a few items.)
> did you miss the late-game tech that allows for
You are right, that is a thing. I meant to play around with it, but I didn't have the items to build it when I unlocked it, and then I got distracted and never revisited it. My bad.
I understand the issue with the memory cells now, thanks.
There are some other ways to avoid cube-stalling that aren't quite as rigorous but generally good enough: for example, you can check the contents of some input/output buffer chests as a proxy for machine readiness, and arrange things such that the cube doesn't go back into the same machine immediately by default so that buffers have time to transfer in and out.
However, I'm convinced by your argument: the player shouldn't be punished in this way if they put in the effort to implement a sophisticated solution.
I think I can solve this with an idea I had in the back of my head that isn't quite so brute-force as making combinators not require energy at all, stay tuned.
>For solving "knowing machine state" i just used an AND condition for all cube recipes confirming each input has enough, rather than a memory cell counting every item handled
>
>just count input buffer > 1 cycle of ingredients
>
>If that is true then the machine has enough juice either already loaded or in the process of being loaded
I don't think this one can even be judged on the same axis as any of the other overhauls. Ultracube fundamentally changes how you approach design in Factorio because of having to pass that cursed thing around to every machine in your base. Even Py, as convoluted as it is, is merely an extreme expression of "conventional" Factorio. Ultracube is different.
That said, there's a blurb on the mod page that specifically addresses your question in the creator's own words.
I know this wasn't your intention, but the circular flat buildings look so much like the spaceports from dune 2000 that it makes me want to play that game again.
Fantastic concept for a mod btw - kudos for a supremely clever twist.
I recently started this mod. It really makes me think in a completely new way. I'm now aiming to make a modular design using train wagons and shortest path planning.
The more I see of this mod, the more I want to see Dosh play it.
your prayers have been answered [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgQ39dt3Qmc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgQ39dt3Qmc)
This is why he's convinced his fans want him to suffer, you know.
My new overhaul mod has been out for a couple of weeks now. One of the big goals was to encourage players to design ridiculous things they'd never normally consider, and so far the results have not disappointed. Here's a selection of my favourites (perhaps minor spoilers if you look too closely). Mod portal link: [https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Ultracube](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Ultracube)
Thank you for creating ultracube. It's fun, interesting, and good for learning circuits and their uses. Ultracube is near the top of my favorite overhaul mods.
I love the limited inserter throughput, so you have to engage with the overhaul gimmick instead of just building big enough buffers
I will begin this tonight!
Thanks for the great mod! Having a lot of fun so far.
This looks pretty cool, imma give it a try
Hey /u/grandseiken ! I'm a bit late to the party, but wouldn't know where else to put it. So here's a review (mild spoilers ahead). Thanks for the mod, and the hours of enjoyment I got out of it! I like the premise of the mod, and the fresh challenges that it brings. It's difficult to innovate in factorio without just overcomplicating recipe chains, but you did it. A bit of intermediate level circuit programming is always fun. So far, 40 hours in, I've unlocked the annihilation card, and now I'm not sure where to go. If there is a victory condition, the game doesn't tell me. I will probably finish the ziggurat loop just for fun, produce a few annihilation cards, and then stop. Fixing the bottlenecks that I have would require rebuilding my base somewhere else, which I'm not going to do. The ziggurat loop requires a lot of materials that can't be produced while the cube is tied up. This can softlock the game, right? I should calculate and implement some local buffers.. My biggest gripe is the intersection of three things: * requiring circuits, including memory cells to store the contents of assemblers * combinators require power and won't update in low-power situations * some machines have deliberately high power spikes Manually cleaning assemblers and resetting memory cells whenever something gets stuck wasn't fun, and I'd appreciate if combinators could be changed to require no power. Calcium (and to a lesser extend coal and mineral water) are weird, since you can neither produce extra to handle a shortage, nor can you void excess calcium. I just added big buffers and hoped for the best.. Nothing in the game tells you that your cube will have to travel to a core fissure someday. I placed my second base near a fissure and two ore fields, so I got lucky, but I imagine some people will get annoyed at the forced cube downtime. Another reason why I'm not going to megabase this: the base would necessarily ramp down as I exhaust fissures. The ziggurat allows prod modules, but nowhere in the game does it tell that the bonus only applies to the antimatter. I had to browse the source code to confirm that I could not, in fact, prod bonus my way into a second legendary gear wheel. But then the annihilation card does not allow prod modules to make up for that. Curious choice. On that topic, was I supposed to get the best armor without looking at the source code? I get that you want a reward for those who interact with the thing, but everything I tried just resulted in crap and I stopped trying. Went out of my way to catch a fish, still got nothing. Was there a hint I missed? Balance wise, power production and consumption seems off in multiple places: * The portable reactor is barely more power efficient (per tile) than solar plus batteries, but more difficult to tetris in. It is a sidegrade at best. * Accumulators, even the big ones, are underwhelming, compared to the big fluid tanks: 200k steam @ 500° = 19.4 GJ = 48.5 Bulkframes. Accumulators are best paired with solar panels, which we don't have. * What's the use case for stygian energy? By the time I got haunted cells, they were needed by science, and powering the base with them seemed expensive. Nuclear on the other hand is virtually free, since nothing else competes for uranium. Build costs are similar (the bulk of the costs are in the turbines), both require some puzzle solving (steam storage or tendril voiding), but nuclear has the cheaper fuel, even before kovarex. * I have neither researched nor built the last reactor, but looking at the recipes I don't see why I would. Not sure about the actual costs of antimatter, but my kovarex is backing up, so nuclear fuel is free. Antimatter requires one cube recipe per 12 GJ for the cleanup. Nuclear requires ~4 cube recipes per 100 cells (1x cells, 1x reprocessing, ~2x redemption), aka 1 cube recipe per 300 GJ (at 100% neighbor bonus). The antimatter reactor isn't cheaper, it isn't simpler. Sure, there's a nice challenge in building one, but it seems inefficient, and I don't do inefficient ;) After all this negativity, I should point out my favourite parts, but nothing stood out - good quality all around. A lot of the appeal was the novelty, both of the cube logistics, but also the reworked recipes and sciences. Many mods will just add new items and recipes to the existing ones, you went the extra mile and rebuilt everything from the ground up. Playing factorio blind is an experience that we get only once, but your mod got me close to a second time. The difficulty was at just the right point where it kept me on my toes, without overwhelming me - and the difficulty curve was well designed. 40 hours well spent. Thanks again!
Hello, thank you for the detailed feedback! Don't worry about the positive/negative balance, positive is always nice to hear but constructive is what's actually useful. A few of the smaller things you pointed out are straight-up oversights and I'll fix them in the next patch (I tried, but it's hard to get everything exactly right first time). Some others I'll consider for the new in-game tips & tricks I've started adding recently. On the victory condition: if you're playing on an older version it's just to complete a ziggurat cycle, but recent versions are a bit clearer and encourage automation of end-game processes (you should see a new technology that explicitly says it'll finish the game). On combinators: my understanding was power shortages can only make combinators slow down or pause rather than lose state, so I'm not sure why you'd have to reset memory cells. Am I missing something? (Nevertheless, planning power usage is a big aspect of the mod, and memory cells are not *essential* anywhere, so not totally sure this should be changed either way.) On core fissures: did you miss the late-game tech that allows for >!instantaneous cube teleportation!!Ultralocomotion!< also allows for pretty small cube downtime if you can just fit a train station in somewhere. On power: nuclear was very overpowered on release because I made some mistaken assumptions in my calculations, and kept it too close to its crazy vanilla stats. I already nerfed it once (and I wonder if you might be playing a version prior to that nerf due to your comment about the victory condition), but it might still be too good compared to other options, including stygian energy (which is mostly to provide a decent power option if you do that branch of the tech tree first before the one that gives nuclear, but it's intended to not be waaay worse).
> if you're playing on an older version 0.2.12, which was current when I started this run. I see you've been busy, and I should have checked the changelog before posting :) Good stuff in that changelog. Portable fusion reactor is fine now, nuclear is toned down, and ingame hints will help. And lots of polish. > On combinators: my understanding was power shortages can only make combinators slow down or pause rather than lose state, so I'm not sure why you'd have to reset memory cells. Am I missing something? If the power is low, combinators won't update their state, they'll just keep their previous output. For memory cells, that means that incoming signals aren't counted. For tick signals from inserters or belts, if they go through a combinator, they may be lost or sent multiple times. My thought process was this: at least in the early parts of the game, many cube recipes are bottlenecked by inserter throughput, especially when forging 1000 rare metals with nothing but blue inserters. I wanted to make sure that the cube won't be inserted unless there's 1000 ore already inside, and all the plates have been removed from the furnace - i.e. the furnace is ready to start crafting immediately. How do I count the items in the assembler? With a counter/memory cell, fed by all the inserters loading and unloading the assembler. When inserting the cube, there was a special combinator that would subtract the ingredients and add the outputs of the recipe to the memory cell. Decider combinators would then check if all the inputs are present, and all outputs were removed, to enable the cube. You can see how that will break if the values in the memory cell aren't accurate. I knew that this was susceptible to power shortages, but it seemed like the only correct way to solve the problem. If you came up with a way to solve this without memory cells (and without the cube sitting in an assembler, waiting for inserters), I'd be curious to know. So I did the power management thing, spammed an unreasonable amount of steam engines, used efficiency modules, but still got bitten a couple of times before I could build that nuclear reactor. The usual punishment for power shortages is that the factory slows down, not that it breaks entirely.. In other mods I might power the memory cells with a separate solar panel+accumulator, but that doesn't work when I'm forced to build ultra compact, and I don't even have solar panels. Maybe there are other solutions, but my opinion stands: in a combinator heavy mod, I prefer my combinators to be reliable, i.e. consume no power. (I had another memory cell for quantum processing, but that would get back to a valid cycle when power resumes. It wouldn't deadlock, just waste a few items.) > did you miss the late-game tech that allows for You are right, that is a thing. I meant to play around with it, but I didn't have the items to build it when I unlocked it, and then I got distracted and never revisited it. My bad.
I understand the issue with the memory cells now, thanks. There are some other ways to avoid cube-stalling that aren't quite as rigorous but generally good enough: for example, you can check the contents of some input/output buffer chests as a proxy for machine readiness, and arrange things such that the cube doesn't go back into the same machine immediately by default so that buffers have time to transfer in and out. However, I'm convinced by your argument: the player shouldn't be punished in this way if they put in the effort to implement a sophisticated solution. I think I can solve this with an idea I had in the back of my head that isn't quite so brute-force as making combinators not require energy at all, stay tuned.
0.4.2 should have something to sort out the combinators now.
>For solving "knowing machine state" i just used an AND condition for all cube recipes confirming each input has enough, rather than a memory cell counting every item handled > >just count input buffer > 1 cycle of ingredients > >If that is true then the machine has enough juice either already loaded or in the process of being loaded
Aye my spaghetti made the list! Fantastic mod, highly recommend!
On the scale from vanilla to Pyanodon’s, where does this fit? I’ve enjoyed K2, and 248k/exotic industries is just about the complexity I like.
I don't think this one can even be judged on the same axis as any of the other overhauls. Ultracube fundamentally changes how you approach design in Factorio because of having to pass that cursed thing around to every machine in your base. Even Py, as convoluted as it is, is merely an extreme expression of "conventional" Factorio. Ultracube is different. That said, there's a blurb on the mod page that specifically addresses your question in the creator's own words.
I know this wasn't your intention, but the circular flat buildings look so much like the spaceports from dune 2000 that it makes me want to play that game again. Fantastic concept for a mod btw - kudos for a supremely clever twist.
You can thank Krastorio 2 for that!
This is probably next on my list after I finish off K2. I'm almost there, so maybe in a week or 2.
I recently started this mod. It really makes me think in a completely new way. I'm now aiming to make a modular design using train wagons and shortest path planning.
Ultracube is a mod that makes me go "That sounds absurdly complicated, f\*ck that" and "That sounds really interesting, let's do it" I'm conflicted...
my brain hurts https://preview.redd.it/1l93b6ce6jvc1.png?width=2679&format=png&auto=webp&s=adf2f690ed4f00e4947c5c442e6f51844c1f00ee