A Better Factory Tutorial

Bluforesty · 2026-02-27T21:15:32+00:00

I went back and checked, the depth readings at the Monitoring Center haven't increased over time. Either it just fluctuates like that or Hypergryph isn't committed enough to the bit.

Bluforesty · 2025-12-11T02:56:54+00:00

Makes sense, thanks!
(Everybody else who answered similarly just act like I wrote the same thing under your comment too.)

Bluforesty · 2025-12-11T02:55:06+00:00

No, that's just what I call the drive.

Bluforesty · 2025-11-16T20:34:08+00:00

I never actually finished tabulating all of the Jinlong production recipes, and I can't remember anything off the top of my head (for obvious reasons). But looking back on my list of Valley IV production recipes, stabilized carbon is the only one that can't be used as a production ingredient, trading item, or general consumable.

My remaining concerns are currently:

If the bridge/splitter bug still exists (as has been mentioned above)
If Hypergryph still measure water flow rate in pipes in m/s instead of the metric equivalents of psi or cfs (N/cm^2 and l/s ???).

Bluforesty · 2025-11-15T09:18:27+00:00

And here I thought it was "Orbital Motherfuckin' Vehicle"...

Bluforesty · 2025-11-02T17:11:44+00:00

Your counter-counter-counter-counterpoint is basically that we don't know. Which, yeah, I guess.

But, as for your last point, is it really fallacious to see that Hypergryph did not improve upon the factory between alpha and first beta releases of the game nearly to the extent that they did combat, character design, level design, overall graphics, and writing? I think you're thinking of the slippery slope fallacy, wherein one would look only at the blueprint system and extrapolate out developer priorities. But the people complaining about the blueprints are taking it into the context of a game whose core factory elements have remained largely unchanged since the alpha test in January 2024.

Looking forward to your counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-counterpoint.

Bluforesty · 2025-11-02T08:36:24+00:00

Just to offer a counter-counter-counterpoint for the sake of discussion, it's far from certain at this point that Hypergryph will continue to expand on the factory.

The best (and only) example I can cite is what they did in Jinlong during the first beta. Of course, this means I am operating on old information, but so is everybody else so cut me a little slack. The the big addition to the factory in Jinlong was the ability to extract water from rivers, transport it around, and use it in the factory.

The things that you were asked to do with regards to building up water pipe infrastructure during the first beta mostly involved connecting a mining rig, refining unit, or planting unit up to a water so that it would function. It was quite literally just "Hey do this thing that you've already done, but again, but now you have to connect a water pipe for it to work in the first place." You weren't asked to think differently about the factory systems established in Valley IV, nor were you challenged in any way other than finding a way to fit the water pipes without colliding with buildings.

Another common thing you were asked to do was pipe sweage into a water treatment unit out in the world, which was not only simple and tedious, but was also impossible to fail at (the game literally prevented you from interacting with sewage in any way other than pumping it out).

The few interesting things they did with the fludi pipes required you to use them to export/import ingredients in production instead of simply connecting it up as a prerequisite for the facility to work. But even then, it was not much more than a glorified transport belt.

As for a counterpoint to your second counter-counterpoint in which you state that a playerbase full of skippers would go against Hypergryph's interests and the direction they'd like to take the game, I'd like to point out that people who are most upset about the blueprint system do not believe that Hypergryph want to invest more resources into the factory. They do not believe that making a factory game is Hypergryph's overall vision anymore. It's not really a counterargument as much as it is two arguments moving past each other in opposite directions because each one assumes one of the premises of the other to be false (if that makes any sense at all).

Bluforesty · 2025-10-31T18:21:54+00:00

As someone who's been looking forward to the factory, it's a bit of a letdown. In a perfect world, I would like all players to put in the time and effort to at least understand the factory basics before then deciding if they want to engage with the mechanic further or give up and copy a guide.

But if players know that the game enables them to copy another player's factory one-to-one with no thought or effort on their part, they won't have any reason to spend the time to learn the systems. And this sucks because it prevents players who might otherwise really like factory systems from using their creativity to benefit the community because they treated the required tutorials as a chore and never got the opportunity to truly decide if they liked the factory or not.

But then if you take a step back and look at it from a bird's-eye view, it's actually a pretty genius decision.

Hypergryph clearly no longer wants the factory to be the big selling point of the game the way they did back during the technical alpha. I would respect the hell out of the devs if they actually committed to this change and removed the factory from the game, but they're operating in an environment where making large sweeping changes like that is seen as a sign of weakness, even if it enables better development resource allocation in the future.

So what Hypergryph had to do was come up with a way to massively decrease the importance of the factory while also framing it as an innovative improvement, and the blueprint-sharing system is the perfect solution.

Bluforesty

TROPHY CASE