Right now the base game is excellent and is just long enough to cover everything about building for scale. Mods like nullius and B+A take that idea and run with it by making more recipes, more process control. What's really new in there? Nullius adds terraforming and SpaceEx adds build the space ship - innovative gameplay! Nice. I notice that both are about building something huge in an original way.
So thinking more about that, here are some ideas of that can't be built in Factorio and how they might change the game.
I'd like to be able to...
...build an extrusion machine that turns many bars into a straight beam of great length. Maybe max length controlled by bar type. One long bar fills many adjacent slots in your inventory and on the ground. Many bars might stack in the same multi-slot and eventually hit a stack limit.
...have items take the same footprint in inventory as they do on the ground.
...put one motors and one beam together to make a linear actuator. same fit problem.
...put two linear actuators together to build a plotter over a paved surface. not sure how to instruct the machine to "print" - gcode?
...put several actuators together to build a gantry crane. definitely won't fit in inventory, but it can move enormous shapes medium distances.
...gantry crane + assemblers = new path to building and moving huge shapes like trains, which no longer fit in a player inventory.
...have two types of assemblers:
- those that can extrude a larger shape (like a beam out one end)
- those that can only produce items smaller than themselves. So you'd need 6x2 (?) assembler to make a train. Nearly all base game items can still be made in the classic 3x3 assembler.
...train cars would be required to move objects out of the reach of gantry assemblers and into the next phase of construction. The exception would be a train factory that directly builds train cars onto tracks. I suppose this means large assemblers would have a way to be attached to rail.
Could be outdoor cranes (think building construction) or indoor cranes (think warehouses, moving engines into car bodies, etc). huge structures like wint turbines already exist, "just" trade out the top for a crane... maybe the arm mods that set pick up and drop off points could be used here...
side effects:
- Gives players more reason to put down concrete - to lay the required foundations for the indoor crane.
- requires thinking about how to move huge items by train - two cars on either end of a long item? one car in the middle, precariously balanced? what happens when it goes around a corner and smacks another player?
- The challenge of building the rocket would split. what used to be "dump many parts into a large assembler" would become "build the VAB, assemble the rocket parts, train the rocket to the pad, raise it, and fill it with fuel"....plus the gangway to get to the capsule on top? The rocket raising machine would be cool, a special milestone in game.
anyways... it's a half-formed idea that won't leave me alone and I needed to get it out of my brain. Thank you for reading this far. Have a great day!