> If you had SLIGHTLY below 100% reliability in Factorio, the game would be a terrible grind limited to small factories.
I'd argue you do have <100% reliability in Factorio, and much of the game is in increasing the 9s.
Biters can wreck havok on your base. Miners contaminate your belts with the wrong types of ore, if you weren't paying enough attention near overlapping fields. Misplaced inserters may mis-feed your assemblers, reducing efficiency or leaving outright nonfunctional buildings. Misclicks can cripple large swaths of your previously working factory, ruining plenty of speedruns if they go uncaught. For later game megabase situations, you must deal with limited lifetimes as mining locations dry up, requiring you to overhaul existing systems with new routes of resources into them. As inputs are split and redirected, existing manufacturing can choke and sputter when they end up starved of resources. Letting your power plants starve of fuel can result in a small crisis! Electric miners mining coal, refineries turning oil into solid fuel, electric inserters fueling the boilers, water pumps providing the water to said boilers - these things all take power, and jump starting these after a power outage takes time you might not have if under active attack if your laser turrets are all offline as well.
But you have means of remediating much of this unreliability. Emergency fuel and water stockpiles, configuring priorities such that fuel for power is prioritized ahead of your fancy new iron smelting setup, programmable alerts for when input stockpiles run low, ammo-turrets that work without power, burner inserters for your power production's critical path will bootstrap themselves after an outage, roboports that replace biter-attacked defenses.
Your first smelting setup in Factorio will likely be a hand-fed burner miner and furnace, taking at most 50 coal. This will run out of power in minutes. Then you might use inserters to add a coal buffer. Then a belt of coal, so you don't need to constantly refill the coal buffer. Then a rail station, so you don't need to constantly hand-route entirely new coal and ore mining patches. Then you'll use blueprints and bots to automate much of constructing your new inputs. If you're really crazy, you'll experiment with automating the usage of those blueprints to build self-expanding bases...
I really considered getting into Factorio but your comment is exactly why I can’t touch it. I have certain demands upon my time that would inevitably go unmet as I fuss with factory.
Now imagine if machines got clogged 1% of the time and you had to fix them, or if items occasionally fell off conveyer belts onto other conveyor belts. The amount of redundancy and work that would create would be paralyzing, but that’s the bare minimum of recreating what goes wrong in the real world. I love factorio, but what always strikes me as most interesting is thinking about what it is you get to take for granted in one of the most complex games around.
That's a nice post and all, but none of that had anything to do with reliability. In all of those cases, those components worked exactly as designed when operating within their specification ranges (ie inserters insert when they have power).
The point is, it would be significantly more complex if things frequently failed even when "operating properly". And this happened at all levels of abstraction in a factory.
You're drawing what appear to be arbitrary distinctions between failure modes without making a good argument as to why one is a reliability issue and another is not.
My printer might jam if I feed paper crooked or poorly. My assemblers might jam if I feed incorrect components through misclicks, misplaced miners, or filled outputs.
My printer might fail from the entropy of wear and tear. My assemblers might fail from the entropy of biters attracted by generated pollution.
My printer might stall from running out of paper or a filled output tray. My assemblers might stall from running out of inputs or a filled output belt or chest.
Why is the printer arguably unreliable, but the assembler "100% reliable"?
Failures of my printer are not caused by magic faries sprinkling dice rolling pixie dust on my toner cartrige. Failures have physical causes. That factorio's assembler failures have modeled causes as well, instead of an arbitrary and magic dice roll, does not detract from those failure modes being reliability issues.
That my printer fails far less frequently than my Factorio assemblers points to my printer being more reliable than my Factorio assemblers. Your point that reliability could be even worse misses my point, which is merely that not only does Factorio already avoid the fiction of "100%" or "perfect reliability" - but that perhaps Factorio already models reliability worse than "real-life" in some aspects already.
It's still reliability, just who the whole system rather than the individual parts. The aliens breaking stuff is part of the whole system "operating properly"
I don't think it would be particularly bad for inserters inserting at slightly different speeds from each other, or occasionally destroying the item it was supposed to insert. Same with components occasionally breaking on their own.
I'd argue you do have <100% reliability in Factorio, and much of the game is in increasing the 9s.
Biters can wreck havok on your base. Miners contaminate your belts with the wrong types of ore, if you weren't paying enough attention near overlapping fields. Misplaced inserters may mis-feed your assemblers, reducing efficiency or leaving outright nonfunctional buildings. Misclicks can cripple large swaths of your previously working factory, ruining plenty of speedruns if they go uncaught. For later game megabase situations, you must deal with limited lifetimes as mining locations dry up, requiring you to overhaul existing systems with new routes of resources into them. As inputs are split and redirected, existing manufacturing can choke and sputter when they end up starved of resources. Letting your power plants starve of fuel can result in a small crisis! Electric miners mining coal, refineries turning oil into solid fuel, electric inserters fueling the boilers, water pumps providing the water to said boilers - these things all take power, and jump starting these after a power outage takes time you might not have if under active attack if your laser turrets are all offline as well.
But you have means of remediating much of this unreliability. Emergency fuel and water stockpiles, configuring priorities such that fuel for power is prioritized ahead of your fancy new iron smelting setup, programmable alerts for when input stockpiles run low, ammo-turrets that work without power, burner inserters for your power production's critical path will bootstrap themselves after an outage, roboports that replace biter-attacked defenses.
Your first smelting setup in Factorio will likely be a hand-fed burner miner and furnace, taking at most 50 coal. This will run out of power in minutes. Then you might use inserters to add a coal buffer. Then a belt of coal, so you don't need to constantly refill the coal buffer. Then a rail station, so you don't need to constantly hand-route entirely new coal and ore mining patches. Then you'll use blueprints and bots to automate much of constructing your new inputs. If you're really crazy, you'll experiment with automating the usage of those blueprints to build self-expanding bases...