|
LonsomeSon posted:Waste Water, Sour Water, and then later Toxic Slurry are the things you want to find a way to re-use. Brine is fine! Fun fact: you can bury pipes if you're clever. I haven't done it on this playthrough yet because labor is expensive still, but you can absolutely cut a trench, run your water trunk through it, and have the trucks come through and fill it with dirt after to nicely bury your infrastructure (as it should be). And with the new surfaces tool, you can totally build a road on top of it so you know where they are! Currently I'm at 1k pop and right at the cusp of moving from T3 to T4 (need to start making electronics 2), and I have zero water problems. But I'm also playing on apocalypse and went heavy into rain collection. I 36 raincatchers prioritized into a storage tank, with groundwater acting as backup. I have a desal plant but... it doesn't do much more than make salt and chlorine and act as a strategic water reserve. I dipped below 50% groundwater once, which was about when I doubled my raincatcher footprint and haven't had an issue since. I'm wondering how long I can go without heavy desal investment... In other news, Apocalypse is BIIIIIIIIG. 28 October 0235. 
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 16:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 07:28 |
|
|
Yeah that map justifies trains for sure We need trains
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 16:27
|
|
|
euphronius posted:We need trains
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 16:30
|
|
|
I buried some pipes to get them across my "road" while allowing excavators to pass and was quite pleased with the results:
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 16:33
|
|
|
explosivo posted:I buried some pipes to get them across my "road" while allowing excavators to pass and was quite pleased with the results: I like how you integrated 'guard rails' to try to keep stuff actually using your roads.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 16:36
|
|
|
That owns dude. Good job
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 16:36
|
|
|
The Locator posted:I like how you integrated 'guard rails' to try to keep stuff actually using your roads. Thanks! I got the idea from some folks in the management thread, you don't have to actually build them just keep the construction job 'paused' and the blueprint stays but still blocks movement as if they were built. It kind of works. Sometimes they go rouge and make new paths.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 16:39
|
|
|
I've definitely thrown myself over the T3 cliff on my very first playthrough, and am feeling the effects. What had been a pretty natural and slow progression where population, food, and maintenance just naturally and easily grew is now feeling like a feedback loop of ever increasing demands just to inch forwards. I definitely went all in on modular sub-factories with truck logistics, but am starting to worry if I need to tear down and rebuild significant chunks of the factory with more belted interconnects, as my truck needs are growing faster than the factory it feels. As it stands, I truck around raws (coal/ore/wood/etc), rubber, and electronics. I'm just about to build my T2 vehicle parts and jump to the next tier of vehicles which should(?) help quite a bit. Have I just delayed T2 vehicles too long, or is my factory truly cursed?
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 21:55
|
|
|
If your buildings aren’t lacking for raw materials, and you’re producing enough diesel (and not about to run out of crude), then you’re not doomed at all. I get truck demand spikes all the time, but enough staring at the ant farm usually reveals the reason (and it’s often distant dumping locations). WithoutTheFezOn fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Apr 22, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:03
|
|
|
I'm kind of in the same boat, mini factories everywhere with trucks supplying them and am just breaking into T3 construction now. I've started building T2 vehicles with glass I'm buying with the materials and while it's not exactly rapid, I am starting to amass a decent collection of T2 trucks and excavators which I think are helping. Dumping locations nowhere near my mines are what's killing me right now personally. I think this would be less of an issue with ore sorters since the stone/dirt/ore can all be dumped in there but I made this bed and now I gotta lay in it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:08
|
|
|
I actually went in and enabled ore sorters on the save for this exact reason (that's an option btw) and it was definitely a good move. I've really only used it to belt and dump dirt but that took some serious pressure off my mines. Was able to drop like 30-40% of the trucks I had on mines back into the general logistics pool without failscading my coal production (again).
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:10
|
|
|
Fwiw I’ve made it to the nuclear stage multiple times only “bussing” coal, iron, copper, water, and maybe piping acid a long way because I want to quit worrying about it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:11
|
|
|
DrHammond posted:I actually went in and enabled ore sorters on the save for this exact reason (that's an option btw) and it was definitely a good move. Oh drat I had no idea I could enable it mid game. Maybe that is what I should be doing now that 80 construction mats aren't going to sink me.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:12
|
|
|
DrHammond posted:I've definitely thrown myself over the T3 cliff on my very first playthrough, and am feeling the effects. What had been a pretty natural and slow progression where population, food, and maintenance just naturally and easily grew is now feeling like a feedback loop of ever increasing demands just to inch forwards. The general rule, if you can call it that, is that every time you need to accommodate something new in your production chains, whether it be something as complicated as Household Goods or Computer Chips, or something as simple as building more trucks, you're potentially disturbing a fragile equilibrium. You might be fine until you build a new production line, which consumes a lot of construction parts, which consume a lot of electronics when replenishing, which your maintenance is also using, and you're actually only producing enough electronics to keep up with maintenance demand but you didn't notice because nothing was going wrong. Now suddenly you're behind on maintenance, trucks are breaking down, coal isn't getting delivered, and the power is out. All because you wanted to add an additional smelter line to your metalworks.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:14
|
|
|
Hm I just had an idea to have three factories each with their own dedicated smelting. Construction, maintenance, everything else (vehicles, consumer goods, research) . Then the issue would be just belting or trucking or ports for the ore
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:30
|
|
|
I just hit what I think is my first death spiral. I just wrapped up concrete slabs, diesel ran out because I didn't have trucks delivering coal, trucks are out of diesel, people starving, I just wanna redo it all without the first time playing mistakes. I'm trying to enjoy the game, but it often feels like way too many plates to spin and doesn't really lend itself to understanding where you're going to be going
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:35
|
|
|
One thing you can do is have a dedicated truck taking coal from the coal mine to a coal bin dedicated to just the diesel plant. You need advanced logistics ? I think to do this
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:38
|
|
|
Its a Rolex posted:I just hit what I think is my first death spiral. I just wrapped up concrete slabs, diesel ran out because I didn't have trucks delivering coal, trucks are out of diesel, people starving, I just wanna redo it all without the first time playing mistakes. I'm trying to enjoy the game, but it often feels like way too many plates to spin and doesn't really lend itself to understanding where you're going to be going Putting alerts on all the important storage bins helps tremendously.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 22:55
|
|
|
e: set alerts everywhere you might need to know something, if it never becomes a problem then they’ll just never bother you, if it becomes a problem you’ll be glad you had a notification. You can instant trade coal for some diesel, if you pause and set priorities appropriately your 2-3 trucks which can refuel from the Trade Dock might be able to shift enough stuff around to start fixing the problem. Also you can take a Loan for a much larger amount of diesel as long as you can pay it back after the problem is corrected. But, I do feel like I wasn’t harmed by doing several starts initially, to run into and then work out how to fix the worst problems (just not usually fast enough to keep going). Once you can avoid starvation, coal and diesel vapor lock, and your basic maintenance spiral then suddenly your latest game will be the one you play for 3-4 centuries. As for belts I loving belt everything, to the point where there’s just not space for very many more transports along the shoreward side of my settlement, not to mention vehicle ramps. I might actually have to move my Shipyard, something I’ve never once done or even contemplated, or demolish some housing. Basically what gets delivered by non-mine trucks is finished goods to the settlement, and Rock from ore sorters. Rock never accounts for less than 30 jobs per 6 months, because I’m running four mega excavators and 12 dump trucks to rip unneeded terrain out of where the map creator put it, and add it to the edges of my production zones. LonsomeSon fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Apr 22, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 23:16
|
|
|
WithoutTheFezOn posted:I start over all the time. But … Yeah this was always a frustration for me until I started utilizing the alerts. You don't need to set many, just one on the crucial resources like diesel or water or your potatoes so you get some kind of ding when somethings wrong so you have time to correct it. It's real easy to get sidetracked in this and lose focus on what's going on elsewhere so use the tools they give you to keep a handle on it all. Edit: vv Yeah same. You only have to restart due to missing electronics so many times before learning that lesson 
explosivo fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Apr 22, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 23:23
|
|
|
I also set alerts on the maintenance inputs
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 23:27
|
|
|
I experienced both maintenance and coal spirals before I figured out the power of alerts. Lucky that both times I was able to pull trucks and excavators from other projects quick enough to bootstrap back into production and prevent full-death-spiral.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2024 23:53
|
|
|
I am really addicted to this game right now. I just started playing and was having a good run. I started making my advanced diesel setup and accidentally hooked the sour water output to the waste water from my normal diesel setup. This up grinding all my fuel production to a halt, and with that stopped my rubber production, which stopped electronics, which stopped maintenance. I caught this at 30% maintenance not sure how I missed everything else. I wasn't thinking either, in my panic, I removed all the pipe and redid both as separate outputs instead of just adding the sour to the output of the waste. I have fuel redundancy now at least.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 02:41
|
|
|
Restarted and played right up until I was about to unlock conveyor belts. I also turned on ore sorting and gave myself 100% deconstruction refunds, which is really nice for how frequently I mess up placing things The ore sorting facility is much more enjoyable to play with, it seems like it should be the default despite the difficulty menu making it seem harder. I guess it was added in update 2? but still seems superior to have to disaggregate among a bunch of different silos
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 02:53
|
|
|
I have alerts on the coal bin at my power plant, but I should really put the alert on the output bin at the coal mine as that long belt-ride to the power can be ugly if it gets empty. Today I completely forgot that my number 1 priority when getting started was supposed to be sludge handling, so of course I did a whole bunch of other stuff and then noticed that my unity, which normally sits near the cap, was almost out and I was losing more monthly.. I checked my settlement, and all the poop water was backed up because the sludge storage was full. Oops.. added more sludge storage as a bandaid, then put priority pipe splitter in and reinstalled ocean dumps so that it won't fail again while I figure out how to handle the poop sludge. I am making a glass factory finally, after adding low-pressure steam turbines to my power plant. For some reason when sharing the cooling towers between low pressure steam and exhausted steam, it doesn't flow well at all, so I ended up giving up on that and just have low pressure steam cooling towers for when the high pressure turbines can't exhaust to the low pressure turbines, and separate cooling towers for the exhausted steam from the low pressure turbines and now it all works fine. I did come pretty close to disaster when I redid all my farming with belts and priority balancers and at one point dropped to a 3 month food supply before it recovered. I have 1300 population and I'm running 9 irrigated farms, 2 each of wheat, corn, potatoes and 3 vegetable. Wheat is for making bread, and the excess goes into animal feed which gets turned into compost and then organic fertilizer. I don't make nearly enough fertilizer this way to keep all the farms fertilized, but I figured it's gotta be better than nothing and just letting everything back up and be only food. Also a tiny bit of fuel gas from excess potatoes and corn, but only potatoes so far has had enough to make any, and it's such a small amount that I haven't bothered figuring out what to do with it yet. Once the glass factory is up and churning out glass, I suppose I'll start swapping out my truck fleet to the nice big yellow ones.. when I should probably be looking into how to get hydrogen up and running. I also need to build a clinic for my people and supply it with all those medical things because they keep catching a cold. My population is at cap at 1300 right now, but I have researched the T3 buildings so I can increase that if I need more workers.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 02:57
|
|
|
Something to note when using pipes for different products is that you can't mix. Pipes can only hold one resource and until it's completely empty nothing new will go in. A pipe that can hold 200 units will be completely blocked even if there's only one unit of water inside. If you need to dump/burn several products, do it by having a separate pipe and a corresponding fluid dump/smokestack for each resource. I found out the hard way when I needed to get rid of 30 water and 30 sour water, all my pipes could move 60/60 but my buildings were backed up all the time. The only way to dump several products and still use max capacity is if the pipes connect directly in front of the dump/smokestack/flare. The little junction that the game creates by itself moves products instantly, so it's handled as if the pipes directly connect to the building.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 10:01
|
|
|
I don’t think that’s right. Each pipe section (like 1-2 grids) can only hold one material, but I’ve definitely run mixed pipes before. Assuming unhindered flow.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 14:19
|
|
|
The Locator posted:I have alerts on the coal bin at my power plant, but I should really put the alert on the output bin at the coal mine as that long belt-ride to the power can be ugly if it gets empty. Sometimes it's worth building a 'relief valve' on critical infrastructure like waste treatment to tell you when there's a problem. You want a balancer and a container, with the balancer set to prioritize the container (which then leads to the rest of your system) and a shunt off the balancer to whatever the disposal option is. You put an alert on the container, and the shunt gives you time to react if the poop water container fills up by dumping poop into the sea. This is critical infrastructure for things like oil refining where if something like heavy oil backs up, you stop getting diesel. Sometimes the disposals are more complex too. My most hilariously overbuilt one is for loose food, which sorts potatoes, corn, wheat, and soy into bins, but also has an overflow condition for each where, if the product coming off the sorter can't fit in the bin, it's send to a mixer facility and turned into animal feed. If that feed can't fit in the feed bin, the feed is then turned into compost, which is turned into organic fertilizer for the farms. This way I can send all my loose food on the same belt, and if I overproduce any one thing it just gets sent back toward the farms as fertilizer. You don't need to be able to dispose of everything you make (if you're overproducing to that degree, rethink your system), but it gives you a way to prevent foul ups. I expanding my oil facility last night using a blueprint because I couldn't be bothered reinventing the wheel again. This one seems to do what it claims, but if something goes wrong it's going to be a pain in the butt to troubleshoot since I didn't build it. But it got me over the T3 hump. I need to get to microchips next so I can start the sprint for high-end nuclear and start divesting from oil and coal. My single ore sorter megamine finally collapsed under its own weight last night and I needed to put down separate ore sorters for each output.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 14:23
|
|
|
WithoutTheFezOn posted:I don’t think that’s right. Each pipe section (like 1-2 grids) can only hold one material, but I’ve definitely run mixed pipes before. Assuming unhindered flow. As I understand it, transports are whole objects from wherever you started building them to wherever you finished building them, and get split up if you make a junction along the middle. These objects can be any length. If you build a long pipe in separate sections, then it'll consist of a chain of pipe objects and each one can hold a separate fluid (although they'll have to wait for the next one to empty before they can outflow). If you build one uninterrupted pipe across the whole map, it will only be able to have one fluid in it, albeit a lot of it. The same logic works for conveyors, although they're happy to mix resources. A conveyor will be drawing power as long as there is a single item anywhere on it. In theory you could save power by making a long conveyor out of short separate sections, so only the part of it actively transporting something actually need to be powered. If this is a concern, though, the volume being shifted is probably low enough that you could have just had your trucks handle it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 14:45
|
|
|
If you’re trying to dispose of eg 30/mo waste water and 30/mo sour water down the same 60/mo pipe you will never be able to have a fully-free waste flow even though the liquid dump can handle the volume, because the pipe has to empty of one before the other can enter. You really do want an outflow pipe for every different kind of liquid you’re trashing, even if it’s only a contingency for recycling overflow. And keep an eye on Brine volume once you really get started desalinating, you need two and a half dumps for every four Desalinators.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 14:55
|
|
|
Pipes (at least, a span of pipe between junctions) are all one storage and can only hold one type of fluid at a time, which is different from belts. The only use case I've found for a mixed pipe is for the fertilizer input for farms. Connect the farm to a balancer with a one-tile length of pipe, and connect a branch for each of two fertilizer lines, and you can use the balancer to prioritize between the two fertilizers. Since the "mixed" pipe is just the one-tile section, it empties quickly. Handy to make sure organic gets used up first. Is there a way to have a truck move less than a truckload of something without using the global setting? I was trying to move a handful of enriched uranium across the map, and I couldn't find a way to do it without belting the uranium into storage then deconstructing the storage to force it to be unloaded. Enigma fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Apr 23, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 15:17
|
|
|
Hm, I'm using a mixed pipes setup for my copper right now with water or acid feeding in depending on whether I have acid available and stocked. It seems like it's worked so far but I guess it has potential to slow down if something needs to come manually deliver water because some squeaked in but the pipes now are filled with acid.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 15:53
|
|
|
It's doable, just in the cases of long runs or close-to-max-throughput, it causes issues.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 15:59
|
|
|
IMO Just say No! to mixed pipes. It's just not worth the hassle and troubleshooting time. It works if you design it perfect and know what you're doing, but how many of us are just winging it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 16:01
|
|
|
Yeah the liquid inputs for copper are so minuscule that you’re not going to run into the same throughput problem. You really want to have the Acid processing at all times though, otherwise you’re just throwing Copper away. Why don’t you have a consistent Acid supply?
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 16:01
|
|
|
LonsomeSon posted:Yeah the liquid inputs for copper are so minuscule that you’re not going to run into the same throughput problem. Eh it's just a temporary setup after just unlocking acid really, the copper production is happening closer to the copper mines while the acid is being made on the shoreline very far away so I was just planning on trucking acid over for the time being before moving one or the other closer.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 16:04
|
|
|
LonsomeSon posted:Yeah the liquid inputs for copper are so minuscule that you’re not going to run into the same throughput problem. Not to mention that sooner or later you're going to be begging for productive ways to use up your sulphur!
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 16:05
|
|
|
Incredibly valid to just truck Acid around, nothing ever demands it in large volumes but as you pass mid-game you unlock more and more processes calling for it. A lot of those can be co-located and run off the same mk1 tank feed. e: ^^ that struggle is real, but you can set up a trade route to sell half a hold of sulfur at a time for 3 holds worth of Sludge, which becomes a minuscule amount of Compost and a paltry amount of Fuel Gas in the Anaerobic Digester. Last game before I realized this, I had an immense silo farm of just sulfur but now it’s all replaced with an overflow Balancer and a trade pier. LonsomeSon fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Apr 23, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 16:08
|
|
|
LonsomeSon posted:Incredibly valid to just truck Acid around, nothing ever demands it in large volumes but as you pass mid-game you unlock more and more processes calling for it. A lot of those can be co-located and run off the same mk1 tank feed. Thanks for this tip.. I need to set that up because I have a stupid amount of sulphur piling up and I keep looking for better ways to use it. Given that my fuel gas supply isn't keeping up with my new hydrogen demands, adding another digester like this seems like an excellent idea!
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 16:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 07:28 |
|
|
You can also put sulfur into a Mixer with Limestone to get clean, inert, dumpable slag but I strongly prefer this method which gets a little dirt and useable petrochemicals. I’ve got five digesters running between imports and my own water treatment, and they’re not often idle. You’ll need at least that many; working through your backlog you’ll be receiving shipments as fast as you can unload your ship.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 17:04
|
|