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Glazius posted:Wow. I did not expect solar would need so much space, but I guess it's to balance out pollution being a big drat deal. Seems realistic to me.
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Nov 2, 2017 13:06
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Glazius posted:Wow. I did not expect solar would need so much space, but I guess it's to balance out pollution being a big drat deal. For reference, a single Steam Engine is worth 15 solar panels in terms of energy output. Add in the accumulators and extra panels you need to juice them up (so you get max power out of the panels) and you end up with fields of solar power that dwarf your main factory when you go full solar.
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Nov 2, 2017 20:43
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EponymousMrYar posted:For reference, a single Steam Engine is worth 15 solar panels in terms of energy output. Add in the accumulators and extra panels you need to juice them up (so you get max power out of the panels) and you end up with fields of solar power that dwarf your main factory when you go full solar. According to the wiki, you need 23.8 panels/MW when accounting for night-time (+ sufficient accumulators), so its about 21.4 panels(+ accumulators)/steam engine. Yeah, it's an absolute huge amount of space.
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Nov 2, 2017 21:11
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I checked out of curiosity, and I actually have some pictures saved on Steam of my old base from a previous playthrough! Since words really cannot do justice just how much space solar takes up. It's a few versions old and got a few mods visible in the screenshots but they're all just convenience / quality of life mods, nothing that actually significantly changes gameplay, so this should all still be mostly accurate for a vanilla playthrough. It's been ages so I don't really remember the context of these screenshots, but the first one conveniently is a close-up of almost one roboport's worth of solar panels and accumulators, probably as I was showing a friend how I was clearing out the stone in the way or something. The second screenshot is my entire base and rails I took after I launched my first rocket, so it shows off just how many panels I had by the end of my game.   Each one of those blue squares in the mini-map represents the range of a roboport with a one tile gap around the edge for walking. Saved as a blueprint, I could just drop one down next to another and the roboports would automatically connect, and construction robots would build the whole thing. Each blueprint also held pretty true to the ideal ratio of solar panels to accumulators. It's the easiest way to build large-scale solar power. You'll also notice that there are a loving ton of them. It got to the point where I was putting down concrete in the gaps between the grid just to make walking to the far end to place down another more convenient. By my count there's about 23 of those robo "cells" in the first picture alone, and as you can tell by the giant blue boxes in the second screenshot, there's even more in the north-west corner of the factory because I was running out of room. I'd guess there's about another 17 up there, maybe more since I could have built some with robots that were outside my radar range. That's something like 30 or more roboports worth of space of nothing but solar panels and accumulators, and I probably could've smacked down a few more to be on the safe side. And that little blue, grey, and yellow blob inbetween them? That's my entire factory. The solar panels take up as much if not more space than my entire factory. Now keep in mind this was in the version before nuclear power was put in, so this was a base running almost entirely on solar. Late game factories today will probably not need this many panels to keep the entire thing running, but this is what life was like for a Factorio player for a loong loooonnnngggg time. ousire fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Nov 3, 2017 |
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Nov 3, 2017 00:36
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ousire posted:words really cannot do justice just how much space solar takes up Yep. I'll try to put in a shot or two every once in a while to show how this is growing. Also as PSA, might be sporadic updates for a while. Factorio isn't a game I can play(well, at least not sensibly) for large amounts of time, because my brain basically wants a break from all of the thinking periodically. Case in point, a couple days ago I was working on the next update and I just had to take a break as I wasn't going to be able to productively move forward at that point in time. It'll keep going, just perhaps not as swiftly as my other LP.
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Nov 7, 2017 02:05
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That's very understandable. Factorio is a great great game, but it is also a VERY thought-intensive game. I'm playing a modded playthrough now and I'm only touching it maybe once or twice a week at this rate. Last time I played I spent over an hour making a spreadsheet trying to calculate ratios of buildings and I just kinda had to stop after that to prevent myself from getting a headache.
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Nov 7, 2017 07:50
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I am far more likely to end up planning to play only an hour and realize five or six have gone by, but I'm more okay with working with less than perfect ratios. Sure it makes a mess, but when it reaches a critical point I can rip it all up and make a more efficient layout to be able to make things in bulk easier. Ratios are something for being worked out as a tileable design, blueprinted, then placed again and again in future worlds with less thinking. If you're going into modded, I've heard of a mod that will help by just telling you what the ratios are, too.
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Nov 7, 2017 21:26
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Faylone posted:I am far more likely to end up planning to play only an hour and realize five or six have gone by, but I'm more okay with working with less than perfect ratios. I usually argue that ratios are mostly a trap before the late game. Getting a ratio wrong in some part of the factory means that some of your assemblers will be idling , either because their output is filled or their inputs aren't satisfied. Idling assemblers cost you a very small amount of power and some factory space. Neither of these are limiting resources. Build in a way that's easy to manually place and easy to extend later, screw ratios unless they're trivial (e.g. green circuits). Once you do start to build setups with module 3s and beacons in the late game then the cost of idling assemblers is much higher and construction robots mean that building something complicated isn't too much of a pain. Minimizing the idling in your design is a lot more practical and valuable as a result. Even then, getting "perfect ratios" is usually impossible with varying production and speed module coverage, and definitely not worth the effort. On the other hand, Factorio is mostly a game about satisfying your own OCD. If building a big complex block of assemblers where all input is exactly consumed and no assembler ever idles makes someone happy then, hey, whatever floats your boat.
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Nov 8, 2017 04:48
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Faylone posted:I am far more likely to end up planning to play only an hour and realize five or six have gone by, but I'm more okay with working with less than perfect ratios. I tend to play that way more when I go solo then when I do something like this. When it's for an LP, I'm a little more restrictive in what I permit myself to get away with. Not sanitizing screw-ups or anything like that, just need to be in the right frame of mind and make sure I'm doing something vaguely sensible. Xerophyte posted:I usually argue that ratios are mostly a trap before the late game. Agree with this too. For any large-scale production I think they should be fairly close. Beyond that -- it's for people with more OCD than me. I have enough.
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Nov 12, 2017 18:15
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After deploying the tanks, I did a big solar expansion, and got this: Another sign of progress. I then started throwing down some accumulators. There's a ratio for this which I don't know, but mostly I just wanted a ridiculous amount.  Zoomed-out for scale(you can see some assemblers for the solar panels and the coal field with drills to the east of it). This has eight of those 64-panel sections I showed in the video, plus a roboport with a few dozen accumulators in the middle. This size can generate 15.4 MW in daytime. That's not bad. I want four of these. Basic rule of thumb I'm going to go with here: if I'm ever using more than half of capacity, for any reason, I need more. Next up was expanding the logistics network. Here that is almost finished -- this is another minimap mode, and another new-to-0.15 feature:  15 roboports now, and I need one more to cover everything. As before, the yellowish area is where logistics bots can operate, construction bots in the larger greenish zones. Getting the roboports in place is just the beginning, the foundation of the infrastructure. Even at this point though, I gain the benefit that I don't have to go to a small area to be brought supplies; the robots can reach me in most of the places I'll be hanging out.  Here's the next step. Instead of long conveyor belts bringing everything to a central location, the bots will do that job and bring me what I need. The rub here is that I can't do this with everything; I have only so many logistic slots available and everything else will still follow the conveyors. Still, it's a step away from spaghetti and towards having the robots take over on transportation. Everything oil-related is now barely moving -- we aren't producing nearly enough petroleum gas for our needs. But I have other fish to fry yet. Next we need to get those accumulators working. Power Prioritizing Factorio will draw power in the following order: solar panels first, then steam engines, then accumulators. The first part is good; that means the steam plant is already working a bit less hard during the day already. On the second part though, you can end up with waste once you get accumulators going; it won't use the energy they've stored as long as the steam engines are up to the night-time task. The solution I'm using here was ripped shamelessly from a youtube video made by another, quality content from the Factorio community:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEOXGBYR6oM&t=325s With that in place, we can get a handle on how well our accumulators are keeping up and more importantly use less coal. Next up is modular armor gear and the combat robots, after I throw another batch of efficiency modules around. I decide to repurpose the research area as it's the most convenient spot -- and I've got to tear all that stuff down eventually anyway. No bots for this since I don't have any roboports to spare and production of them is virtually nil, so I've got to do it by hand. How archaic. I only take down enough(basically the green vials part) to create the room I need. There is ridiculous spaghetti here but I can clean up later and since the labs aren't running, the power overhead shouldn't be significant.  Piercing round magazines, green circuits, gear wheels. These don't take much to make. I even go with the dumbed-down method of just throwing a few stacks into a chest, rather than bothering with running a conveyor back down to central storage. Once I clear out enough biters to get to the oil and start getting more product flowing, I can throw roboports up here and have them bring me what I need. This is just quick-and-dirty to get me to that point. The assembling machine 2 will take almost 11 seconds each on these, so it'll be a bit until I have a decent amount ready -- but combat won't be quick so they'll have time to build more while I fight, then run back for a re-supply, etc. Shortly afterwards, I've got some modular equipment which I crafted. Slowly. While this was going on.  Here's how it looks. What is all this crap? Well, upper left green things are batteries to store energy. Below that, the 'binoculars' are the night-vision equipment. Generally that's not considered to be worth using, but I'm going to try it out anyway. Point is to show off the gear, right? In the middle are portable solar panels, each of which require several regular ones. These are the only option for gathering energy -- and right now I don't have any at all. I'll wait and see how long it takes them to fill up. Then on the right I've got a couple of energy shields to increase the damage I can take. Once I've got this powered up -- I'll add my portable solar if I need to -- and have a good supply of Defender capsules, I'll be ready to go on the attack again. Enough to capture that big oil field? I don't know. We'll see. I then realize that my solar blueprint has a flaw; slightly too big, meaning there's not enough room for the roboports to 'connect'. I'll deal with that later -- for now I just throw more panels down by hand while I wait for this thing to charge. When daylight comes, the equipment charges quickly but the batteries are taking quite a while. One of them could probably handle the load but I decide to max out on solar panels just to be safe. Soon I've got nine of them on there(90 kw power acquisition, 40 MJ capacity from the batteries). Yeah that'll take a while. 240kw each for the energy shields, 10kw for the night vision stuff. There's absolutely no reason to have more than one battery, so I remove one of them and get a 3rd energy shield. Takes me down to 7 panels.  I don't think I can do any better than that(well getting rid of the infra and adding another shield would probably be better, but I'll deal with that). Then I realize I made a minor mistake and the defender capsule assembly had stopped running, so I've gotta wait a bit more for those. Not really covering myself in glory here. I throw down some more big solar panels and accumulators, and notice during the night-time cycle that the steam engines are still being used, but only very briefly. Full solar is nearly here. Up to 30 capsules now. That's enough to start. But start where? Well, our pollution footprint has reduced dramatically. There's no bright red anywhere. There would be if we were seriously mass-producing much, but most of the smelters are silent. So the next step is press eastish to the oil.  This is what we need to take out to get the oil, in order. 1 through 3 are just knocking out small ones to avoid them 'reinforcing' the other nests -- and because just leaving them would let them grow. We want a clear path. Then it gets interesting. 4, 5, and 6 are all roughly equivalent and they'll be a lot harder to take out, bigger than anything we've dealt with so far. #5 is of course actually two bases but they are close enough together that for all practical purposes, it's one. The first three literally took three minutes total, and I could have done it in two if I'd really wanted to. Piece of cake. The biters have evolved a bit but not all that much. Now things would get interesting though. With the flamethrower you have to be careful of terrain. Here's what happens if you're not:  Some trees on fire, started intentionally just for demonstration.  A couple minutes later, as it spreads through the forest. It will eventually die out, but a lot of trees will get burnt in the process. Note that I've also shown the biter progression, the Medium Biter on the right here. More health and also more resistance to physical damage, so they are harder to kill. IIRC they are also more dangerous in terms of how much damage I'll take from their attacks.  Burning trees don't just do damage(the fire will also kill biter nests); they also cause pollution. A lot of pollution. This is just a relatively small fire, they can get a lot worse -- but as shown it would tick off all of the biters in the area resulting in more attacks. No thank you. The moral of this story is: don't use the flamethrower in forested areas. In clearings though, it's a fine tool. And it just so happens our next barrel of joy is a sizable group of nests out in the open. First up, let's see how these robotic capsules work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll8Qb0_sF3g A few things to remember here: ** Capsules are easy to use. Just click anywhere nearby and they'll follow you around. ** As discussed, there's a limit. In this case five of them(as shown by the number to the right of quickbars at the bottom of the screen turning green when I hit that number). I did a couple of extra, and it used them up -- but they just replaced 'older' ones. Extra clicks here basically just mean using up more capsules with no benefit, so be careful not to spam-waste them. ** Until the very end, I did not fire at all. The Defenders will shoot at whatever is nearby. You can 'swing' them into the enemy base if need be. ** They also can take damage(one was destroyed by hostile fire) and after some time has passed they will self-destruct. They'll need to be regenerated from additional capsules for longer engagements. Finally, notice the purple bar above the quickbar. That was green in previous combat videos; the purple is the amount from my energy shields. Until it's depleted, I will take no damage. So what to do with this information? Well, the five defender capsules I can have at any one time add significantly to my firepower without being overwhelming. In a situation like this, a combination of those, the improved modular armor stuff adding to protection, and circling the hostile base with the flamethrower at the ready seems a sensible approach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8VuxkQXzi4 This was done FAR from expertly, esp. at the beginning when I couldn't seem to figure out what I was aiming at. The benefit of the flamethrower is that you do damage for several seconds well after you hit something, so circling the perimeter while hitting the outer defenses of the nest cluster can be quite effective. The defenders and my increased protection were also on display here; those big worms that I took out with rockets at the end would have killed me very quickly without the improved armor and shielding. An effective demonstration that we can in fact do this. Bases of this size and somewhat larger can be handled reasonably well with my current tech. There is a price of my screwing up parts of this though; I drained basically all of my power and have to wait for some recharging. Running out of energy in the middle of a fight like this would be ... unpleasant. Quite probably fatal. The flamethrower still does some pollution by the way -- that's going to happen every time you use it. But it's not nearly as bad as turning the thing loose and accidentally(or even purposefully) creating a massive forest fire.  Less than 15 minutes later, I stood amongst the smoldering, charred, and decaying corpses of my slain enemies -- and a rich oil field. Success!! Or rather, the foundation of it. Getting out here was one thing. Now this location must be secured and exploited. That meant more fun with logistics. New power grid or connect to the old one? Refine the oil on site, or ship it back to the base? And how to ship it if we do so -- pipe or train? Etc.  Here's the location relative to the east of our base where we currently have all our operations. You can bridge almost any distance via pipes, but it seems a lot more sensible to not do it that way. A train station seems better. We're going to need radars out here. And turrets. And walls(it's a bit far to extend our main fortifications around the base/factory, so we'll just make an 'island' here). First up, that train route though is worth sorting out. The best way to send it seems clearly to be around the south end of the big lake -- and that means I'll want to get rid of that base which is to the south of me and northeast of there, it's sort of in the way.  Here's what night vision looks like, compared to the image I put up just after the battle. You can see the 'vision cone', but outside of that instead of being almost total blackness you can still see things almost normal, just with less color than usual. Essentially I don't really even need lamps with this thing, though they still help of course. It takes just over a dozen big electric poles to string power out here -- no problem at all. In the meantime I got the 14 additional pumpjacks we'll be needing crafted.  Here's what it looks like with 14 new pumpjacks(we have two back at the main factory) connected to power and basic piping. The oil isn't going anywhere yet, but the pollution from just this little bit of activity has made it clear I need to take out a few more bases nearby before they cause problems. I need to make another supply run for more capsules -- and in the middle of that something occurs to me. I never set up concrete when I changed the stone line way back when to build rail sections. Concrete is a long-term project because of the sheer epic crapton of it that I want, so I should really take care of it now. Because of the location where our stone brick furnaces happened to be set up, this resulted in a stupid-long and convoluted process of getting the water and iron ore(water esp.) over to the proper location. The concrete formula is 100 water + 5 Stone Bricks + 1 Iron Ore. From that, we'll get 10 units of Concrete every 13.3 seconds, or 45 of them a minute. Here's how that looks:  It'll fill this iron chest to capacity, and believe me that will NOT be overkill. For the amount I'm going to need, we will require an epic crapton of the stuff.  I'm now going to 2-hour increments for updates, so that I have more stuff to report. Here's how things look like then, 15 hours in. You can see here the extremely regular spikes in accumulator draw as they save up energy each 'morning' -- that's the orange on the graph. On the production side, we used 9.8 MW of solar, 1.6 MW of stored accumulator power, and and 935 KW of steam over the past hour. That all works out to 7.6% of steam, 92.4% solar. Not quite to full reliance on solar power, but getting close.  This is interesting; we're using more copper cable than anything else. The economy is definitely shifting. This is still very much a lull in our factory as we work on getting more oil production up and running; everything depends on it including moving to the next research phase. At that point there'll be a relative explosion in a lot of products and pretty much everything will need to be reassessed. The usual numbers: Item Count: 35(-5) Total Production: 152k(-37% from 241k) Yeah that's a steep drop. Resources ** Iron: 214k primary(3k used), 17k steel(26k used), 33k supplmental(none used), 304k western backup(24k used). Heh. Guess what I forgot to do. We need to divert some to the steel area. ** Copper: 44k(None) old, 678k(38k used) new. Changed the belt setup and obviously made it worse -- we're drawing everything from the new field instead of using the old one up. As can be seen, I'm not super at these kind of logistics. ** Stone: 377k(no change). There will be now that concrete is powering up. ** Coal: 180k power(4k used), 313k factory(3k used), 591k steel(2k used). With the switch to solar, coal is now a complete non-issue once again. ** Crude Oil: 6.9/sec(-1.7). Down to about a third of the original output. This doesn't include the new pumpjacks, because I haven't got the transportation set up to get that supply into the system yet. I did check and see just how much we'll get though. Initially, the maximum will be an additional 210 units/second!! One of the fields is 22.8, well over what our current two were when they started. I don't know how that even compares to the pipe throughput, but suffice to say we won't have a crude supply problem anymore.
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Nov 12, 2017 21:57
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Fire makes us stand at the top of the food chain. Burn baby burn! Burn that mother down. 
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Nov 12, 2017 22:30
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You can go one deeper with train debate, and go barrels v fluidic oil. Since it affects how it loads/unloads for trainlogic
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Nov 13, 2017 00:59
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After buying the game because of this LP, I just finished my first game - took me just a bit over 24 hours to launch the rocket. It's interesting how much of the game isn't necessary for getting to the "win" condition - I ended up not using either solar or nuclear power, didn't use the control circuits except in one location, and only had two basic trains to get iron ore. And there's so much to improve about my factory. I think the most basic lesson I learned is that you will always need more space for something than you think, so plan bigger. My total resources consumed: 2.2M iron ore, 1M copper ore, 900K coal, 130K stone, 2.4M oil, 22.6 MW of power used (on average). Looking forward to seeing more of this LP, as I go improve my factory and use the systems I didn't really try in my next game.
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Nov 13, 2017 15:55
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I understand why you're not doing a turret creep strategy for fighting bases, but I think bringing a few to set up a safe spot to retreat to while attacking bases would reduce risk substantially without making things boring as poo poo. Do you need to protect any power poles you'd string out to a satellite base where you're going to gather the oil? I'd imagine you don't, because they don't generate any pollution, so the biters won't give a gently caress.
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Nov 14, 2017 05:02
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Very occasionally they will attack power poles. The jerks.
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Nov 14, 2017 10:55
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More likely they'll get ticked off at any Radar's you put in a satellite base and work to get those. If they're not hacked off at pollution or Radar's then generally they'll only hit your stuff if it's in the way of an expansion party. That's old info though, I got fed up one too many times at the biters distracting me from factory stuff back when you needed them for science.
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Nov 14, 2017 12:04
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I think (after playing all of one game) that the biters will only destroy power poles if they are literally in the path of an attack. I had a couple of remote train-connected mine bases that were in operation for hours, and the only once did the biters destroy a power pole connecting to one of those bases. Annoying as hell, but it seems to be rare.
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Nov 14, 2017 15:34
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Veloxyll posted:You can go one deeper with train debate, and go barrels v fluidic oil. Since it affects how it loads/unloads for trainlogic I did barreling in 0.14(everyone did, since there were no liquid wagons). However to me I just looked at the way things are now -- it seems not the best to build a bunch of barrels that you don't need. I don't see an upside to it that makes it worth considering anymore. Gully_Foyle posted:After buying the game because of this LP, I just finished my first game - took me just a bit over 24 hours to launch the rocket. It's interesting how much of the game isn't necessary for getting to the "win" condition Congrats! Took me 40 hours on 0.14 and 0.15 takes longer -- I doubt very much this ends by 24 hours. Maybe you should be doing the LP :p. A lot of stuff is really in the beneficial but not necessary category and can be taken or left depending on your style. EponymousMrYar posted:If they're not hacked off at pollution or Radar's then generally they'll only hit your stuff if it's in the way of an expansion party. It's still true based on everything I'm aware of, and the attacks I've seen so far in this run.
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Nov 15, 2017 23:04
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Thotimx posted:Congrats! Took me 40 hours on 0.14 and 0.15 takes longer -- I doubt very much this ends by 24 hours. Maybe you should be doing the LP :p. A lot of stuff is really in the beneficial but not necessary category and can be taken or left depending on your style. Haha, well it's not like I was going in blind. Besides learning from this LP, I did do some looking up on main bus set-up, smelter design, basic oil refinery layout, and some other things. If I had tried it without that, it would have been such a mess. I did everything past blue science without looking up any designs, and that part of my factory was - sub-par, at the very least. I underestimated how much green-chip production I would need, and then when I tried to improve that, my iron/copper smelting was too slow, and then when I improved that, my mining was too slow, or my belt system was crap, or my train mines were crap, etc... it really laid down how important the basics in the game are.
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Nov 16, 2017 18:16
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 I could always just keep going with oil, but I think I'll be better off fixing the current, obvious logistics issues before creating new ones. So, I yanked four exhausted mines off this field and there are only five operational ones left. A fraction of the original and only enough to keep maybe a third of our steel furnaces running. On my way up to take care of that, I made a somewhat spaghettified, but effective and temporary, adjustment to how the copper ore feeds in together, ensuring that the majority will now come from the older field. Shouldn't take long to drain the rest of that now. On the iron side, I diverted the flow of several iron mines to the south -- their output will be added in to the steel draw.  I'll need to regularly revisit this situation, but it should handle things for now. Heading back to our new oil project, I decided I wanted to divert the train further south, so I took out a couple more smallish bases to make room for that. Then this ...  Another achievement. Also, the locomotive is on the track, train stop just to the south of it. Then I hooked this up:  Took a bit of doing to figure it out, but that's a liquid wagon with a pump to get the oil from the pipes into it. Pumps now require electrical power, which I think is new. Checked the pumpjacks, and a few of them needed a pipe connection which I'd neglected. Once those were all up and running, I could work on getting this train situation going.  Or not. Forgot to deal with this. To the northeast and east, we have some more business to handle. Can also the new train station and it's stupid name indicated on the minimap there. Off I went with the same plan -- but this time I had to stop in between to recharge and go back. Even died a couple times. Bastards were packed together more tightly and had more worms. These bases are close to the limit that I can take out with this approach.  This is something that I'm not real good at and can get tricky in terms of placing the rails, but the next step was to make a loop like this so the train can turn around. After that, a lot of track to lay all the way back to the base.  Once we get back, I use one of these handy-dandy things. A fantastic modern invention we've had for a long time. It's called a 'gate', and with no power whatsoever, it will magically go down via some sort of sensor whenever I or a train get nearby. Seamless entry back into the factory.  This is where everything will get unloaded. The location here is intentionally semi-remote, the very southeast of our current factory with room to add things as needed in all directions. A second train station, and you can see there's another pump here which I'll assumedly need to get the crude off the liquid wagon. To the left of that, I've set up a single mining drill on a massive coal field just north of here for fuel(already loaded some solid fuel in the locomotive). Eventually I may want to go with all solid fuel for the extra acceleration, but right now I don't really care and just want to get this up and running. Now I need another loop so the train can go back the other way(I could also use a second locomotive so it could go both directions, but I don't like doing that).  Here's how you set down the track -- pick a direction and then it's several sections at a time. Note that this will just end up in things crossing and won't actually complete the loop.  Either they've made this less fiddly and easier to work with, or else I've just gotten used to it. Either way, this is how it needs to look, so that it connects up fully with the previously laid track. Now I just need to send the crude northwest to where the crude storage is, and it'll get added to the system. Gotta pick some more pipes up, and while I do that I start playing with concrete: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_dsOs9Or9I&feature=youtu.be The basic idea is to 'paint' the ground wherever you want it. Some people will make really interesting designs and just put it where they want to walk. Me, I like to put it everywhere that I control(that is, everything within my walls). Claim the planet from the aliens and make it my personal concrete 'jungle'. Now this will take some time. What you just saw was 900 slabs, and it's only the tiniest fraction of what will be required. The last bit was a demonstration of how much faster you can run on concrete than normal terrain; 40% is the number. This is of course not at all necessary, and will make things take somewhat longer and use up some resources. But that's sort of the Factorio way. I'm keeping the needless building to a minimum in this game, but I am indulging somewhat here. Gradually it will get faster to move around the base as the concrete coverage expands. And of course, this wouldn't matter nearly as much if I designed things with good pathways for driving the car. I didn't, and as previously established I suck at the car. So this is what we've got -- different strokes for different folks. For storing the black gold, each wagon-load brings 75k, 25k per storage tank. We need three tanks then for it, and why not go some extra? Doubled that amount to six now. Going to abuse our poor little refinery here pretty soon, because we're all set up to get the train going. Of course, it can be used for things other than delivering oil ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOHSrVgstpI&feature=youtu.be Well, takes some practice to control as you can see, I need to brake a lot sooner. Nonetheless, it can get me out here and back a lot faster than just walking if I so choose.  Having established how good I'm not at dealing with controlling moving vehicles, what say we turn things over to the power of automation? This is the train scheduler, easily accessed by clicking on any locomotive. On the right, a zoomable minimap so you can see where you are, where the stations are, etc. On the left, we give the thing orders(or change the color and load fuel on the other tabs).  You can make these as complicated as you like, but this one is simplicity itself. Stay here until the cargo is full(crude on the liquid wagon). Then go to the other station and wait until it's empty. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The coal will get loaded for fuel much, much faster than it will get used up, so there's no need to add any instructions for that. Then once the orders are set, I switch the control from Manual to Automatic and away the train goes. Ain't technology grand?? So now we've got oil. LOTS of oil. I'm still whittling away at those two nearby bases bit by bit -- one down, one just started -- but eventually that matter will be handled. I decide to hitch a ride on the train next time it comes by(just get in and don't switch it to manual) but then it occurs to me. Dork, this would work better if you had enough storage for a couple of trips out here as well, so that the pumpjacks would be able to work full-time, at least until they got a decent amount ready to ship. So another half-dozen tanks set up it is. With that up, it's going to take a while(wagon's only half full) so I hightail it back on my own. First order of business is to upgrade refining capacity, as we've got crazy-go-nuts level of supply now incoming. For now I just add one more refinery and get rid of the power switch. It's served it's purpose -- now we're going to be cranking out a lot more petrol products, measured in numbers of refineries, not fractions of a single one. Gonna overwhelm our light and heavy oil storage soon. I could just add more -- but better refining tech is on the way. Another one of those things you wouldn't know on the first time through. It seems though that the next thing to do is finish the process of taking down the old research area, and expand the bus further to make a new one.  Heh. Look at all that wonderful pollution from our pumpjacks. Going to need to do a lot more fighting. To the south of that there's some trees, and then a nice big open space. If I run the bus south of that lake, that'll make a very nice place for our latest research 'outpost'. Of course I need to get more radars out this way. And expand the wall. Which means more turrets. And clear out more biter bases. And get more solar going to run everything, including an improved blueprint for proper spacing. And place the new roboports we're producing now. And take down the old research area. And take down the steam power plant that won't be needed anymore. And keep laying concrete. And figure out what the heck is going on with blue research(and another vial type soon). And ... and ... and ... my brain hurts! I WANT MY MOMMY!!! *Ahem*. Having the oil secured is top priority. It also seems best to me to fortify against attacks and improve combat abilities before going much further in taking out more bases; seems more useful than the alternative of grinding through more of this fighting. In doing so I'd like to transition to laser turrets, which means enough solar power to have a large buffer of that, and that means a better blueprint with proper roboport spacing. Having more oil should help crank the occasional roboport, at least for a bit here. Eventually I came up with a design that is once again not a perfect ratio, but I don't really care at this point. It's a 15x15 grid instead of 18x18. While the bots clear out more space, I wanted to figure something for getting laser turrets made -- but that requires batteries so I decided to stick with conventional ones for now. Just don't want to mess with expanding oil operations more until we get the next level of tech going. At this point I realized I may have gone just a wee bit overboard on the solar panels -- I've got a few thousand of the things ready -- so I limit the chests they are going into. I've also got efficiency modules almost everywhere. As we reach the 17-hour mark I feel I've just gotten the oil secured; very little is being produced now as we've got all the storage saturated. Of course that will change soon, but the station, train turnaround, and pumping area is all surrounded by walls. I'll add more turrets as need arises. Next up I'll need to expand our wall to the east so that the bus can go out to the new research area. That's going to take some time. Meanwhile, it's time to check in with another summary.  The production side is by far the most important right now. Specifically, how much the steam is getting used. It's less than it was early on in the past hour -- there was some disruption as I took down the old solar and put up the new blueprint. Right now we've almost got the 4th 15x15 grid up and running. Still this shows a sixth of our draw coming from the steam. I won't touch that until we are easily functioning without it.  Stopping solar panels from being built knocked out a significant amount of what we are building. Another case where I'll need to keep a close eye on pretty much everything when we get the bus extended and start knocking out the next research tier. Item Count: 37(+2) Total Production: 191k(+26% from 152k) Iron is back in it's normal top position. Resources ** Iron: 179k primary(17.5k used per hour), 3.5k steel(6.8k), 33k supplmental(none), 273k western backup(15.5k used). Soon the field down by the steel smelting will be completely gone -- I've already shifted more production from the 'main' field down that way. ** Copper: 18k(13k) old, 663k(7.5k) new. Looks like the belt setup adjustments worked this time, another resource field about to be drained. ** Stone: 371k(3k). Concrete is drawing some off this but not enough to be a concern. ** Coal: 177k steam power(1.5k), 309k factory(2k used), 588k steel(1.5k used), 1M train(none). All is still fine here. ** Crude Oil: 197/sec. Way more than we need; everything's stopped because we have a backlog of light oil stored(and heavy is close). All the more reason to get on the whole process of getting the next tier of research going.
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Nov 18, 2017 17:51
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That's some, uh, interesting track lay out around that lake to the south. Taking the scenic route around it. Have we started manufacturing grenades yet? I find they are indispensable when laying out my tracks and need to cut through some thick woods or rocky areas.
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Nov 18, 2017 18:03
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Locomotives are physically incapable of traversing that!  (I mean, I suppose Factorio's trains can turn like automobiles do, but real-world trains can only turn because the track arcs slowly enough for them to traverse without derailing. There's way too much mass for swiveling wheels to be practical.)
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Nov 18, 2017 21:21
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In the space future trains can turn on a dime. Without losing speed. Yes, trains can take that chicane at 300 kph. Fun fact: You can just run the track straight out from the station and make the smallest circle possible to turn trains around. Once you get a bigger network you probably want to make all your track one-way, but for now, that is a gate friendly option (You can only build gates on tracks travelling horizontally or vertically)
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Nov 20, 2017 03:09
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Gotta try not to think too hard about this kind of stuff. Factorio is semi-realistic in the sense that trains can't turn as sharp as the car can, they can't stop on a dime, etc. But if you really think about it, you never eat/drink/sleep, lots of stuff doesn't require power, the number of things you can craft in a ridiculously short amount of time, carrying a small city's worth of supplies with you everywhere without so much as slowing down ... you'll go mad if you get too picky.
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Nov 21, 2017 02:14
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Thotimx posted:Gotta try not to think too hard about this kind of stuff. Factorio is semi-realistic in the sense that trains can't turn as sharp as the car can, they can't stop on a dime, etc. But if you really think about it, you never eat/drink/sleep, lots of stuff doesn't require power, the number of things you can craft in a ridiculously short amount of time, carrying a small city's worth of supplies with you everywhere without so much as slowing down ... you'll go mad if you get too picky. Multiple locomitoves in your pants
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Nov 21, 2017 06:36
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Nah, it's because the player character is a robot himself, not a human. Besides the evidence of how much you can carry at once, and how you can craft things with your bare hands faster than all but the fastest of assembly machines, there's also the fact that biters attack you when you get too close. What triggers biters to attack your factory? Pollution. So why do they attack you? Because you are also a source of pollution.
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Nov 21, 2017 15:02
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Veloxyll posted:Multiple locomitoves in your pants I'm just happy to see you. *train falls out of pants leg.*
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Nov 21, 2017 15:50
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Tax Refund posted:Nah, it's because the player character is a robot himself, not a human. Besides the evidence of how much you can carry at once, and how you can craft things with your bare hands faster than all but the fastest of assembly machines, there's also the fact that biters attack you when you get too close. What triggers biters to attack your factory? Pollution. So why do they attack you? Because you are also a source of pollution. Are you saying humans are not a source of pollution?
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Nov 21, 2017 23:25
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Hey, I just happen to have a sensitive and easily upset stomach. No need to get rude!
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Nov 21, 2017 23:38
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Carbon dioxide posted:Are you saying humans are not a source of pollution? Human bodies, no. (Well, unless you have really bad intestinal gas.) The machines that humans build, sure. But in Factorio, you get attacked even when you're just wandering near a base without using any machines, which says that your body is an inherent source of pollution. That's what I mean. Oh, I see Poil beat me to the fart joke. :-)
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Nov 22, 2017 03:58
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 I start pushing the wall east, and have to do some fighting to get it as far as I want it. Nothing major, I think the largest base had 7-8 spawners. But I did run into these bastards. More than 4x the size of a medium biter, and look at the physical resistance there. They take just over a third of the standard damage from my SMG. It takes a while to kill them. I'm taking this as a sign that I need more research, because going up against a larger base with a bunch of those blue things would be ... unpleasant.  There's no radars or turrets up yet, but here's the new wall expansion to the east less than 15 minutes later. I think it'll have to go further east than this, but it's a start. Another 500 or so sections into the grinder for that, and the entire train route is now contained in our territory. Also, note the oil fields on the extreme east of our current scanner range. That's actually a hair better than the one we just tapped. Depending on how much we need in the future, it's another good reason to keep on heading out this direction. Each of our 15x15 solar panel grids is producing about 10.5 MW; we have four in place and there's enough clear space there to get two more in position. That'll get us up to abou 63 MW -- at the current fairly minimal level of production we're using 10. Then I finally got around to spending some quality time picking up all of the old research area. This is not at all necessary, but serves two purposes(three if count just simply tying up loose ends). I'd like to use that spot for more solar later on, and by removing some of the splitters(defender capsules are the only thing being built there anymore) the bus will flow more smoothly. The whole process required several trips back and forth to storage. I shouldn't have to do this again though; I'm hoping the next research area will be the final, permanent one. After stringing radars are gun turrets along our wall extension, I was ready to extend the bus. We've now got another four radars, 25 total. The power requirements are really very trivial by this point.  A couple thousand sections of transport belt and a modest amount of tree-cutting later, here is the new bus churning to the east. It goes south a bit around the lake, then cuts north and finally east along the top of that new section. From to bottom this is red circuits, green circuits, gear wheels, iron, copper, steel, and coal. Seven products on the bus for now. We're ready to set up the new area to include blue(and eventually other types) of vials. And that's means it's time for ... drumroll plz ... MORE MATH. Currently available projects range from 50 to 300 vials needed for the most part -- but can go as high as 1000. I'll eventually want to feed as many as 50 labs I think, double our current number. That'll allow for doing high-end projects at more than a snail's pace. The majority seem to be at 30 seconds per vial, though some go as high as a minute. Using the 30-second time as our benchmark, that means up to two vials/second will be needed(50 labs/30 seconds each to use is 1.67). Might be overkill, but that's where I'm headed. In order to get that kind of supply, we'll need the following: ** 14 Red Vial Assembling Machines ** 16 Green ** 14 Black ** 16 Blue We can already see here that this will not exactly be a small operation, even before expanding into other types. I'm going to start smaller, but I need to leave space to go nuts here. As for the new blue ones, they require Advanced Circuits(the red ones, on the bus), Engine Units(steel plates, gear wheels, iron, not difficult), and Electric Mining Drills(green circuits, gear wheels, iron). The only problem is the need for red circuits. First things first however.  I've got to extend some belts here and feed them into a lab area further south, but this has expandable to the point I've calculated I'll need it production of red, green, black, and blue vials. Further types will be added to the east. We're pretty close to the eastern wall here, but a more pressing priority is that there's an inconveniently-placed lake to the south. Time for another fairly recent Factorio addition: landfill.  Another example of what the the slightest error can cause. Somewhere along the line I severed a connection in the circuit network. The copper cables and small electric poles were no longer properly hooked up, so now I have a truly obscene amount of them. Well over a thousand poles, and more cable than that. The cable I'll use up eventually, but I almost never use small poles anymore. Then there are the downstream effects; in this case, overproduction of underground belts as well, since they were all stuck behind this on their way to central storage, and the network kept reading low on them, so they kept coming ... and coming ... and coming. Stupid. The reason I came back was to build this; landfill. And then I over-wrote the picture stupidly so I couldn't show it. But it's simple: 200 raw stone per unit, we can fill in any water areas. Chest to store the output from the assembler. Basic stuff. I won't need a lot so I've limited this chest to a pretty small amount, but it's pretty much vital.  Here we go. Having spent nearly two hours on this(other stuff like concrete and the network mess in between), I'm finally researching the first blue project: ** Advanced Oil Processing(75 Red, Green, Blue each). Not particulary expensive. None of the feeds are hooked up yet, but basically red/green are going to be on the left and right of the labs, blue/green in the middle, leaving room for two more vial types. I can also add a second lane on the outside if needed. I had enough red circuits stored(though not by much) to feed those into the blue assemblers; gotta fill in that lake before I hook those up. Don't need black yet, but it's coming. This whole thing is a hike south of the bus, to leave room in case future vials need more intensive production(have a feeling that might be the case). It's nice to be moving forward again though. Research Progress Not sure if I already showed this information, but at the moment: ** Completed: 53 ** Available: 40 ** Locked: 19 Not quite halfway up the 'tree' basically. While the oil processing research grinds away, I head back and take a look at some resource issues; I've left thing unattended for quite some time.  The iron field that originally served our steel smelting is gone. I'll probably eventually extend the smelters down this way to the east. Steel's only coming at a trickle, and I'll want to up the iron supply heading this way. I don't have time to do any more before we get our new oil processing finished, and I need to deal with that immediately. ** As a review from before, standard oil processing converts 100 crude to 30 heavy, 30 light, and 40 petroleum gas. ** Advanced Oil Processing requires 50 water, but results in a much better output, 10 heavy, 45 light, and 55 petroleum gas. I say 'better' because petroleum gas is what we want right now, as I need it in obscene quantities for sulfur and plastic, which form the foundation of a lot of products -- including those red circuits I need for the light blue research. ** Additionally and just as importantly, it also allows for cracking heavy oil to light, and light oil to petroleum gas, with the addition of water as well in both cases. This allows me to use all of the refining by-products as petroleum gas eventually, and is the reason I didn't just want to tack on more, and more, and more storage. To get the system running again at a minimal level, I need to relieve the pressure on the light and heavy oil by setting up cracking for each of those. I've changed to the advanced recipe on both of our crude refineries, but that's not going to do a whole lot since they are still pumping out some heavy/light oil and there's nowhere for it to go.  First step: chemical plant for cracking heavy to light by the heavy storage. Water and heavy go in, light comes out, and heads south to the tanks that store that. This still accomplishes nothing without the next step:  Another chemical plant takes in water and light oil, then sends out petroleum gas to the pipe network that uses it. Now it's just a case of balancing out the system, which is best done by observing and seeing where the chokepoints are, whether more capacity is needed anywhere, etc. It's soon clear that we need more light oil cracking. That makes sense, since a lot more of that is being produced than heavy oil with the new refining recipe. A second chemical plant is added to crack light to gas. Now the chokepoint is crude-refining capacity.  On the right here, there is no longer a backlog of light oil: all of it has been sent out early on in the refinery process. Eventually I'll use up all of the stored light and heavy oil, which could be a problem if I want to use it. I can always cut power to some of the chemical plants at that point and change-up the balance that way, but right now I want everything going into petroleum gas. These three chemical plants are enough to keep things going so that we have at least some level of production heading downstream. There are now some red circuits heading down the bus. Very few, but some.  I go to work with landfill for the first time. Works pretty much just like concrete. The greener part of the ground here was lake, but has been filled in. Now the blue vials can come down the distance I need them to. After merging them with the black ones to the left, then running them south to the research area:  Rather obviously we need more blue vials, but all four types are now fully connected; red, green, black, and blue. Progress. Time to trouble-shoot the system. First problem is obvious; I only had a couple assembling machines for blue vials in place, just to get things going. I up that to a half-dozen, leading to:  Red circuits. I figured as much. Time to trace that backwards. Steadily we are getting one every 10 seconds, a fraction of what we need. More than that are being produced, but efficiency modules have started back up, roboports need making, there's a lot of stuff that uses them. I'm surprised to see the area fully supplied with plastic(and green circuits and copper cable). I just need more. A lot more -- I've only got four assemblers, and will need at least a dozen probably. More than I think I have room for. It's time for a dedicated, expanded, and definitely moved red circuit area with some semblance of decent design thought going into it. For the moment though, I've moved on to the next research tier, albeit with some kinks to work out, and it's a hair shy of the 20-hour mark.  I've also neglected the power situation; we're still using some steam, so solar will need more expanding soon.  Iron's spiked to a new high and you can see all the cable that came out with the screw-up in the network. There's going to be a lot of continuing to work backwards through the factory and cleaning up various issues, needs for more of this or that, coming soon. Item Count: 41 Total Production: 215k(+13% from 191k) Still down somewhat from our peak(241k) but that will change, and soon. Resources ** Iron: 111k primary(12.7k used per hour), 31k supplmental(0.7k), 218k western backup(21.7k used). Down to three sources, and we used a lot more in the last hour than we had been. Between the current mining operations we only have about a six-hour supply. Safe to say I'll be a taking a closer look at that before I worry about end-product production. ** Copper: 1.2k(5.3k) old, 627k(12k) new. We're almost completely off the old field now, and the new one has enough to last us a while(25-30 hours). ** Stone: 351k(6.7k). The landfill took some of this, and concrete production continues. Still a very safe supply though. ** Coal: 173k steam power(1.3k), 295k factory(4.7k used), 584k steel(1.3k used), 1M train(negligible). No issues. ** Crude Oil: 206/sec. I must have miscalculated last time; it was a little lower. Double-checked this one. The train is actually having to make the occasional run now, but we're using far more than it can transport. Crude supply is not an issue for the forseeable future.
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Nov 24, 2017 20:02
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quote:Have we started manufacturing grenades yet? I find they are indispensable when laying out my tracks and need to cut through some thick woods or rocky areas. Forgot to answer this, but only for the military vials. I cut through stuff like that by ... actually cutting through it. I know, I'm a Neanderthal. The grenades aren't bad for what they are, but I don't use them.
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Nov 24, 2017 20:03
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Thotimx posted:Forgot to answer this, but only for the military vials. I cut through stuff like that by ... actually cutting through it. I know, I'm a Neanderthal. The grenades aren't bad for what they are, but I don't use them. My god, that must be torture... I find myself flinging around grenades like candy at Mardi Gras when I need to clear an area for expansion. And when laying tracks I'll use them until I get rocket fuel powered tanks to just bulldoze my way through while I lay tracks behind it. I know bots can also help clear them but they're so drat fiddly I usually don't bother with them. Psychotic Weasel fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Nov 24, 2017 |
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Nov 24, 2017 21:08
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You have to be careful with grenades though. I always end up taking a whole lot of damage. 
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Nov 24, 2017 21:32
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Red circuits are SOOOO SLOOOOOOW. It's inane. They're a key consideration for using Productivity modules (the orange ones) instead of throwing efficiency stuff everywhere.Psychotic Weasel posted:I know bots can also help clear them but they're so drat fiddly I usually don't bother with them. Personal Roboport bots are the best way I've found to hassle-free clear trees. They take most of the fiddlyness out of it.
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Nov 24, 2017 23:45
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I make my personal roboport do a lot of work. Or just designate trees in the Roboradius to do the work. they get there...eventually. I am really bad at lategame stuff though. Never enough production. Though even with 2 copper lines and 3 iron, I never seemed to have enough of both at the same time.
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Nov 25, 2017 07:21
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Eponymous Mr Yar posted:Red circuits are SOOOO SLOOOOOOW. It's inane. Truth. Veloxyll posted:I am really bad at lategame stuff though. Never enough production. Though even with 2 copper lines and 3 iron, I never seemed to have enough of both at the same time. If you have enough of everything, you aren't building enough crap yet. Right?!? But yeah, not that far away from feeling the pain of this.
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Dec 3, 2017 02:27
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One of the lessons I'm taking away from that last update is that three hours is too much. Gonna stick with two to make sure I stay on top of all the resources. The red circuit issue will get pushed to later, because I want to take a good look at iron(and probably throw up some more solar while I'm over there, by which I mean tell the bots to throw up some more solar).  Here's the iron belt heading from our initial iron field east to the smelters. As you can see, it's no longer full. Close, but not quite. As noted before, we also don't have enough going to steel. We just plain need more iron, period. I went out to check on the western field(doing just fine, only one drill exhausted), put another solar section down -- and discovered that the reason the steam keeps coming on is that I severed another network connection on accident, this one when I redid the solar from 18x18 to 15x15. It's way too easy to miss stuff like that. *Slap self*. I figured out what I wanted to do in terms of expanding our iron resources -- and then the next research came in. ** Advanced Material Processing 2(250 Red/250 Green/250 Blue). From now on I'm just going to call that color Aqua(the third stage of research vial after red and green). That way there's no confusion(RGB means RedGreenBlack, RGA RedGreenAqua). Hope that makes sense. Anyway, this one was a must because ... drumroll please ... we now have another vial type. Purple(production science packs/vials). These require electric engine units(joy), assembling machines 1(no big deal), and Electric furnaces. That last one we just invented. Once we are real secure in our solar supply I'll start putting those in. They run on electricity, not fuel like coal, as the name implies. Major pollution reduction obviously. Crafting speed of 2, energy use of 180kw. That's the same as our current steel furnances, so they work just as well while being fuel-free. However, if you haven't gotten off of steam power it's actually a net negative -- because the boilers are only 50% efficient. That means you'll use twice the coal to power an electric furnace via steam that you would to run a steel furnance and just burn coal. So yeah, we're just going to sit tight on research for now because there's lots of stuff to work on here. The new furnaces will require basically reworking all our smelting, but getting rid of the pollution and, even if you don't care about that, further simplifying the resource chain by eliminating the need for fuel, is worth the effort. First we're off to tap our biggest iron field yet, at over 800k. Even at that size, we're only talking about extending our supply by maybe 13 hours, possibly not even that if demand increases. I'm starting to reach a point where this is going to need to be done more and more often.  Near the north-northeast wall here. And hey look, there's some trees in the way. Not too thick at least. 28 mining drills required here.  Here's how the new iron supply looks right now. ** 1. Original iron field. Everything here runs south to the steel smelting. ** 2. Western field. ** 3. Supplemental. This will probably drain quickly now, as it's all being sent to join the original field, and get made into steel. ** 4. Northeast(new) field. If you look closely, you can see where the belt from this comes from the east and joins the western one. At that point it becomes a fast transport belt iron highway. Equal amounts from both sides. This makes for an nearly-full fast belt and it's not perfect, but it should be nearly-full for a while yet. Just this side of the lake in the northwest is another good-sized field -- but pollution there would easily drift across and aggravate the biters. Don't feel like dealing with that right now, and I don't have to yet. The seven big solar sections in the west, and the grey area in the middle and east that is covered by concrete, are also pretty easily visible here. Ok that's handled. Next: electric furnances. I'm going to want to build them a little closer than way out by the research complex. Ingredients? ** 10x Steel Plate ** 5x Advanced(Red) Circuits ** 10x Stone Bricks You just knew that the red circuits were going to pop up again here. I've got two problems here. Steel is already on the bus. So we're going to use more of it. Big freaking surprise. I need the new red circuit area, and I need to figure out the best way to deal with needing stone bricks a ways east of the stone area, and then also a freaking journey east of that, to the far end of the research zone where the new vials are going to be made. Yet another product that I need to make available on the far end. Further complicating this is the fact that electric furnaces are 3x3, not 2x2. So the spacing of every place I'm currently using furnaces is going to change. Depending on the playstyle, you can just keep shipping coal everywhere and say 'screw the electric option', since there's certainly enough of it. There's a not-bad argument to be made for that, but it's not the way I tend to do things. I spend a bit considering other options, but the bottom line is this: I need a significant amount of stone bricks in at least three spread-out locations(and who knows what else I'll need them for in the future). There's really only one answer IMO; it's time for an 8th lane on the bus. Stone freaking bricks are going on it. Never did this before -- but production vials weren't a thing before either. Factorio's up and complicated stuff. AGAIN.  This is basically due north of our oil refining/sulfur/plastic/etc. area, on the other side of the bus and just west of where we build inserters and and efficiency modules. Supply belts run south-to-north, output in the opposite direction to the bus. Tripled the previous production to a dozen assembling machines and I could multiply it more with little hassle. Room to the north and west to keep going for quite a while, so I think this will work nicely.  Not far to the east, the electric furnace setup is put in. Taking three items from the bus and putting them together is not at all difficult, and once again we're hooked into the circuit network to maintain approximately 50 furnaces, with a somewhat convoluted belt taking it back west to central storage. Now for the 'fun' of reworking furnace arrays. All of them. A little before-and-after:  Steel smelters and belt spaghetti, basically.  My groove was interrupted with another achievement. That's a decent little bit of energy. It's the only solar-related one(other than one for winning without using any at all). Back to what it looks like after the electric furnaces are put in and things generally cleaned up:  I had to shut down both iron and copper for a few minutes while setting this up, because the whole thing got wider and taller. That's why you leave room though, and it was only temporary. One thing I'd forgotten, or maybe never knew; electric furnaces, unlike their predecessors, having two module slots. That means the energy bill will only be 40% of what it was before(-30% for each of the two standard efficiency modules in each). And of course the coal now just goes directly to the bus, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. Less belt craziness, less energy going to power the coal miners, etc. At 22 hours I'm almost done with the new furnace setup, with the iron part of the steel line up and running and working on the steel-smelting end of things.  That zero by the steam is a beautiful thing. Amazing what actually having everything hooked up properly can accomplish. We are using on average right now about a quarter of what we can produce at peak, so we're good for the time being. It's reasonable to now consider putting laser turrets in play. The new electric furnaces are 5th on the consumers list at over 2 MW, and they aren't even all in place yet. One of the things above them are the accumulators, which don't really count because they are just storing energy, not really using it. The 25 radar stations use 7.4 MW/hour; nothing else uses even quite a third of that. For now. Keep in mind that this is a period in which no research was done, and that will of course be picking up along with adding new stuff we build from the discoveries made there into the mix. I'll definitely want to be monitoring this, and at the moment I'm leaning towards keeping the steam plant in place as a backup system. I can't think of a good reason not to, taking it down gains nothing other than satisfying a desire to make things look a little better. I don't need the space for anything else ... I think it's staying there. Unless I change my mind. . Just go ahead and imagine the production one because I forgot to save it. Wasn't THAT interesting anyway. Item Count: 23. Don't think it's ever been that low before. Total Production: 192k(-11% from 215k). This is another 'yeah, that's all going to change' thing here. The iron and copper usage and pretty much everything else(because they depend on it) went all over the place on the graph. Most of that is due to when I had to replace the furnaces. This should be the last time for that though, unless I decide I just need a massive amount of more space for it and put a different operation in place somewhere else. I think I've going room to expand quite a bit if I need to though -- I don't expect that to be a problem. Much more likely to be an issue is continually having enough ore. I'm actually rather shocked that the total production number is as high as it is with no research and the smelting interruption. An explosion may well be coming. Resources ** Iron: 75k primary(18k used per hour), 22k supplemental(4.5k), 180k western(19k used), 807k northeast(first usage). I like the current belt setup, but we still are going to have a problem with getting enough iron to the steel area. I want another source in order to make this more sustainable. 26+ hours at our reduced usage overall, but that won't last, and that small supplemental field's going to be gone before long. ** Copper: 580k(23.5k). The original copper field is completely kaput. This'll do for now. ** Stone: 338k(6.5k). In 0.14 stone was not used at all for any research that I recall. We've got plenty, which is good because we're going to need more than before. ** Coal: 172k steam power(0.5k), 285k factory(5k used), 581k steel(1.5k used), 1M train(negligible). Didn't use much and we're going to use even less now that we no longer need it as smelter fuel. The period of needing to be concerned with this pretty much at all is probably over. ** Crude Oil: 201/sec(-5). Still looking very good. I don't think our current supply is enough to make us secure for the rest of the game, but it's not something to concern myself with anytime soon.
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Dec 3, 2017 02:36
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Can you, like, recycle your old furnaces or anything? Or is the only option to just smash them into oblivion?
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Dec 3, 2017 16:17
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Coat it in thermite and light it up. Edit: Woops. Thought this was the crappy construction thread.
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Dec 3, 2017 16:37
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