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That's sort of the problem with Modular Armor thingamawhats, at the beginning you really only have one setup: A battery or two, a couple of items that you really want (exofeet, personal roboport, nightvision etc.) with the rest being piddly little solar power to fill up your battery/ies for some use at night time. The solar panels are pretty cheap to make and take up only a 1x1 square on your armor grid but they produce absolutely pitiful power. Mr. Fusion (  ), the other power source for modular armor replaces 'cheap and small' with 'holy shittake's amount of power I can run pretty much everything I want off of this one thing hell yeah.'Additionally, one of the things that offsets the Flamethrower's short range is that things it sets on fire stay on fire for a bit and also tend to set other things on fire. Edit: Update on bottom of last page.
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Dec 19, 2017 04:48
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Thotimx posted:I don't like the really short range on it. But I will give another try. There certainly is something of a fiddly opportunity cost to using the flamethrower - swapping weapons while driving, turning, and aiming while also driving slow enough that biters actually catch up to the tank can be annoying. I wouldn't blame anyone for just not using it, but it does have a niche. Unfortunately, once you get Uranium ammo regular bullets pack enough punch that the extra damage from the flamethrower simply isn't worth it anymore. As far as combat robots go, I've touched on this before but the real value of combat robots is just the economic equivalent of throwing money at the biters to clear bases faster. I never stopped producing them, but I also never bothered upgrading past Defenders either. I wasn't aware at the time that Distractor capsules were armed and spawned three robots per capsule, or that Destroyer capsules spawned five robots per capsule. My experience with modular armor and the first level of power armor are that you basically can't afford to power anything other than night vision all the time, though with batteries you can use a shield for a while. If you really want to be powering any other kind of module, you need to stock up with a bunch of batteries and solar panels, and temporarily swap in items to run directly off of battery power. A single personal laser defense consumes 600 kW, while personal solar panels only generate 10 kW. A fully charged battery MK1 gives you ~33 shots; five charged batteries will let you run a couple personal laser defenses for long enough to clear a biter base or two, but it's almost certainly not worth the hassle. Much easier to just throw combat robots at the problem, even if Defenders are largely ineffective against big biters and big worms. Sadly, exoskeletons are largely unusable until you get that better power source - you can just barely power a single exoskeleton once you get access to Power Armor, but you're only one or two research projects away from better power sources at that point so there's not much point. Exoskeletons have a constant 200 kW power draw, so in order to be able to use them constantly you'd need 20 solar cells just to power them during the day, plus enough battery capacity to last all night, plus additional solar cells to charge the batteries during the day. I don't think it's even possible without Power Armor Mk2, at which point you have better options. Olesh fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Dec 19, 2017 |
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Dec 19, 2017 13:13
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Is this going to be updated to 0.16? I don't expect cliffs, as that's a worldgen thing and that ship has long since sailed, but artillery could be fun. This assumes that updating to 0.16 doesn't break anything, of course, because if it does, then obviously we aren't going to start from scratch. Also, what are you burning to make your tank go? You can throw anything burnable in it, but better fuels give you better performance. Solid fuel shouldn't be too much of a hassle, and I think you have the lines set up for it (but I'm not sure). There's further upgrades, but obviously they're far enough down the tech tree that I just refer to it vaguely as "further upgrades." There's also your train, which can benefit from being given solid fuel instead of coal, but that requires giving enough of a poo poo to tear up the coal feeding line and turn it into a solid fuel production line.
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Dec 20, 2017 01:54
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This run will not be; I assume that 0.16 breaks 0.15 saves, that's been the case with pretty much every major revision so far. However, if there is enough interest in a Crazy-Go-Nuts modded game after I 'merely' complete the rocket-launching task this time, the timing could be right to migrate to 0.16 for that. Mecha Crash posted:what are you burning to make your tank go? You can throw anything burnable in it, but better fuels give you better performance. Solid fuel shouldn't be too much of a hassle, and I think you have the lines set up for it (but I'm not sure). I am making solid fuel, and I've used some of that, some coal when I couldn't be bothered to run all the way back for it. I might end up going with more solid fuel for the trains when I start shipping in ore. Or I might not. I'm undecided about that.
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Dec 20, 2017 03:31
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Saves are all forward compatible, but your factory may get slightly broken by gameplay changes.
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Dec 20, 2017 19:55
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Weird that you can't charge your armour by plugging into the electric grid back at base.
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Dec 20, 2017 23:24
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Yeah I definitely agree with that -- I've thought how much easier that would be from time to time.
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Dec 21, 2017 00:42
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So last session I made it halfway through the goals; new smelting area and expanding research to the final two vial remain. On the smelting, I wanted to get a stack of each(iron and copper) in place. Once I do that, and get the ore lines feeding into it hooked up, the output plates hooked into the bus, I can expand the operation whenever I need to. ** Mining Productivity 7(700 RGA) -- This is the final one of these we can do for now. +14% is a pretty significant yield. Next one requires the production vials. This whole smelting operation is a great example of something that would be done easier, and probably faster, if I bothered to use blueprints. Building roboport connections all the way up here is the only reason I haven't, but it definitely would be more of the Factorio Way*. I'm also getting more frequent attacks on the walls, one about every 10-20 minutes now. They aren't getting through; laser turrets are taking them out effectively, and based on the numbers they look to be expansion parties for the most part.  Here's the first part of it; new stack of iron smelters, with output hooked up to the bus, inserters, belts for ore, and power. I've only placed two out of every three furnaces because that's all we can use until we get the final belt upgrade. I haven't yet re-routed the ore here to the top of this though, which is all that remains to get it operational. It was important to do that first, because as soon as I start re-routing, less product is going to come from the existing smelters as their supply of ore will dry up. As an aside, don't play Factorio absent-mindedly. Stuff like this happens.  Yep. Sent the raw ore straight now the finished plates line. Because I'm an idiot. If you do this and don't notice, thankfully I did right away, you'll have a nice lovely mess all throughout your bus. Once I did it again, the right way, I end up with this:  Here, the finished iron plates enter the top of the old smelting column. Not that many yet but more are coming. Now, I need to finish connecting the rest of iron ore belts to the new area, and then take all of the old one down. ** Nuclear Power(1000 RGA) -- And here's the research I can build without the new vials. This hit in the middle of finishing up the iron ore connections, and I needed to handle that first. I don't know jack diddly squat about nuclear power. I know it's an involved process, and I know it needs uranium. And, uh, that's about the size of it. Let's see what stuff we have to work with here. New components: 1. Nuclear Reactor(500 ea. of concrete, steel plates, red circuits, and copper plates). That's, uh, a bit of material. 2. Centrifuge(100 Concrete/Red Circuits/Iron gear wheels, and 50 Steel plates) 3. Uranium Processing(10 seconds to process 10 Uranium Ore. Yields 0.7% of Uranium-235, and 99% of Uranium 238. 4. Uranium Fuel Cell(10 of these can be built with 10 Iron Plates, 1 Uranium-235, and 19 Uranium-238). At least there's some use for both isotopes. 5. Heat Exhanger(10 Steel plates, 100 Copper Plates, 10 Pipes) 6. Heat Pipe(10 Steel Plates, 20 Copper Plates) 7. Steam Turbine(50 Iron Gear Wheels, 50 Copper Plates, 20 Pipes) Ok then. Research goes silent for now, but this is of higher priority. We don't need this at all, but it would pretty terrible of me not to at least give this toy a whirl and see what I can do. I definitely did not just experiment here: I looked up some tutorials on this because I am not particularly interested in going through hours of trial-and-error to figure it out. For anyone interested, here's one that I think is good:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izJOVMQyLCc As far as we're concerned here, the long and the short of it is that this going to be a multi-stage process, and I'm not going to be able to just set up nuclear power anytime soon. That means it's not even necessarily going to be that valuable for this run, but let's take the plunge anyway.  This is the small, roughly 9k-strong uranium mining patch right where we started off this grand adventure. The drill looks weird on this surface, and here it is powered --- and doing nothing. That's because the mining process itself requires 1 sulfuric acid for each uranium ore that is mined.  After running some fairly stupid-long piping(with more to come), it works. Rather obvious step 1: get the radioactive green crud out of the ground. Next, we need to refine it, and this is where we're going to need a more involved operation. Definitely can't do that here.  So here's the plan; shove everything in the north. The New Smelting area shouldn't have to go any further up; I've already spaced that out. Off to the east where it says Ore Operations is where I'd have the great unloading/re-routing station for ore in the future. The 'Nuclear' section is a good open space, and you can see there's sizable uranium patches to the east and west. Those are by far the biggest ones we have access to, something like almost 400k combined. So I run belt from the lone miner which by itself can excavate the smaller area I just showed, mine these other two fields which involves truly ridiculously long piping of sulfuric acid, get conveyors moving that product to the south end of that clearing, and so on. The northwest field could not even be seen from overhead, so thick were the trees that covered it. There was quite a bit of hacking to do, and no good way to route it to the southeast to join the others without making a path through thick forest either. So this took some doing. Our turrets had done well against the last couple of incursions, but just as I began the tree-cutting there was a warning of a new attack. Southeast corner of the base. Exactly opposite where I was. They'd broken through an unprotected section of the wall.  I found this when I arrived. Another expansion party. They weren't interested in attacking me, just expanding. This is due south of the east end of the bus, southeast of our labs(though there's water between the two). No fellas. No pests allowed. Three wall sections damaged badly, five more destroyed as they came through. I put a turret up in case they decide that's a good idea again. Then it was dark, and my suit was out of energy(I've got an Exoskeleton to make me faster, which is great as long as it has power. The portable solar panels aren't up to the task anymore).  I ended up cutting down almost 200 trees to get everything in order. The last 20 or so of them, I was reduced to the ignominy of using an iron axe, since the steel ones wore out and I didn't have any steel on me. What you see here is that last patch, a dozen of what are now 23 operational uranium mines, all belts set up and converging roughly where I want them to. So that's Part One of the nuclear process; getting the uranium out of the ground takes an extra step(the sulfuric acid), but it's mostly the same deal we're used to with other mining. Now we need to process the ore.  These lovely green-glowing things here are the Centrifuges. This is Part Two, and will take a WHILE. Wasn't sure how many we'd need, so I built four. In retrospect, it might have been easier to just do the math. I'm going to need closer to ten. Uranium Processing produces over 99% uranium-238, which is useless for the moment, and 0.7% uranium-235. It also takes 10 ore to produce a single uranium isotope, and each centrifuge takes over 13 seconds to process each load. To get usable U-235 ... we're going to be here a while. That's why, as people mentioned earlier in the thread, you want to get this processing started ASAP. For reasons that I'll explain later, I'm just storing all the output in chests for the moment. Each Centrifuge, as mentioned, needs concrete, steel, red circuits, and iron gear wheels. And a pretty good amount of them. I grabbed up enough to expand this operation to 10, which should be about enough to handle our mining capacity. By the time those were in place, I was up to four U-235 produced ... along with over 300 U-238. I could at this point build a few uranium fuel cells and a reactor, but it would be unwise to do that just yet. We'll build up some more and let this run. There are more advanced processes coming. I returned briefly to the matter of tearing down to the old iron-smelting furnaces, since we've got a new column in place and operational now.  With research shut off for the moment, nothing is working as hard as it was right now.  This tells that tale as clear as anything. Still lots of copper cable since I snagged up a bunch of red circuits to make the centrifuges, but otherwhise we built about half as much as we were of the other main products. Item Count: 37 Total Production: 263k(-46% from 485k) Resources ** Iron: 920k(66k) primary, 413k(29k) steel. Still drawing just as much for the steel really, though that's backed up now as well. The original iron patch is finally gone, and a couple others only have about 40k left. In related news, we've got about 13 hours or a bit less on the clock here once we go back to the level we were at before the smelting change. ** Copper: 191k(26k) old, 526k(10k) new. Same 13 hours here. Tick-tock. ** Stone: 294(2k). Part of this is because concrete has stopped; I don't have any iron heading there yet at the moment. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 211k(3.5k) factory, 1M train(negligible). ** Crude Oil: 185/sec(-3). Uranium mining plus the new research will eventualy spike how much of this we use. ** Uranium: 396k(new). I expect this to be our last resource to add to the list. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 21, 2017 |
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Dec 21, 2017 00:42
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The amount of centrifuge's you need depends on the amount of reactors you want running, since the time it takes for a reactor to use up one recipe of fuel cells is about the time it takes for a centrifuge to produce another U-235 assuming you meet the law of averages and don't get RNG screwed. More importantly, you need to save up a lot of U-235 for Kovarex enrichment. That fixes the RNG part. Anyway, the big thing about Uranium Power is that Nuclear Reactors get a massive adjacency bonus. +100% massive. So it goes like this: 1x1 Reactor: 40 MW of power 2x1 Reactors: 160 MW of power (each gets +100% from the other) 2x2 Reactors: 480 MW 2x3 Reactors: 800 MW 2x2 is the sweet spot for getting the most out of your reactors since you need space to load and unload fuel cells. 480 MW of power is a pretty insane amount of power though. The big downside is that unlike coal or solar power, it doesn't scale downward. So once a fuel cell is in a reactor it's getting used up no matter how much of it's power is wasted. Turbines and Heat Exchangers do scale their production/consumption according to your need though, so most players store Nuclear Power as steam in tanks.
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Dec 21, 2017 01:26
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As long as you've got enough buffer, you're probably not going to get rng-screwed. Even less likely if you have surplus refining capacity. You could set up a reactor (remembering to leave space to expand it to at least 2x2 later on) right now to handle literally all your power consumption, and you'd still be saving up U-235 for later. The other way of making U-235 is mainly useful when you get up to the other thing that uses U-235. -- also, the ~optimal~ reactor layout is a 2xX block long enough to meet your factory's power needs.
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Dec 21, 2017 01:32
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Jabor posted:As long as you've got enough buffer, you're probably not going to get rng-screwed. Even less likely if you have surplus refining capacity. You could set up a reactor (remembering to leave space to expand it to at least 2x2 later on) right now to handle literally all your power consumption, and you'd still be saving up U-235 for later. Is it still 4 exchangers -> 8 turbines/reactor or did they change it again?
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Dec 21, 2017 01:57
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Veloxyll posted:Is it still 4 exchangers -> 8 turbines/reactor or did they change it again? For each reactors worth of power. I'll just copy the table I found online. pre:Configuration | Reactors | Exchangers | Turbines | Power | Power per reactor Single | 1 | 4 | 7 | 40MW | 40MW 2x1 | 2 | 16 | 28 | 160MW | 80MW 2x2 | 4 | 48 | 83 | 480MW | 120MW 2x3 | 6 | 80 | 138 | 800MW | 133MW
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Dec 21, 2017 02:17
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Instead of running a crapload of pipes, how feasible would "bring in iron and sulfur, produce acid on-site" be? Since you'd also need water, I'm going to guess "not very." Maybe using barrels to transport it instead of pipes? If I were doing it, I'd just barrel up a bunch of acid, manually lug it to the mining site, then throw it in a chest to be un-barelled and sent to the miners. But I think that comes down to "do you want a big pain in the rear end up front, or repeated minor pains in the rear end down the line?" Pick your poison on that one. I don't know how much nuclear nonsense you're going to get up to (since you're angling pretty heavily for solar stuff, I suspect not a lot), but as has been alluded to, there are...other uses for your nuclear material. 
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Dec 21, 2017 07:18
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MechaCrash posted:Instead of running a crapload of pipes, how feasible would "bring in iron and sulfur, produce acid on-site" be? Since you'd also need water, I'm going to guess "not very." Maybe using barrels to transport it instead of pipes? For my second (and eventually furthermore) uranium patches I made a dedicated train that pulls a tanker and a single cargo wagon. The tanker train (currently) gets one tank's worth of acid from my main base, goes to the uranium field, tops off the acid store there, loads up on uranium, then goes to the uranium processing station to dump that and cycles between those three stations. Of course my second uranium patch was a good 30 seconds away by solid-fuel'd train so... I kinda had to do that
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Dec 21, 2017 19:45
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EponymousMrYar posted:For my second (and eventually furthermore) uranium patches I made a dedicated train that pulls a tanker and a single cargo wagon. The tanker train (currently) gets one tank's worth of acid from my main base, goes to the uranium field, tops off the acid store there, loads up on uranium, then goes to the uranium processing station to dump that and cycles between those three stations. This is exactly what I do as well - have a train that always fills a tank farm of sulfuric acid and grabs all the mine output so it can be processed at a central location near the reactors. It's not even that complicated; it waits on a 5 minute timer then makes a round. Only thing you have to worry about is what to do with several chests worth of U-235 until you get the enrichment thing unlocked and covert it in to fuel.
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Dec 21, 2017 21:17
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MechaCrash posted:how feasible would "bring in iron and sulfur, produce acid on-site" be? Since you'd also need water, I'm going to guess "not very." Maybe using barrels to transport it instead of pipes? I'm not a barreling fan, but it would be better than the pipes. The main issue with this is that it basically needs to transport directly through(or it could go around) my factory. Directly between where I make the sulfuric acid and the uranium fields is stuff like the smelting array, concrete, etc. So making a loop around for what isn't really a huge distance(still long for piping, but very short for a train) wasn't really something I was a fan of. EponymousMrYar posted:I made a dedicated train that pulls a tanker and a single cargo wagon. The tanker train (currently) gets one tank's worth of acid from my main base, goes to the uranium field, tops off the acid store there, loads up on uranium, then goes to the uranium processing station to dump that and cycles between those three stations. This idea I like, but it's probably something more for the next game. We'll see, but I think I'm going to get minimal nuclear use here. I'll build a reactor near the end anyway even if I don't need to use just for demonstration purposes, and I do think I will need the power. Probably. Not going to build any more solar, but by my calculations I have enough to produce 132 MW of power. That's pretty much exactly four times what I am currently using. I'm going to use more ... but very possibly not that much more. So all this nuclear stuff is probably in the proof-of-concept category since this is just a 'finish-the-game' run here. Also, thanks for all the nuclear details everyone. I don't even have to figure out ratios and whatnot when I get to that point.
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Dec 21, 2017 23:50
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Those collision-based achievements seem like they might get kind of risky to acquire.
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Dec 23, 2017 07:53
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Lots of *Blah Blah Blah* in this update. You've been warned. So what next? While the uranium mining and processing continues, getting rid of the rest of old smelting stuff and putting a copper column in place next to the new iron one is first on the agenda. Went a little faster than the iron switch, now that I knew what I was doing a little better; maybe a half-hour was involved. Then I started upgrading the copper lane on the bus to red belts, which is going to need to happen pretty soon anyway. Finally, it was on to the research zone to put in purple(production) vial stuff. It's been long in the waiting. Before I do that, here's we stand: ** Research Completed: 71 projects ** Research Available: 33 ** Research Locked: 8 There's not much left we can't do; we're at about two-thirds of the tree completed now. The majority of what's left needs yellow(Hi-Tech) vials as well, but there are 10 things we can proceed with once purple is in place. Production Vial Ingredients ** 1 Electric Engine Unit ** 1 Assembling Machine 1 ** 1 Electric Furnace The last two I can make with stuff that's already on the bus. The only issue here is that the Electric Engine Unit requires Lubricant. I could be wrong, but I don't know anything else that needs it. It seemed the most sensible thing was to keep building them in place where they are(oil area), and bus them down here. It's either that or bus lubricant itself. Not sure if I'll need to re-work that area eventually, but for now I just expand to four assembling machines(and four more for the standard engine units feeding them). 10 lanes on the bus now. All of them are different products. Thing is taking on a life of its own. Once the production vials were hooked up(ensuring they only go on one half of a belt, as the other half is reserved for the Hi-Tech ones), the labs powered up again. The costs range from cheap(150 vials of 3-5 types each) to the obscene(ten times that much). Any logistic/production issues keeping research from happening is the first goal now; secondary to that, getting Hi-Tech vials produced eventually. It would take a while for any shortages to filter back through the bus, so I took at look at the needs for our final research type: Hi-Tech Vial Ingredients ** 1 Battery ** 3 Processing Units ** 1 Speed Module ** 30 Copper Cable Once again I need to expand the bus. Either batteries, or the sulfuric acid to make them. Again I think the best option is to build the batteries themselves in the oil area, then ship them here. I've already got a pair of assemblers set up there. I add four more for a total of six as a temporary stopgap. ** Automation 3(150 RGAP) -- P stands for purple/production of course here. This is an important one. The final step in assembling-machine progression, the Assembling Machine 3 can work faster than even a trained engineer such as myself, with a crafting speed of 1.25: that's two-thirds faster than the 0.75 we get from the previous version(the blue ones). The battery project is on hold while I deal with this. Essentially it's going to involve another example of moving stuff to the east. Currently assembling machines are built way back close to where the bus starts. The new ones require speed modules, which need red circuits, which require oil, etc. On the way back, I deal with one problem; red circuits are short on plastic. Another chemical plant for that; I'll likely need more but that'll double our output for now. ** Character logistics slots 4(150 RGAP) -- Another six spots added for new items to be supplied with. ** Worker robot speed 3(150 RGAP) -- Another 45% speed for the 'civil servant' bots. ** Coal liquefaction(200 RGAP) -- Yet another 0.15 addition. Basically this trades a modest amount of coal and a good amount of steam for some of each of the three oil products(Heavy, Light, Petroleum Gas). I don't anticipate using it, but it's another option for using that coal that's everywhere.  I discover that I broke a circuit connection while setting up the engine unit stuff. Same mistake -- AGAIN. This is the result. We, uh, won't need to build any more inserters. Ever. I've decided that in my next factory, I'm going to build redundant network connections intentionally so that I don't run into this problem. Who knows, there's a remote chance I might even be disciplined enough to do such a fail-safe. Equal chance of me just loading a bunch of crap I don't need in a chest off somewhere and either leaving it there or blowing it up.  Here's your latest entry in the 'Crap Thotimx Should Have Done Hours Ago, But Procrastinated On'. Aka the Factorio Way(tm). It seems that churning through stone bricks for the electric furnaces, in the production research vial effort, exhausted three of my six operational drills here. That made a barely adequate supply no longer so. Who could have predicted this? What's that, you over in the corner there? No comments from the peanut gallery needed. Yes, I did predict it myself a while back and said I was going to take care of it, then didn't. What's your point?? Err ... *AHEM* ... what was I doing? Oh yeah, new assembling machines need a production line. Roger that. ** Worker robot speed 4(250 RGAP) -- Starting to ramp up the costs more. Another 55% increase. They can zip around pretty decent now. The new assembling machine line is soon in place, at the end of the now-obsolete inserter line which already had all the required products in a convenient location. And isn't getting enough green circuits to do a darn thing. Hey, there's my next project! But also, a couple of other specs of the new assembers: they use 210kw of power(60 kw more than the previous, more than made up for by the increased speed) and can make anything with up to six ingredients instead of four(meaning basically anything). Essentially I now want to replace almost all of the tier-2 assemblers with the new tier-3 types. According to the electricity report, there's only 169 of those connected to the grid. Scattered all over the factory. So it's not like that will take long at all. In all seriousness, some don't need to be replaced, such as those making the inserters or transport belts or what-have-you. But all the research ones, those for the red circuits and blue circuits that take freaking forever, etc; yeah all those are getting replaced.  Here we go. Fix one problem ... and create another. We have enough plastic at the red-circuit line, thanks to having a second chemical plant on the job there. So now we don't have enough green circuits, and we aren't getting jack flowing downstream from here. Okey-dokey. All the green-circuit assemblers(six of them) are running full-steam. So what do we do, class?? That's right, we build more. Let's go for a dozen(which means a total of 30 including the copper-cable ones feeding them). That'll push us up to basically a full belt on the bus instead of just one lane. That was getting put up as we hit the next session-end.  33.4 MW average usage, which is about as high as we've been. The top few items here(below radar stations) are worth watching for the next few updates as we start ramping up again.  Raw stone, plastic, green/red circuits should all boost up soon. Copper cable is making a play to be used as much as iron. Item Count: 45(a new high) Total Production: 538k(+11% from 485k) Also a new high, and we'll leave it behind soon I'm sure. On the uranium front, we've got 40 U-235 now. And almost 6k of the U-238, but we are gradually getting the good stuff. Resources ** Iron: 829k(??) primary, 412k(negl.) steel. Steel was backed up, but has now broken loose again. Either way I clearly miscalculated the numbers here last time -- looks like we still have about a dozen hours. ** Copper: 150k(20k) old, 501k(12k) new. About as expected. ** Stone: 279(7k). This one will be worth watching now that we are drawing more for research. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 202k(4.5k) factory, 1M train(negligible). ** Crude Oil: 180/sec(-5). ** Uranium: 340k(28k). So basically with our current supply of ore we're looking at the same 12-13 hours. That may be enough, or it may not be close. I'll have a better handle on that once we start actually using it.
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Dec 23, 2017 14:24
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Thotimx posted:The last two I can make with stuff that's already on the bus. The only issue here is that the Electric Engine Unit requires Lubricant. I could be wrong, but I don't know anything else that needs it. It seemed the most sensible thing was to keep building them in place where they are(oil area), and bus them down here. It's either that or bus lubricant itself. Tier3 belts needs lubricant, so you’ll eventually probably want to have a pipeline over for it.
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Dec 23, 2017 15:32
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That's pretty prophetic, as in an update or two I did in fact deal with that issue; somewhat differently though.
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Dec 24, 2017 02:17
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I could start getting nuclear power going, but I'd rather have more U-235 first. We'll get into why a little further down the road. I'm also going to need to mine some more iron and copper, add another smelting column for at least iron which is at capacity, etc. eventually. But I think there are other logistic issues that are more pressing. That was only true for a few minutes. After getting the expanded green-circuit production going and handling a couple of smaller issues(red circuits were running short on copper cable now), it became clear that we needed a second iron line on the bus to handle demand. That ... is not going to be a small task. Another smelting column and more ore are needed. I don't think it's quite time yet to set up the train station for them, but it sure won't be too long. ** Inserter Capacity bonus 4(250 RGAP) -- Another +1 to stack inserters. ** Logistics 3(300 RGAP) -- This comes in just as I've got a new iron field mined, and the yield flowing into a partially-assembled second iron-smelting column. Now we can make it all go faster. Express belts(blue), and their companion splitters and underground versions. That means we can fill it that last third of furnaces(two out of each three are placed right now). Eventually -- we'll need a crapload of the new stuff first. And uh ... that's going to be interesting. They need the red versions, plus a crapload of iron gear wheels(more iron down the drain) ... and lubricant. Which isn't available anywhere near there. This is one of those 'Oh. Crap.' moments, since I was able to get away with not building any express belts in 0.14. I can either move the whole belt assembly line to the east, or make another stupid-long pipe, this one carrying lubricant, to the west. The infrastructure over there really doesn't fit for building the new belts though; a more complex line is needed. ** Braking Force 3(250 RGAP) -- Continuing to improve train efficiency ** Worker Robot Cargo Size 3(300 RGAP) -- They can carry up to three items at once now. I'd be getting a lot more research finished if we were satisfying more than 4-5 labs at at time, but first things first.  This slightly convoluted -- ok, more than slightly -- thing is really too far up to see exactly what's happening, in order to fit everything in. But basically, nine assemblers and several support products shoehorned in at various places to get the three express-belt products built.  Back to the iron smelting column ... which I've screwed up, as you can see. No room for inserters on the left side. Grrr. Time to tear a bunch of it down and move it over. While that was done, but before I powered the whole thing and hooked it up to the bus, we had a couple more attacks.  The new iron patch, in the north here, was 655k strong when I set it up. That's significant because it means I needed red belts to connect it to the smelting area. And by skippy, that's a lot of red belts. Also, the pollution is aggravating local clusters. I need to go clean them out. On the east end, we're getting expansion-party attacks too often for my liking as well. It's just time for a little more clearing-out with my good buddy the tank. That way I can stop getting interrupted -- at least for a while. I've strengthened to 2-3 laser turrets at their most common attack points, but they are still being more of a pain than I want to deal with. Best defense is a good offense, and all that crap. Out east, the clusters were bigger and closer together. This first part was simple and quick.  By the way, here's a shot of the centrifuges at night. They have an attractive -- and obviously, uh, unhealthy -- greenish glow. Turns out I've got the right amount here, as nine of them run non-stop, the 10th part-time. Ore never backs up. It's nice when things work out that way. ** Inserter Capacity Bonus 5(300 RGAP) -- Another +2 to stack inserters. One of the clusters out east was the biggest one I've taken out yet. It was interspersed with sections of trees which I banged the tank into repeately, and after using up 80 cannon shells and about 50 defenders(on that cluster only) it was only mostly gone. There was also a ridiculous part of it which was basically just a worm center. There's a reason I hadn't taken it out before. Still, it didn't take that long now that I have a better idea what I'm doing, and on the plus side I've mostly cleared the way to the next big group of oil fields, should they be required. On the way back in, I noticed we have a red circuits problem again ... because we have a plastic problem again ... because we have a petroleum gas problem ... because we have a refining capacity problem. I knew two wouldn't last forever.  Here's the worm cluster, after I finished them off. A number of big ones in there. Bastards. Anyway, it was worth getting more refineries going because I'm basically not going to get much of anything done until I do and it's a fairly quick setup. When I say I'm not getting much red circuit production, I mean one every 10-12 seconds is making it down to the research zone. So it's pretty close to zero happening at the moment.  Pretty much exactly as I hit the end of this update, I was comfortable with the new refinery situation, and got rid of three of the four storage tanks, since we aren't needing to save up much gas. It looked fairly balanced overall with four of these and a third chemical plant added for producing plastic. The gas was holding pretty steady. This means we're doubling the amount of crude we chew through also, so that'll bear watching.  Actually down slightly to 32.7 MW usage.  A rather humorous usage profile there for the copper cable(green). I think that's related to the petroleum gas/plastic issue and will go back up, but we'll see. Item Count: 44 Total Production: 535k(-1% from 538k) Pretty much stagnated here. Resources ** Iron: 1.33M(?, added more) primary, 354k(29k) steel. I'll need to re-evaluate this, and probably find an additional patch to wire into the steel side of things, once we get the second column up for a while. ** Copper: 114k(18k) old, 436k(33k) new. We can wait a little longer here -- but not much. ** Stone: 266(7k). Holding steady for now. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 192k(5k) factory, 1M train(negligible). ** Crude Oil: 174/sec(-6). ** Uranium: 308k(16k). Not sure why this has slowed down -- maybe my math was faulty, but more likely we've just used up a few mining locations.
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Dec 25, 2017 12:59
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We've still got quite a few things hanging in the air here. ** Uranium is on the back-burner, largely because I'm not close to needing it yet. ** Connecting the battery production to the bus as the first step towards Hi-Tech research vials. ** Getting the second lane of iron smelting going. ** Upgrading assembling machines to the latest tier-3 where needed. ** Upgrading belts to the express speed where needed(iron and copper smelting only now, for the bus). ** Expanding copper mining. ** Continuing to throw Efficiency Modules 2 basically everywhere. And then there's getting some iron sent to the concrete area again, which has stalled. There's some small patches that would do well for that purpose. And throwing out more roboports finally, which I've procrastinated on. And getting a few things that would be useful, such as substations, set up for production. Plenty to do for sure. What to do first? I decided to go grab some more iron ore to feed into the concrete operation. The fact that I'll need it for nuclear reactors was good enough reason for me. One of our current patches has 20k left. That'll work fine for a while. Then I slapped down a bunch of the new assemblers, and hooked the new iron line up to the bus. That was the easy part. Getting this to work all the way down the line is going to be fairly time-consuming.  Here I've got it down to between where I make iron gear wheels and green circuits. Each time a new product joins, I've got to move stuff over, re-lay new belts, etc. In this case the iron gear wheels have gotten pushed 'down' a spot, and the circuits are about to. Having twice the supply will mean a lot more than twice getting to the end, so it's well worth it -- but I'm essentially re-doing a significant part of the entire bus. And it's a pretty long bus at this point. It's also real easy to screw this up, and have, for example, circuits and gears get mixed up on the wrong exit ramp, creating a whole new problem. When the junctions get complicated, it's enough to make your brain hurt. This whole business is the main reason why you want to have a good swath of space on either side of the bus; as painful as it can be, it's a lot LESS painful than having to tear up and move all your production lines out of the way. Of course it'd be a lot better if you knew how many lanes of everything you need, and where, so you can make it that way from the beginning ... but I'm not that experienced with the game. ** Productivity Module 3(300 RGAP) -- I pretty much don't care. +10% productivity for 10% more pollution, 80% more energy consumption, and 15% less speed. Again, these are useless unless you absolutely need to maximize resources.  Every so often, after splitting off resources for one line or another, it's good to put one of these in. Why have a splitter when you aren't diverting anything? It keeps the load even. Any shortfall on either lane will be distributed evenly, so that we have an equal amount available for the next stop. This whole re-doing the main bus thing is a new Factorio issue for me; another case where the first time I went through the game, I simply put up with the slowness of one lane. It's better to know how big you want things to be at first, of course, but I had no idea about that. And since it, like everything else, depends on the flow of materials, research had ground to a halt. That's as good a reason as any to get this done. As I got further down the bus, things got more complicated with more and more stuff being added, and more lanes needing adjusting. I was interrupted some by biter attacks but not all that much. The whole process of adding the second iron belt took nearly two hours from start to finish. Thankfully, it will be much simpler and faster if I have to do this again; I don't need to put any more early on, so I should be able to just route additional lanes to join much closer to the research area. Also, I can upgrade from here with the express(blue) to increase the throughput quite a bit. Afterwards, research wasn't doing anything even so. Soon I discovered why. I had inadvertently, while 'fixing' the circuit network, attached a wire to an inserter at a pipe assembler. So it wasn't operating ... which meant no pipe went out, no engine units got made, no electric engine units got made, etc. etc. etc.  Once that was fixed, the next step was to Go Blue. So far what's been done here is to replace the output lines for the plates in the smelting arrays with blue express belts, and fill in the every-third-furnace gap. There's not enough ore supply coming through yet: I'll have to upgrade at least some of those to red belts in order for that to keep pace, but first things first. Replacing three lanes(two iron, one copper) with express belts for the full length of the bus will take a bit of time. There's a lot of backup now from the previous long-winded bus maintenance, so I don't need this right away; but there's no good reason not to get it in place. Research has noticeably resumed, and this gives me something to do while I wait for other issues to make their presence felt. It soon became clear we could do this a lot faster with more engine units. Doubling that, to start, was fairly simple. ** Braking Force 4(350 RGAP) -- Another 15% improvement. A fresh supply of the newest assemblers was soon available, and as soon as they were put down in some more key areas including the red-circuit production line, progress accelerated quickly. ** Inserter capacity bonus 6(400 RGAP) -- +2 more for the stack inserters, which can carry a ton now. Then a new problem: running low on lubricant. I don't use it for many things, but those things are important: express belts and electric engine units for the research. To solve this, I first stopped cracking heavy oil into light. Only a minor effect. I switched one refinery to standard oil processing(less gas, more heavy oil). Still just enough to run one Lubricant plant, which is at best only half of what I need. More drastic steps were required. I added two new refineries, both running Basic Processing; this makes three on each process, six refineries total. ** Braking Force 5(450 RGAP) -- Continuing to unnecessarily improve train performance. With the new refineries in place, and a second lubricant plant(I added a third as well, but so far it's completely redundant and not getting used), it looked like there was enough to keep everything running. I also added a third plant for cracking light oil to petroleum gas, since we'll have more of that now. It looks like we have a light oil and gas surplus now -- which means the supply of heavy oil/lubricant might well slow down once we get 'full' on those.  Too far up to really see much, but this is the 'oil processing' area now. Six refineries along the left, lubricant plants in the upper-right, light oil cracking in the middle, sulfur and plastic operations on the lower right. We're definitely expanding here, and the pressure on the crude supply is definitely going to increase -- I still expect us to be well below what our current production maximum is though. ** Character logistics slots 5(500 RGAP) -- Another welcomed addition of six more spots. Up to 30 now, and I've been gradually expanding what I'm asking for. I notice two things at this point. One, we're up to 12-14 labs active nonstop, which is better. Not good yet, but better. I want to let things run a bit and see how that shakes out. Also, it's time to start building logistics bots again. I've got a bunch of construction ones in storage. I started 'blueing' up the bus lines a little further, and I also realized it was past time to spread the roboports out further. Really no reason not to at this stage. ** Lab Research Speed 5(500 RGAP) -- Another 50% increase. Missed a screenshot here, but basically it showed the bus -- and that our supply of steel and gear wheels is quite lacking right now. It seemed useful to take a break from upgrading this, that, and everything in between to increase our production of those. That's really the best way to describe what's going on now. Not many tasks left to research before we make the final jump to Hi-Tech. Some of this I've already stated, but in the meantime, I'm ** Upgrading iron/copper bus lanes to blue as those components become available. ** Upgrading to tier-3 'yellow' assembling machines(almost done) ** Extending roboport network and building logistics bots; I'm putting four storage chests at each roboport, just because. This is a 'self-replicating' thing; as more logistics bots are added I get refilled faster; as more roboports are added I get refilled more frequently; therefore I have less to concern myself with going to get, esp. now that I've got logistics slots enough for most things I need. ** Slapping down more concrete from time to time. ** Checking on logistics issues such as the just-mentioned bus shortages. And so on. I'm basically doing a lot of maintenance/upgrade stuff to improve the overall smooth-running of the factory. Steel was simple to increase production 50%; eight more furnaces of each. To do more would be somewhat problematic now, but it'll be a lot easier once we get more room -- that means using up the older of our two copper patches, which won't take long. So that's in the 'coming, just not yet' category. Gear wheels need more iron, which is an issue because ore is starting to become an issue. And that one is a real red-flag concern. Very quickly, it has become enough of an issue that we have one operation research lab. ONE LAB. So, pun intended, we're basically spinning our wheels at the moment. After doing a tour of all our major sources, I came up with three conclusions: ** A handful of drills are done, and eliminated. This is no surprise, but shouldn't have caused such a dropoff. ** I did something stupid. With any major Factorio issue, that's really the usual cause. One of our more productive patches was directed towards the concrete assembler, when it was supposed to be one of the dying ones. I fixed that with a quick and simple redirect, but that's really just putting my fingers in the dam. ** It's time for a big mining expansion. As in, NOW. After looking at where that's going to come from, I added in one more: ** It's time for the the big train station I've been threatening to do.  Spread out north-to-south on the east end of our territory are several iron patches. I estimate the combined yield to be 3.5 million. To put that in perspective, we've used 2.7 million total iron from the start of the game to now. So this is kind of a big deal. Not only are they spread out north-to-south though, but they are about three times as far away from the smelting array as our current train line for the crude oil runs. So basically, it's just time: time for a more involved train system. This is another one of those 'I've never done this before' moments. After thinking about it for a while, a few things became obvious: ** I'm going to need multiple trains on the same network, so train signals are going to need to become a thing. And I've got to figure out how to use them(checks the tutorial laid out in the LP thread). ** I want to refuel the locomotives at the main drop-off station. Solid fuel definitely here; I don't need it for the crude oil line, but performance is really going to matter on this one. ** Extending the logistics(roboport) network out to where I'm going to build the Grand Ore Processing Station needs to happen yesterday. The solid fuel is the simplest and easiest issue to deal with. I think the one plant I have set up for it can build them faster than they'll get used, and if not it wouldn't be difficult to expand production further. Adding the Roboports is easy also. This was interrupted by a base too close to our east end that had gotten large enough to be a problem even to multiple turrets -- so I went and quickly 'sanitized' the area.  This update lasted four hours instead of two, because I was working on the bus stuff and there would have been almost nothing to report. For those scoring at home, we're at 42 hours and approaching the endgame. The average usage is now up to 41.7 MW, a significant increase. There was one overnight period when a very small amount of steam power(less than a half-megawatt) was used. That's not nearly enough to prompt me to go nuclear, but it's definitely an increase from the low 30s. I'm at 140 U-235, more than enough to start that up whenever I need to. Also, not all of the furnaces shown here have efficiency modules yet, though a lot of them do. I'm steadily throwing those out, but as of late I've been building stuff faster.  Iron's up some, although not that much; you can see though that the last 10 minutes, after I made the ore-supply band-aid change, we boosted back upwards. Item Count: 49(new high again!) Total Production: 640k(+20% from 535k) Record production by over 100k, and that's with an iron-shortage problem. We'll be pushing toward a million once I get the ore problem sorted. I've reached a point where I want to overproduce the crap out of the raw material to make sure we don't have any more shortfalls. If I'm going to do this, might as well do it right. Resources ** Iron: 1.07M primary, 248k steel. I need to make sure I include an ore supply for steel in this new project. It's not going to last long. ** Copper: 59k old, 322k new. Still have more copper options within convenient belting range. I want to make sure the train infrastructure can handle copper, but for now I just want to mine and hook up some of the nearer patches. ** Stone: 230k. Plowing through it a bit faster now, but still fine. ** Coal: 169k steam power, 161k factory, 1M train. I added some more drills on the main factory field, and it won't be long before I hook up the one that used to feed steel to that process. Not yet though. ** Crude Oil: 155/sec(-19). Yeah we're definitely churning through the black gold now. ** Uranium: 229k. About 11 hours worth at the current rate, but we've got plenty processed; just continuing to build up the reserve at this point.
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Dec 27, 2017 23:21
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I ended up making a separate oil refinery area that I piped crude to in order to set up lubricant and solid fuel production. Mostly because I didn't have enough space at my original petro-focused plant and the only space I had that was convenient for a lubricant line to go was on the opposite side of my factory For lubricant and solid fuel it pays to stick with basic processing due to the output ratios line up more with the lubricant/solid fuel inputs than advanced processing (which seems to be really geared for making maximum petro.)
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Dec 27, 2017 23:57
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In the past when fuel didn't matter for trains, eventually your base would shift almost entirely to solar and coal was just used for backup steam and some oil production stuff, and it was easy to push the majority of coal to your trains. And I always ended up needing more and more petro and not much light/heavy oil it was easy to keep all of my base on advanced oil refining for maximum petro. Nowadays though you probably want to eventually upgrade your trains to solid fuel so ratios are more important. You still need a buttload of petro though so I usually do a mix between regular and advanced cracking. Maybe half and half, or two regular to one advanced, depending on my oil needs.
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Dec 28, 2017 00:37
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Does greater productivity help you get more out of the resources that are there, or does it just use them up faster?
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Dec 29, 2017 03:43
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Productivity gives you 'free' product. I.e., a mining productivity of 10% means every 10 units of ore you mine, you get an 11th one free.ousire posted:you probably want to eventually upgrade your trains to solid fuel so ratios are more important. You still need a buttload of petro though so I usually do a mix between regular and advanced cracking. Maybe half and half, or two regular to one advanced, depending on my oil needs. Another far-seeing statement; this will come up soon. EpononymousMrYar posted:Mostly because I didn't have enough space at my original petro-focused plant and the only space I had that was convenient for a lubricant line to go was on the opposite side of my factory Quite easy to do. I started out with what I thought was a ton of extra space, and I'm glad I have a decent-length crude oil pipeline down to the train station at this point because I may need to extend refineries down that way and do some piping gymnastics. The oil production chain really does take up a LOT of room. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Dec 29, 2017 |
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Dec 29, 2017 04:45
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Didn't take long to get the line set up for solid fuel. I also added track to the current group of logistics requests. Another thing that hasn't been made for hours, but I'll sure be needing a crapton of it now: I also added concrete shortly after this, a long-overdue step. The # of things that just don't occur to you because you've got a dozen other priorities is rather mindboggling. In my next run, I need to do what I've done in other complicated games in the past: obsessively make lists. Not long aftewards, the basic form of the station was up.  I call it 'Central Ore'. Solid fuel to fill the locomotive on the left, stack-filter inserters to unload as fast as possible, with a second row of chests for buffer. Eventually I'll have express belts taking these west and a bit south to the smelting array. Probably at least twice as much but this is set up for a pair of cargo wagons as a starting point. Here, I redid the next part multiple times after some thinking. Using a single track with loops isn't going to work; at most I could get two trains running(one at a station, one waiting for it to leave). The structure needs to be more complex, accomodating trains headed in both directions, etc. Made regular use of the tutorial(near the top of page 4) by EponymousMrYar(thanks again for that!). ** Mining Productivity 8(800 RGAP) -- The start of another series of four of these, with gradually escalatings costs. One can always use getting more from less. While that was finishing up, I found myself overwhelmed for a while with all the stuff the logistic bots were bringing me. Soon all the yellow assembling machines I needed were in place, and almost all of the efficiency modules. That was all well and good, but I wanted to be busy with fixing my stupid roundabout blueprint that I'm not getting quite straight so I could get this railway going. That doesn't make for the most compelling LP reading, but it was necessary. Anyway, I screwed things up good and proper multiple times. The amount of chopping down trees to place track, only to discover that I didn't really want the blasted track in quite that location to begin with, lather-rinse-repeat ... this happened a LOT. I think my personal favorite is the brilliant way in which I put all the train signals on the wrong freaking side of the roundabouts at first -- so that the trains would be going the opposite way on them that they need to go in order to use the Central Ore unloading station. And then continued to put them on the wrong side afterwards, after partially fixing it. When it comes to wrong-side rail signals, I must be the world champion of Factorio. But eventually, after a sufficient amount of repetitive failcannon extraordinaire, I got a starting setup done. I REALLY HATE TRYING TO GET RAIL SECTIONS TO FREAKING MERGE. Often I can get it to go every freaking which way, except the way I want it to, and I could never get the stupid roundabouts to be even/symmetrical which meant fiddling with every single stinking one after they were built. Factorio makes a lot of things really easy. I'm here to say this still isn't one of them, at least for me. Abcdef. I'd like to say that I slaved over it and, in the interests of an informative LP, came up with a multi-step process that is easy to use and make it work. Uh-uh. Actually, after the 'slaving over it' part, I often found myself ragequitting Factorio to go do something else before mud-wrestling with the track-laying interface. I feel that's a sufficient amount of rant on that. Or at least close. ** Mining Productivity 9(900 RGAP) -- *Yawn* After spending almost the whole blasted session on this project, I had nine minutes left and was finally ready for a test drive. I'll not spoil it with screenshots; here's a video of the first shot at the new ore-supply line. Warning: this is not for the faint of heart(or the faint of butt, or other body parts, for that matter). Viewer discretion is highly encouraged; those with OCD like myself will be annoyed at some aspects of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcEi0qyNgHg No path. No path? What the heck do you mean, no path??(yes, I know it means the train can't find a path to the next station, but there is clearly one in this case. I've walked it multiple times). Sigh. I could have driven manually to see what the problem was, but we've already seen me drive trains manually. I'm not a sadist. So I went and took a look. What I found was shocking. Absolutely shocking.  What's that? A train signal on the wrong freaking side, leading to a red light preventing me from leaving the station. You don't say. After replacing every.single.signal in the entire roundabout that is just to the east here, I discovered that I couldn't even put the signal here on the correct side ... because it's curved too much. Sweet! Let's just rip up more track and re-merge! I love re-merging rail tracks. Wait. Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you. While I'm at it, a further demonstration of why it's so awesome.  Two rail tracks, pointed almost directly at each other. Note that I can easily lay more track alongside(the green part). So just angle it a little more to the north, right? That results in this:  Which doesn't work. It's simply crossing tracks, they don't link up. Can't move it just that slight bit I need to. The manipulations I go through to get it the way it needs to be(deleting more track and doing the merge on a straighter, not-angled section usually) are just stupid. Anyway. I go back to the locomotive, and guess what it says? That's right, 'No path'. It can take it's 'no path' and shove it. I check the track and I can't figure out why it won't work. Screw it, manual driving to test it out. And, despite the blue section indicated it would work, I have a bad merge and the train just stops instead of following the track around a turn. ARGEBARGLEZORZ!!!!  It won't move forward. It hates me. After removing one miniscule, barely-detectable-to-the-human-eye segment, that had the locomotive thinking it was supposed to keep going straight, I try again. Similar problem at one of the roundabouts; a tiny section is missing this time. Fix that, one other issue I spot. Attempt number umpteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kW1OYl6TOA It's working! It's working!! Uh, sort of. It like, goes around the circuit I intended it to. I need stack inserters to load the ore, the fast ones are just way too slow. And of course, I rather humorously forgot to put any at the Central Ore station to unload the chests onto the belts, which is to say nothing of the fact that I haven't completed sending them to the west to where the smelters are. But this will work. Eventually. And who knows, I may even get vaguely competent at setting up the rails, though perhaps that's expecting too much. The patch I had set up there in the east to produce the ore is, for this point, in the game, a mid-sized one; a little over a half-million. Maybe a dozen miners; it's dense but not particularly big. I'll need to rework the instructions at each stop; this one just said wait here for a minute. Once I get the train line extended to several more patches, some of them bigger, get another couple trains put on the network, I'll get more regular deliveries and then I'll have a sense of what further adjustments need to be made. But I will succeed. I will not be defeated by stupid track-laying and pathing mechanics, or my own ineptitude at properly using them. Both are conspiring against me, but I will endeavor to persevere. Or something.  Haven't looked at it yet, but I suspect the iron ore flow is diminishing again. I also have almost all the modules I want out, so that's helped with the savings. 37.8 MW is the load for the last hour.  Hrm. Looks like ore supply is holding just fine for the moment. Item Count: an even 50 Total Production: 689k(+8% from 640k) We're still far from being fully-supplied, even though things are going much better than expected for how long I've been out dealing with the train setup. I still want to get ridiculously oversupplied on ore and at least max out our current smelters with blue lines all the way down the bus(only partway done still on that) -- then I can see what other issues have come up. Resources ** Iron: 898k primary, 152k steel. Definitely churning through it, esp. when it comes to the steel. I need to send a belt down that way from Central Ore as soon as the network is up and running properly. The new patch is not included here, since I haven't got it hooked up yet to the smelters. ** Copper: 36k old, 241k new. At 60k an hour, this is getting really low also. Going to see a lot of things grind to a halt soon. ** Stone: 204k. Really starting to cut through this more now, at about 13k per hour. ** Coal: 169k steam power, 147k factory, 1M train. About 7k an hour, still manageable for now. ** Crude Oil: 143/sec(-12). Still a lot of waiting around for the liquid wagon to be drained. ** Uranium: 193k. A couple of drills have gone quiet, and more will join them soon.
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Dec 30, 2017 01:51
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A lot of basic railway stuff is best learned by going 'ARGH what did I do wrong OH WOW THAT WAS IT!? grumble grumble have to waddle over there and fix it and...' You've seen my railway in my tutorial post. I've had to rip up at least 50% more track than I've laid on that thing because of figuring out and finagling the details of rail laying. And that was WITH a personal roboport and 10 construction bots doing most of the work (after I painstakingly made blueprints of my freakin' roundabouts.)
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Dec 30, 2017 02:28
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What is the point of the roundabouts anyways? I can't tell what purpose they are serving in your tracks.
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Dec 30, 2017 02:38
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Slaan posted:What is the point of the roundabouts anyways? I can't tell what purpose they are serving in your tracks. Room to expand to the other fields for exploitation. No need to make a separate track for each, just branch off whats there.
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Dec 30, 2017 02:44
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Slaan posted:What is the point of the roundabouts anyways? I can't tell what purpose they are serving in your tracks. Modular turns. Instead of hardcoding a turn, the train just goes around until it's heading the right direction, and it can handle any input and any output.
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Dec 30, 2017 03:24
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Apparently roundabouts tend to jam easier than other types of intersections that don't allow trains to 180. Or so I've been told; personally, I've never experienced a problem with them but that's what I've heard from the Factorio subreddit, which tends to discourage the use of them for that reason. I usually build them liberally since it makes it easy to expand rails in the future, but it's just something to keep in mind.
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Dec 31, 2017 14:46
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ousire posted:Apparently roundabouts tend to jam easier than other types of intersections that don't allow trains to 180. Or so I've been told; personally, I've never experienced a problem with them but that's what I've heard from the Factorio subreddit, which tends to discourage the use of them for that reason. I usually build them liberally since it makes it easy to expand rails in the future, but it's just something to keep in mind. Traffic jams arise from a bad signal setup that allows trains to stop in such a way that cross traffic is blocked. If you treat your roundabouts like intersections and set your signals up so that no stopped train can interfere with traffic coming from another direction (and only stop traffic behind them), then your only worry is overall traffic density - which is a problem that can only be solved by expanding capacity and throughput (aka more lanes). That's a can that you will be theoretically kicking down the road forever, but at least it's one that doesn't become a frequent problem.
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Dec 31, 2017 17:32
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I'll have to see how that whole situation goes, but for this run I don't think I'll reach a point where I get all that many problems with traffic jams.
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Dec 31, 2017 18:56
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After getting inserters properly set up both at Central Ore and the new iron patch, I did some mining maintenance, clearing out some used-up drills, and then hooked up our new-found ore supply to the smelting columns. It's a spaghettified, quick-n-dirty for-now solution.  Also corrected a problem; I was using a yellow instead of red splitter in one spot, artifically limiting the flow. This will get much cleaner once our older patches are used up and all I have to do is divide up the incoming from Central Ore, instead of merging it with the existing supply. Good enough for now though; the buffer is already starting to back up at Central Ore, and I'm going to make sure it does even more by laying more track. The next patch on the route is 1M strong. That ought to do for a while. After getting the two dozen or so mines that field required set up, it was necessary to do some biter-clearing in the tank to keep the pollution from bringing too many of them on raids. With iron ok for the time being, I moved on to copper. Within our borders to the west, there are four patches of varying size, none much bigger than 400k but a pretty good supply combined.  A couple patches in the east are also worth snagging up. Combine all of them together, and six fields that probably don't exceed 1M. It'll clean up the surrounding area quite a bit though, and after that we've got some much bigger ones to hook up the train to. ** Mining Productivity 10(RGAP) -- Now up to a full 20% extra. There were some interruptions, and not a whole lot worth reporting here; a few attacks in unexpected numbers or unexpected locations, and also an oil supply issue. I haven't found the sweet spot yet; I had too much heavy oil and that was causing a backlog, slowing down plastic to a crawl. I really need to get a 'smart switch' going if I can rig something up using the circuit network, so that it will react to changes in the needs of the different products over there. I need to ponder that, which will help keep things running smoothly. Anyway, I haven't gotten the copper quite connected yet:  A couple of overview shots to finish things off and at least add something useful to this update. This is the current train network. Andrew Hobbs station there is the 1M patch. I've got the train set to remain at each one for a full minute, which seems to be a reasonable amount(I would later drop it to 30 seconds, and I may optimize that more, but that is at least sufficient). Right now I still have the one train cycling between the two. Andrew Hobbs is set up to load a third cargo wagon, but I don't have that attached, and I also don't have the unloading set up. I really should do that as soon as copper is finished, and send that third line south to the steel-smelting area. Got a feeling the resource numbers there are probably pretty ugly by now. This also shows the roundabout situation a little better. When a train reaches the northern one, it can go west to Central Ore, east to the French-sounding station, or south to Andrew Hobbs, as needed.  Here's how the copper situation stands. I've just completed getting drills set up on the biggest patch here, which was another one in the middle of a forest so that had to be dealt with. Soon I'll at least have this western group connected up to the smelting.  Another dip to less than 37 MW used, probably due to the petrol-related slowdown.  The difference between iron ore and iron plate production here is mostly due to the buffering in chests; there's some unevenness in getting everything where I want to go in a smooth and balanced fashion. I also had the ore train stuck for a while due to bad instructions(stay until empty, while one of the lines was backed up so it just never unloaded and sat there). There'll be a fair amount of this for a while as I work out the kinks and try to improve the system; only so many problems that can be fixed at once. Item Count: 47 Total Production: 571k(-17% from 689k) Yep, definitely need to get logistics running smoother than they are. Eventually. Resources ** Iron: 769k(65k) primary, 104k(24k) steel, 1.54M Central(about 30k). Surprised the steel fields still have that much, to be honest. Probably lost some drills making it slow down. Central here is simply the amount in the patches connected by train to Central Ore. Eventually we'll just have one number. ** Copper: 21k(8k) old, 177k(32k) new. Saw a slowdown here, though I don't know if it's because of something else. Either way, it's just a few hours worth and falling fast. ** Stone: 183k(10k). Eventually I'll set up drills on the other large nearby field, just north of the current one. A very minimally-painful transition for that. ** Coal: 169k steam power, 138k(4.5k) factory, 1M train. ** Crude Oil: 134/sec(-9). Not as much of a drop, due to the heavy oil backlog. ** Uranium: 159k(17k). The nearby one-drill field is gone, and nearly half the original drills are now off-line. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Dec 31, 2017 |
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Dec 31, 2017 19:00
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You can set up perfect ratios for oil production/cracking to convert everything to petroleum gas, but it's more hassle than it's worth. You WILL want lubricant and solid fuel, at the least, and flamethrower ammo is nice to have. Oil annoys a lot of people to start with, because really most of what people actually want is petroleum gas, and so they either continually expand storage of heavy and light oil, or set up cracking lines and solid fuel and flamethrower production without really understanding the production bottleneck. Once flamethrower ammo/solid fuel storage back up, though, the problem persists. The basic, low-effort solution is to set up cracking lines (heavy oil to light, and light oil to petroleum), put a pump feeding each line, and connect the pump to a single tank of the initial product - connect your heavy oil cracking line to a heavy oil tank, your light oil cracking line to a light oil tank. Set the pump to turn on when when the tank gets too high (>20k is usually a safe margin). This ensures that your cracking lines will shut off to maintain a reserve of heavy/light oil for producing other products (like lubricant, solid fuel, and flamethrower ammo) and gives you a flexible margin for production without having to worry that you haven't gotten the ratios perfect. The goal is to always maintain enough cracking that heavy oil/light oil never fill up beyond 20k - this means that as you expand your refineries, you need to also expand cracking, but since cracking shuts off at a 20k reserve and below, you can't run out because of too much cracking and managing your chemical plants is easy. Light oil filling up in the tank? Add more light oil cracking until it drops to 20k and stays there. Heavy oil filling up? Same thing. Not producing enough petroleum? Add more refineries and cracking until the petroleum tank starts filling again.
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Dec 31, 2017 19:48
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It's more efficient to set up your train schedules depending on their cargo rather than trying to guess time. For transporting raw stuff though you can still keep it pretty simple: IF Cargo = Full OR Time Passed = 60 Sec That'll leave you to fix any slowdowns on the non-train side while the train'll continue to do work. Olesh posted:Traffic jams arise from a bad signal setup that allows trains to stop in such a way that cross traffic is blocked. The thing with Roundabouts is that in order to set up their signal's properly they have a minimum size that is NOT the smallest roundabout you can make. That's why people tend to have trouble with them, because they're too lazy to get their signals done properly in the first place, leading to jams. The only jam that should result from any properly signal'd roundabout is if you're manually riding about and manage to catch two trains that get caught in a 'you need to move' 'no you need to move' signal jam or if there's too many trains using it. Olesh posted:The basic, low-effort solution is to set up cracking lines (heavy oil to light, and light oil to petroleum), put a pump feeding each line, and connect the pump to a single tank of the initial product - connect your heavy oil cracking line to a heavy oil tank, your light oil cracking line to a light oil tank. Set the pump to turn on when when the tank gets too high (>20k is usually a safe margin). This ensures that your cracking lines will shut off to maintain a reserve of heavy/light oil for producing other products (like lubricant, solid fuel, and flamethrower ammo) and gives you a flexible margin for production without having to worry that you haven't gotten the ratios perfect. The only problem with this solution is that you can't crack 'upwards' IE you can't crack light/petrol to heavy, which is needed for lubricant. Most of the time when people get their initial oil set up they want to turn everything into petrol (for Plastic and Batteries,) which means they're going to want to switch over their refineries to Advanced Processing ASAP. That means you're getting a whole lot less Heavy output to both turn into Lubricant and crack into other things. And you do really want to use Advanced Processing whenever you can because you get extra light and petrol out of your crude compared to basic processing, not to mention the loss of output when you crack anything.
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Dec 31, 2017 22:12
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Oh my god, the belt spaghetti. It's glorious.
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Jan 1, 2018 02:25
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EponymousMrYar posted:It's more efficient to set up your train schedules depending on their cargo rather than trying to guess time. For transporting raw stuff though you can still keep it pretty simple: I usually use 120 sec to minimise the time trains with depleted stations jam up the lines when I don't notice, but both work. Also: IF Time Passed = 20 sec OR IF Time Passed = 5 sec AND Inventory Empty for unloading. The 5s wait is just to make sure they get at least 1 grab of fuel. Not that I've ever had any train run out, but I'd rather not take that chance. Those mixed outputs though *twitch* One cargo per train car only please good sir! The basic rule I have with signaling is that there should never be two trains on an intersection at the same time. So use chain signals on incoming lines, and regular signals everywhere else. I really wish there was a way to auto-plan signals down a track because running the whole line putting in pairs of signals gets old real fast. As for heavy oil, make 1, maybe 2 tanks for lube before you set the switches up. You will literally never need that much lube, so even small overflows of heavy will restock your Lubarium.
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Jan 3, 2018 01:24
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| # ? May 20, 2024 12:16 |
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I've been playing for hours on peaceful mode and now I have four conveyor belts, one each of iron, copper, steel, and green circuits, that go nowhere, and literally nothing else. I guess I'll put up some radars and see what's around???
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Jan 3, 2018 03:02
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