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Olesh
Aug 4, 2008

Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.

Veloxyll posted:

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.

A reminder that blueprints are a thing that exist to save you time on repetitive tasks, and that once you have a set of basic train blueprints, you can ride a train, laying blueprints down ahead of you - your bots will do the work and you can benefit from your train cars' inventory to carry all of things you actually need to set up a station once you get to your destination.

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100 HOGS AGREE
Oct 13, 2007
Grimey Drawer
Is there like, a time saving poo poo guide for basic poo poo I've overlooked? I only figured out yesterday you can load/unload items into furnaces and poo poo without opening them. I'm sure I don't know about a bunch of poo poo like that.

EponymousMrYar
Jan 4, 2015

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.
The Official Factorio Wiki is a pretty good resource all things considered.

Also the Alt key is very important. Hold it down to get a detailed view of everything.

Veloxyll
May 3, 2011

Fuck you say?!

Olesh posted:

A reminder that blueprints are a thing that exist to save you time on repetitive tasks, and that once you have a set of basic train blueprints, you can ride a train, laying blueprints down ahead of you - your bots will do the work and you can benefit from your train cars' inventory to carry all of things you actually need to set up a station once you get to your destination.

I guess, but I prefer organic train lines to the grid hell that comes with roundabouts. And I quite like the track laying mode, besides not slapping down signals.
Fun fact - if you're doing it in blueprint mode, you can shift click to lay track right over trees etc. And your robopals will clear and build the line. I mean, eventually you run out of stored power because that's how personal roboports go pre-high tech. But still.

Also, I've beaten the game like 4 times.
And only just realised I could build a modular armour with just a robo-port, 1 or 2 batteries, and all the solar panels for when I'm doing building. Then switch to a different suit for fighting...
Some math nerd can figure out exact solar-battery ratio for maximum robotics (probably actuially involves starting with mostly solar, no roboport equipped, then swapping panels to batteries until you're down to 6 panels to charge the last battery. Then replace 4 panels with batteries, but EFFORT)

Veloxyll fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Jan 5, 2018

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...

ousire posted:

Oh my god, the belt spaghetti. It's glorious.

What I like best about that nonsense is that it's using all three speeds, all for specific purposes. That were clear in my mind at one point. And no longer are.

EponymousMrYar posted:

It's more efficient to set up your train schedules depending on their cargo rather than trying to guess time.

I'm gradually learning to do the orders better, and I mostly agree with this. You'll be seeing things slowly, forcibly drag themselves into a more reasonable arrangement in the future here.

Veloxyll posted:

Those mixed outputs though *twitch* One cargo per train car only please good sir!

Like the order set with the max time for waiting. I think I'll eventually adopt that. As far as this goes ... I realized eventually that it wasn't the best. And didn't do anything about it, because I think it's sufficient for the purposes of this game. The idea was to be flexible -- but that's not the spot to be flexible. Adjusting train orders and destinations for flexibility would have been better. So, something to remember for next time.

Veloxyll posted:

I quite like the track laying mode, besides not slapping down signals.

Drives me up the wall and down the other side.

Veloxyll posted:

if you're doing it in blueprint mode, you can shift click to lay track right over trees etc. And your robopals will clear and build the line. I mean, eventually you run out of stored power because that's how personal roboports go pre-high tech. But still.

I knew there was a way to do this, but didn't remember how. I don't use blueprints a 50th as much as I should probably.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
A couple screenshots are missing from this: apparently my brain was on vacation even more than it usually is. My apologies. Anyway ...



Finishing the western copper setup was pretty quick from this point, and I moved on to the two small eastern patches, just for redundancy's sake.

** Mining Productivity 11(1100 RGAP) -- 22% now, and that's where we'll stay for a while. Further progress required Hi-Tech research. But there is yet one further task to be done before making that move.

After finishing with the copper, I got the third wagon on the train and hooked up a line down to the steel.




How's this for spaghetti belting? It's a mess if you don't know what you're doing(or even if you do). As a general outline for this latest one, the new ore supply line to steel runs south from Central Ore, zig-zagging around the left of that copper field right in the middle here, and joining the existing steel-supply belt at the bottom, where the white asterisk is. This also shows the spread of concrete to date. On the left side there's quite a bit of empty space where the start of the factory was at the beginning.

At this point I was momentarily satisfied with ore supply. Manually switching things up in the oil area is working for now(though I need a better solution there eventually). Next on the agenda was getting Hi-Tech research vials rolling. You may remember that, probably close to 10 hours back now, I had starting running a line of batteries over that way but stopped in the middle of that first step. Time to get back on it.

Getting the batteries over there was pretty quick. Now we've got two of the four needed Hi-Tech ingredients bussed, and the components for the other two, to be assembled on site, also available. That should be sufficient. I had most of it up when the last 'pre-Hi Tech' project finished.

** Nuclear fuel reprocessing(1500 RGAP) -- The most expensive project so far by a good margin. This allows us to 'recycle' used uranium fuel cells, getting some U-238(the 'bad' isotope) back.

Research Progress

And now we have officially arrived completely at the final tier.

Projects Completed: 76
Available: 30
Locked: 6

Costs range from 75 to 1500 vials of each type per project, though there's one not-yet-unlocked which is substantially more.




Here's the Black vial-assembly area to demonstrate an issue I need to resolve. The general pattern I've followed is to produce the ingredients for a vial, then for the vial assembly itself send those down the middle, with two columns outputting the vials to either side, and from there they are taken to the labs. This isn't going to work for the Hi-Tech vials though. Three of the ingredients(Speed Modules, Processing Units, and Batteries) will do just fine with that. The fourth(30 Copper Cable each pair) will not. Even the one lane I could give it on an express belt would only be able to handle enough to support a few assemblers if filled.

The copper cable needs to be produced 'on-site', which won't leave room for the same kind of setup.




Once again I'm interrupted by another achievement(10k red circuits per hour isn't bad though).




Here's the initial setup I'm going with. Convoluted, but it works. Each pair of vial assembling machines on each side has a belt taking the completed vials to the outside of the copper that comes in to feed the cable assemblers. The cable machines themselves produce more than we'll need; each can supply almost, but not quite, twice as much as is needed. I don't mind a little redundancy in that fashion. I shudder at the amount of copper this is going to burn through, but that is a problem for another time.

Once I get everything connected, I have an initial setup to fund our final tier of research. There is nothing in the current research list that I can't eventually discover with this. Finally I am nearing the end. While we go through the faster items, I'll be spending my time mostly checking up on various production issues and ensuring everything is running reasonably smoothly, fixing problems where they crop up.

** Effect Transmission(75 RGAY) -- Unlocks the beacon, which 'transmits the effects of upgrade modules to friendly entities'. In other words, instead of throwing efficiency modules in every mining drill, I can use the beacon to spread those instructions over an area of coverage, with all machines in it gaining the benefit. Very nice. Note: I would then proceed to ignore the entire idea for far too long. Because that's what I do. Ignore helpful things, to pursue whatever my brain is locked on.

** Military 4(150 RGABY) -- Unlocks Piercing Shotgun Shells, improved versions of our standard shotgun shells -- which I'm not using. Rather unimpressive advance.

** Logistic System(150 RGAPY) -- The other two types of logistics chests, Active Provider and Requester, are now available. Once research slows down I'll get into a bit of how to use them, but suffice to say this is the point at which you only have to use belts as much as you want to. Everything is in place now to have robots do the transportation work, if desired.

** Cluster Grenade(200 RGABY) -- A grenade upgrade that pretty much does what it's name says, but I'm still not planning on using them.

A couple of laser turret upgrades followed, as a copper shortage directed my attention back to upgrading the bus lines to express belts. More progress on that helped some, but the appetite of the green circuits is sucking up over half of a saturated line right now, to say nothing about what happens further down.

The red circuit line convinced me of the need to make the next major change. I've already done some small upgrades here: faster inserters for the copper cable and a couple more assemblers there, fast/red belts to supply all of the products(cable/green circuits/plastic), etc. Even so, the green circuits can't keep up, and it's a fully saturated standard/yellow belt on the bus up to this point. We're going to have to upgrade to a fast/red one, doubling production of those -- and the current amount is sucking down over half of the current copper supply.

Going back to the source then, it's time for a second copper smelting column, and a second copper line on the ever-growing bus. It can join pretty much anywhere before this, which is about halfway through the bus, to minimize the required reworking and logistics. Even so, the demands of the ravenous beast that the factory is becoming continue to grow.

It's not all bad news. The iron ore imports are going well despite some kinks in the system still to be worked out. The steel line is operating at full capacity until I get to expanding that, and is producing enough -- barely -- to keep up. Research has nearly stalled though, and the problem is on the Hi-Tech end. Not enough Processing Units, because of the green circuit issue; only half a belt left when it gets there, which becomes a quarter-belt after the splitting. That's enough for only a very slow trickle. So there's just really no option now except going insane on the copper supply.

There is some good news; our borders have been mostly silent, and the turrets have taken care of any attacks recently without issue. Of course, that's partly because there is less pressure on the iron mining and research area with the copper shortage slowing things down. The new column is mostly finished at this point.




42.2 MW now, which is a new high. A hair of steam usage again, which I think happens mostly when a lot of turrets have to fire during the overnight period. Less than 600 KW though, nothing to be concerned with. Not quite time to get the nuclear operation going yet.




Copper cable speaks for itself. That's ... a lot. And yet, not enough. 46k green circuits, 10k red, 600+ blue.

Item Count: 44
Total Production: 900k(+58% from 571k)

We'd never hit 700k before so we basically smashed the previous high. Not a huge surprise that the copper couldn't keep up given the circumstances.

Resources

** Iron: 649k(55k) primary, 36k(34k) steel, 1.49M Central(about 30k). Lots of patches drying up -- we'll continue to rely on the imports more and more.

** Copper: 1.11M. Most of this is new. Still, it's only a stopgap at about 10 hours worth of supply. Once the new smelting is up and running, we're definitely going to need to add more.

** Stone: 164k(9.5k).

** Coal: 168k(less than 1k steam power, 121k(8.5k) factory, 1M train.

** Crude Oil: 119/sec(-15). Down to just over half of what it was at peak. Which is still enough, but I'm not certain how long that will remain the case.

** Uranium: 130k(14k). Continuing to gradually slow down. Total U-235 supply is now at 226, enough to last quite a while. At the moment, I don't think we'll need to seek out any new sources.

EponymousMrYar
Jan 4, 2015

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.
Track Laying mode is something you do have to get used to since it's impossible to do some things without it (unless you have a blueprint for that.) Most of the annoyances I've had with it are actually because of how the game handles train tracks themselves (with the sprite layers making it seem like things are connected when they're actually not or with how the game allows tracks to merge vs. them crossing etc.)

Beacons honestly sounded nicer to me than they are. The affected area I feel is really, really small for what they want you to put into them. I still tried to use them for my smelting setups since Electric Furnaces only get 2 module slots :v:

Veloxyll posted:

And only just realised I could build a modular armour with just a robo-port, 1 or 2 batteries, and all the solar panels for when I'm doing building. Then switch to a different suit for fighting...
Some math nerd can figure out exact solar-battery ratio for maximum robotics (probably actuially involves starting with mostly solar, no roboport equipped, then swapping panels to batteries until you're down to 6 panels to charge the last battery. Then replace 4 panels with batteries, but EFFORT)

Roboport, 2 batteries and the rest solar are as good as it gets. Have to watch out for doing huge projects/everything with personal roboport, especially at night but that's par for the course with personal solar being your only option.

Psychotic Weasel
Jun 24, 2004

Bang! You're dead.
You know, I never considered building science vials like that - I usually use the 'feed one factory into the next' method when making circuits and various levels of belts. I'm just about ready to start making high-tech vials in my current game so I'll give that method a shot to see how it works.

As for spaghetti, my factories are such a disorganized mess I spend as much time figuring out how to hook a new resource in as I do building the necessary infrastructure:

(there's even more to the north and west that wouldn't fit)

You can see where I sort of tried setting up a main bus but no matter how hard I try I always just end up shoving new parts in where they fit when the time comes... Does anyone really stick to a plan when they start playing this game? Between dealing with biters that come in from an unexpected vector and start chewing on things, noticing that you're low on iron plates and need to solve that and then you're now short on copper and need to solve that when all you really wanted were more god damned green circuits it's hard to stay focused.

When I finally get logistics unlocked I usually switch to feeding goods into a massive system of bots and just fly what I need where ever it's convenient.

Psychotic Weasel fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Jan 5, 2018

Sage Grimm
Feb 18, 2013

Let's go explorin' little dude!
Piercing Shotgun ammo combined with the eventual auto-shotgun results in a blender that'll ruin any biter group below behemoth. And it will render biter bases and worms to shreds in seconds. It's not disappointing in the slightest. :colbert:

Olesh
Aug 4, 2008

Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.

Sage Grimm posted:

Piercing Shotgun ammo combined with the eventual auto-shotgun results in a blender that'll ruin any biter group below behemoth. And it will render biter bases and worms to shreds in seconds. It's not disappointing in the slightest. :colbert:

My problem with shotguns is that they just don't fill a need. The regular submachinegun with piercing rounds covers non-resistant targets in pretty decently sized groups. The flamethrower covers resistant targets and also handles large groups well, and then you have the rocket launcher for more safely approaching clusters of Big Worms. Shotguns aren't really good at handling groups until they get Piercing Ammo, at which point there's no need for a shotgun anymore. Once you get Uranium Ammo, you don't even really need the flamethrower anymore.

Veloxyll
May 3, 2011

Fuck you say?!

Thotimx posted:


Like the order set with the max time for waiting. I think I'll eventually adopt that. As far as this goes ... I realized eventually that it wasn't the best. And didn't do anything about it, because I think it's sufficient for the purposes of this game. The idea was to be flexible -- but that's not the spot to be flexible. Adjusting train orders and destinations for flexibility would have been better. So, something to remember for next time.


Drives me up the wall and down the other side.


I knew there was a way to do this, but didn't remember how. I don't use blueprints a 50th as much as I should probably.

The solution is more trains. I just run 1-2 wagons and solve any througput issues with more trains.

I really wish there was a better way to lay tracks in non-blueprint mode (if you start a train track by shift-clicking, it lays down a blueprint of the tracks). Because when trees or rocks get in the way doing it regularly, augh! It's better than it WAS, but still.
As for intersection hell, I always drag my blueprint/track one or two squares further, until it gives me a blue tile just to make sure that sucker is linked.

You can also shift-click normal blueprints if something is blocking part of it. And it'll either remove it, in the case of trees and rocks, or skip it when the thing is unbuildable. Like say with mines. So you can quickly lay down a new mining base.

Or defensive walls.

Veloxyll fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jan 5, 2018

EponymousMrYar
Jan 4, 2015

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.

Psychotic Weasel posted:

You can see where I sort of tried setting up a main bus but no matter how hard I try I always just end up shoving new parts in where they fit when the time comes... Does anyone really stick to a plan when they start playing this game? Between dealing with biters that come in from an unexpected vector and start chewing on things, noticing that you're low on iron plates and need to solve that and then you're now short on copper and need to solve that when all you really wanted were more god damned green circuits it's hard to stay focused.

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Even with minimal biter presence and using RSO so my resource patches last really long I still started going 'I need more iron plates, ok I fixed that now I need more green circuits, ok that's that wait why's my copper so low DANGIT ok, there's that AUGH WHY ARE RED CIRCUITS SO SLOOOOOOW'

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...

EponymousMrYar posted:

Most of the annoyances I've had with it are actually because of how the game handles train tracks themselves (with the sprite layers making it seem like things are connected when they're actually not or with how the game allows tracks to merge vs. them crossing etc.)

The actual general laying of track doesn't bother me. This is what annoys me, but I am getting better at it. Not good, but better. Like anything, experience with it, learning the tricks, getting better at eyeballing stuff, etc helps.

PsychoticWeasel posted:

s for spaghetti, my factories are such a disorganized mess I spend as much time figuring out how to hook a new resource in as I do building the necessary infrastructure:

I think that looks highly organized by comparison.

PsychoticWeasel posted:

Does anyone really stick to a plan when they start playing this game?

You have to be really disciplined in order to do it, for sure. I'm going to have to for the second game(I've started planning that recently), but Factorio definitely lends itself easily to the sort of 'oh, what was I doing again?' moments.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Note: I may end up accelerating the pace of updates here; I binged Factorio over the weekend and have a lot more in the hopper(at the expense of getting behind on everything else I'm supposed to be doing, pretty-much, including sleep) and for some of them there just isn't a whole lot there.

** Portable Fusion Reactor(200 RGABY) -- This comes in while finishing up the second copper column. And it's kind of a big deal. Takes up 4x4 space in the armor, producing 750kw. 16 portable solar panels, occupying the same space, will produce 160kw. That makes the fusion reactor a 368% improvement. Price is 250 blue circuits, or about 20 minutes worth at the moment. Still, I need this thing to fully power my suit. I stop the flow of blue circuits to the research area for a while, so that I can gather enough to build one.

The bi-hourly tour of our mining facilities is taking longer and longer each time; this one took almost half an hour, but most of that was spent ripping up a sizable section of transport belt from the west that is no longer needed as all the iron mines are exhausted there. It has it's benefits as well; the re-use of the materials involved, clearing out areas of belt spaghetti, removing several underground belt passages that are no longer needed, etc. I took part of the journeying by train, and eventually I'll be able to do almost if not all of that way to speed things up. It's also beneficial for catching and correcting things I forgot to do, in this case adding modules to about a dozen mining drills.

For the next bus adjustment, the 'center highway' of the bus will consist of two iron and two copper belts, all of the high-speed blue/express variety. Gear wheels will slide up to the top 'highway. This will not be nearly as involved of a project as when we added the second belt of iron, but it will still take a while.





This did however afford me an opportunity to use the logistic bots to do some more busy work for me, and demonstrate one of the new chests. This is the requester chest, whose purpose essentially is to feed assembling machines with the products they need. That is, instead of pulling items off a belt, bots can fill this chest with whatever you ask for, and the assembler can grab from there. In this case, I'm taking down a bunch of belt that has stone bricks in them. I need somewhere convenient to put it. Here at the concrete assembler is a good spot. On the left, 'Logistic Request' allows me to specify what to bring there. Since I've just set it up there's nothing in it. But now when I set my personal logistics up to auto-trash almost all of the stone bricks I acquire, the logistics bots will take them here, where they can actually be used for something.




A million green circuits. And how many more to come?

** Personal Roboport 2(250 RGAY) -- Still working on the bus, but I'm approaching the research area so we've got enough done to resume some level of operations there. Also had one expansion party break through in the southeast to deal with, first one of those in hours. Anyway, an improved roboport for my armor will be worth getting eventually.




Skipped the power readout this time because, just like this one, it dropped while I was working on the bus. I'm now a full 50 hours in -- longer than it took to finish 0.14. I figured I'd be done by now, but Factorio had it's own opinion about that.

Item Count: 44
Total Production: 515k(-43% from 900k)

Seemed a good time to take a look at some history-of-the-factory numbers:

** 4M iron ore, and almost as many plates
** 3M copper cable
** 1.7M copper
** 800k green circuits(the achievement disagrees, not sure why)
** 453k coal
** 308k stone, about the same uranium
** 142k red circuits
** 8.4k blue circuits
** 18M Steam
** 26M water
** 5.4M crude oil
** 19k net sections of transport belt(32k built, 13k deconstructed)
** 4800 trees cut down
** 2.4k net fast belt sections
** 4.8k net express belt sections

That's a fair amount of crap.

Resources

** Iron: 541k(54k) primary, 37k(--) steel, 1.39M Central(about 50k).

** Copper: 988k(65k). I think everything is still safe here until the bus is fully functional again; then we'll see how crazy things get.

** Stone: 151k(6.5k).

** Coal: 168k(--), 111k(5k) factory, 1M train(--)

** Crude Oil: 111/sec(-8).

** Uranium: 102k(14k). Another 15 U-235, now at 241.

Faylone
Feb 18, 2012

EponymousMrYar posted:

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

As long as you have a bunch of turrets loaded with a good stockpile of "plan" and no enemy ever survives contact with "plan" long enough to damage the turrets, that's just fine.

EponymousMrYar
Jan 4, 2015

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.

Faylone posted:

As long as you have a bunch of turrets loaded with a good stockpile of "plan" and no enemy ever survives contact with "plan" long enough to damage the turrets, that's just fine.

Turrets are useless at mining though. They can't shoot the ore out of the ground! I've tried it just wastes bullets!

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...

EponymousMrYar posted:

en with minimal biter presence and using RSO so my resource patches last really long I still started going 'I need more iron plates, ok I fixed that now I need more green circuits, ok that's that wait why's my copper so low DANGIT ok, there's that AUGH WHY ARE RED CIRCUITS SO SLOOOOOOW'

Yeah I agree -- I marvel at some of the YouTube creations where most of the factory isn't even on most of the time and all production is balanced, but mostly that's achieved by absurdly overproducing and then just turning stuff of when it isn't needed via the circuit network. Either way, that's a state I imagine -- not one I expect to achieve.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...



I do believe this is the first time we've been recognized for blue circuits. 18 Achievements completed, 7 can no longer be accomplished, 13 still possible.

** Speed Module 3(300 RGAY) -- 50% speed gain for 70% extra energy. The ratios get better at the top tier, but still generally not worth it.

** Efficiency Module 3(300 RGAY) -- 50% reduction in energy use. However, we can get nothing from this, unless there's something out there that takes only one module slot, that we can't get from the second-tier module ... which is cheaper.

At this point it's time for another whole mess of military upgrades. After finishing up the bus, including double express/blue lines of both iron and copper now in it's centre, I was confident throughput would be less of an issue. Still an issue, but less of one. I'll still need to add another green circuit production area to boost up to a red line of those, but I want to make sure ore is oversupplied. That means getting copper going to Central Ore now.

Garr! Missing screenshot here. What it was supposed to show is the largest ore patch yet of either kind, 1.3 million, a short distance east of Central Ore. Unfortunately, it's literally right in the middle of the main train highway(I bent one lane north around it and the other south, not bothering to consider the consequences of this decision -- you can see that in the train vid I made a while back). So the question was, to belt or to make a train stop here? Clogging up the railway didn't seem worth it, esp. given that I'd only be transporting it a short distance. So for now, I'll just get some high-speed belts going. Once that was hooked up, the copper smelting was even more secure, and iron ore was backed up at the station as well. Now for more green circuits:




Like the original one, only more efficient. At the bottom of the screen, the green circuit belt disengages from the bus completely, comes in from the west, merges with the output here on a fast/red belt, then heads back to rejoin the bus.




That bus now has 13 belts on it, 11 products, four express belts, one fast, eight standard. And, roboports straddle it all the way down for making quick changes. A good amount of upgrades in the last couple hours or so. Now what? Well, it's pretty obvious where the problem is, and also pretty predictable. The blue circuits are now the shortage. Only enough to make enough Hi-Tech vials to keep a few labs running.




Most of the assemblers there are running though -- I just need more of them. Nearly doubling it and upgrading to fast inserters helped a bit ... but not enough, as the supply of green circuits couldn't keep up. If a fast belt of them isn't enough, I guess I'll have to go blue. However, this is major progress nonetheless; 16 labs are running now, and still increasing. That's not bad by any stretch -- I may have to put more down soon.




Despite expanding numbers of roboports, furnaces, assemblers, etc. we are not yet up to peak power usage. The latest average is 39.7 MW, about 3 MW below that peak.




That's a scary amount of copper cable, leaving everything in the dust. And I'm going higher. The only reason iron isn't more than it is, is that we don't actually need more than this right now. Definitely the biggest numbers I've seen for the circuits(58k green, 8.5k red, 1.7k blue).

Item Count: 43
Total Production: 812k(+58% from 515k)

Not quite to the record so for of 900k, but a nice rebound nonetheless.

Resources

** Iron: 446k(47.5k) primary, 33k(2k) steel, 1.31M Central(about 40k). At least for now, we are really oversupplied on steel. Which is just fine.

** Copper: 2.07M. Over half is the new field.

** Stone: 146k(2.5k).

** Coal: 167k(less than 1k) steam power, 99k(6k) factory, 1M train(--)

** Crude Oil: 101/sec(-10).

** Uranium: 81k(10.5k).

We seem to have 'enough for now' again.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
I got the green circuit area up to producing enough, between the two areas combined, to roughly fill a blue/express belt. This helped -- but then I discovered an issue. No research, due to no aqua vials, due to no engine units. Here's that production line:




The problem here is not immediately obvious. It becomes so once you realize that pipe is in place, steel is in place ... and they need gear wheels, not iron plates. I messed up the split off of the bus for that when adding the second copper belt a little while ago. Oops. Incidentally, the same splitter was also feeding electric mining drills, another ingredient. So both had stopped. A fairly simple correction, but I'll have wait a while for everything to work its way downstream, and see how things balance out.

The mining tour revealed that everything is working smoothly with the train; that most of the uranium is depleted, which I already expected; and the biggest revealed problem is copper. I intended the to get a full belt out of the new copper big field, but it's not close. Everything's working smoothly, I just overestimated how much it would yield at a time. The other, smaller patches combine to more than satisfy one column, and iron is backed up, but we clearly need to supplement this source(or do some redirection).

I rather not redirect; I just want more. And this time, I am going to use the train.




I think I'll fix this first though. Nothing is happening once again on the research end -- because I left this gap in the bus for the gear wheels. That's stupid with a capital S. Fortunately this is most of the way down the belt; research is the only thing affected. But still.

:siren:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwH6-496KyU
:siren:


A brief look here at the construction bots from the personal roboport setting up the loop for our next station that I've laid out for them.




This expansion is basically a poster child for 'ugly, but it works'. Three iron ore locations totaling 1.2M, and the copper one is 1.7M, the biggest patch yet. The various fields here are close enough together that I figure I might as well mine them all and combine their yield into one stop.

I've got to refine the train logic to make this work, however. The cars are mostly full with iron at the moment. I need to have them take on copper as well, which means they can't be packed full of iron ore when they arrive here. So how to solve this??

Simply adding more buffer at the unloading is a very inelegant solution and would do no more than kick the can down the road. Circuit networks are not something I'm eager to try and employ across large distances like this. After thinking for a while, I thought the best idea would be to have separate cars for each item; in this case perhaps two for iron ore, one for copper ore. That too has it's flaws though; some stations have only one or the other, some have varying amounts of each. I decided on something else that is simpler, and jarringly low-tech.

** Combat Robotics 3(300 RGABY) -- An interruption, at the same cost, in the military upgrades ... though this is one as well, after a fashion. The latest in artificial followers is the Destroyer; I never did use its predecessor, the Distractor. I still have a few Defenders left. For comparison:

** Lifetime: 45 seconds for Defenders/Distractors, 120 for Destroyers. To the extent they are able to survive, this is a huge upgrade.
** Health: 60 for Defenders/Destroyers, 90 for Distractors. So this is actually a step backwards.
** Range: 15 for all three variants
** DPS: At present capabilities, the Defender is actually still the best. 69.3, with the new Destroyer just behind at 63. The Distractor is well named, with a lower damage output just under 39/second right now.

Overall, the Destroyer is the best choice. But until/unless the damage situation looks a fair bit better, I don't see the point in pushing the setting up production. More important here is the fact that research has really accelerated. At last check, it's proceeding with all 20 Labs running full-throttle. I'll look again once I'm done out here with the track, but we may have seriously turned the corner in terms of the overall production flow.

The new station is named 'Dharch'. Or something close to that. Loads copper on one side, iron on the other. That's a lot of chests and inserters. The first copper ore-supplying train station, but I've still got to deal with making sure there's room for it.




Here's my current approach to dealing with both ore types. By setting up all the cargo wagons like this, half of the space is filtered to only be usable for iron, half for copper. If I need to expand to using multiple trains, then I would probably change up what they bring as needed. When I go to the iron-only stations I won't be as efficient in those trips, but on the other hand this will be more flexible. Six of one, half-dozen of the other, perhaps? Either way, I want to try this and see what's what.

The trip to the new station takes almost a half-minute each way, and everything seems to be in order -- except for the fact that we're running low on iron ore now. The half-full cars aren't bringing in enough. A second locomotive seems to be the ticket here. It's a quick matter to build one with the same settings.




We're starting to consistently have minor overnight steam usage. 45.2 MW is a new usage high, and there are efficiency modules everywhere. I could just add more accumulators ... but I think it's time to go nuclear on this issue. Literally.




Item Count: 42(down a bit)
Total Production: 978k(+20% from 817k)

Close to a million items in the past hour, but not quite there. Made a lot of improvements in the overall flow of things but there are still kinks in the system to be dealt with. You can see in the past roughly 30 minutes a lot of big fluctuations. I have discovered the primary supply issue, and with the ore transport issue at least partially sorted now, I should be able to turn my attentions to that.

Resources

** Iron: 349k(48.5k) primary, 18.3k(7.4k) steel, 2.38M Central(about 50k, more added). The belt-transported patches are really starting to dry up.

** Copper: 1.71M(180k) primary, 1.7M Central(new). We've got access to more copper than iron at the moment.

** Stone: 145k(less than 1k). Remembering to keep throwing down concrete has been hit-and-miss for me.

** Coal: 164k(1.5k) steam power, 78k(10.5k) factory, 1M train(--). The factory supply is no longer keeping up. I need to hook up the old steel field(almost 600k left there) to supplement it.

** Crude Oil: 90/sec(-11). We are down to about triple the minimum(16 pumpjacks mean we'll be able to get 32/second when they are all as depleted as they get). We'll see if we hit a shortage before then or not. It hasn't happened yet.

** Uranium: 61k(10k).

Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jan 12, 2018

Olesh
Aug 4, 2008

Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.

Thotimx posted:

** Lifetime: 45 seconds for Defenders/Distractors, 120 for Destroyers. To the extent they are able to survive, this is a huge upgrade.
** Health: 60 for Defenders/Destroyers, 90 for Distractors. So this is actually a step backwards.
** Range: 15 for all three variants
** DPS: At present capabilities, the Defender is actually still the best. 69.3, with the new Destroyer just behind at 63. The Distractor is well named, with a lower damage output just under 39/second right now.

Overall, the Destroyer is the best choice. But until/unless the damage situation looks a fair bit better, I don't see the point in pushing the setting up production.

You're not wrong. On the face of it. Destroyers look incredibly expensive for what seems like a modest duration increase on the face of it.

Here's the thing... each Defender capsule spawns one robot. Each distractor capsule spawns three robots, and each Destroyer capsule spawns five robots.

Distractor capsules are supposed to draw biter aggression, but don't seem to do a great job of it once the biters are already chasing you. Additionally, Distractor capsules are completely stationary - they don't move at all, but stick around where they're placed and shoot any enemies in their range. This isn't entirely a drawback - since Distractors are stationary, they don't contribute to your follower robot count - your only limit is however many you want to place.

Destroyer capsules, on the other hand, are an expensive optional military upgrade. The robots individually do less DPS than Defenders (because all robots benefit from Combat Robot Damage, while Defenders also benefit from bullet shooting speed and bullet damage upgrades), but you get five per capsule - deploying a swarm of robots is significantly faster (10 Destroyer robots/sec vs 4 Defender robots/sec). They consume a ton more raw materials than Defender robots. Since they individually do less damage, they look like a bit of a bum deal considering you're paying 20-25x the price in resources per capsule. Even with 5 robots per capsule, you're still paying 4-5x the cost per robot.

There's one important difference, though. Defender robots shoot bullets and do physical damage. Medium Biters and up have physical damage resistance. Big biters and Big Worms have enough physical damage resistance to render Defender robots more or less completely impotent. Once biter evolution has progressed to the point where Big Biters become increasingly more common, regular Defender robots simply don't cut it anymore, as while they're perfectly fine against spitters and smaller biters, they will frequently get distracted trying to shoot enemies they can't reasonably damage and stop actually contributing.

Distractor and Destroyer capsules, on the other hand, do laser/electric damage, which biters don't resist whatsoever, and can be quickly deployed in large groups, enabling you to tackle large swarms and clear out multiple bases very quickly and with minimal effort.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Interesting. I think the key point I didn't consider is the damage resistance vs. the non-physical types of attacks.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Research continues plowing through weapons-related upgrades, and is in the 400/type of vials cost range right now. We're keeping about half(10) of the Labs running for the most part with all the various hitches, interruptions, upgrades, ebbs and flows that have been found. Borders have been pretty secure, it's only occasionally that anything gets damaged, and I typically respond by beefing up the number of the turrets in the area. For now, what I need to get done:

** Mining Tour as always to check on the resource patches and make changes as necessary.

** Increase Iron Gear Wheel production, which is our top bottleneck at the moment. It'll be something else after that's improved I'm sure, but it's still worth hammering the nail that sticks up.

** Connect up increased coal supply for the bus. The mining drills are still in place and everything, I just need to send the belts to the proper place.

** Get Nuclear Power up and running. Most of it we won't use, but I still think it's time if for no other reason that to do it for the sake of doing it and demonstration.

** ?? Whatever is causing a problem. I do need to upgrade some of the iron ore supply belts, but I don't know if that or something else will prove the biggest issue.

The Mining Tour revealed a few things. One, I wasn't doing a good job of using all the copper off the train, so I made a small change to make sure it was all getting on the line heading west to the smelters. The two trains are imperfect in multiple ways, but they are catching up so it's good enough. The last of the copper field nearest the starting point has been used up, so I was able to clear that out and some belts in the area. And it also didn't appear that the gear wheels are a problem anymore, at least for the moment: so I needed to take a closer look at how research is doing.

Our long-standing factory-supply of coal is nearly obsolete after the new patch has been connected up to it. Aside from the local belt spaghetti, there is the fact that only a half-dozen mining drills remain operational there. The new field has somewhere on the order of two dozen more, so with a relatively painless merging addition there should be no more coal issues for a long time.

Ok, so on to nuclear power. At last.




In a recent development, uranium ore has started backing up here at the centrifuges. Only the northern-most two on each side are even still operational: storage is full on the others. So what do we do here?

What is needed are Uranium Fuel Cells, for use in the reactor. Those require iron plates along with 1 U-235 and 19 U-238. As you may recall, we are a not-small distance north of the bus here, and will need to divert iron plates here for this endeavor.




Once that's done, I place two assembling machines on each side to build the fuel cells, using the output chests of the centrifuges for the source of their isotopes. The first pair of centrifuges are not involved in this process: they can serve as a 'reserve' to ensure we have some of the good stuff remaining. So now we've got fuel cells -- a reactor is needed to use them.

The Nuclear Reactor itself is not cheap: 500 each of Concrete, Steel, Red Circuits, and Copper Plate. But for now at least, I need only one.

** Power Armor 2(400 RGABY) -- This comes in while I'm setting up the reactor. I'll get to it a bit later, but new armor is a nice boost.




Here's my first, inexpertly-designed, but functional nuclear reactor. I finally did it. What does all this crap do?




The reactor itself takes in uranium fuel cells on the left side that are coming in from the south; we've already seen how those are produced. It turns these into heat, which leaves to the east in the thin, rust-colored things which are heat pipes. Like pretty much all of this stuff, heat pipes consume a significant amount of copper and steel to make. Since the reactor runs whether I need it or not, I'm going to waste most of the power that is produced here right now. But, I will guarantee that I have enough. And right now, that's all I really care about. Also, there's the output chest to store used fuel cells, which can be recycled ... to a degree.




The heat pipes are hooked up to Heat Exchangers, which turn the heat into steam. That is then fed into the bottom row here of Steam Turbines, which turn the steam into power. I've just nearly doubled my power output using a fraction of the space, and as mentioned in the thread can use the 'neighbor' bonus nuclear reactors get to really ramp this up if needed. If I ever got annoyed at where the solar stuff is, I could just tear it down if I did that.

Right now this thing is not even operating -- because it doesn't need to. But until I run out of fuel cells, it'll keep running. Upon returning to the research area, I am very pleased at what I find. All 20 Labs are operating! This is good news, but at the costs we are seeing(and increasing all the time), I'd like to speed things up a bit. I lay down another 10 of them. I also notice that it's definitely the Black and Aqua vials that are having the biggest problem.




This is the black problem. Easy to fix; we just need to add a couple more assembling machines here for the turrets. Since the military vials are only used for some of the items, it's only times of intense research along those lines such as we've just gone through that even cause any issue -- that's why I've gotten away with this for so long.

Aqua is actually doing pretty well. 9 of the 10 assembling machines are running constantly. It just isn't quite enough. So I definitely need more of them -- but I also need red circuit production boosted, which will probably be more complicated. Overall though I'm feeling pretty good about things. If I can reach the point where I have all 30 Labs running non-stop, I'll be able to cruise through some of this late-game research reasonably quickly.

There's room to exactly double this to 20. I don't need to do that, but I do it anyway just to be done with it. Let's take a look at that armor now. Power Armor MK 2 specs, compared to the original version I have now:

** Acid Resistance -- 10/40%(7/30%)
** Explosion Resistance -- 60/50%(40/40%)
** Fire Resistance -- 0/70%(0/60%)
** Physical Resistance -- 10/40%(8/30%)
** Inventory size bonus -- 30 slots(20)
** Grid Size -- 10x10(7x7)
** Durability -- 20k(15k)

Better across the board as you might expect, but particularly when you consider that it has double the room. Thing about it is though, I really don't need it. I'm feeling pretty secure right now.




Here's what I have right now, which is kind of silly in being underpowered. The white thing in the upper-left there is the portable fusion generator which I did build, and which took care of the power issues. I've got nightvision, an exoskeleton, a basic shield, and a personal roboport. And a crappy battery. I could upgrade to better storage, a couple of improved shields -- but I get in the tank whenever I need to do serious fighting anyway. I'm just thinking that, as cool as it is, the MK 2 armor is in the 'why bother' category.

So back to the red circuits issue. I need more plastic first of all. Petroleum Gas was stable before; now it starts declining quickly. Too much light oil to keep the refineries moving. Ok, a 5th light oil cracking plant. Still not enough. Let's not do half-measures: I upgrade to eight. Surely that'll do it. Meanwhile ...

** Worker robot cargo size 3(450 RGAPY) -- Every one of these makes a significant difference.

It's starting to get a little interesting to fit everything in. Even with the 8 Chemical Plants dedicated to Light Oil Cracking, the light oil supply is only decreasing slowly. But it is decreasing, and Petroleum Gas is gaining. Ok, plastic problem solved for the moment. Back at the red circuit line, it looks like we've got enough to just keep all the assemblers going. Production there is better. Not great, but better.




Back to gear wheels, where I originally thought the problem was. The turrets are now siphoning off so much that almost none is getting down here to the mining drills. Gotta chuckle at the fact that I've only got four assemblers on the gear-wheel task still -- but that's not even the problem, because I don't have enough iron to satisfy them. Lots of empty spaces in the bus, even back this far, when it comes to those iron belts. So I'm back to basics.




Here's the same spaghetti interchange that I showed a few updates ago. It's different this time though: ore is a lot more sparse. What this mess basically does is takes the imports from Central Ore and merges them with the output of the existing local patches, so that we go through the local stuff first as things transition more towards Central Ore handling more of the load. Well, that transition is happening, there isn't much coming in locally, and the train system isn't close to keeping up. This is going to get worse and worse unless it's fixed, as more and more mining drills exhaust their deposits. The belt speeds here are not high enough in spots; they only supply two-thirds of the columns. But when there's not enough ore coming in, that really doesn't matter. Ore supply needs to be fixed.

Train Route Efficiency

After pondering the issue, I soon realized this is the first matter to be handled. I have a simple, and not-great, setup right now. Two locomotives each haul three cargo wagons to all three stops in order; all cargo wagons are set to accept half iron and half copper. The stops are not all the same though: one(Pierre-Etienne Chasse) supplies two wagons with iron only, the second(Andrew Hobbs) three wagons with iron only, and the third(dharh) supplies all three with both. Doing the math, Chasse can only fill up a third of the train(two of three wagons, half-full each), Hobbs half, while dharh can fully fill them. In terms of only cargo efficiency, forgetting about travel time, whether there's enough supply to fill the wagons, etc., this system works out to 61%. Which isn't good.

As a first order of business, I will direct one train to keep the wagons as is but only get deliveries from dharh to Central Ore, back and forth. That locomotive will now be at 100%; it can have all wagons filled, given enough supply and sufficient engineering. The second one will be iron-only, going to the other two stops. This will allow it to reach 83%, two of three wagons filled at Chasse, all three at Hobbs. Overall this should be a significant improvement by itself: and it was shown to be immediately.

Unloading

Next up; improving the efficiency of getting ore off the trains and onto the proper belts to where it needs to go. Here's how that is working right now:



The main problem here is a throughput one; three inserters loading from chests onto the belts, but two of them go on one side, the third on the other side. Ore tends to 'back up' in the middle of the three chests. I noticed this a while ago, but it's time to do something about it.




This is not perfect, but it's better. The basic idea behind it is that if any of the 'unload belt' segments has too much on it and another one is empty/low, the load will be redistributed at least somewhat by the splitters before they get merged onto one belt. Throughput should be improved here.

Unloading Orders

I've already adjusted one train unloading instruction, but I agree with EpononymousMrYar's point about time not being the best way to do things -- because time is going to vary somewhat. I wouldn't say seconds count just yet; but certainly anything that is suboptimal by as much as 10 seconds is going to count. I need to make each train stay at the station as long as it needs to, and no longer.

Simpy 'stay until empty' doesn't work because if copper backs up but iron is low, or vice versa, then i'm not going to be getting what I need the most as a train just sits at the station while it waits for whatever the backlog is to resolve itself. Rather, I'll go with 'Empty Cargo Inventory' OR 'X seconds on inactivity'. The problem that can arise with this, is the unloading chests can get full and then slowly unload, causing more activity(i.e., inserters unloading more stuff) a bit at a time -- but just enough to keep the train at the station. My first attempt at dealing with this is simply to set the time low; if nothing happens for two seconds, take off.

With that in place, I'm confident I've significantly improved Central Ore unloading. I think the new routes are as efficient as they can be for this limited number of stations. What about the loading side of things? I observe a stop at Andrew Hobbs which ends with two cars full ... and the third at less than 40%, just over 700 of the 2k capacity. That obviously isn't helpful, and there are multiple things to fix here also.




First, there is nothing close to an equal amount of ore going down the three belts here. Second, the way they are set up, there's going to be a lot more ore in the chests on one end of each wagon than the others, which is not good for quickly loading.

For the first one, I'm using a nice link on the forums which lists all manner of possible balancers that have been tested.




Don't ask me to explain how this works in detail; I don't know. It is noted that it can cut throughput by half, but I don't think that's going to be an issue here(and I'll just upgrade belt speed if it is). The point though is to distribute whatever amount of ore I'm getting evenly between three different belts, each to go to a different cargo wagon. For each of the three output belts here then, I need to divide them as evenly as possible into six.




This is exactly the kind of thing that blueprints were made for. Having to memorize this layout for every time and throw them all down manually would make my brain explode. It is a good example of how the community has improved Factorio though. Left to my own devices, I'd definitely just use a half-measure(like I have at Central Ore).

Loading Instructions


Once that is all hooked up, we can be assured that everything is being distributed as close to evenly as it can be. The current orders at loading stations are simply 'wait 30 seconds'. I switch to the inverse of the unloading commands: 'Inventory Full' OR '2 seconds of inactivity'. That way we'll leave if there isn't anything left to get, otherwhise we stay until full.

At the smallest station(Chasse) I hadn't left enough room for this kind of setup, but I used some haphazardly placed splitters to approximate the basic idea of splitting up the load as best I could. Hobbs had been no problem, dharh would be somewhat more involved.




We're getting some production from the nuclear reactor. Not nearly what it's capable of, but some. Still hanging out in the low-40s MW usage.




Things are moving around a lot as can be seen, with the continued fixing, unfixing, tearing down, refixing, etc. going on. Also, that's a ridiculous amount of copper cable. 70k green circuits, 15k red, 1.5k blue.

Item Count: 53(new high)
Total Production: 1.17M(+20% from 978k)

One million strong ... and growing. I must be doing something right here. Nearing 5M each on iron ore, iron plates, and copper cable.

Resources

** Iron: 267k(41k) primary, 8.3k(5k) steel, 2.16M Central(110kish). About two-thirds of the iron ore is now train-imported.

** Copper: 1.69M primary, 1.6M Central(new). Miscalculated last time, but we continue to look pretty good here.

** Stone: 140k(2.5k).

** Coal: 162k(1k) steam power, 62k(8k) factory, 1M train(--), 568k secondary(new).

** Crude Oil: 72/sec(-18). Crude is definitely crashing. Going to find out soon how much more we need.

** Uranium: 47k(7k).

Olesh
Aug 4, 2008

Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.
The main advantage is additional inventory space and room to run a second Portable Fusion Reactor, which then allows you to fill up the rest of your space with shields, lasers, roboports, and/or legs without having to worry about running out of power. You mention that you don't really feel the need to upgrade, but I find that Power Armor Mk2 is a fairly substantial QoL upgrade and frequently don't even bother making Mk1s. Having more roboports, more lasers (which, as a reminder, still work from inside vehicles), or simply more walking speed is enough to make it worth it for me.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...



Once the dharh station was completely set up, this was the next problem. Soon this will go away, but not yet. The lines coming from Central Ore(express ones, from the top here) are completely full. That means they've got enough to fully satisfy the smelting columns, but they won't because this clustermess needs faster belts. Everything here that is red needs to be blue, and that which is yellow needs to be red. Even before this though, great progress has been made on getting enough ore to and through Central Ore.

In the process of upgrading, I also discovered I had one splitter in the wrong place in the middle of all that -- imagine that, screwing up such a monstrosity so that everything doesn't work optimally. When it was done though, I had enough throughput, at least temporarily, to max-out smelting. It seemed a good time to check on crude supply -- we still have more than we are using by a good margin. Excellent.

Next problem: new iron sources. I don't know if the trains can keep up with the newly increased demand, but I do know that even if they do, it won't last long. 13-14 hours worth remains right now.




At the bottom of the screen, just inside our borders, is the only significant iron patch we aren't currently using. A little over a million there. Hooking that up to the current rail network directly would be decidedly inconvenient given it's location. However, I could belt it up to where the last of the steel is drawing off from; that's near the top of this shot, just north of the column of research labs. Then I wouldn't have to divert anything from Central Ore south to the steel smelters: the output from the third cargo wagon there could join the two belts heading west to the smelters, supplementing any shortfall. At least, that'd be the case for a while. I really want to make use of this patch somehow, and I can't see a better way.

I like the elegance of utilizing existing infrastructure, with minimal setup. I thought it was a reasonable-sized project to do while wait to see what shakes out elsewhere. And then ...




That's a nice sign that at least some of it is going well. As I finished the setup though, I noticed the ore supply was not keeping up again. Back to the work on the train network to see about that. I was not surprised by what I found. Even at Hobbs, the train sits there waiting for more ore to be produced for over half the time. We simply need more supply to satisfy this ravenous a beast. A lot more supply. More stations and iron patches must be found and developed. And to do that, we'll have to leave the comfort of our established walls, strike out, and do more biter-slaughtering.

On my way to check out something else, this happened ...




Happens to pretty much everyone eventually, but don't just casually saunter across railroad tracks. It's not worth the risk.

After reloading, I confirm that even the half-and-half dharh station, the furthest to travel and only half of each ore, is still shipping out ore faster than it's producing.




With the way the rail network is currently set up and position of other features(bus, bodies of water, etc.) we pretty much need to go either north or east. So naturally I want to both. This is north. Small to modest-sized clusters of biters. Three iron patches in view here, and another a ways to the southeast of this. The four combine for somewhere in the vicinity of 3.2M.




More biters, less iron patches -- but a lot more oil. Also, the big patch here is really big: 3.3M by itself, another 1.1M for the one in the south, though no others are worth mentioning. So basically north is easiest, east is more lucrative. I decide to head north first, since the sooner we get additional supply, the sooner we can use it.

I soon realize that I really want to do this efficiently, and that means revisiting combat robots. I still like the Defender; the damage advantadge over the other types has only increased. I took down the production line for that a while ago, but this seems a good opportunity to demonstrate how the robots can handle such a thing completely independent of the bus.

** Worker Robot Speed 5(500 RGAPY) -- This will certainly help, another 65% speed boost. We're done with the military upgrades for now.




After putting all the logistics bots in a couple of roboports to trigger the production of more, I set up this little thingy. The purple filter inserter will grab any logistics bots produced and send them on to a local roboport. Anytime more fly off from there to go do whatever, more will be produced. In this way, I'll gradually acquire an absurd amount to make sure the work I want them to do gets done.




Here's the defender production line. All the chests except the one on the right end, which stores the Defenders, are requester chests. Iron plates for the magazines, which feed into the piercing magazines(copper plate and steel plate added), and those feed into the Defender assembler(green circuits and gear wheels added). Every bit of it delivered by logistic bots, with no belts involved. A lot of bots are needed for this, but it's a lot easier logistically because the spacing is easier and there's no throughput limitation, assuming sufficient bots for the work.




I noticed that gear wheels were once again the bottleneck, so while waiting for more Defenders to be built, I added new production for those. This is the 'splitter merge' technique, which I was unaware of until it was mentioned fairly early in the thread. It's as painless a way as I know to add more product onto the bus.

By this point I had over 100 Defenders. It was time to go to war.

** Lab Research Speed 6(500 RGAPY) -- Another 60% boost.

The fighting went quite well; the increased damage we've achieved, esp. from increased rate-of-fire of the main tank cannon, has allowed for much greater lethality and the ability to make quicker work of the biter clusters. It also means I burn through ammo more quickly. As I returned to restock, a group of biters broke through north of the dharh station in the southeast, and took out several drills before I could get out there. As always, I put a couple turrets up where they broke through the wall in an unprotected section. I also took a look at the production flow; blue circuits for the Hi-Tech vials are now the bottleneck. That's because we don't have enough iron to feed the green-circuit beast. Over half of a blue/express belt of those greens, but it's not nearly enough.




The red split-off going north here feeds most of the green circuit area. And it's just starving. Only way to fix that is to keep doing what I'm doing -- load up on ammo and Defenders, and harvest that iron in the north.

** Braking Force 6(550 RGAPY) -- The price of advancement continues to gradually rise. Another 15% to train braking, which suddenly is a lot more important to me now. There are only a dozen research projects left available at the moment, so we're narrowing it down.

I took more resources with me on the second run. Less than 40 minutes after starting the first attempt, I had enough of the biters cleared out to start running track north to where I'd like to build our first 'ore outpost' and next station.

** Inserter Capacity Bonus 7(600 RGAPY) -- This is a big one; even 'normal' inserters can now move three items at a time -- the stack variants increase from 10 to 12. 11 projects remaining. It's worth counting down the items as we eliminate them. There are actually more that require 'post-endgame' activities that I won't be indulging in for the sake of this run; I'll get to what exactly I mean by that later.




Here's the current status of the northern expansion. The tracks have been extended beyond our walls, and not far north of me here is where I want to put the next roundabout, and near that a train station to handle all of the output that is relatively close by.




Over 52 MW, several higher than we've ever used before. The nuclear reactor is still only at a little over 20% of capacity, but it's getting used more and more all the time. Laser turrets drawing as much overall as the pumpjacks, I don't remember placing 50+ roboports, and almost 300 mining drills are in place despite regularly taking down the exhausted ones.




Those are some big numbers. Over 200k of both ores mined out -- and still not enough on the iron side. Almost 100k green circuits, 15k reds, and 2.3k blue is holding us back.

Item Count: 50
Total Production: 1.51M(+29% from 1.17M)

Crushing all previous records, and not satisfied yet. Almost a million units of good old H20 an hour, and 300k+ crude.

Resources

** Iron: 200k(33.5k) primary, 1.1M(??) steel, 1.93M Central(115k). Three minor patches are nearly-extinct.

** Copper: 1.45M(120k) primary, 1.5M Central(50k). Still plenty in the primary belts to limit the import need.

** Stone: 122k(9k). Still on the original field; we'll have to expand beyond it in a while.

** Coal: 162k(--) steam power, 41k(10.5k) factory, 1M train(--), 553k secondary(7.5k). Still tons of places we can go for more if need be.

** Crude Oil: 58/sec(-14). The production report indicates we consumed 70k more than we produced in the past hour. I'll need to check on this.

** Uranium: 38k(4.5k). Drying up.

Veloxyll
May 3, 2011

Fuck you say?!

For the south Iron, you could have either made a bypass around Dharh, thrown down some landfill to make a bridge, then reconnected with that other line directly north.0 Or just split off from that other line and reconnect a little further on. And just comissioned 1 or 2 trains to go down, get a full load of ore, then go to the loading station.

Power Armour II is great for filling with legs, shields, personal lasers, and then becoming a cybernetic god of death and fast running.

And you have plenty of stuff for green bullets to be more shooty, too!

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
I like the bridge idea. That never even occurred to me.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Getting the new station up and running was the top priority before the mining tour. Even if we are running low on crude, there isn't anything I can do about it right away.

** Braking Force 7(650 RGAPY) -- Same 15% boost. That's the last of these; we're now down to 10 projects remaining.

** Follower Robot Count 5(800 RGABY) -- Another +10; now we can have 40 combat assistants. There is nothing left under 1000 of each vial type.




It takes most of an hour to get it all done, and the biters try to make a few encroachments in the meantime. Nonetheless, eventually the northern outpost is ready for business. I give you Blue Frostfire station. I decided not to surround the entire complex by walls, but only the patches themselves which are most likely to draw attention. Three iron fields, one of them really small but two good-sized ones. Two radar stations are in place which will let us know what's happening around here -- and push our knowledge of the terrain further northward, so we can discover if it is worthwhile to push further in this direction. Each walled resource field has multiple turrets ready inside, spaced so that anything that approaches will be fired on by at least 2-3 of them.

I'm not sure if this will work protection-wise. We'll find out. I also may want to add copper to this station eventually. And there is some oil nearby if I need it which would complicate things further. But it's worth a first try. Time to get our iron-only train to add this to it's route.

The most interesting fact to come out of the Mining Tour is that we are definitely seeing some crude shortfalls now. Taking some of the thread advice, I put in a new set of orders for our dedicated iron ore train:




The problem is that it is waiting for a long time at Chasse. Too long. So I tell it to spend no more than a minute there, while lengthening the list of stops(too many to mention here) to have it go to Hobbs and Frostfire twice for every time it visits Chasse. That should make the circuit more efficient, and I'll check back in a while to see how that goes. I could have also just added another train to go to Hobbs and Frostfire only, but I don't think we're producing enough to justify that.




In terms of bringing in more oil, there's some we're almost to in the north, and it won't take that much fighting to reach the big batch in the east. Getting to it is not the problem. It's more getting it here. I'd like to just keep using the same train I have been, but in order to do that I need to find a way to deal with crossing train tracks. Shown here is our primary oil field that just isn't cutting it anymore. You can see the tracks to the north, and they also are to the east, heading south to Hobbs and dharh stations. There's no non-insane way to get around them.

Since I want to fight my way east to get to the iron, I might as well go for the big crude payday out that way as well. They are close enough together that I probably want to use the same station for them. How do I make that work? I don't really know. But I'll have to figure out. First up, I've got to clear out resistance. While they aren't causing enough trouble to really bother me, a number of clusters out that way have expanded into our pollution cloud anyway. Time to end their pain -- permanently.

Took me less than twenty minutes to burn through over 150 Defenders. Those things are like freaking candy at the moment.

** Uranium Ammo(1000 RGABY) -- The impact of this is ... not small. Nearly triple the damage output of my current piercing ammo for magazines, and almost doubles how hard the cannon shells hit. If I wasn't cleaning the clock of the biters as-is and near the end of the game, I would be all over this. It's pretty much superfluous though given the situation.




A nice swath around the oil here, and just a little more work needed to secure the iron. I think instead of doing crossing, I'm just going to hook up a line to the roundabouts already in place. Essentially I'll be connecting the oil and ore networks -- except that only the oil train will be using that part of it.

By the time this session is done, I've extended the rail out to the oil field with a new roundabout : next step is getting a station up out here.




I'd expect everything to be a little slower with the crude shortage, and that's exactly where we sit. A little over 47 MW, about five less than last time.




The ores are pretty steady, but everything else is all over the map. That's because it's not ore production, but ore transportation, that is now the issue of the day.

Item Count: 47
Total Production: 1.25M(-17% from 1.51M)

I'm surprised things are holding up this well to be honest. It's not like we have no oil coming in -- it's just not enough. This next big field should take care of the finish.

Resources

** Iron: 150k(25k) primary, 1M(50kish) steel, 3.85M Central(more added). Primary iron smelting is almost entirely on the train network now.

** Copper: 1.26M(95k) primary, 1.4M Central(50k).

** Stone: 115k(3.5k

** Coal: 162k(--) steam power, 28k(6.5k) factory, 1M train(--), 541k secondary(6k).

** Crude Oil: 49/sec(-9). From what I've seen we need something around the 70-80 mark to fully supply the six refineries. We'll have a few times that much soon.

Veloxyll
May 3, 2011

Fuck you say?!

Thotimx posted:





The problem is that it is waiting for a long time at Chasse. Too long. So I tell it to spend no more than a minute there, while lengthening the list of stops(too many to mention here) to have it go to Hobbs and Frostfire twice for every time it visits Chasse. That should make the circuit more efficient, and I'll check back in a while to see how that goes. I could have also just added another train to go to Hobbs and Frostfire only, but I don't think we're producing enough to justify that.

Producing any minerals is producing enough to have a dedicated train! Sure you'll get occasional downtime with train(s) sitting at loading stations, but who cares? It's not like they have anywhere else to be.

quote:


Since I want to fight my way east to get to the iron, I might as well go for the big crude payday out that way as well. They are close enough together that I probably want to use the same station for them. How do I make that work? I don't really know. But I'll have to figure out. First up, I've got to clear out resistance. While they aren't causing enough trouble to really bother me, a number of clusters out that way have expanded into our pollution cloud anyway. Time to end their pain -- permanently.



Actually with fluid wagons - pretty easy. Since pumps to fill the wagons won't fill the materials train, you just load iron from one side, oil from the other. Put signals around the station and a little behind and let the trains queue to sort it out. Providing there's a timed wait, everything will be hunky dory.

EponymousMrYar
Jan 4, 2015

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.

Veloxyll posted:

Actually with fluid wagons - pretty easy. Since pumps to fill the wagons won't fill the materials train, you just load iron from one side, oil from the other. Put signals around the station and a little behind and let the trains queue to sort it out. Providing there's a timed wait, everything will be hunky dory.

What's this about sides? You can stick something like 12 inserters to load/unload cargo wagons and a single pump will handle loading/unloading crude no problem as long as you have the buffer to empty into. Train pumps have quite a reach.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...

Veloxyll posted:

with fluid wagons - pretty easy. Since pumps to fill the wagons won't fill the materials train, you just load iron from one side, oil from the other. Put signals around the station and a little behind and let the trains queue to sort it out. Providing there's a timed wait, everything will be hunky dory.

I ended up not going with a combined station, but this sounds like a good approach.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...



This is blahblahblah Gribas, which I have decided to make as an oil-only station; I'll build another iron one nearby. The longest part of the task was deciding how to hook up the pipes to a full two dozen pumpjacks.




The full train network. The crude train will now cycle from Huriyade(delivery) to both Roflev(largely depleted) and then to Gribas(currently outputting 420/second, or 5-6 times our needs by itself). Similarly to the iron train, it will only stop for a couple minutes at most, to avoid waiting for supply at Roflev. After doing the Tour and taking down everything including the supply belt from another iron patch, I ran into this.




Unfortunately dark here, but right now the factory cannot consume all the ore that is coming in on the trains. I like this problem, and the oil area is back to running full-steam as well. That probably means I need to expand production of something. Either that, or boost throughput somewhere.

We're at 10 Labs operational, only a third. Hi-Tech is once again the issue. 4 Assemblers there running almost full-steam ... but not quite. Jam-packed of everything save blue circuits. Still over 2000 of them an hour, and it's not enough. They don't have enough green or red circuits incoming, but green especially. The green circuit line isn't getting enough copper, because ...




Here's the source of the problem: one smelting column doesn't have nearly enough ore. The way this has been working for a while is that the left column here gets supplied by the various small patches in the area; the one on the right gets imports from Central Ore. It's worked well but clearly we are no longer getting enough on the left. Time to bring a second belt over like I'm already doing with the iron, and feed that in.




That wasn't the only problem though. Here we now have plenty of copper with the ore problem fixed -- but the standard belts just aren't enough to supply the demand. A full belt runs out before it can reach the far end of this section. Upgrading to red/fast, and making a couple other small related changes got us back to a full express belt of green circuits. But the reds were still lagging -- low on plastic, because we don't have enough petroleum gas.

Six refineries are no longer enough. It took some doing to cram in two more, but it was enough to keep all of the plastic plants running.

Back at the other end, a welcome sight:




First time I've seen a blue circuit backup here. Naturally I doubled the Hi-Tech vial assemblers to eight in order to supply a few more labs. Reasonably satisfied with how things were running here, I headed back out to secure more resources past our eastern border.




It was a bit dark last time, but here's our new oil-pumping outpost. Totally walled in with a gate for me to enter, a radar in the northeast to extend our terrain knowledge, and turrets around the perimeter. Even the tanks are inside; the only thing outside the walls is the station itself.

** Follower Robot Count 6(1000 RGABY) -- Another 10 combat robots, to 50 maximum. I only use about 15-20 typically though. Five projects only are active. Getting close to the end now -- though it's slowed down due to a copper issue I noted while heading back for supplies. No time to deal with that yet as our latest staton is being built.

A new station(Xawirses)went operational just as this session ended. Our largest resource patch of any kind at well over 3M, it will have a dedicated 3-wagon train built for it and should ensure that iron is not a problem for the forseeable future. This is just east of the new oil station. Further to the south I can get similar quantities of copper, and I'm considering adding that station soon. Really that should about do it though from a supply standpoint.




Almost 59 MW now, with the nuclear reactor at more than a quarter capacity and a significant portion of that(11 MW).




Worth noting that we smelted significantly more plates than ore that was mined out here. That means either that we need to mine more, or that more train transport is needed. I'm thinking probably the latter, but it'll bear a review.

Item Count: 63(well over the previous high)
Total Production: 1.59M(+27% from 1.25M)

Just over the previous best despite the copper issue that I need to resolve.

Resources

** Iron: 115k(17.5k) primary, 1M(--) steel, 6.89M Central(more added, about 145k usage).

** Copper: 1.17M(48k) primary, 1.3M Central(50k).

** Stone: 113k(1.5k)

** Coal: 162k(--) steam power, 15k(6.5k) factory, 1M train(--), 517k secondary(12k).

** Crude Oil: 456/sec(new patch added). Hard to imagine needing more, but even if we do it'd be pretty trivial to add at this point.

Seraphic Neoman
Jul 19, 2011


I don't suppose you can send out your robots to deal with the biters for you?

Olesh
Aug 4, 2008

Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.

SSNeoman posted:

I don't suppose you can send out your robots to deal with the biters for you?

Combat robots either follow you (for Defenders/Destroyers) or are launched at a specific point (for Distracters). Either way, the range is limited to the area around you personally.

0.16 included a pair of longer-range options for dealing with biters, but those are frankly post-game options as by the time you can build them, you're in a position to simply win the game if you choose.

Faylone
Feb 18, 2012
If you want to use robots to kill your enemies, it's far more effective to use the construction and logistics ones to manage waves of turrets using blueprints since you can pick up the majority of what's used and move it on ahead to kill again. Laser turrets are great for this.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
The copper issue was indeed an importing problem. First holdup was the train waiting for iron to fill up at dharh -- I limited the time in the station as I've done with the other trains already to at least speed up the copper deliveries. I had to do the same at Central Ore, which is backed up on iron but doesn't have enough copper, even with the changes. Bottom line: we need that copper station for more imports. This one's going to be a dedicated copper line.

** Character logistic slots 6(1000 RGAPY) -- Another 6 spots. The next project is kind of a big deal.

When it was finished, new station spikedoom08 brought 3M+ copper into the network.




Here's the next problem. Central Ore can't handle the number of incoming trains. I need to expand the unloading station here -- or rather, add a second one. I decide the best way is to route traffic south from the roundabout just east of here, and branch a second unloading platform off of that.

** Rocket Silo(1000 RGABPY) -- This unlocks several items which, when used in concert, allow us to assemble and launch the rocket that will complete our journey. There are still three other projects to research which are more expensive, and resources will need to be diverted to those. Once I get the new unloading station working though, this will become the primary priority.

It's time, at long last, to win the game.




Central Ore is no longer really worthy of the name. Here is the new unloading station, fully connected as I end this session. All that remains is to divert a couple of the trains there, so that they aren't clogging up Central. Then it'll be time to take a look at the rocket stuff. Right now, as you can see, there's only one train waiting. At times there has been a third which is at the roundabout itself, which then prevents other traffic from going through -- it's gotten to be a mess at times. Connor Hallasch should resolve that.




54 MW and more or less holding steady.




A lot of yo-yoing in a fairly steady pattern. Those peaks correspond to ore deliveries, the valleys are gaps in the supply in-between them. Soon I hope there will be much less fluctuation.

Item Count: 64. A lot of different crap.
Total Production: 1.38M(-13% from 1.59M)

Not bad, just some things to be smoothed out.

Resources

** Iron: 89k(13k) primary, 957k(30k?) steel, 6.48M Central(210k). I think we've got about 25 hours worth. That should be more than enough to conclude things.

** Copper: 943kM(113k) primary, 4.27M Central(more added). Not quite as much here, but it still should be enough.

** Stone: 98k(7.5k). I think we're going to make it all the way to the end on the original patch here. Probably.

** Coal: 162k(--) steam power, 10k(2.5k) factory, 1M train(--), 496k secondary(10k).

** Crude Oil: 450/sec(-6).

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Last one was really light to put it mildly, so I'll charge right ahead with another session here.


I set up the two trains that serve the big eastern ore deposits to head to Hallasch initially. That should roughly split up the traffic. Now on to rocketry.

** Rocket Silo -- This thing is the biggest, most expensive single entity in the game. It houses and produces the rocket itself, and is therefore the final step of this process. First up, we need to supply what it needs for the rocket.

** The silo produces Rocket Parts, and needs 100 of them to finalize construction. Each part requires 10 each of three components: Low-density structure, Rocket Fuel, and Rocket Control Units. So that's what we must provide the Silo, in large quantities.

** Low density structures need steel, copper, and plastic.

** Rocket fuel is made from solid fuel.

** Rocket control units need processing units and speed modules.

To accomplish this task then, I want to extend a new, more compact 'mini-bus' beyond the end of the current one. Copper, steel, and processing units are already on it. Rocket fuel, plastic, and speed modules will need to be added. I'm already building speed modules in the research area: I can just ramp up production and steal from there. For the plastic and the fuel, it seems best to me to set up a new oil processing area closer to where this is all going down.

Here's the Rocket Plan. Roflev Station, which is supplying little anyway, will serve as a delivery point now, not a supply point. Oil will get pumped east to a Secondary Refining area, where whatever necessary balance of resources is required will be set up to make the needed plastic and solid fuel. This will be sent back west, along with a few belts from the bus swinging around to Rocket Production. That's where the final infrastructure to escape this planet will be built.

Right now I've got a pretty good balance of things in the original oil area; this will let me mostly leave that be, and I can manage the needs of each separately.

** Mining Productivity 12(1200 RGAPY) -- 24% now. We've got three more of these to go, which will boost it to 30% eventually. That'll drag out research longer, but also make doubly-sure that our resources last. Definitely worth it.




Including several resupply trips to gather stupid amounts of piping, it took about half an hour to throw this together. Eight refineries, with local water source, and plenty of room below to send it wherever. Not shown here at the two storage tanks each for petroleum gas, light oil, and heavy oil in the east. I'll also do any cracking operation that is needed out that way.

Next I set up chemical plants for plastic and solid fuel. Five of each to start. The solid fuel ones will use the same proportion of oil products that we get from Advanced Processing(four on light, one on heavy). Hopefully that limits any necessary cracking. My guess is that I'll need to build more fuel plants, as they take 3x as long as plastic. But this at least gets the outline of things in place, and I can expand as needed.

Then it was time to go check on general logistics, starting with the ore supply.




These are the belts running west from the unloading stations to the smelters. Short version: we have a copper problem, but iron is fine. But why do I have a copper problem with a dedicated copper station? At first I thought maybe the route was too far for one train, but it's only filling up to a little over half capacity. Doing just fine there. No, we're just clogging up the unloading station again. For whatever reason, I don't think I saved the game after I changed destinations.

Nobody's going to Connor Hallasch, because I'm an idiot. After watching the system for a few deliveries of each train, I'm confident it's working properly now. There are still some slowdowns when trains approach the same roundabouts at the same time, but there's enough supply coming in to meet demands, or at least very nearly so.

That still leaves matters far from perfect. Only a half-dozen Labs running. There isn't a great deal I can do without going to a third copper column, which would involve a lot more work than I think is worth it at this stage of things. Red Circuits are the current shortfall though, and I do think I can coax some increase out of them. I boost the count there from 24 to 30 assemblers, and will check back in a while. Time to take the next step in the rocket process.




Here's the rocket-supplying 'mini-bus'. Speed modules are scarce because of the red circuit issue, and will remain so until research is finished. I may revisit expanding copper production, but not until I get the rocket section set up. There's lot of trees to cut here to make room, and I want to make use of a couple of the more recent advances, if only for demonstration purposes.

** Mining Productivity 13(1300 RGAPY)




Here's the basic form of the production for the components. There's no new ground being broken here, it's the same basic setup as for most of the research. Each of the three items has ingredients coming up the middle, assemblers grabbing from each side and the output belts merge at the top. All three items will then proceed northward to where the silo will be constructed. About the only thing different is that I did no splitting here; I just ran the full line up here because there's nowhere else for the material to go, nothing else for it to do.




I did want to show a couple of things though. This here is the substation. It can directly power anything in a much wider range than even the most commonly-used medium electrical poles. The 18x18 supply area(compared by 7x7 for the mediums) is massive: close to seven times the area covered. For building compact designs where there isn't any spare 'in-between buildings' room, it can be quite useful; but most of the time I don't care about it.




This is the Beacon, which as mentioned transmits module effect to all friendly buildings in it's radius. But as you can see, and has been mentioned, it's not much of a radius. It'll cover a few buildings at most -- and only allows for two modules anyway. Transmitting to a building that doesn't have module slots or has limited slots would potentially be useful, or if you build enough of them you could save on the cost of modules some by only putting them in the beacon.

Really high-end factories pack them in for the post-game, taking advantadge of the fact that the effects stack. But that's way, way beyond my concerns here.

The raw cost is only a fraction of one of the tier-3 modules. Now granted I'm not using those, but it definitely has it's uses. Just not any I care about, given that I'm still throwing efficiency modules everywhere. Not because I need to, but just because I've been going with a power-conservation approach.

Then it's time to build the Rocket Silo itself. The single most expensive thing in Factorio, it makes even the nuclear reactor seem a breeze by comparison. I could store a bunch of stuff and reduce my logistics demands to craft it -- but I'll just load it into a temporary assembler instead.

** 1000 Steel Plate
** 1000 Concrete
** 100 Pipe
** 200 Processing Units
** 200 Electric Engine Units

The first three are already brought to me automatically by the bots; the last two easy to go pick up. It ended up being a bit more involved than expected. Copper is running short again which I'll go investigate soon, but one of the impacts that is having down the chain is not as much oil is being used, therefore gas backs up, not as much is refined, we don't have enough heavy oil, which means not enough lubricant and the electric engine units are barely trickling out. Changed up the refineries to Basic for the time being to get more of the heavy stuff.




Well isn't that just as pretty as a painting. My first official train jam. None of them can move anywhere, so they just sit there. Forever. Nothing is getting delivered, so the factory just putters along on minimal resources.

OUTSTANDING.

Not sure how it happened, or how to prevent it from happening again.

:siren:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMEkKxGlDtI&feature=youtu.be
:siren:


I'm able to slightly move one of them and get things steaming forward again. Hopefully this won't happen often, or alternatively, if it does I can find a solution.




Here is the operational Rocket Silo. It draws 4 MW of power by itself. That's rather sizable for one structure.




And this is what it looks like inside. Up at the top, you can see it is waiting for more ingredients; I've only got two assemblers each working, and they just started. As enough are delivered, the rocket parts will be assembled. Then the Rocket bar will gradually fill up, and the % indicator will advance. Note the 'Auto-launch with cargo' thing there. That's the only half-warning you get about a nasty trick. If you launch the Rocket without a communications Satellite, it will still launch. It just won't do you any good. The game is not over, and you'll have to build another Rocket. I'm going to get a satellite together right away and not do any such nonsense.

After that though, the rest of this is just making sure the factory runs smoothly. Everything is in place -- all I have left to do is ensure that things are getting done, resources are flowing, and to the extent they aren't, fix it.

In the early days of Factorio, a common challenge for a 'mega-factory', or a so-called 'gigafactory', was to launch one rocket every minute. I assure you, it will take me a lot longer than a minute. But we will launch this sucker, and achieve victory.




Just under 52 MW average, though right now we're at nearly 60. It appears unlikely that I'm ever going to do more than bore that nuclear reactor. Se la vi.




You can clearly see that we were doing fine, until we weren't, and I didn't resolve the train situation for over half an hour. Looks like jamming will be rare under the current setup, but that doesn't make it any less fatal to the smooth flow I need.

Item Count: 58
Total Production: 1.29M(-7% from 1.38M)

If I keep everything running well I think we'll push close to 2M. A real big IF.

Resources

** Iron: 64k(12.5k) primary, 889k(34k) steel, 6.23M Central(125k). All of this usage goes with a grain of salt due to the train issues.

** Copper: 804kM(64.5k) primary, 4.04M Central(115k).

** Stone: 74k(12k).

** Coal: 162k(--) steam power, 6k(2k) factory, 1M train(--), 474k secondary(11k).

** Crude Oil: 434/sec(-16)

Veloxyll
May 3, 2011

Fuck you say?!

That's a tough one with the trains. The easiest fix would be to remove signals from the ring. Only one train can be on the roundabout at a time then, but that also means that what happened here - the two trains on the ring blocking each other - can't happen. I'd guess they wanted to go left and right respectively.

More advanced would be have the entry and ring signals be chain instead of standard, so that trains only enter if they can leave.

Given that normally I find I am short on something for my rocket (having never done the giga factory thing) I tend to throw productivity III modules in it, so I get some parts free.

EponymousMrYar
Jan 4, 2015

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.

Veloxyll posted:

That's a tough one with the trains. The easiest fix would be to remove signals from the ring. Only one train can be on the roundabout at a time then, but that also means that what happened here - the two trains on the ring blocking each other - can't happen. I'd guess they wanted to go left and right respectively.

More advanced would be have the entry and ring signals be chain instead of standard, so that trains only enter if they can leave.

Chain signals in the ring don't work unless your roundabout is friggen' ginormous so that they don't read both the next segment of the roundabout AND the exit.

This type of jam will just happen sometimes. The best fix is to make the roundabout a bit bigger, Thotmix's looks like a minimum size roundabout which I've found is too small for this exact reason. I went back an added another note in my roundabout suggestions.

Probably should have thrown blueprints in there but I figured out how to export/import them after writing that post :shobon:

EponymousMrYar fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Jan 21, 2018

Jabor
Jul 16, 2010

#1 Loser at SpaceChem

EponymousMrYar posted:

Chain signals in the ring don't work unless your roundabout is friggen' ginormous so that they don't read both the next segment of the roundabout AND the exit.

This type of jam will just happen sometimes. The best fix is to make the roundabout a bit bigger, Thotmix's looks like a minimum size roundabout which I've found is too small for this exact reason. I went back an added another note in my roundabout suggestions.

Probably should have thrown blueprints in there but I figured out how to export/import them after writing that post :shobon:

Chain signals absolutely solve this though? The whole point of using chain signals is you want them to find a clear path all the way to the exit before entering the roundabout. So when you have two trains making right turns across each other's path, one of them will go first, while the other will wait outside the roundabout (hence not blocking the first train's path) until there's room for it to make its own turn.

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Xerophyte
Mar 17, 2008

This space intentionally left blank

Jabor posted:

Chain signals absolutely solve this though? The whole point of using chain signals is you want them to find a clear path all the way to the exit before entering the roundabout. So when you have two trains making right turns across each other's path, one of them will go first, while the other will wait outside the roundabout (hence not blocking the first train's path) until there's room for it to make its own turn.

I think in this case they might possibly not, depending on how chain signals work in Factorio. Both trains might have a free path to the exit when entering, but block eachother's critical sections as they are traveling through the intersection. If trains reserve their entire path on entering it's fine, but I don't think they do? Really not sure.

Roundabouts would be more prone to that sort of issue, since trains doing right turns (in this drive-on-left case) travel through so many sections. Just making a chain-signaled intersection seems more robust.

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