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The more I think about the more I realize it's a little weird there's so few power generation options. 1- Steam Engines, with: -Wood (I wish wooden crates and small power poles too, but alas) -Coal (The most popular option) -Solid Fuel (I'm suddenly curious what percent of players make this move) -Rocket Fuel or for extra spice, Nuclear Fuel (It's like gold plating everything you own) 2- Solar, for when you have more steel, green circuits, and unnecessary land than you know what to do with. 3- Nuclear, when the spicy rocks are calling. An additional mid-to-late-game option would be neat. Maybe something to strike a balance between the complex, resource efficient, and low pollution Nuclear and simple but sprawling and non-polluting Solar.
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Nov 26, 2020 06:05
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I go for solid fuel asap and leave coal for smelting. Rocket fuel is I think a net negative for non-vehicle fuel, the real gain is the acceleration bonus for vehicles. Now I want to do nuclear fuel steam power, though. What a complete waste that would be!
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Nov 26, 2020 06:21
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Yeah solid fuel is pretty good for power generation. Oil is infinite, so if you have enough wells hooked up you can power a base forever on solid fuel. That being said, solar isn't that bad. Once you have enough construction bots, just make a blueprint that has solar panels and roboports, and then you can easily expand your solar farm as much as you want.
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Nov 26, 2020 06:30
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Teledahn posted:The more I think about the more I realize it's a little weird there's so few power generation options. So I looked up power plants on wikipedia, and apparently it's possible to extract energy from the osmotic pressure gradient between fresh water and salt water. Now, we don't have salt water in factorio, but we do have polluted water...
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Nov 26, 2020 06:56
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Teledahn posted:The more I think about the more I realize it's a little weird there's so few power generation options. This time I built the closest thing we have to a mid-to-late game setup: The crazy non-covarex autonomous nuclear build as seen on the 100% speedrun.  Tho I managed to research kovarex before having to plop down the actual reactors so I will do that instead. But it is a nice lesson to everybody who overthinks nuclear.
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Nov 26, 2020 13:53
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Something I think the base game should do is make more use of temperature, eg burning coal gives higher output temperature than wood, and solid fuel higher than coal Turbines should be an efficiency upgrade from steam engines, before you go nuclear.
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Nov 26, 2020 14:38
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GotLag posted:Something I think the base game should do is make more use of temperature, eg burning coal gives higher output temperature than wood, and solid fuel higher than coal Are there any mods that do this with the actual fluid temperature attribute? Is it actually possible from a modding perspective? Space exploration does something similar with thermofluids but they actually have like 5 separate fluid entities for it.
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Nov 26, 2020 14:41
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I really shouldn’t have set my mall storage limits so high...I don’t have any more iron on the bus, despite feeding two iron belts into the thing. Maybe this means I need to expand out again and do some steel smelting far away and train it in, so I can swap all my currently train’ed iron ore to iron plate production instead of steel. That’ll also free up some coal which was starting to back up in places, and plenty of space for the iron smelting plus additional copper smelting, which will mean I can add another chunk of green circuit production to support the red circuit production that I will need now that I have unlocked blue circuits... And then it was midnight, and all I’d done was hook up blue science, diagnose one or two problems, and plan another complete base redesign! Is that part of the factorio experience? Also, what’s the preferred upgrade on biter clearing from grenades and cars? I’ve finally unlocked combat shotguns and flamethrowers and rockets, but haven’t yet added either of their ammo to the mall yet. I’m just finding driving in circles has gotten harder as the biter bases have gotten bigger, even throwing some defender capsules out the window, and there are some pretty nicely sized iron/coal/copper deposits next to each other just over there behind three nests... (By the way I had no idea just how much input the higher tiers of science needed. I think my blue science-basically enough to keep pace with my measly ten red science assemblers-takes a whole belt of iron just by itself! Which is, as noted above, not making it down the belt that far anyways, at least not yet.) Oh, how do I figure out the throughput on my trains of ore. I’m sure it will depend on travel time, but setting that aside, how do you folks figure it out? I certainly need to upgrade my stops on both loading and unloading to stack inserters instead of just the basic fast inserters I was using, but I was just having one output belt per train car (I run one engine, three car trains). It feels like I have more capacity for that, particularly with the upgrade to stack inserters? And upgrading this would be nice because my current iron ore mine could support five belts, not just three.
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Nov 26, 2020 15:43
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Arcturas posted:And then it was midnight, and all I’d done was hook up blue science, diagnose one or two problems, and plan another complete base redesign! Is that part of the factorio experience? Time disappearing is definitely a thing this game does. quote:Also, what’s the preferred upgrade on biter clearing from grenades and cars? Tanks and rockets can do work. When you can swing personal defense lasers, some of those and a rocket launcher are all I've needed to clear nests now. The rockets kill the nest in 2-3 shots based on research, the lasers deal with biters, dodge and weave so worms don't tag you (their aiming AI is not smart). Supplement lasers with firearms as needed. quote:Oh, how do I figure out the throughput on my trains of ore. I’m sure it will depend on travel time, but setting that aside, how do you folks figure it out? I certainly need to upgrade my stops on both loading and unloading to stack inserters instead of just the basic fast inserters I was using, but I was just having one output belt per train car (I run one engine, three car trains). It feels like I have more capacity for that, particularly with the upgrade to stack inserters? SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Nov 27, 2020 |
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Nov 26, 2020 16:01
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Arcturas posted:Also, what’s the preferred upgrade on biter clearing from grenades and cars? I like using destroyer bots if i want it to go fast. Automated artillery outposts if I have time.
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Nov 26, 2020 16:12
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Restricting storage by connecting a chest to the inserter filling it is one of the primary ways of reducing resources sitting around in chests. It gives you much more granular control than per-stack, it's one of the first things I try to get going in my bases. It's very, very normal to have early-game smelting basically sitting at the head of your bus, and then transition it away and train everything in. Aside from defender bots, the next big combat steps are the rocket launcher and tank. Both are really powerful, but also both scale REALLY hard with upgrades. They are OK when you first unlock them, and then the first few upgrades massively increase their power. The rocket launcher outranges all but the biggest worms, so driving your car near the base, throwing down some defenders or turrets, then creeping your way in with rockets is very viable. The tank has less range, but it's very tanky and does insane DPS with a few upgrades. Cluster grenades are also a huge damage boost if you want to keep using the car, although that does require more skill on your part since the car will easily die if you hit anything. There is a super effective way to use stack inserters to unload cars. I'm going to spoiler it in pieces and deliberately not show an image because while it's not at all obvious, you may want to try to think about yourself. This first one is pretty obvious, but in general it's wise to buffer both loading and unloading by going belt > chest > train or vice versa. Stack inserters can dump their entire load into a splitter instantly. The splitter can be facing sideways and sideload a belt. Another splitter can be on the other side of the belt. You can do this twice on both sides of the train to fit 8 inserters and easily saturate 2 belts per car long before you hit max stack inserter capacity. At max upgrades and with blue undergrounds you can slightly redesign and put out almost 4 belts. Also, using filter inserters/filter stack inserters for primary unloading is super cheap and you should DEFINITELY do it. It's a giant loving pain when you inevitably mis-name a station and a car full of the wrong thing shows up and floods a line with unusable ingredients.
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Nov 26, 2020 16:18
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Thanks folks. I do have my stack inserters feeding into steel chests, with inserters taking ore out of the chests and dropping it onto belts. I figured that would let the stations load/unload while the trains were traveling back and forth. I don't think I've researched tanks just yet, but I did just barely start laser research so I can look into that. I barely remembered I could make modular armor, though, so I'll need to spend some time fiddling with armor bits and bobs too. And yeah, a big problem with the car is smashing into a surprise tree or rock at night and getting caught by the biter blob. Re: assemblers, stacks, inserters, and chests, from watching a video I got the idea of red circuiting the inserter to the chest, and I've been doing that to control how much is in the chests in my mall. The problem is I set the numbers unreasonably high (like 1500 yellow inserters or something dumb like that), so the resources are just piling up in there. I should do a sanity pass. Also I wasn't sure the stack size on some of the larger items like refineries, chemical plants, train engines, etc., so I need to fiddle those numbers. Re: smelting away from the base, I'd like to keep at least some smelting here so that I have iron ore on hand for making concrete. Possibly a few other things that I'm forgetting. But I should also figure out the train controls to get multiple trains hooked up to the same station, so that I can have more than one outpost for each base station. Stations just take up so much space! I think the rail network is otherwise set up ok - I have paired one-way tracks about three rail widths apart, and basic roundabouts for major cardinal direction changes, so I think it can accommodate additional trains. I just am not sure how to make the trains wait at the outpost until needed. Or I need to figure out a train waiting zone near my base... Re: filter inserters/filter stack inserters. I should have thought of that! I don't think I have too many filter/filter stack inserters made yet, they're far enough down the mall that they're really struggling to get gears. Arcturas fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Nov 26, 2020 |
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Nov 26, 2020 16:53
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To get trains to wait you need to use the circuit networks. That actually became much simpler last monday, so don't listen random advice from the internets.
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Nov 26, 2020 20:43
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GotLag posted:What are you going to do, upgrade the sun? Improve panel efficiency. In 2012 solar panels were only 17% efficient. State of the art prototype panels were pulling down 44% efficiency only 5 years later in 2017. Last time I checked my local market most panels were 20-25% efficient. Historically, there’s been an even wider range of panel efficiency. There’s plenty of real science to justify a game mechanic to upgrade solar panels with a scaling tech or upgrade tree if someone wants to.
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Nov 26, 2020 21:09
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VictualSquid posted:To get trains to wait you need to use the circuit networks. That actually became much simpler last monday, so don't listen random advice from the internets. Literally the only circuitry thing I’ve touched is using red or green cable to limit inserter use on assemblers. Networking sounds hard.
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Nov 27, 2020 00:03
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Arcturas posted:Literally the only circuitry thing I’ve touched is using red or green cable to limit inserter use on assemblers. Networking sounds hard. You can do simple but effective train stuff that is basically on that level. Especially in 1.1 with the new train limit for stations.
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Nov 27, 2020 00:13
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There has to be an easier way to control my refinery than wiring the pumps, but literally nothing else in the fluid system (except tanks) accepts input. I can feel the spaghetti solutions forming already. Also, is there a way to filter pumps/fluids? Trying to set up a pumping station in my rail yard; for now it's a pair of separated ones, but I'd like to be able to fill my sulphuric train and empty my crude oil train at the same platform. I just end up with sulphuric in my crude oil pipes instead. (8 hour straight session today that only stopped on account of a power outage. Autosave hopefully worked as intended. Fixed my oil, sort of fixed my nuclear octopus, built a giant fuckin wall as a defense prototype, refactored chunks of my base... Very productive.)
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Nov 27, 2020 00:26
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Can you use separate pumps that are disabled unless the station outputs their fluid signal from the train contents?
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Nov 27, 2020 03:13
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I think you could do that if you had the oil tanks and sulfur tanks be physically separate, like oil on the right and sulfur on the left. But if you want to empty both types of train into one set of tanks and then filter into separate directions, that will be hard because you'll have sometimes have to reject a train if the oil or sulfur storage gets close to full. You need to make sure the shared tanks empty fully, otherwise your fluids will mix.
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Nov 27, 2020 03:20
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It there any way to blueprint in modules into mining and smelting setups, or do you need to deposit them by hand?
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Nov 27, 2020 11:35
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Taking a blueprint of those with the modules present will save it in the blueprint. You can also blueprint a single miner / smelter with modules in it and just paste it over the top of already-built entities and bots will come along and fill it with the appropriate modules.
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Nov 27, 2020 11:43
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Awesome, thanks. Followup question, do I have this right: Have x trains dedicated to transporting Iron Ore from Mines to Smelting. parallel rails (e.g. 2* one-way rather than using a two-way rail system) Set up the following stops: 1. identically-named "Iron Pickup" stops in all of my mining operations, with the stop itself wired to a combinator that only makes it active when all chests are full. 2. Iron drop-off stop. 3. A bank of parallel "siding" stops, one for each train. Tell trains to go to "Iron Pickup", then "Iron Drop-off" then "Siding" The result should be that the trains will all idle in their own siding until an iron pickup stop becomes active, and only the number of trains required will be out on the track at any one time. Have I missed anything?
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Nov 27, 2020 13:08
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The trains will queue up in the lanes before your drop-off. You could have the drop station also only accept trains if they have space. I haven't tested that with the new system yet. I have space for M trains at all my miners and the station only requests a max of M trains.
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Nov 27, 2020 13:29
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Breetai posted:Awesome, thanks. If I've read this right, then you're proposing a schedule of pre:[1] Iron Pickup -> [2] Iron Drop-off -> [3] Siding
^ v
I---<-----<-----<------<----<----<--------I
pre:
This applies for 1 train. When you have X trains with that schedule, I don't know what happens when [1] is available but can only accept less-than-X trains. Probably the easiest fix is to remove your "Siding" stations - if [1] is diabled, then the trains will just wait in [2] (or queue up to arrive at [2]). Which should be fine, because there's no iron to pick up!
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Nov 27, 2020 14:47
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You'd have to make your drop-off point able to either buffer all the trains or contain enough unloading stations to service all the trains, since otherwise full trains going to drop stuff off would be stuck waiting for trains that already unloaded and are in turn waiting for a pickup point to become active again. The alternative would be to have a holding station that is named the same as the iron pick up stations, but only becomes active if no other iron pickup station is active.
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Nov 27, 2020 18:20
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If you update to the 1.1 experimental, you can use the new train limit feature, which might be exactly what you need here: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-361
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Nov 27, 2020 19:49
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Thanks, everyone that's really helpful, and those 1.1 changes are amazing.
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Nov 27, 2020 21:30
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I’m just at the stage of setting up second and subsequent depots for each type of ore. And those 1.1 change seem like lifesavers. I think I will redesign my train stops and belts instead of adding outposts, then, while I check the 1.1 release date... (And doing things in game helps my nascent uranium mines feed the handful of centrifuges I just put down...got my first useful isotope! Now to decide if I belt/ship the ore to the coast where my iron is, or pipe/belt in iron and water.)
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Nov 28, 2020 00:36
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Don't wait on release. Factorio experimentals are more stable than almost any game's major releases.
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Nov 28, 2020 00:58
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K8.0 posted:Don't wait on release. Factorio experimentals are more stable than almost any game's major releases. I can count the number of times that a factorio beta has had a serious bug on the fingers of one hand. The only reason I'm not updating to 1.1 beta immedately is that I'm waiting for mods to update.
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Nov 28, 2020 01:22
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Tesla was right posted:The only reason I'm not updating to 1.1 beta immedately is that I'm waiting for mods to update. They mostly are updated already. It's pretty much a find-and-replace update, the only mods I've had to make actual changes for are Electric Furnaces (for the pretty glow effects) and Nuclear Interface (it uses one of the few API calls to actually change)
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Nov 28, 2020 01:44
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Oh, I can just opt in to a beta? Well, I misinterpreted that. I’ll upgrade then. The mods I use should be fine, since they’re basically vanilla. Nanobots, after dark, FNEI (though I should re-figure this one out).
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Nov 28, 2020 02:01
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GotLag posted:They mostly are updated already. It's pretty much a find-and-replace update, the only mods I've had to make actual changes for are Electric Furnaces (for the pretty glow effects) and Nuclear Interface (it uses one of the few API calls to actually change) Orphan finder isn't compatible yet
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Nov 28, 2020 02:04
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The spirit of the untitled goose has entered my game and is wrecking  Two identical machines, just mirrored. Fed from what was formerly the same belt, but either way, fed pure U-238 right now. Everything is configured the same. Started all 4 machines in sequence, left to right. One mirror copy works and one mirror copy doesn't, because somehow the speed-differential spacer *doesn't work* on the red belt and it's compressed tighter than should be physically possible. ??? edit: I cleared and replaced the right hand machine, exactly the same... and SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Nov 28, 2020 |
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Nov 28, 2020 02:19
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I think that design will naturally have some temporary build-ups of U238 on the red belt section when the centrifuges decide to output their U238 last but input it first. That could get big enough to cause a temporary blockage in itself if you had more centrifuges. With two centrifuges it should be fine though, unless they were seeded with a ton of U238 in which case both orientations should break down. My best wild-rear end guess is some floating or fixed point precision gremlin is making those temporary build-ups accumulate. The inaccuracies of computer math might mean that occasionally a gap on the red belt turns into a sorta-one-item gap on the yellow belt that does not provide not enough space for sideloading an item from the left, but does provide enough space to sideload from the top or right. Not really sure if the belt sideloading logic is even subject to that though.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:44
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When inserters put onto a belt, they can push items back if there's a gap that's not quite big enough. That's how the belt gets overcompressed. And note that you have a solid yellow belt lane entering the red section, and a maximum of one solid yellow belt lane of 238 leaving it, so once it clogs it will never unclog unless there's a 235 in that section that can leave and make more space. (Note that as the clog started, one of the centrifuges is trying to output a 235 - the cycle before it clogged, that first 235 made it on to the belt and kept it going for another cycle). Why does the left one not seem to clog? I dunno, my guess is there's some asymmetry in how placing items on a clogged belt pushes things around.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:53
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Rarely things like that can be caused by crossing a grid boundary, at least in the past.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:59
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Honestly, sushi belts like that rarely are worth the effort to get working right: just have the output changed to a couple filter inserters with the ore you want to exit the system on an underground belt.
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Nov 28, 2020 04:42
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So a little more experimentation revealed potential causes and also more bullshit: It unjammed itself. Again. And stayed unjammed. The cause appears to be slightly different merge logic with splitters based on belt side. The right-hand one hitches ever so slightly more when U-238 is re-merged onto the belt. I think that's what's been adding up enough to jam it entirely. I barely even use nuclear anything, if it starts jamming again I'll just tear it down and use the lefthand one. This game gives me a headache. I'm glad I actually enjoy it anyway. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Nov 28, 2020 |
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Nov 28, 2020 04:54
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What version? 1.1.0 added multithreaded belt logic. Where are the chunk boundaries? Turn on the grid overlay (F4? F5? I forget)
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Nov 28, 2020 06:36
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