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Thanks for the tips after I posted my last sad little factory, I think I'm getting it now! Is there a good resource for learning about ratios of input to output? Like for example I've got a group of 24 steel furnaces smelting copper on a yellow belt to nowhere, I want to craft them into copper wire, is there somewhere that I could look up the ratio of steel furnace to level 2 assembling machine to determine how many times I need to split the belt/how many assemblers I can support? Side-question: What's the most effective way to split a single belt into three equal directions? I've been using 3 [whatever] inserters to place them on 3 different belts, but if there's something more effective I'm all ears. Yellow inserters are kinda slow for this, and blue inserters are too fast for a yellow belt to keep up with three of them I'm getting to the point now where I'm about to start laying down lots of rail lines and building outposts and I'm excited 
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Jan 10, 2021 05:18
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deep dish peat moss posted:Side-question: What's the most effective way to split a single belt into three equal directions? I've been using 3 [whatever] inserters to place them on 3 different belts, but if there's something more effective I'm all ears. Yellow inserters are kinda slow for this, and blue inserters are too fast for a yellow belt to keep up with three of them Build a 4-way splitter, loop one of the lanes back to the beginning. You technically split to four, but the fourth "rerolls" until it lands in one of the other three.
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Jan 10, 2021 05:28
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deep dish peat moss posted:Thanks for the tips after I posted my last sad little factory, I think I'm getting it now! https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#data=1-0-0&items=advanced-circuit:f:1 is an out of game calculator that will let you do this but you might consider it a spoiler if you haven't gotten to the late game yet and want to be surprised by items and recipes. It also won't adapt to mods, whenever (if ever) you experiment with those, and you'll have to manually select bonuses and stuff. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/factoryplanner is a mod that adds a new in-game GUI that lets you pick recipes and select subcomponents and can tell you these values exactly https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RateCalculator is kind of a different approach. Instead of planning it's about inspection: it gives you a button that lets you select an area in your game and tells you exactly how much input it eats, how much output it provides, and any intermediates that are over or under producing. Like an advanced version of gauging how full belts are by eye.
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Jan 10, 2021 05:38
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Most of the math is easy to do in your head by looking at the number of ingredients, the time to craft, and the speed multiplier of the machine. If you're a new player, unless you really, really hate basic math you're probably missing out if you jump straight to kirk mcdonald's calculator.
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Jan 10, 2021 07:38
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LLSix posted:Krastorio green belts take an insane amount of steel. It doesn't help that green underground belts take 25 normal belts. I assume green/purples are very similar to Factotio Extended tiers. I never finished this thing...but it worked well enough in testing. Too Many Gears
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Jan 10, 2021 15:06
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Speaking of belts what do y'all do with the different speeds? I know megabases graduate to blue and never look back; personally I build everything out of red ASAP but have never figured out when blue becomes worth the massive iron expense
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Jan 10, 2021 16:48
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More throughput over the same space. I guess at a certain point I never think about the material costs when everything is assembled and I don't run out of natural resources, which is usually around when I start making blue belts. Sometimes it's far easier to upgrade than lay down additional belts for more throughput.
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Jan 10, 2021 16:59
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The only places I significantly used blue on my old base were train unloaders (max speed matters) and part of the unloader-furnace feed until the blue belts were split. A couple places where I used them in production, but only in one or two internal supply lanes (copper to green circuits, I think).
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Jan 10, 2021 17:08
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Blue belts are for megabases. When I build a belt based megabase I stop putting any other belts on my construction trains. For my last base I used yellow for all of my starter base because I tried following the speedrun guide. Until that I had my starter base only until I unlocked construction bots and then built a bus base with red belts throughout. 4 red belts of iron (with separate steel) is pretty much the standard for a small bus base, you can expand it a bit by building separate smelting for your green circuit lines later.
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Jan 10, 2021 19:42
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Once you reach a certain point in a factory where the resources effectively become limited only by how many mining stations and unloading stations I want to build, I just pretty much blanket upgrade everything to blue and never look back. While I'm out messing around building whatever new part of the base I'm working on, the mall will be happily slurping up iron and turning it into thousands of blue belts/undergrounds/splitters and when I eventually get somewhere near the mall a horde of logistics bots will descend upon me loading me up to whatever quantities I have set so I can go out and do something else. Basically whenever you get to the point where you aren't trying to figure out how to get the production of blue keep up with your projects I guess? I can't say I really have any sort of rule on this, just that eventually blue is the only thing I use. I even get lazy/stupid and make mining outposts with all blue beyond a certain point in the factory.
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Jan 10, 2021 19:44
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Last run I did, I made a conscious effort to not upgrade my belts until it was the main reason that throughput couldn't be handled. Almost like I was playing I was surprised how long I used yellow belts for. FInishing my game with some red belts here and there and a single factory for blue belts which were hardly even used
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Jan 10, 2021 19:59
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i feel like im cheating, i grabbed the nanobots: early bots mod. but man, my mind is being blown coming from satisfactory where im connecting everything by hand. just copy pasting parts of my base is insane. im assuming this is what construction bots do later on, but not expendable? queeb fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Jan 10, 2021 20:09
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queeb posted:im assuming this is what construction bots do later on, but not expendable? Yarp. But you don't need to be nearby for construction bots to work, assuming you have radar and robopot coverage. You can cut, copy and paste factory segments from map view. Bots let you build very large things very fast.
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Jan 10, 2021 20:39
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I can't think of a real unavoidable belt bottleneck you can't trade off for space. Even train stations you can just use extra train cars for a given bandwidth. That's not to say you shouldn't upgrade. They are a load off your planning brain when you can just see "belt backup here but empty later, and I don't really have room parallel so it's time to upgrade instead." Following that trigger point I've never really needed more than red but I never make it incredibly far past the first rocket launch.
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Jan 10, 2021 20:44
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Ciaphas posted:Speaking of belts what do y'all do with the different speeds? I know megabases graduate to blue and never look back; personally I build everything out of red ASAP but have never figured out when blue becomes worth the massive iron expense Since Belt costs go up exponentially and space is infinite: Blue belts go in space constrained areas like between beacons and assemblers that need that per-tile density, as well as train unloaders because those are also space constrained by the size of the cars. Yellow belts for just about everything Red belts for the rare occasions where you can't solve something with more yellow belts or just can't be arsed. anything where you think you need 4 parallels red belts (let alone blue belts) is better served by trains.
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Jan 10, 2021 20:59
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Phobeste posted:https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#data=1-0-0&items=advanced-circuit:f:1 is an out of game calculator that will let you do this but you might consider it a spoiler if you haven't gotten to the late game yet and want to be surprised by items and recipes. It also won't adapt to mods, whenever (if ever) you experiment with those, and you'll have to manually select bonuses and stuff. Use https://factoriolab.github.io/list instead. It's a newer version of the kirk mcdonald calculator that also supports mods like Krastorio 2, Bob's and Angels, Pyanodons, and more!
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Jan 10, 2021 21:07
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Dootman posted:Use https://factoriolab.github.io/list instead. It's a newer version of the kirk mcdonald calculator that also supports mods like Krastorio 2, Bob's and Angels, Pyanodons, and more! Oooh thank you so much for this, I had no idea there was a newer version of this tool
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Jan 10, 2021 21:12
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I just installed the Bottleneck mod and it's great, found a load of factories where I'd messed up an inserter etc. But it doesn't catch everything (if output belt is backed up anyway, or a pumpjack with pipes but not hooked up to refineries). Is there a way to highlight based on lifetime production numbers, that will find something that's never made more than 1 output stack of stuff, or a really low number relative to similar machines nearby?
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Jan 10, 2021 21:18
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Ciaphas posted:Speaking of belts what do y'all do with the different speeds? I know megabases graduate to blue and never look back; personally I build everything out of red ASAP but have never figured out when blue becomes worth the massive iron expense Towards the end of a non-megabase (i.e. just build a rocket and win) run, at about the time that all sciences are running I have completely retired Yellow belts in favour of reds everywhere, and the only blue belts I use are in the main bus and also the smelting setups for the 4*iron and 4* copper belts I have in the bus (plus the station that drops the raw ore off to the smelters).
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Jan 10, 2021 22:35
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 you may not like it, but this is what peak "I keep causing myself problems and then fixing them haphazardly" performance looks like
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Jan 11, 2021 04:56
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SkyeAuroline posted:
Would love to know more about this. Are you supplementing an existing smelting setup?
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Jan 11, 2021 05:01
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promising carl posted:Would love to know more about this. Are you supplementing an existing smelting setup? I've mentioned in previous posts that I intended on avoiding a main bus entirely for this run, bootstrapping pure spaghetti until it suffocates itself with tangling and transitioning to rail. Because of how horribly designed the original spaghetti base is, my "keep the bootstrap base supplied while I get copper and coal mining outposts built" iron dropoff couldn't actually route a new iron line in from ANY direction and supply the whole thing. So I just ran the offload lines along the outside of one of my existing smelting arrays, hooked up splitters, and set it to draw from the smelting array first. The original iron deposit is rapidly running out, but I have a ton of copper left, so I'm going to try and run the deposit out entirely first before it switches fully to import. As production drops it'll automatically, gradually switch. By then I should have offsite production anyway. The balancing mechanisms are all solving various problems that came up now or in previous bases. e: just noticed a splitter's priority is flipped oops e2: Oversight of the iron processing region of the base. All of this is just staying in place to fund future expansion as I figure out how the hell you actually run a train-based base; I haven't really gotten much straight answers. 
SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 05:10
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Dootman posted:Use https://factoriolab.github.io/list instead. It's a newer version of the kirk mcdonald calculator that also supports mods like Krastorio 2, Bob's and Angels, Pyanodons, and more! Is there a method to make this tool display production data on the flowchart? Otherwise I'm not seeing any benefit aside from the potential mod support.
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Jan 11, 2021 07:44
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I switched to Krastorio and also am using some cheaty mods like Factorissimo, but I feel pretty good about my current base   It even has a belt looping around the interior of the wall to feed ammo into all of my turrets that I had to build because I was getting attacked by biters every couple minutes before I wiped a bunch of their bases out.  It's very mysterious and atmospheric to be in one part of my base and see the ammo belt start moving a large amount of ammo past and know that hundreds of biters are dying somewhere And I get to keep all of my spaghetti bullshit inside the factory buildings  Is there a use for Hydrogen? Currently I'm going by my Hydrogen tanks occasionally and releasing/dumping it all because if the tanks fill up my electrolysis tanks stop producing and that includes the Chlorine I built them for. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 15:09
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deep dish peat moss posted:Is there a use for Hydrogen? Currently I'm going by my Hydrogen tanks occasionally and releasing/dumping it all because if the tanks fill up my electrolysis tanks stop producing and that includes the Chlorine I built them for. Not really, make some fuel and just burn the rest. Despite the scary tooltip, the pollution isn't all that much (less than using that hydrogen + oxygen from condensers to turn it into water would be), and since you're playing Krastorio, you could just build those air filter things if pollution ever becomes a problem.
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Jan 11, 2021 15:23
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Can you not get industrial revolution 2 through the in-game mod portal? It doesn't seem to show up for me
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Jan 11, 2021 15:44
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kanonvandekempen posted:Can you not get industrial revolution 2 through the in-game mod portal? It doesn't seem to show up for me Looks like it's only marked as compatible for 1.1, so if you're on 1.0 (which you would be unless you went to steam betas and opted in to the 1.1.x "experimental", in quotes since factorio experimental/beta releases tend to be perfectly stable and completely suitable for long term use) it wouldn't show up.
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Jan 11, 2021 15:47
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Phobeste posted:Looks like it's only marked as compatible for 1.1, so if you're on 1.0 (which you would be unless you went to steam betas and opted in to the 1.1.x "experimental", in quotes since factorio experimental/beta releases tend to be perfectly stable and completely suitable for long term use) it wouldn't show up. Ah I may have gone back to the stable release when 1.0 came out, that makes sense, thanks.
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Jan 11, 2021 15:52
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I did it! my main base had a small crappy coal patch, so i got to train research and built my first.
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Jan 12, 2021 08:56
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queeb posted:I did it! my main base had a small crappy coal patch, so i got to train research and built my first. That way to load the train won't work well. The lower inserters will grab all the coal first. As you can see in your sacreenshot, your train will always have to sit there, waiting for the top car to start filling up until all the lower buffer chests are full. You should give each car its own belt (with enough mining, and/or with a balancer to evenly distribute the coal) e: or if you want to get fancy with circuits: Only enable an inserter, if the content of its chest is <= the average content of all chests Tamba fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 11:52
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I think that way of loading is just fine, assuming you are satisfied with the belt throughput. Using splitters to even the loading won't actually increase the rate at which trains will leave. In the end it is limited by the bottleneck of the system, which in this case is the 2 x yellow belts for 30 items per second total. This means you can have, at most, one train leave every 200 seconds. 2000 per wagon * 3 wagons / 30 items/sec. Adding splitters can bump up the schedule, and make the first train leave a little earlier, but the next one will still need to wait 200 seconds, assuming there is no buffer left. As you mentioned, though, adding more belts with more miners can change this equation.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:25
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UU TEE EFF posted:I think that way of loading is just fine, assuming you are satisfied with the belt throughput. Using splitters to even the loading won't actually increase the rate at which trains will leave. In the end it is limited by the bottleneck of the system, which in this case is the 2 x yellow belts for 30 items per second total. In this case, though, splitters actually will help. Here's the issue: their belt setup is 18 blues per yellow belt, groups of 6, each fed to an iron chest and then another blue. 30 items/sec and each blue inserter will take slightly over 2 items a second; by the time you get to the end 4 (maybe 5 depending on rounding) of the 6 inserters on the last wagon on each side aren't working. "Sure, but when the train is full it stops being a problem" - not quite, because when the train is full the iron buffers will still refill and won't increase the rate that the last wagon gets items until they're completely full. Stack size research will only make this worse, even with higher tier belts. A 1:3 balancer per side will result in the same total throughput of items but ensure that it's evenly distributed across the wagons. Might be slightly slower to fill individually but will definitely be faster overall (the buffer means I can't really estimate an exact speed, depends on how fast trains are coming and going; I've had some trains where the station could never fill the buffer for even one train and some where the buffer was filled long before the train came back). It's not broken as is but balancing it would improve it. If nothing else it's useful for the future.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:42
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SkyeAuroline posted:In this case, though, splitters actually will help. Here's the issue: their belt setup is 18 blues per yellow belt, groups of 6, each fed to an iron chest and then another blue. 30 items/sec and each blue inserter will take slightly over 2 items a second; by the time you get to the end 4 (maybe 5 depending on rounding) of the 6 inserters on the last wagon on each side aren't working. "Sure, but when the train is full it stops being a problem" - not quite, because when the train is full the iron buffers will still refill and won't increase the rate that the last wagon gets items until they're completely full. Stack size research will only make this worse, even with higher tier belts. I wasn't actually considering the inserter throughput, you may have a point there. With this set-up the inserters may become a bottleneck as the first chests fill up and some inserters stop working. It could feed less than 15/s to the final wagon. If the inserters have +1 to stack size, though, it should still be able to pull the 15/s off the belt with only the 6 inserters on the final wagon. So I am not sure what you mean when you say that increased stack sizes won't help.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:07
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UU TEE EFF posted:I wasn't actually considering the inserter throughput, you may have a point there. With this set-up the inserters may become a bottleneck as the first chests fill up and some inserters stop working. It could feed less than 15/s to the final wagon. If the inserters have +1 to stack size, though, it should still be able to pull the 15/s off the belt with only the 6 inserters on the final wagon. So I am not sure what you mean when you say that increased stack sizes won't help. I meant it in the sense that as the stack size for pickups increases for a given throughput, less and less will get to the end of the belt; not that it can't help things (bigger stacks and red/blue belts will go faster in general, and bigger stacks means the first buffers will fill faster) but that it's not going to do much to help on its own versus rerouting the belts for better balance.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:18
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queeb posted:I did it! my main base had a small crappy coal patch, so i got to train research and built my first.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:26
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SkyeAuroline posted:I meant it in the sense that as the stack size for pickups increases for a given throughput, less and less will get to the end of the belt; not that it can't help things (bigger stacks and red/blue belts will go faster in general, and bigger stacks means the first buffers will fill faster) but that it's not going to do much to help on its own versus rerouting the belts for better balance. Gotcha. Yeah, splitters will help you keep the buffers even, so you don't have a train sitting waiting for items off the belt when the chest next door on the previous wagon has 2000 items. But as long as you can deliver 30/s to any one wagon you are not hurting your overall rate of departure. It will be 200 seconds per train, whether all trains load evenly, or you load them one by one.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:32
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I'm interested in both Krastorio and Space Exploration ,but god, why the gently caress did Krastorio decide the burner portion of the game needed to be longer? I hear they're both good combined, but is that going to make it take a billion hours to do anything? Obviously they're both mods that expand the lategame a bunch, but. What other good overhauls are there that ARE NOT as complicated as bob's? Bob's mod made me lie down and think about my life. Nea fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 22:19
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Nea posted:I'm interested in both Krastorio and Space Exploration ,but god, why the gently caress did Krastorio decide the burner portion of the game needed to be longer? K2 doesn't make the burner phase longer, but SE does (because it bundles AAI Industry, which is where all that stuff comes from). K2 adds some moderate pre-rocket complexity, but its a pretty small amount. The only big differences are in stone processing and red circuits, the rest is close to identical to vanilla. It's post-rocket that K2 adds a ton of content. Burner phase should be essentially unchanged, but you should still install a quickstart mod because the burner stage sucks after you've done it 2 or 3 times.
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Jan 12, 2021 22:51
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Taffer posted:K2 doesn't make the burner phase longer, but SE does (because it bundles AAI Industry, which is where all that stuff comes from). K2 adds some moderate pre-rocket complexity, but its a pretty small amount. The only big differences are in stone processing and red circuits, the rest is close to identical to vanilla. It's post-rocket that K2 adds a ton of content. Burner phase should be essentially unchanged, but you should still install a quickstart mod because the burner stage sucks after you've done it 2 or 3 times. Fair, any recommendations on that front?
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Jan 12, 2021 22:58
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I use TinyStart, it gives you a few construction bots and a personal roboport with a small personal generator (that doesn't require fuel), as well as some basic startomg supplies like a few electric miners, a couple boilers/steam gens, and some furnaces/inserters/powerpoles/etc. Doesn't make you super powerful from the start, but lets you use blueprints right away with the construction bots and skip most of the burner stage. But there are dozens of quick start mods, so you can find one that fits your preference very easily.
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Jan 12, 2021 23:04
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