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QOL mods that I don't play without anymore: Auto Deconstruct (Not needed if using Mining Drones) -- marks miners for deconstruction if the ore runs out Bottleneck Construction Drones (Not updated for 1.1, I think I'll fix this myself) Even Distribution FNEI (if not playing vanilla) Long Reach Max Rate Calculator - Ctrl-N drag over a section of your factory - returns required inputs and outputs in per second/per minute/belts. I use this instead of factory planner type mods as it's much simpler to use IMO. Mini Loader - because I like loaders Side Inserters - allows inserters to work at 90 degree angles and allows selection of near/far dropping. Squeak Through - makes moving through your factory much easier. Vehicle Snap - helps me not wreck too much of the factory while driving cars/tanks. LTN or TSM (Logistics Train Network or Train Supply Manager) -- for managing trains ------------ Stuff I like and use sometimes: Afraid of the Dark Inbuilt Lighting Big Brother -- more power consumption but long ranged radars Explosive Excavation -- dig holes for water anywhere Flow Control Fluid Must Flow Mining Drones -- Kinda cheaty I suppose since they need no power, but they do pollute.
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Jan 28, 2021 18:36
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You should play vanilla on your first time through, and IMO stick to pretty small QoL mods for a while - jumping straight into a lot of mods will make you bypass a lot of genuinely great vanilla functionality and you'll be worse off for it, IMO. Wait to add a mod in a particular area until you feel like something is lacking. But there are two mods everyone should get even on their first playthrough: squeak through, and honk.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:02
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Elswyyr posted:Any new interesting revamp mods? Last one I tried was Krastorio 2, but I felt like it didn't change enough. Industrial Revolution 2 really revamps the entire game, creating a 'steam age' before electricity and increases overall complexity, albeit not to Pynadon levels. It's good fun; the only drawback is the start - handcrafting takes so much longer because of the additional components.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:22
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Taffer posted:You should play vanilla on your first time through, and IMO stick to pretty small QoL mods for a while - jumping straight into a lot of mods will make you bypass a lot of genuinely great vanilla functionality and you'll be worse off for it, IMO. Wait to add a mod in a particular area until you feel like something is lacking. Even squeak through is cheating  Everyone should use Honk though. Basically required.
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Jan 28, 2021 20:01
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nrook posted:Everyone should use Honk though. Basically required. And Disco Science.
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Jan 28, 2021 20:05
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nrook posted:Everyone should use Honk though. Basically required. power crystals posted:And Disco Science. I am a rebel, I use neither of these. I tried Honk once, drove me crazy.. (well, crazier).
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Jan 28, 2021 21:11
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The Locator posted:I am a rebel, I use neither of these. I tried Honk once, drove me crazy.. (well, crazier). It's highly configurable so you can set when and how loudly trains honk
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Jan 28, 2021 21:23
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It's your game, play it the way you like. If this means playing vanilla only until you launch a rocket, fine, but I don't think this is as necessary as some people make out. If there's something in the base game is an annoyance or rough edge that is irritating rather than a fun challenge, you should feel free to mod it out. There are a bunch of small mods that add little things that add to or modify vanilla while still keeping the same feel. I don't have many to recommend because these days I usually use my own mods. Noxys Trees is a nice one. It makes trees spread or grow back in areas that aren't heavily polluted. Majere posted:Isn't Bob Adjustable Inserters like some trivial 50 red and green science for research? Which means you can't use it for the burner stage, where it's a lot of fun
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Jan 29, 2021 02:24
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power crystals posted:And Disco Science. I wish this mod was canon. E: FF-364 was posted, appears 1.1 stable has been released. Wube continue to be the one of the best devs. https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364 Teledahn fucked around with this message at 10:55 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 09:37
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Are there any mods which will make power grid placement (substation/power poles) less of a hassle without outright cheating? I'm really bugged by power poles getting in the way of production facilities and vice versa, even with the Full Power Coverage mod it restricts me too much to build my factories the way I want. Ideally I'd just need to set up some power pole equivalent to define the outer perimeter of my power and then everything inside would be covered automatically 
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Jan 29, 2021 15:13
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Teledahn posted:E: FF-364 was posted, appears 1.1 stable has been released. Wube continue to be the one of the best devs. Hell yeah, I've been wanting blueprint mirroring for a year. But of course it happens the day after I slap down this map's final-ish loading and unloading stations rotated every which way.
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Jan 29, 2021 15:30
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deep dish peat moss posted:Are there any mods which will make power grid placement (substation/power poles) less of a hassle without outright cheating? I'm really bugged by power poles getting in the way of production facilities and vice versa, even with the Full Power Coverage mod it restricts me too much to build my factories the way I want. I haven't tried either of these, but I looked through the power mods on the mod portal and one of these might be close to what you want:
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Jan 29, 2021 15:39
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Teledahn posted:I wish this mod was canon. tucked in the middle: quote:gives between 20 to 40% overall performance gain. oh yeah hey just a 20-40% performance gain nbd
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Jan 29, 2021 19:27
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RUM hack posted:tucked in the middle: 21K belt base back on the menu boys!
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Jan 29, 2021 19:54
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It does look like certain megabase configurations are seeing a UPS hit on updating to the new version. Some commentary about forcing a reload by using a deconstruct planner on the entire base and canceling the deconstruct before it gets taken apart, to freeze all the belts and then force them to recalculate. Just as a heads up in case people see a drop.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:57
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Teledahn posted:E: FF-364 was posted, appears 1.1 stable has been released. Wube continue to be the one of the best devs. FFF posts are just the greatest. Incredible technical detail and an amazing commitment to quality and communication.
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Jan 29, 2021 20:22
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:To be honest I actually think bot attrition and meteors are pretty interesting on a conceptual level. Considering that SE is all about exploring a bunch of different planets, meteors for example seem like a great way to introduce difficult risk/reward decisions. Do you go for the planet with a shitload of resources but also meteor strikes? Or do you play it safer? To play off of this part of the discussion further (attrition/upkeep mechanics in games like Factorio), there's some other games with neat inspiration. Oxygen Not Included has meteor strikes as one of the hazards of the space biome, and those meteors will destroy most buildings that they hit. However, meteors also bring raw materials with them, and thus become more than just a hazard - they're another resource to tame, harvest, and exploit. This dovetails with most of the other renewable resources being similar; they often come out in dangerous forms (steam vents, volcanoes, etc.), and you need to figure out a way to deal with those dangers. Crucially, there are a lot of different ways to deal with meteors, and they only show up in a specific region that you need to interact with, but don't have to do so until you are ready. Coming up with solutions to deal with the meteors is an interesting challenge, and not as simple as just setting up an anti-meteor laser. A random hit that blows up part of the base unless you have the anti-thing that blows up your base defense is much less interesting. In a game like Rimworld it's fine, because you are expected to lose buildings, equipment, and people on a regular basis as part of how the storytellers work to keep tension up. In a game like Factorio it just ends up being a forgettable resource drain that is either not impactful, or mildly irritating. And that kind of breaks into what attrition and resource drains should look like. Combat in Factorio works in that in order to prevent the loss of lots of resources (or your entire factory), you have a number of options that you can mix and match - reducing pollution, killing biter nests, building defensive lines, etc. Each has different costs, advantages, disadvantages, and different players can do different things or have their own solutions. Contrast that with robots randomly breaking down. It's just not that interesting. In Surviving Mars, drones breaking down can be a serious problem, as your survival is precarious in the beginning, and until your colony can reliably build its own replacement drones, it's something that you have to keep in mind. In Factorio it's a minor irritation that can be fixed automatically, and even if you lose all of your drones, it's just irritating, and not crippling. Hell, even the breakdowns in OTTD are much more interesting, as a broken down train blocks traffic to other trains, but scheduling too much maintenance can drive up your costs. I don't have a perfect solution for what an attrition or resource drain mechanic should be, and it's a hard thing to make a mechanic in that vein that works well and is interesting to play around.
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Jan 29, 2021 21:38
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My bizarre sort of starting area in the Krastorio 2 game I'm playing. Keep trying to snake through more crap when what I should really be doing is building a real mall area off of a bus and diverting all of the resources from this mess into that bus. Yet again planned to leave 'plenty of space' but failed miserably as usual. I need to figure out a chlorine plant setup next so I can start mining rare metals so I can make power armor and other fun stuff now. 
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Jan 31, 2021 07:03
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Are there any mods for the aircraft mods to add honking sounds? The engines are nice but I need additional noisemakers.
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Feb 1, 2021 02:12
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The Locator posted:My bizarre sort of starting area in the Krastorio 2 game I'm playing. Keep trying to snake through more crap when what I should really be doing is building a real mall area off of a bus and diverting all of the resources from this mess into that bus. What mod does that building storing stone come from? I don't recognize the shape.
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Feb 1, 2021 02:32
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Mining Drones.
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Feb 1, 2021 04:37
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NachtSieger posted:What mod does that building storing stone come from? I don't recognize the shape. Already answered, but I am using two of Klonan's mods along with Krastorio2 - Companion Drones (replaces Construction Drones) and Mining Drones. Mining Drones replaces normal electric mining drills with a bunch of little dudes with pickaxes that go out and harvest the ore for you. I'm honestly not a huge fan of Companion Drones, it's a lot cheatier than Construction Drones was. The little derpy drones were handicapped by pathfinding and all they did was construction bot stuff. The Companion Drones are legit overpowered as hell in the early game at least, as you can equip them with lasers and just mow down biters. I have 3 of them (mostly by mistake when I was trying to figure out how they worked) and with all three set up for combat with lasers I can handle big biter nests at around 40% evolution and with Armored Biters mod installed. I need to get off my butt and get regular bots up and running and then just stuff these into a chest and forget about them, and if I start a new game anytime soon I'll just update Construction Bots and get the little derpy's back. Mining drones also is pretty 'cheaty' in the sense that it doesn't use power for mining, which is one of the big power drains in most games, but with loaders it eliminates the pain of trying to balance the outputs of ore fields.
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Feb 1, 2021 05:35
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Oh so those are the new mining depot graphics? Neat.
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Feb 1, 2021 05:44
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The Locator posted:Mining drones also is pretty 'cheaty' in the sense that it doesn't use power for mining, which is one of the big power drains in most games, but with loaders it eliminates the pain of trying to balance the outputs of ore fields. Just do this!   (those all come through a standard balancer from a usual ore field) 
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Feb 1, 2021 05:51
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Taffer posted:Just do this! That's how pretty much all my mining fields normally look if I'm playing with loaders and warehouses, except that I use a throttled (space limited) warehouse as the balancer because balancers annoy me, even though I use them when I need to. You can also use 'merged chests' mod to create a chest the same width as your number of lanes out and balance it down into however many lanes you want, works great.
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Feb 1, 2021 06:10
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Yeah I am basically using the warehouses as a secondary balancer, the only reason I use two in this case is because I need more space to put loaders to get higher throughput. Lower demand mines just get one, and I skip the belt balancer.
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Feb 1, 2021 06:13
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So as my resource demands shift around I really need to get started on moving things from spaghetti base to modules fed by trains. How do you guys divide yours up? I already built a green circuit module, I'm guessing I'll have an oil + plastic module, other things that focus on one or two resources... The supply chains just get very complex and I'm not sure where to divide things at to avoid spaghetti sprawl returning, especially since railroads are much less flexible.
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Feb 1, 2021 06:43
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Railroads are actually much more flexible! Since you can do many-to-one or one-to-many or N-to-N the potential setups are infinite and you can have really flexible routes that fit your setup no matter what it is. The new train limit option in 1.1 make scaleable routes really really powerful and way easier than they used to be. That said, it is also a really big learning curve so it'll take a lot of playing around with to get comfortable. The first thing you have to do with rails is stick pick a lane configuration and stick to it everywhere. If this is your first time doing rails you might have isolated networks going from point A to point B, but you shouldn't do that - all your rails should be in one single big rail network where any point can access any other point. The closest thing there is to a "standard" in rail setups is two-lane right-hand-drive. That is, 1 line going each direction, where in a north-south line the right-hand side is going north. From there you need a few basic intersections that you then blueprinted and can copy-paste wherever needed. You could write a billion words about good intersection design (and people have), but for your first attempt at a scaling up rails simple designs are perfectly fine. As it grows you'll discover where it breaks and ways to improve it - I iterate on my rail designs literally every time I play because I keep finding problems with the things I design  .As for what to cut out of your main base and put into outposts - that depends. If you're going really big scale the answer is "basically everything", but if this is your first big foray into rails that's probably not the case. If you don't have a big grand plan going in to your game, the basic rule of thumb is that if a certain product gets to the point where you need to duplicate it or scale up in a big way, it's time to move it to an outpost. Then the space that you gain in your main base from doing that can be used to scale up production of things higher up in the chain. Rinse and repeat until you're satisfied. To give an idea of what an interconnected rail network looks like, here's a section of the base I'm playing on. You should build a design that works for you, but notice the standard lanes and intersections that are used throughout. 
Taffer fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 09:08
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Old news to most but 1.1 is out and is good. Spidertron logistics! All they need now is proper interaction with chests. Also my phone wants to autocorrect that word to "Spidery Ron." You can get a long way without doing train networks, but it does get messy. e: I mean specifically without doing shared-track, logic-controlled train networks. Xaintrailles fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 16:20
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Taffer posted:a lot of good insights Yup, I'm aware of the fundamentals pretty well. I have standard 4-ways and 3-ways blueprinted, I've got everything connected on 2-lane standard with all my stuff on it. I started working on rail networks in my last save so I was able to just jump straight into it here. The reason I find rail less flexible is the space requirements to bolt a station into the network. If you want to add one more resource with belts, you just... run a belt in. As little as 1 wide. Bots are even less complex. Meanwhile, to get one more resource in with trains, you're looking at a full station, rails to route that to an existing rail, installing an intersection while keeping signal distances that won't cause jams... Two tiles or a dozen tiles, versus a few hundred tiles wasted on pure infrastructure. Adds up fast with more complicated things. Dedicated mixed trains might be the answer, but as far as I can tell they also require either their own stations or some black magic with circuits.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:30
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Why would you want to avoid train networks? Playing with a train set is one of the joys of this game. Edit: less churlishly, train networks are much cheaper per volume of goods they deliver and are expandable from a single station. You can pull 32 belts off a 4-car train, and with adequate trains on a network have enormous throughput. There's a tradeoff in flexibility sure, but if you compare a train versus 32 belts that tradeoff starts looking questionable. That being said, if you prefer the belt aesthetic feel free to ignore trains. It's a big Meccano set after all; build it the way you like. Aethernet fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 16:34
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SkyeAuroline posted:So as my resource demands shift around I really need to get started on moving things from spaghetti base to modules fed by trains. How do you guys divide yours up? I already built a green circuit module, I'm guessing I'll have an oil + plastic module, other things that focus on one or two resources... The supply chains just get very complex and I'm not sure where to divide things at to avoid spaghetti sprawl returning, especially since railroads are much less flexible. The obvious one is smelting. It takes a lot of space, the recipes are simple, and you're probably shipping iron and copper to your base with trains anyway. I always build a flexible smelting facility which can use the same furnaces to refine both iron and copper, but there's not really any good reason to do this, and you need to use circuits to stop it from getting backed up if you have more demand for one than the other. It's fun to do though. I got really mad when playing Krastorio 2 because you can't do this. (Indeed, I don't think it's allowed in really any of the big mods, because it's not compatible with more complicated recipes. So enjoy it while you can in vanilla!)
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Feb 1, 2021 16:36
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Yup, my current mines feed directly into a smelting array that has rails prepped to install an ore unloading station when they run dry. Future proofing, even if I'll have to build more later.Aethernet posted:Why would you want to avoid train networks? Playing with a train set is one of the joys of this game. I don't, I'm actively looking to engage with trains this time around. I'm just trying to figure out the most "effective" way to go about it instead of science production ending up with a dozen train unloading stations just for raw materials.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:47
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SkyeAuroline posted:So as my resource demands shift around I really need to get started on moving things from spaghetti base to modules fed by trains. How do you guys divide yours up? I already built a green circuit module, I'm guessing I'll have an oil + plastic module, other things that focus on one or two resources... The supply chains just get very complex and I'm not sure where to divide things at to avoid spaghetti sprawl returning, especially since railroads are much less flexible. One enormous base and five digits of logistics robots. Routing is for cowards. Raw resources come from trains and beyond that robots do everything. Fluids are barrelled so robots do that too.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:51
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SkyeAuroline posted:I don't, I'm actively looking to engage with trains this time around. I'm just trying to figure out the most "effective" way to go about it instead of science production ending up with a dozen train unloading stations just for raw materials. I mean, that depends entirely on what your goal is. You could, in theory, build a massive factory that takes all of the raw inputs (ore/crude oil), runs them through all of the refinement, and spits out the perfect ratio of science beakers and rocket parts to throw directly into labs and rockets. Then you're only training in the raw materials and your inputs are minimal. Smelting everything and shipping in plates is a good step, as then you can move your smelting area somewhere else and give yourself room to expand smelting capacity, while not dramatically changing the amount of train inputs you bring. A dedicated oil area or a dedicated circuit area can be a good step, but then you're increasing the number of unloading stations over at the science area. You can also make dedicated beaker production areas, like a green/red area, and then dedicated regions for the more complex beakers. Then you're just training the beakers over to the labs. The real advantage to a dedicated area is that it's easier to beacon everything and expand production as and when you need it. Ultimately though, it's up to you how complex you want your logistics to be, and how large you are willing to make each individual factory block that churns out materials. Individual factory blocks are easier to create, expand, and optimize, at the tradeoff of more complex logistics. Large factory blocks have easier logistics, but are much harder to create, expand, and optimize (unless you just copy/paste the whole block). If I were you, I think I'd focus on making each individual beaker as one factory complex, but each beaker factory near each other, and then just belt the results into your labs. You can ship raw resources (or plates) into each beaker factory, minimizing the inputs required, and belting to the labs makes it easy to evaluate what you have and what you need.
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Feb 1, 2021 18:16
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SkyeAuroline posted:I don't, I'm actively looking to engage with trains this time around. I'm just trying to figure out the most "effective" way to go about it instead of science production ending up with a dozen train unloading stations just for raw materials. I'm probably not the best person to provide advice since my bases tend to be whatever the hell pops into my head next... But here is how I progress normally. Early game, as I need to bring in more raw materials I start the train layout and simply feed raw materials into the same smelting arrays that the early base used. As the base grows, I eventually need more/faster raw materials than the early smelters can provide so they get replaced with on-site smelting and the trains bring the basic plates into the base to be fed into the bus. I'll normally have steel smelting at one or more ore patches dedicated to that with iron plates coming from others. Later, typically after the rocket has been shot into the moon, I'll start building modular areas making first green circuits, then red and blue, and those are sized large enough to support both the existing bus, as well as later modular science builds to scale up. Somewhere between step 2 and 3 I will typically build a huge coal liquefaction module somewhere and move 100% of my plastic and solid fuel production to coal based assuming the map has plenty of coal. Really anything can be made into a modular train served thing if you want to, as space is effectively infinite, and late-game trains are fast and efficient. Edit: You can also combine this modular concept with on-site smelting if the resources are right. Here is a shot from a game where I had the resource settings a bit too high, where I combined on-site copper and iron smelting with a green-circuits build. The only thing the trains did was pick up the green circuits. Later on if I had continued this map, at some point the smelting arrays would have had to be replaced with train stations to accept delivery of the plates. 
The Locator fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 18:42
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I've always wanted to make a village-style base, where everything has its own boutique base and everything is connected by rails. It's annoying to do without an early start mod though.
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Feb 1, 2021 18:51
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I was a little afraid infinite ores would lead to no trains in my bases but I NEED MORE IRON AND STEEL so happily I'm making trains and I LOVE the honk mod. Hearing those bad boys go off while I'm building something just gives me the biggest grin.
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Feb 1, 2021 19:22
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I'm gonna once again plug Warehousing + Loader Redux + Texugo TA Miners, which replaces 90/180/360 electric mining drills with a single Total Annihilation sprite giant drill. It hasn't updated for 1.1 but you just have to go into the info.json for the mod and change "factorio_version": "1.1" until the creator pushes an update. Makes setting up mining outposts much faster as they've got mining areas that cover most ore patches. M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 19:31
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How do the train count orders deal with distance? My understanding is that I could have 10 "iron ore deposit" stations spread all over the map, and then instead of directing a specific mine to a specific rail factory, I just send them all to "iron ore deposit" and let the counts settle it. But allowing 2 trains to fill the order when they come from the next tile over (reaching my factory in 30 seconds) is totally different than 2 trains filling the order from the opposite end of the map (reaching my factory in 3-5 minutes). Do the train orders account for that somehow?
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Feb 1, 2021 20:11
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