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Less Fat Luke posted:Nice, thank you! If you removed it, you should also re-add a regular signal to the last lane, otherwise a train sitting there will stop any other trains from entering the whole thing. Personally, I'd add it at the same height as the others for visual clarity and future flexibility.
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Nov 21, 2022 02:24
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wowie this game is overwhelming but goddamn if it doesnt feel good only took me 2 and a half hours to beat the car tutorial  i really need to learn the mechanics of figuring out how to get two resources on a single belt and how to get grabbers to drop and pick things up where i want
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Nov 21, 2022 03:52
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verbal enema posted:i really need to learn the mechanics of figuring out how to get two resources on a single belt and how to get grabbers to drop and pick things up where i want As much as I love the game the tutorial felt kind of disjointed and confusing. The real game has a more natural flow, and has good tips that unlock as you tech up, so I got way more out of that than I did the actual demo/tutorial. You'll probably still spend a lot of time on the wiki and youtube but the tips should cover the basics.
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Nov 21, 2022 04:37
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The game has an in-game tutorial for like two years now that is amazingly good. Just click every tip as soon as it pops up at the bottom left. Mixing a belt is easy. In a line from left to right, place a belt facing right, down, left. Orientation doesn't matter, I've just given you one to help you understand it. Inserters will always and only put things down on the far side of a belt. On occasion it can be a good idea to use this in building - for example, to put red and green science on the same belt. There's an option in interface options to make inserters show where they will pick up from and put down at when alt mode is on, which can be useful. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Nov 21, 2022 |
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Nov 21, 2022 04:46
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:I feel the best way to up the challenge is play multiplayer, never talk to each other about what you are doing, don't even nesseciarly log in at the same time, but agree beforehand that you can only move things long distances via trains and not belts. multiplayer like this is extremely good, it's important to go out of your way to patch problems in ridiculous ways so that when your buddy shows up to debug something else they're baffled. We had one wood power pole that happened to be the single point of failure that cut our base into halves and was also easy to drive cars over. We ended up fortifying it and building musical shrines around it and building lit roads to ensure driving past it was safe, instead of fixing it. It became very important to NOT remove the point of failure.
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Nov 21, 2022 04:49
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verbal enema posted:wowie this game is overwhelming but goddamn if it doesnt feel good Without mods, an inserter will always place on the side of the belt farther from it. If the inserter is placed such that the left side and right side are equally distant, it'll place on the right side of the belt. To get two resources on a single belt, you can make use of that inserter behavior, or you can merge two belts without using splitters by just running them into each other. A belt that goes straight into another belt will dump all its resources on that one side of the belt.  An easy way to do it is to make a T-split: make an empty belt, and have your two resource belts come into it from different sides, which'll put each input into the lane on the side it comes in on. Here's an example, though with a single resource.  If you use a splitter to divide one belt into two, both output belts will maintain the lane positions from the input belts, so once you've got your belts put together the way you want them it's easy to maintain the split: 
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Nov 21, 2022 05:04
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Also note that for almost every interaction you can have with a regular belt, you can do it with splitters and undergrounds too. There are some notable exceptions: side-loading into an underground belt will only take one lane (if the underground is going west to east and the regular belt is going south to north, teeing the regular belt into the input side of the underground will load the left lane of the regular belt, and teeing it into the output of the underground will only load the right lane). You can use inserters on any underground belt from any direction, and on splitters in most orientations although a few cases can act weird.
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Nov 21, 2022 05:15
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LonsomeSon posted:My approach to this was to completely surround the rocket silo with requester chests fed by inserters which were wired to the silo, allowing them to read the cargo rocket's contents. Launch for the silo was controlled by logic conditions, which required both the loading array to be showing all of the inserters for specific products as inactive and to have received a request signal from the orbital platform. Fortunately I didn't rely on rocket deliveries for terribly long, though. LonsomeSon posted:Yeah I assume that's what the buildable and automatable spacecraft would wind up being for. Having posted about it so much recently is making me consider trying to just step back into that enormous multiplanetary factory and try to keep climbing the tech tree from there. This used to be true but the most recent big update added a space elevator which provides surface to orbit train links so you can use trains to automate it now. It's a little janky because trains can't auto pathfind, you have to add an "up station" manually, so it doesn't play nice with LTN/TSM, but it really eases the headache. It feels really silly to use cannons like that lol and now you don't have to, at least for single surface to orbit logistics
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Nov 21, 2022 05:25
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 Never played any particular save for more than 30-40 hours, so this complete Nullius playthrough was a hell of a trip at over 400 hours (that's with lots of durdling). Strong recommend to anyone looking for a big complex total conversion mod along the lines of Py or SE, or if you like colored ground tiles  .
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Nov 22, 2022 04:10
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Phobeste posted:This used to be true but the most recent big update added a space elevator which provides surface to orbit train links so you can use trains to automate it now. It's a little janky because trains can't auto pathfind, you have to add an "up station" manually, so it doesn't play nice with LTN/TSM, but it really eases the headache. It feels really silly to use cannons like that lol and now you don't have to, at least for single surface to orbit logistics I believe there is a new standalone mod that let's LTN work with space elevators. I haven't tried it out yet as I just finished my material science 2 layout.
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Nov 22, 2022 12:27
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ok any like not too gamey tips for a newbie? is it normal to have every line backed up? I'm making green research bottles and oh my god i just want to drive my car but this is getting INTENSELY confusing. maybe im making TOO much of stuff
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Nov 22, 2022 15:18
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There is no such thing as too much (unless you're using all your iron on thousands of pieces of armor or something). A line being backed up is only a problem if something downstream is bottlenecked. A full belt is a happy belt.
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Nov 22, 2022 15:24
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You cannot make too much, you can only consume too little.
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Nov 22, 2022 15:25
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Having lines backed up is totally fine as long as everything that's consuming that product is fully-fed. If anything downstream is starved for goods but those goods are backing up at the source, you have a bottleneck to fix.
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Nov 22, 2022 15:42
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And that's really the whole game loop. Find something that's backed up and make it not back up any more, then find something that's starving and feed it more of what it needs. 
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Nov 22, 2022 16:00
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KillHour posted:A full belt is a happy belt. This alone is probably the most helpful thing to read, ever. If you don't have a full belt, something is almost certainly wrong.
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Nov 22, 2022 16:00
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guess i just gotta work on my logistics then if i can even get to half the cool poo poo the main menu shows then i'll be happy
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Nov 22, 2022 16:01
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KillHour posted:A full belt is a happy belt. New thread title pls?
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Nov 22, 2022 16:21
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jokes posted:This alone is probably the most helpful thing to read, ever. If you don't have a full belt, something is almost certainly wrong. There are many things that you shouldn't be trying to make a full belt of anytime soon. A full yellow belt of Blue chips? That's too much until you're well past your first dozen rockets. Four full red belts of plate? Totally normal. If things are flowing properly you'll be tapping off of this and by the end you've got only 1 belt worth left. I made a relevant mistake in my first SpaceEX playthrough: I tried to start scaling to train fed after Chemical Science. Combined with how I always use warehousing I kneecapped myself because I had the infinite hungry maw plus warehouse buffers in my train network capable of holding 200,000 chips and since I didn't restrict the capacity I ended up with a mega ase sized stockpile of science bottles and red chips while struggling to make progress on rocket parts. "I'll need this eventually I'll just let it fill up" goes from a 20 minute problem to a 8 hour problem when you step down from megabase scale production to midgane.
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Nov 22, 2022 16:30
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Thing about sweeping platitudes is that they're never totally correct. But to a new player, just getting more of everything and filling belts up is probably the most valuable thing you can do, and if you're not filling up a belt with copper wire or something, then you're loving up. By the time you're loving with blue chips you're on some other poo poo and things get way more macro-oriented. Don't you get drones by that point?
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Nov 22, 2022 16:33
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If your red and green science are backing up while researching, you have too few labs and should build more. If the ingredients for science are backing up but red and green aren't, you have too few assemblers making one those. If your plates are backing up but your intermediates aren't, you have too few assemblers for those. If your ore is backing up but your plates aren't, you have too few smelters. If your ore isn't backing up, you have too few miners. If your ore belts are full and moving continuously but output is still too little, you need more or faster belts of ore and more or faster lanes of smelters, etc. Fairly early on you should have your entire iron patch blanketed in electric miners, and enough of your coal patch to make sure at least one lane stays backed up (otherwise you might run out and lose power). Copper and stone are pretty limited early on, build those as it seems like you need them. Factorio is a game about automation & scaling. There are two basic rules : automate everything and scale up. Build an assembler for EVERYTHING. You can limit output either with the X in your output chest (for things going into a chest, which early game just means everything you build with) or using circuits. Learn how to use circuits to limit output, it's very easy to just red or green wire an inserter to a chest and tell it to only take things out of the assembler if (icon of the item the assembler is making) is < (some number that seems to makes sense, like maybe 400 for belts or 2 for locomotives early on). This will help you to control how much of your resources winds up as things that aren't being immediately used. If you don't want to take the minimal amount of time to learn how to use circuits, 4 chest slots for belts, 1 chest slot for everything else is a workable (if a bit limiting) way to start.
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Nov 22, 2022 16:46
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jokes posted:Thing about sweeping platitudes is that they're never totally correct. But to a new player, just getting more of everything and filling belts up is probably the most valuable thing you can do, and if you're not filling up a belt with copper wire or something, then you're loving up. My thought is finding out about this stuff is the game. Advanced players are drawn to incredibly complicated mods because they want to be surprised like they were when they were new. "I should make everything a full belt" is a great mindset for a a beginner to have because it will both help them now and cause problems later that they will then have the tools and experience to solve, which is fun.
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Nov 22, 2022 16:57
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Yeah it really all starts with having the resources to expand the factory available and convenient. If you're building all your belts and inserters by hoovering the green science input belt that's going to limit you greatly. IMO there's 3 main things you need to figure out (and I mean figure out on your own, don't just look it up, this will teach you a lot) to get on the path to playing effectively: 1) A primary method of moving resources around. For most people this ends up being a main bus but it doesn't have to be. You could spaghetti/beeline for bots and use those, or use a lot of trains, or a combination of methods. You might end up using a main bus in the long term but experiment with this for a while and maybe you figure out some other things in the process. Key part here is just having a way to get resources to consumers in a consistent way, rather than reinventing the wheel for each build. 2) A way to build the factory. This is not just the mall or whatever you use to have buildings at hand, but can also include logistics bots to just keep yourself supplied, construction bots and blueprints to do it for you, and even just ways to get around the factory faster without having to squeeze through mazes of pipes and machines. (But it also includes the mall.) This will be very influenced by whatever solution you use for #1; if you use a main bus then you could just skip a set of belts to make a walking path, or if you're bot-based then it can all be a dense mishmash of machinery that you entirely interact with through the map screen and never step foot inside the actual factory. Space is infinite, use it. Having a general idea of how you want to compartmentalize individual builds can help you use the space you have effectively, especially if you're playing on harder biter settings where space isn't free. 3) I don't have a good terminology for this but you don't want to tear anything down until you absolutely need to. Mines might be the only exception, no point in a depleted patch taking up space, but as long as something is being productive there are almost no reasons to ever remove it. Upgrading-in-place is different - you're improving the existing build rather than replacing it - but that yellow belt assembler you set up in the first 15 minutes fed from burner miners is fine to keep up until the ore runs out. If it's not meeting your needs, you don't necessarily need to rebuild it from scratch, just add more. If you have a general plan for #1 and #2, this shouldn't be hard to do.
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Nov 22, 2022 17:06
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I replayed the tutorials not too long ago since I saw a streamer spend 3 hrs on the train one and was curious if I could speed through it due to knowing the game better. It still took like 3 hrs. I think the tutorial was made from an old version or something, since they have weird tech constraints, like forcing you to use burner drills which are less efficient and way more complicated to set up compared to the electric ones you have access to right away in the main game. I think they also made you use yellow loaders, so each assembler needs multiple of them to feed it while it normally doesn’t take that long to get to the much faster blue ones. Trying to keep the distant mining drills alive is also way harder with gun turrets than the lasers as well. You also unlock the ability to change terrain in the main game, so you don’t get as stuck building around cliffs, rocks and water so much. Some little ui stuff to know is you can press ALT to have your assemblers show what they’re making. The train grid is more rigid than the building one, so you can click the end of a piece of track to build off of it, then hold ctrl or shift (one routes around obstacles, the other doesn’t) to open up the planner to make sure they line up. You may need to take a close look at it if the train stops since sometimes the track can look linked but really isn’t. Z let’s you drop stuff in the game world and you can click drop coal or whatever directly on the building using it from the game world view without opening the menu and F lets you pick it up if you’re grabbing material from a conveyor belt. Otherwise, the games pretty flexible and you can always build a new base off of your old one. I stripped down my old base and turned the entire area into one that only makes green circuits to help supply my new factory.
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Nov 22, 2022 17:27
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Xerol posted:3) I don't have a good terminology for this but you don't want to tear anything down until you absolutely need to. Abandon in place? Also, for the full belt thing - a full, moving belt is best. If it’s backed up, it’s unnecessary buffer. Add additional downstream assemblers.
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Nov 22, 2022 18:26
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verbal enema posted:ok any like not too gamey tips for a newbie? Build however much you need. If you want science to go faster, build more science production. If you're happy with the current pace of science production, go do something else. If your lines are backed up, then that means you're producing more of those items than you're consuming, which means you can build more things that consume those items. If you want to, anyway! You don't have to! For optimum efficiency, it's usually possible to calculate out exactly how much of each ingredient you need to supply for a given recipe, and there's websites and mods that can do this for you, but it's largely optional. It's all down to how much you want to hammer on efficiency; there's nothing really wrong with having more ingredient production than you need, or even really having less ingredient production than you need (it just means you'll produce that item slower). One of the strongest points of this game is the flexibility it offers: you don't really NEED to do anything. It's a sandbox which offers some vague goals for you to work toward. If you've got biters turned on, then you need to be able to produce enough ammo, power, and walls to defend your base, proportionate to how much you've expanded and how much pollution you've spread. Aside from that, you can do pretty much whatever you want*. If you want to hand-craft everything that doesn't use oil products, go ahead. If you want to use assemblers for literally everything and avoid hand-crafting whenever possible, go ahead - there's an achievement for that, even! Of course, if you increase your science production, you might find that you need more of the intermediate ingredients that go into science packs. So you might need to increase production of those ingredients. Which in turn might increase consumption of earlier ingredients, and so on, until you find yourself needing to bring in more copper or iron or something. Or you could just leave it be and accept having science production at less than its maximum potential speed for a while. Nothing's going to break down or blow up. *Mods can introduce extra constraints and requirements, of course
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Nov 22, 2022 18:55
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My one tip that I often give new players is if you are expanding your production, like for example maybe to build a new science type or to bring up a new line of outputs like bots, to build the inputs for it at the same time. That is, don't go mining and smelting tons of material you don't have a use for, and similarly when embarking on something new don't leech all the raw materials and circuits from whatever you have going. Try to keep a healthy balance. GLHF.
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Nov 22, 2022 19:45
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verbal enema posted:ok any like not too gamey tips for a newbie? The Factory must expand, in order to meet the needs of the Expanding Factory.
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Nov 22, 2022 19:47
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Fuzzy Mammal posted:My one tip that I often give new players is if you are expanding your production, like for example maybe to build a new science type or to bring up a new line of outputs like bots, to build the inputs for it at the same time. That is, don't go mining and smelting tons of material you don't have a use for, and similarly when embarking on something new don't leech all the raw materials and circuits from whatever you have going. Try to keep a healthy balance. GLHF. I think wrapping your head around the concept of an omnibus-style layout is hugely helpful for expediting everything until you get into Mega Mode, where you have trains dump 50,000 iron ore onto blue belts loaded and unloaded by fast stack inserters each second, or whatever.
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Nov 22, 2022 20:16
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I finally decided to give Wave Defense a try. It's fun. It took me a few tries, but I eventually beat it. You really need to be on top of things the first few days. Once you get up flame turrets and set up roboports, you can relax a little (for a bit). I launched a rocket on Day 81 or so because I was styling on the biters and adding brick floors everywhere, but then I decided to load before the launch and to try to make it to Day 200 to make a really nice base, but it turns out the biters never stop scaling. Flame turrets kept blowing up my bots, and the biters were spawning with some 9000 health. I had laser upgrades up to like 45, but it still wasn't enough. It turns out the map is an island though, so I could wipe out the biters completely, but by Day 180, they had already started pouring into my base and even brought my silo down to half health. And with my bots almost all destroyed, there was no way to survive another night. I thought I could keep just one base alive, but if there are any bases at all, it spawns the maximum number of biters anyway. So I finished wiping them out, and launched a rocket on Day 180.
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Dec 9, 2022 22:59
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Also, I made a Discord server for coordinating if people wanted to play together sometime: https://discord.gg/UpxkNyAK9P It's fun to play with other people. I was thinking about trying Space Exploration if someone wanted to try that together.
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Dec 9, 2022 23:02
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Next time I start a fresh game, I need to ban myself from using trains with just one cargo car It is a power - and a curse - too great for me  
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Dec 11, 2022 20:31
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Glad to see someone else discovering the same design style I use.
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Dec 11, 2022 20:37
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I'm planning my first megabase. My goal is 1k spm. I know beacons are really important for this, because they really cut down on the number of buildings you need. I've never really used beacons though! So: any tips for how to design with beacons in mind?
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Dec 12, 2022 04:02
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Solumin posted:I'm planning my first megabase. My goal is 1k spm. Density Density Density. Use logistics or belt weaving to optimize your I/O footprint. Maximize the number of assemblers each beacon touches, and try to get 4-6+ beacons hitting each assembler.
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Dec 12, 2022 05:50
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Solumin posted:I'm planning my first megabase. My goal is 1k spm. You don't actually *need* to beacon for a megabase, it just makes it smaller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCaGJ32pUDU
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Dec 12, 2022 06:00
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Smaller and hopefully more UPS efficient so your computer doesn't start dying.
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Dec 12, 2022 06:04
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A good baseline is that if you have a row of assemblers, you can build a row of beacons two spaces away, offset slightly so that each beacon touches four assemblers. That gives you 8 beacons on each assembler, and if you chain these production lines next to each other, each beacon hits 8 assemblers. Very efficient. The catch is that you only have room for one input belt and one output belt, so you'll have some fun logistical challenges getting everything in and out, especially since the whole point of those beacons is to make your assemblers run really fast and chew through an awful lot of raw material. Boringly, the best solution to those challenges is to just slap down some logistic chests - bots are by far the easiest way to funnel a large amount of resources into a very tiny area.
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Dec 12, 2022 06:24
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This may be a very unpopular opinion, but I wish they'd never put beacons in the game. They are ugly and ruin the 'feel' of a base for me.
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Dec 12, 2022 09:32
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| # ? May 19, 2024 17:10 |
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kanonvandekempen posted:This may be a very unpopular opinion, but I wish they'd never put beacons in the game. They are ugly and ruin the 'feel' of a base for me. It’s not that unpopular. One of the big mods (Space Exploration, iirc?) reworks beacons for basically this reason: the author finds them ugly and boring.
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Dec 12, 2022 10:39
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