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Xerol posted:Simple sushi belts don't even need a ridiculous amount of combinator knowledge. The key is having a memory cell that gets pulse signals from every inserter that takes from or adds to the belt. (Or from belts that feed in.) When stuff comes off the belt, those inserters subtract from the memory cell, and when the memory cell is lower than the target value, inserters or belts add items to the belt and add to the value in the memory. And the memory cells are literally just a combinator wired to itself, with the other wire color used for input pulses. You just named two mechanics I never interacted with
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Jan 24, 2023 17:01
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Simple Sushi Belt, explaining exactly how there is no such thing as a simple sushi belt
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Jan 24, 2023 17:12
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The simple sushi belt is just a giant blob of splitters. You do an X to 1 merge to create a nicely mixed belt and then at the other end you use a bunch of filter splitters to break them back out into separate lanes so they can feed back in.
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Jan 24, 2023 17:49
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I had never heard of sushi belts until this discussion and I never want to think of them again.
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Jan 24, 2023 17:49
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Darox posted:The simple sushi belt is just a giant blob of splitters. Thats not a sushi belt. Thats some other sort of abomination.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:07
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Xerol posted:Simple sushi belts don't even need a ridiculous amount of combinator knowledge. The key is having a memory cell that gets pulse signals from every inserter that takes from or adds to the belt. (Or from belts that feed in.) When stuff comes off the belt, those inserters subtract from the memory cell, and when the memory cell is lower than the target value, inserters or belts add items to the belt and add to the value in the memory. And the memory cells are literally just a combinator wired to itself, with the other wire color used for input pulses. You're asking a lot from people who give up at green science.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:54
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Ultimately, sushi belts with more than two item types are a very niche solution with a lot of problems. They clog up or get unbalanced easily, so you need to use circuits to make sure it doesn't get too clogged up. And there's no way to directly count how many items are on the sushi belt, so you need to wire up all the inserters to combinators to count each and every time an item enters or leaves the belt, and do some math to determine when it's safe to add more of any particular item. And most of all, they've got poor capacity. You're dividing one belt's throughput among a bunch of different items, and you can't even max out the throughput if you're just adding and removing poo poo from the belt whereever. For me, they're not really worth the trouble. Maybe if I was running a mod where belts were really expensive and I was incentivized to place as few of them as possible, I guess?
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Jan 24, 2023 19:12
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Vizuyos posted:Maybe if I was running a mod where belts were really expensive and I was incentivized to place as few of them as possible, I guess? If that were the case I'd probably still be too lazy to use sushi and focus on trains and direct inserter to inserter handling.
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Jan 24, 2023 19:14
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Vizuyos posted:And there's no way to directly count how many items are on the sushi belt, There is, but you need to wire up every single piece of belt to do it
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Jan 24, 2023 19:40
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Sushi belts can be kind of nice for science labs (large number of distinct items required, overall throughput demands generally not too severe). Even then it's a bit of a gimmick. Everywhere else it's both a gimmick and also objectively worse than your other options.
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Jan 25, 2023 01:09
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I'm glad I finally gave in and bought the game when it was still $30. I don't care what price they set for the game; I'm just poor and $35 would be out of my price range. ~24 hours in and I'm finding oil production to be the next learning curve peak to master. Just when I get early game items going pretty well, I then have to figure out how to get iron and copper plates, copper wires, etc to my oil production site in order to start getting the middle game stuff (e.g: red circuits). It's a little frustrating, not gonna lie, but I enjoy the game.
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Jan 25, 2023 03:40
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Factorio is the only game I've ever played where I need to keep a timer running in the background so I don't play too much when I've got other stuff to do, but refining oil always seems to stop me dead in my tracks. I'll usually take a break at that point, and might not play again for at least a little while. Once I've punched through oil, it's business as usual, set an alarm; oil specifically seems to always kill my mood.
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Jan 25, 2023 06:02
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Once oil kinda 'clicks' in your brain it's fast and easy to set up. I don't pay any attentions to ratios anymore either, I just overbuild cracking and wire my storage to pumps to turn on the cracking as needed to keep everything cranking. Not enough petro? Slap down another 10 refineries. Backing up heavy oil? Slap down another 10 cracking plants. Backing up light oil? Another 10 cracking plants... I think you can see the trend...
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Jan 25, 2023 06:12
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My number 1 problem every time I hit oil is that by then i've started scaling up my base, and I try to build my initial oil at that scale too. I need to have like a little post it note that just reminds me to build a trickle sulfur and red circuits and then come back to build a huge oil processing facility later. Because I always try to build it too big and then stall out on science because nothing is ready for hours.
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Jan 25, 2023 07:18
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Oil tends to throw me off since I actually need to start planning stuff. I'll usually just use a main bus setup with smelters up top spitting out plates and production for anything else splits off of that. The refinery setup represents a mini-factory of its own that needs its own separate area with water access and train depot(s) to hook into the main factory. Then you gotta mess with your back end infrastructure because coal is now an ingredient and solid fuel is the fuel. And now you got a second remote location to defend from biters. Then I usually gently caress up my own bus setup because each of the oil products only produce one thing, so incorporating it into the bus feels weird and I end up piping it in some random path along the outside of the factory. I think my last one I tried sending out raw materials to the refineries and returned with the finished product to simplify things, but I kept forgetting different materials and had to keep tacking on more train stations to make it work. I took a swing at the 8 hr and 15 hr rocket launch time achievements over the holiday and hosed it up by trying to skip military science and cutting corners, completion time was somewhere over 20 hrs. I started another run thinking I'd try out a city block layout and just see what a steadier run times out to, but stalled out and stopped playing around oil the time I got the oil field and train stations set up. By then it was already getting close to 8 hrs, so I was giving up on the speed running and there was a lot to figure out with how to organize the oil/factory setup.
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Jan 25, 2023 07:51
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Sushi belts are old hack. Inserter-only logistics is where its at https://i.imgur.com/Ztb9zBM.gifv
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Jan 25, 2023 08:17
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The thing about oil for me is how it interrupts the flow. I almost never spawn with oil nearby (to the point I'm wondering whether or not it's deliberately coded that way - I actually don't know), so scouting for oil and clearing out biters while I wait for my logistics network to cough up the raw materials necessary to establish a forward base becomes the priority. The slow, granular growth of the early game is halted in favor of turtling until I can make the big push. Once I've got oil set up, I typically have enough going on in the background to resume my much preferred granular trickle, tinkering with my logistics network into the wee hours of the night. That said, big thanks to Jam for the video they linked me. While it didn't touch on the specific annoyance described above, I had no idea about underground piping. This'll be useful for whenever I get back to my current playthrough (which stalled out around when I needed, you guessed it, oil).
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Jan 25, 2023 08:30
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Bad Seafood posted:The thing about oil for me is how it interrupts the flow. I almost never spawn with oil nearby (to the point I'm wondering whether or not it's deliberately coded that way - I actually don't know), It is, oil (and uranium) can never be in the starting area.
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Jan 25, 2023 09:51
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I suppose that makes sense, but man, I've really had to hunt for it sometimes. I even abandoned one base completely after failing to find any oil in any direction for hours. These days I always refresh the map until I can spot at least one oil field within a reasonable distance.
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Jan 25, 2023 09:54
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I try to remember to build radar early so it can discover oil for me by the time I need it. I generally forget though and have to spend ages driving around looking for it.
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Jan 25, 2023 10:26
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Koobze posted:In my opinion, it is still the best factory game - I tried Factory Town, Satisfactory, and DSP, and none of them scratch the same itch. I've been playing Captain of Industry lately and it feels like it might be a contender. For me that means Factorio itself has some special charm (or was just lucky / right game at the right time) that the others do not, so based on the limited competition in this gaming niche I think a price increase is very reasonable. I haven't played nearly enough to make a tier list, but base Factorio is about glorious production. Satisfactory invests a lot in making pretty bases for screenshots. I bounced hard enough on DSP's UI that I don't know if I'll ever touch it again, but it seems like they're aiming for more of a "zoom out and see how big it all is!" thing. They've all got their different spin (which is fine - not knocking it) on the genre but that spin always winds up being a limiter on production in service of some other aspect. Instead of limiters Factorio challenges you to make more things to feed the things that build the things for no other reason than more things. I will day one the expansion directly into my veins and if it is the full $35 price of the game that won't even register to my brain.
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Jan 25, 2023 12:38
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I used to bounce off whenever I had to get oil up and running as well. What helped for me was installing a mod that enables primitive construction bots and blueprinting from the start of the game, and having my basic oil setup blueprinted so that getting oil production going was just a few simple clicks. It made the mental barrier way lower so I stopped getting discouraged whenever I got to the basic oil phase in my games.
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Jan 25, 2023 12:47
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Mailer posted:I haven't played nearly enough to make a tier list, but base Factorio is about glorious production. Satisfactory invests a lot in making pretty bases for screenshots. I was trying to put into words why the others aren't as good as Factorio and I think this is a large part of it, and ties into: AG3 posted:What helped for me was installing a mod that enables primitive construction bots and blueprinting from the start of the game For a long time, I have been playing with a mod (TinyStart? something like that) which lets you start with a few bots and also the stuff to build some initial steam power. That first hour is fun but it's not as fun as the rest of the game, which to me is about "Planning for Large Scale Factories (with trains)". My time with satisfactory and DSP felt more like they were focused on the tiny details rather than the really big-picture, I think similar to how some other games in different genres are - like Cities: Skylines being (in my mind) more about doing those little touches and making a pretty park with a bench and some trees. I don't care about that, I want to stamp out lovely huge factories with nice repeating patterns of production. I think the first sign for me that Satisfactory was not for me was having to hook up power lines individually to things, with a limit to how many things connect to a power pole. I cannot think of a more aggravating and meaningless speedbump on the road to building the biggest factory ever.
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Jan 25, 2023 15:48
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For me, what stands out about Factorio is the combination of simplicity and flexibility. Despite it being a game about automation, there are very few things that you actually have to automate. Almost everything can be crafted just fine by hand, and it's actually somewhat easier because hand-crafting automatically handles the intermediates for you. You don't automate because you have to, you automate because you want to. The game does a fantastic job at gently nudging you into it while still making you feel like it's at your own pace. When you first need an item, you can just hand-craft a few. As your demand for that item increases, you get annoyed by the limitations of hand-crafting and toss down an assembler or two, then manually load them with ingredients when you need more of that item. As your demand for that item increases, you get annoyed by topping off that assembler and having to wait for it to run, so you set it up with chests full of ingredients so it can build up a stockpile while you're busy elsewhere. As your demand for that item increases, you get annoyed by having to stop by every so often to refill the input chests and empty the output chest, so you hook up belts to supply ingredients and carry off the outputs automatically. As your demand for that item increases, you get annoyed by the spaghetti and rebuild it into a more planned setup. But in the entire above paragraph, you're never actually forced to move to the next step. The game doesn't force you into automating more. It's up to you the player to decide when the ongoing annoyance of running things with less automation outweighs the upfront annoyance of automating more. And automating at your own pace like that feels a lot more natural than being forced into it at the game's pace by hitting some arbitrary point in the tech tree or whatever... ...which is exactly what oil does. Unlike basically everything else in the game, oil products have to be automated from the very beginning. They can't be hand-crafted at all, and you have to set up a couple production steps fully automated before you get back to having solid products that you can handle by hand. They're a perfect example of being suddenly forced into automating at the game's pace because you hit an arbitrary point in the tech tree, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it's a stage a lot of people find annoying to hit for one reason or another.
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Jan 25, 2023 16:35
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My stalling point for quite some time has been when I've upgraded the original base with yellow building and modules and maybe even some beacons which generally gets to about 150'ish science per minute, and then start looking to build the 'megabase' and my brain just kind of stalls out as I can never come up with any sort of overall 'theme' or design. If I'm playing with biters off that's not a big deal as I can just start building train supplied 'modules' for each thing that needs to be built - red science gets copper and iron in, red science out for example. But if I'm in a hellworld or something I end up spending dozens of hours expanding the base into the face of the biters to make room and then sort of lose interest. That's where my current game is... I've expanded my walls out enough that I may or may not have enough space and resources to build a megabase, but I am kind of stalled on getting started on it. Looks like this currently after finishing a massive expansion to the east. Original upgraded base steadily doing 150 spm. 
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Jan 25, 2023 18:16
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The Locator posted:My stalling point for quite some time has been when I've upgraded the original base with yellow building and modules and maybe even some beacons which generally gets to about 150'ish science per minute, and then start looking to build the 'megabase' and my brain just kind of stalls out as I can never come up with any sort of overall 'theme' or design. This is where I'm stuck right now, too. I'm not really good at doing things at scale -- I really enjoy making small, fiddly, tight factories, so scaling up to hundreds of science per minute requires some new thinking. One day I'll make that megabase. Your base looks awesome! Is that a grid of roboports?
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Jan 25, 2023 18:35
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The Locator posted:That's where my current game is... I've expanded my walls out enough that I may or may not have enough space and resources to build a megabase, but I am kind of stalled on getting started on it. You've got resources zoomed up so much that your limiting factor is going to be space. You can pack all those nodes with high density mining and train the oil to a central spot but you'll wind up paving over most of that just building the stuff to turn those effectively unlimited resources into something useful.
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Jan 25, 2023 19:06
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Holy tits those are some rich deposits
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Jan 25, 2023 19:26
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Arrath posted:Holy tits those are some rich deposits Yeah... I don't like constantly tearing down and rebuilding mining outposts. I don't remember what the settings are for this game but definitely tuned up. Solumin posted:Is that a grid of roboports? Yes it's a full roboport grid. With vanilla weapons, there is no way (at least in my experience) for a defense to prevent damage to the walls/defenses and because I am extremely lazy I just plopped down a roboport network to let the robots deal with it instead of setting up localized robo-networks fed by a smart rail system of some kind. Even a massive attack from me doing an artillery barrage won't actually overwhelm the defenses but it will cause lots of damage and maybe even some minor destruction, so the slow response times of the robots to arrive with repair materials isn't a big deal. I could make it less prone to damage by adding lasers, but currently those only exist on the angled walls as those were designed later and I never redid the early straight wall blueprint.
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Jan 25, 2023 19:48
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I've found that by about mining productivity 20 your limiting factor on ore deposits starts to be patch size and throughput rather than patch capacity. Any new mines you place around this time will basically never run out if you keep pushing mining prod at whatever rate you're teching (the exception might be on a mega deathworld where you need to churn a ton of resources towards bullets). This is also at the scale where you can start throwing speed3s into every mining drill and you need to start outputting from both sides of the patch because one blue belt isn't enough capacity to span the entire patch, or start moving to bot-based I guess. Maybe you start spacing out the miners so there's no overlap, which will make the patch last a bit longer without maintenance since you won't get the waffling pattern from overlapping miners. Semi-Comedy option of direct feeding into beaconed electric smelters so your stacks are twice as big. Full Comedy option of direct feeding into smelters into assemblers and just outputting gears / chips right off the patch. e: all this to say the default ore settings are usually fine. I might even turn them down to have a reason to expand my rail network further.
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Jan 25, 2023 20:17
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One mod I still love for resource ease is the Texugo TA miners + Warehousing + Loaders Here i'm only putting the base it into a single chest, but you get the idea. The base miner is very expensive but its 90 mining drills covering 25x25, in a single entity, which really really really saves time. Also makes it very easy to tie your warehouses at your train station to turn off the miner when you're full waiting for a train.  Above that you get 180 drills in 35x35 and 360 drills in 50x50. Even the initial one, nice to throw in some efficiency and speed, and you can fill a few blue belts from a storehouse or warehouse via loader. Saves a ton of time and looks cleaner than fields of mining drills. You can also do direct injection to train loading 
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Jan 25, 2023 20:49
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I made a mess. 21K vanilla. I burned out and can't put it together. Save File - https://drive.google.com/file/d/19-1XVCWES0Pi35_sUx-t24bt-fmgVL5V/view?usp=sharing There's some stuff not finished, but all the science module things work at 21.6K, 8 full blue belts of science. Steel 2.0 is started on the left of the big steel. it's UPS optimized over the "finished" one but didn't bother placing 12 more of them. Iron smelter may need the inserter clock fixed...as well as the train station logic for the smelter and rocket fuel. The stations for rocket fuel should have nixie tubes displaying train content and station content but they disappeared one day. Ah there's a hundred things to fix after a few hundred hours as always....
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Jan 25, 2023 20:58
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Xerol posted:I've found that by about mining productivity 20 your limiting factor on ore deposits starts to be patch size and throughput rather than patch capacity. Any new mines you place around this time will basically never run out if you keep pushing mining prod at whatever rate you're teching (the exception might be on a mega deathworld where you need to churn a ton of resources towards bullets). This is also at the scale where you can start throwing speed3s into every mining drill and you need to start outputting from both sides of the patch because one blue belt isn't enough capacity to span the entire patch, or start moving to bot-based I guess. Maybe you start spacing out the miners so there's no overlap, which will make the patch last a bit longer without maintenance since you won't get the waffling pattern from overlapping miners. Semi-Comedy option of direct feeding into beaconed electric smelters so your stacks are twice as big. Full Comedy option of direct feeding into smelters into assemblers and just outputting gears / chips right off the patch. I've definitely played rail world settings that required massively long rails to decent deposits, but this game I just didn't want to do that. I try to mix things up. As far as pulling massive quantities out of ore patches as the game progresses, I normally use a staggered mining setup to double the output but keep all the ore coming out the same side of the patch, like this:  By the point in the game you are doing this, the cost of the undergrounds and speed modules is pretty unimportant as you are just trying to maximize output from each raw material source.
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Jan 25, 2023 21:00
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Majere posted:I made a mess. 21K vanilla. I burned out and can't put it together. Save File - https://drive.google.com/file/d/19-1XVCWES0Pi35_sUx-t24bt-fmgVL5V/view?usp=sharing There's some stuff not finished, but all the science module things work at 21.6K, 8 full blue belts of science. Steel 2.0 is started on the left of the big steel. it's UPS optimized over the "finished" one but didn't bother placing 12 more of them. Iron smelter may need the inserter clock fixed...as well as the train station logic for the smelter and rocket fuel. The stations for rocket fuel should have nixie tubes displaying train content and station content but they disappeared one day. Ah there's a hundred things to fix after a few hundred hours as always.... That's quite a project. Much larger than my biggest actually completed megabase which was.. um... 2850 SPM if I remember correctly. Well, 2700 for the actual megabase, the extra 150 was because the original starter base that was like 10 minutes away by nuclear train was still functioning fully even though it hadn't been visited in a very long time.
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Jan 25, 2023 21:05
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Just read about a pretty drat cool mod called MapShot. It let's you take a snapshot of your current base (it'll actually freeze the game for a bit while it's doing that) which then turns into a full on zoomable, scrollable map. Have a look at my current ~260 hours in Py base: https://pyanodon.frooky.net/
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Jan 25, 2023 22:34
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That's really cool! Maybe I should do a rail grid layout like that.
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Jan 25, 2023 22:39
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Rail Grid + Ltn is the only way to play, IMO.
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Jan 25, 2023 23:05
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Solumin posted:That's really cool! I wouldn't recommend using roundabouts unless you're doing something like Py. The throughput is terrible, but for this type of base where the total production is pretty low but there's just an insane amount of products it works fine and is much easier to build with than a normal T junction. I'm not using LTN though, all of this is done with train limits and combinators.
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Jan 25, 2023 23:13
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The Locator posted:Yeah... I don't like constantly tearing down and rebuilding mining outposts. I don't remember what the settings are for this game but definitely tuned up. Technically a sufficient quantity of landmines will prevent damage to the walls, but then your robots need to replace those. Defenses are inherently ablative, but once you're at the point where you have artillery you don't really need to wall off an area anymore. It takes some effort to get a base defense supply train setup going, including designing your military outpost blueprint, but once you've got that it's an extremely efficient way to deny whole chunks of the map to biters. Want to expand a bit more to the south? Run a rail that direction (covered by your existing artillery defenses), plant the outpost blueprint, and then the military supply train will show up and get the party started. From there, you now have another big chunk of map covered - any biters that expand into the area get cleared by your expanded artillery coverage, and it's very efficient in terms of defensive resources because the biters are being provoked to attack your fortified outpost, rather than covering every square tile of perimeter as you continue to expand. As you get more artillery coverage, you need fewer outposts / can cover a larger area with the same resources. Clearing out chunks of the map manually /leapfrogging artillery a few chunks at a time is a sucker's game - plop down a defensive outpost with artillery (and possibly with a station for an artillery wagon) wherever you want to expand and get back to designing your factory while your trains and robots do all of the grunt work for you.
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Jan 25, 2023 23:21
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| # ? May 19, 2024 17:23 |
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Freaksaus posted:Just read about a pretty drat cool mod called MapShot. It let's you take a snapshot of your current base (it'll actually freeze the game for a bit while it's doing that) which then turns into a full on zoomable, scrollable map. That's cool. Also.. I'm not sure if you are really persistent/stubborn or just crazy. Lol... Py broke me pretty early and I noped out.
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Jan 25, 2023 23:23
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