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Mailer
Nov 4, 2009

Have you accepted The Void as your lord and savior?

Xerol posted:

Sure, you could just overbuild lasers, but imo it's more fun and rewarding to put together a mixed defense.

I walled in phase 1 of a megabase with triple lasers and that effort alone ended the game for me. Supplying bullets and gas can be interesting with less landmass to defend but once you literally need to wall in a state's worth of land the last thing I want to think about is providing resources to hundreds of thousands of things spaced forever away from my production.

That's just me wanting to play beyond the rocket, though. There's plenty of fun defenses to set up early on.

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LonsomeSon
Nov 22, 2009

A fishperson in an intimidating hat!

I've got a tileable blueprint for a WWI+ level fortification that's just a continuous layer of wall, then flame turrets, then two layers of regular turrets fed by inserters from either each other or a belt running behind the whole thing. Lay two out, copy that, lay two of those out and copy that, etc, and eventually you're talking megabase-wall lengths. Blueprint drone ports along behind that and let the bots sort it out while you do something else.

If they didn't want me to rip enough resources out of their planet to build these between lakes in order to claim territory they shouldn't have gotten mad about pollution and attacked my machines!

meowmeowmeowmeow
Jan 4, 2017
I thought this was a good video that explained the design considerations for a perimeter wall and an example solution, I've used it as a reference for rolling my own that's definitely not as advanced as this one but references a lot of the design elements.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3Di8oDUGco

Drone_Fragger
May 9, 2007


M_Gargantua posted:

Factorio: The one place that hasn't been corrupted by Capitalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM

I will forever love how even in the best take he couldn't keep a straight face

drat, you beat me to it. But yeah like half the takes in RA3 hes clearly on the verge of corpsing, its great. Tim curry is a national treasure.

Andohz
Aug 15, 2004

World's Strongest Smelly Hobo

Alkydere posted:

So with the official announcement of Space Exploration Light as an official DLC, are we upgrading the thread to "Factorio: The Solar System doesn't stand a chance"?

More like "Space Exploration: Fun Edition" than SE Light. I just realized I'm already excited for my first K2 + DLC play through.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Dosh is at it again...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etxV4pqVRm8

Sydin
Oct 29, 2011

Another spring commute

Found this channel after me and another goon lost our minds completing a near combined 750 man hour seablock run with about a tenth of Dosh's circuit logic expertise, and it's been real fun watching how he approaches everything in the mod from a completely different angle. Our end base was an absolutely sprawling nightmare that brought a dedicated server to its knees with just how much space we were using to generate sludge, ores, and fly bots everywhere to turn 20 levels of production into required buildings and rocket parts. Dosh is only in the midgame and has already put together a far more competent materials grid + power solution than we did (never figured out beans on our end, we were relying on algae into carbon power until nuclear) so I cannot wait until he reveals what he does in his endgame.

Bernardo Orel
Sep 2, 2011

Sydin posted:

Found this channel after me and another goon lost our minds completing a near combined 750 man hour seablock run with about a tenth of Dosh's circuit logic expertise, and it's been real fun watching how he approaches everything in the mod from a completely different angle. Our end base was an absolutely sprawling nightmare that brought a dedicated server to its knees with just how much space we were using to generate sludge, ores, and fly bots everywhere to turn 20 levels of production into required buildings and rocket parts. Dosh is only in the midgame and has already put together a far more competent materials grid + power solution than we did (never figured out beans on our end, we were relying on algae into carbon power until nuclear) so I cannot wait until he reveals what he does in his endgame.

I hope it's MORE BEANS

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Sydin posted:

Found this channel after me and another goon lost our minds completing a near combined 750 man hour seablock run with about a tenth of Dosh's circuit logic expertise, and it's been real fun watching how he approaches everything in the mod from a completely different angle. Our end base was an absolutely sprawling nightmare that brought a dedicated server to its knees with just how much space we were using to generate sludge, ores, and fly bots everywhere to turn 20 levels of production into required buildings and rocket parts. Dosh is only in the midgame and has already put together a far more competent materials grid + power solution than we did (never figured out beans on our end, we were relying on algae into carbon power until nuclear) so I cannot wait until he reveals what he does in his endgame.

I personally hate coding and circuit logic has never really clicked with me so my use of Factorio's amazing circuit networks is usually limited to wiring up pumps, inserters and loaders to control amounts allowed to accumulate in various boxes.

In my IR3 game I also have added flow control for my smelting stacks to switch between warm and cold ore processing in order to manage the output of the secondary materials (nickel, lead, chromium, etc.) between 10% and 50%, but even then I'm just measuring quantity of materials in a buffer chest and wiring up a pair of pumps on each stack to bypass the furnace or not.

Other than that I use the required combinators for TSM and otherwise ignore the fact that combinators and stuff exist. Watching Dosh's stuff is like watching a completely different game than I play.

Paper Tiger
Jun 17, 2007

🖨️🐯torn apart by idle hands

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-374

This week's Friday Facts covers QoL improvements to robot behavior, the main improvement being that the robot task assigner will now also consider nearby busy robots instead of defaulting to the nearest idle robot (which in some cases might be really far away).

There are also improvements to how robots choose which roboport to charge at (including when robots are traveling over gaps in the network), and now roboports will be able to have logistic requests for specific types of robots.

Neat stuff! No ETA on when the changes would be implemented, but it's cool that they're still finding QoL tweaks and not just focusing on flashy expansion stuff.

necrotic
Aug 2, 2005
I owe my brother big time for this!

Paper Tiger posted:

Neat stuff! No ETA on when the changes would be implemented, but it's cool that they're still finding QoL tweaks and not just focusing on flashy expansion stuff.

Pretty sure all of the new FFF content is specifically about the expansion, so we’ll get these changes then.

They look great, really happy to see the queuing changes.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


I'm more excited about that than about the expansion stuff so far so I hope they don't wait a whole year to release some of these improvements.

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos
I will believe the queued robots is a Factorio level of performant when I see them. I do not envy anyone in the programming muck of queued traveling units of work.

Nea
Feb 28, 2014

Funny Little Guy Aficionado.
it also sounded like in the space age post they might have an LTE/the other one i always forget the name of train scheduling type setup? Which is great, i truly cannot play without one of the train mods.

jokes
Dec 20, 2012

Uh... Kupo?

I want to build space trains very badly

Tamba
Apr 5, 2010

Nea posted:

it also sounded like in the space age post they might have an LTE/the other one i always forget the name of train scheduling type setup? Which is great, i truly cannot play without one of the train mods.

LTN and TSM are the two big train scheduling mods.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Industrial Revolution 3 game...

Pretty much everything in this screenshot minus the power generators and a couple buildings lower left, is a cludged together on the fly 75SPM Yellow Science build. There is more both above and below that wouldn't fit into the screenshot, but this is probably 90% of it.

Embracing the spaghetti up to this point, where I will finally get logistics and can consider building a new bot-based base to make the final jump to space science. So many sub-assemblies and parts for everything. It's kind of a refreshing change because the struggle is to figure out how to make everything work and fit, not 'get more copper'. My entire base making 75SPM of Red, Green, Grey, Blue, Purple and Yellow is running off of 2 yellow lines of copper and iron and 2 yellow lines of steel. All the other oddball materials like lead and gold are a single yellow line or less, and so far the materials are not the bottleneck and I never had to build a giant green circuit array at all.



Oh, and a single yellow line of plastic also.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





The full glory of the IR3 base in a giant'ish image.



I keep running into things that I never automated that I would have normally done long ago, like pumps and offshore pumps, because I never really truly built a mall because all the resources needed aren't in a single spot, so stuff is spread all over the base.

Luckily now I have logi bots and yellow chests so I can keep myself supplied without searching for the unknown location that I automated production of pipes or whatever.

Next task, automate production of blue chests so that I can actually do some sort of bot-based production, but unlike red/yellow chests, the blue chests also need blue chips, which is quite a large process to make.

I have researched everything I need to launch rockets, and make satellites!

Mailer
Nov 4, 2009

Have you accepted The Void as your lord and savior?
That's one thing I always wondered about these mods that add a ton of intermediates and byproducts (not like Py level... but IR or Kras or whatever): how the hell do you build a mall? Do the objects themselves take the same amount but the process is just multiple times longer to get to, say, a belt of green circuits?

The image above doesn't really have any bus logic but if I squint and try to trace products it looks like you're feeding it all with a shockingly small amount of resources and power with everything kind of snaking around to a bunch of small production lines which then snake into other production lines and my vanilla factorio brain is wondering how you don't instantly run out.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Mailer posted:

That's one thing I always wondered about these mods that add a ton of intermediates and byproducts (not like Py level... but IR or Kras or whatever): how the hell do you build a mall? Do the objects themselves take the same amount but the process is just multiple times longer to get to, say, a belt of green circuits?

The image above doesn't really have any bus logic but if I squint and try to trace products it looks like you're feeding it all with a shockingly small amount of resources and power with everything kind of snaking around to a bunch of small production lines which then snake into other production lines and my vanilla factorio brain is wondering how you don't instantly run out.

Yup... everything is small sub-assemblies. The primary resource is ingots of whatever metal. Say the most basic components, an iron gear wheel. To make an iron gear wheel, you make an iron ingot into an iron plate in a small assembler (or a large one but that would be silly) then you feed the iron plat into another small assembler and make the iron gear.

Let's use your example of green circuits. These are not used in anywhere near the quantity as the base game and I'm making them locally in a few places and snaking them around as they are only used for basic items, not for science at all.

Green circuits are made of - 1 copper wire, 1 glass, 3 thermionic tubes.
1 copper wire is made directly from copper ingots in a small assembler.
Glass is made in alloy furnaces by combining tin ingots and silica.
Silica is made by crushing gravel
Gravel is made by crushing rocks.
Thermionic Tubes are made in a large assembler out of glass, copper wire and copper foil.
copper wire is a small assembler from ingots
copper foil is a small assembler from ingots

The classic 3 to 2 ratio of assemblers is retained, but it's 3 thermionic tube assemblers to 2 green circuit assemblers. I mostly just completely ignored ratios early on and was doing 1:1.

This is one of the most basic items in the game, and it gets a lot more complicated. Even simple stuff like bricks. You can't just feed stone into a furnace, oh no. First you crush it, then you feed a couple things (forget what) into a mixer to create liquid concrete. Then you feed the liquid concrete into an assembler and make concrete bricks.

Here is my original green circuit production. I converted the top to electric as you can see, but the original green circuit assembler is copper and still works fine. But you can see how it works where the small assemblers make basic components (they have a very limited list of items they can make - plates, wire, rods, etc.. and a couple secondary items like gears and rivets (rivets are made from rods) which feed into the larger assemblers to make usually another sub-component in the assembly line.



The bottom is a 1:1 build with direct insertion, while the top is a 2:1 because I'm tapping off the extra tubes for something else off to the left somewhere.

Edit: Note that I have not even looked at the recipes for modules, those might be something that requires oodles of circuits, but green circuits don't feed into red circuits and neither green nor red circuits feed directly into blue circuits. That alone eliminates a ton of the circuit assemblies you would normally need.

The Locator fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Sep 2, 2023

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Here is a better image of some of the mess. This is where I decided to build roboports.



One of the ingredients is an accumulator. The three green boxes are showing 3 of the 4 items that go into making an accumulator.
1) Lower left is high energy batteries. Sulfuric acid is piped in from below (it's fairly simple, chem plant eats sulfur and iron pellets if I remember right).
2) Upper left is a Junction box. The left assembler is taking copper wire from two small assemblers and rubber from the belt and making heavy wire. The green arrow from the bottom is where I feed in red circuits, and the green arrow from the top is where I am feeding in small steel frames. Both of those items are their own sub assemblies of cours.
3) Just to the left of the accumulator assembler is an Iron coil thing (forget the name) it is taking copper wire from 2 small assemblers and iron ingots from the belt.
The green arrow to the right is where the final main item comes from, large steel frame. These are a fairly significant sub-assembly item which is why I just stole it (and the small steel frames) from another spot.

The accumulators are only 1 of 4 components that go into the roboport. 1 is the electric motors which is that assembler at the bottom taking in the lube. It takes lube, copper wire, steel plate, steel rod, steel gear (which takes another steel plate). The other visible is another heavy wire. I can't remember the 4th item it's coming from off screen.

If all the sciences are up and running full blast, I have just enough primary resources. If I'm building stuff and therefore pulling from this spaghetti mess for making buildings and inserters and stuff, the science gets starved a bit and slows down.

Primary resources right now go through 3 steps - ore crushing, ore washing, smelting. This produces the primary ingot, a secondary resource based on the primary ore (platinum, lead, etc.). The ratio of the secondary resource can be 10% or 50% of the primary (which is always the same) depending on whether you run the water through boilers first. So you can do cold washing or warm washing to balance your outputs. This should be on some sort of a circuit or something will starve or back up. The washing also produces dirty water (and requires clean water) which you have to run through water cleaners which gives you most of the water back, and extracts sulfur, gravel and silica which you have to handle.

Edit: By running the ore through this process it takes 7.5 raw ore to produce 15 ingots in addition to up to 7.5 (at 50%) ingots of the secondary resource.

Good times!

The Locator fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Sep 2, 2023

Vizuyos
Jun 17, 2020

Thank U for reading

If you hated it...
FUCK U and never come back

Mailer posted:

That's one thing I always wondered about these mods that add a ton of intermediates and byproducts (not like Py level... but IR or Kras or whatever): how the hell do you build a mall? Do the objects themselves take the same amount but the process is just multiple times longer to get to, say, a belt of green circuits?

The image above doesn't really have any bus logic but if I squint and try to trace products it looks like you're feeding it all with a shockingly small amount of resources and power with everything kind of snaking around to a bunch of small production lines which then snake into other production lines and my vanilla factorio brain is wondering how you don't instantly run out.

Typically there's a small amount of basic resources, which produce some intermediates that are used in future steps and some intermediates that can optionally be used to increase the output, efficiency, or quality of later steps.

In Angelbob's, there's six basic ores, which are unusuable on their own but can be converted to usable ores through various steps of ore processing. One step of processing is enough to get small amounts of low-tier ores like copper and iron, but but you can substantially increase the quantity and variety of the outputs by putting it through increasingly complicated processing steps. But the earlier steps produce waste materials which, with further processing, can be turned into the materials used for later processing steps.

For example, putting Saphirite through the second step of processing produces Saphirite Chunks and Sulfuric Waste Water. You can use those chunks as-is to produce iron, copper, silicon, nickel, and slag. But if you have Sulfuric Acid, you can further process those chunks using the third step of processing to turn them into Saphirite Crystals, which adds titanium to that mix of ores you can get from it. And the easiest source of that Sulfuric Acid you need for the third step is by purifying and processing Sulfuric Waste Water - which, again, is produced by the second step.

You need several steps of processing and a couple other intermediates to turn the waste water into acid, of course. But this process also tends to feed back into itself. You purify the waste water to get sulfur and purified water, then you combine oxygen with the sulfur to get sulfur dioxide, and then you combine the sulfur dioxide with purified water (which you got back in the first step) to get sulfuric acid. So even though there's a few steps and several intermediates, the only actual external input you need is oxygen, which is fairly easy to obtain - machines can be used to extract it from water or air, though these machines are large, power-hungry, and produce other products that you'll have to deal with somehow.

These mods tend to have a lot of that kind of thing, with these advanced production processes being complex but relatively self-contained, allowing you the option to reuse their products and loop them into themselves and each other somehow if you want to.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Vizuyos posted:

Typically there's a small amount of basic resources, which produce some intermediates that are used in future steps and some intermediates that can optionally be used to increase the output, efficiency, or quality of later steps.

In Angelbob's, there's six basic ores, which are unusuable on their own but can be converted to usable ores through various steps of ore processing. One step of processing is enough to get small amounts of low-tier ores like copper and iron, but but you can substantially increase the quantity and variety of the outputs by putting it through increasingly complicated processing steps. But the earlier steps produce waste materials which, with further processing, can be turned into the materials used for later processing steps.

For example, putting Saphirite through the second step of processing produces Saphirite Chunks and Sulfuric Waste Water. You can use those chunks as-is to produce iron, copper, silicon, nickel, and slag. But if you have Sulfuric Acid, you can further process those chunks using the third step of processing to turn them into Saphirite Crystals, which adds titanium to that mix of ores you can get from it. And the easiest source of that Sulfuric Acid you need for the third step is by purifying and processing Sulfuric Waste Water - which, again, is produced by the second step.

You need several steps of processing and a couple other intermediates to turn the waste water into acid, of course. But this process also tends to feed back into itself. You purify the waste water to get sulfur and purified water, then you combine oxygen with the sulfur to get sulfur dioxide, and then you combine the sulfur dioxide with purified water (which you got back in the first step) to get sulfuric acid. So even though there's a few steps and several intermediates, the only actual external input you need is oxygen, which is fairly easy to obtain - machines can be used to extract it from water or air, though these machines are large, power-hungry, and produce other products that you'll have to deal with somehow.

These mods tend to have a lot of that kind of thing, with these advanced production processes being complex but relatively self-contained, allowing you the option to reuse their products and loop them into themselves and each other somehow if you want to.

Angelbobs focuses more on the materials side from the little bit I dipped my toes into it and based on your description also. IR3 focuses a lot more on the intermediary parts and sub-assemblies rather than the ore processing side.

In IR3 you start with pretty normal ore processing - 1 iron ore into a stone furnace gives you 1 iron ingot. But the iron ingots are almost never used directly, they must first be turned into plates, rods, gears, foil that are consumed by the machines to make bigger parts, etc.

There seems to be 5 'steps' of ore processing, of which I'm on the 3rd one.

1 - ore --> furnace --> ingot.
2 - ore --> crusher --> crushed ore --> furnace --> ingot -- 1 ore now produces 2 ingots.
3 - ore --> crusher --> crushed ore --> washer --> pure <type> material --> furnace --> ingot -- 1 ore now produces 2 ingots + 10% or 50% (depending on hot or cold washing) pure secondary type material which goes directly to furnace for smelting to ingots.
Step 3 is where secondary and waste materials start. The washing produces a specific secondary resource and waste water that has to be cleaned producing sulfur, gravel, and silica as waste.

4 - Blast furnaces - not sure how this works yet.
5 - Arc furnaces - produces molten metal which can be mixed for alloys and sent directly to casting machines to skip the ingot stage.

I believe 4 and 5 still go through the crushing and washing, but not sure.

So the ore/ingot side of IR3 is definitely a different experience than vanilla, but IMO much simpler than Angelbobs and it doesn't throw you into the deep end at the beginning of the game where normal 'vanilla' ore smelting is how it's done.

LonsomeSon
Nov 22, 2009

A fishperson in an intimidating hat!

My understanding is that Angel’s is the ore end and Bob’s is more of the same expanded subcomponents end.

Kind of thinking about giving Angelbob’s a try, I’ve done IR 2 and 3 as well as K2 -> SpaceEx a bunch of times and we’re getting Good SpaceEx sometime coming up.

Maybe I’ll do a Passive embark and see how deep I get. I did just Bob’s a few times years ago.

Xerophyte
Mar 17, 2008

This space intentionally left blank

zedprime posted:

I will believe the queued robots is a Factorio level of performant when I see them. I do not envy anyone in the programming muck of queued traveling units of work.

It shouldn't be that bad. A 3D closest entity query isn't that much harder than a 2D one, and they should be able to reduce the number of jobs processed per update by a lot while still being more responsive and closer to optimal than the current solution if they have to.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





LonsomeSon posted:

My understanding is that Angel’s is the ore end and Bob’s is more of the same expanded subcomponents end.

Kind of thinking about giving Angelbob’s a try, I’ve done IR 2 and 3 as well as K2 -> SpaceEx a bunch of times and we’re getting Good SpaceEx sometime coming up.

Maybe I’ll do a Passive embark and see how deep I get. I did just Bob’s a few times years ago.

Do Pyanadon's. lol. I bounced off of that so hard... I do understand that they've made the begining somewhat smother these days so maybe I'll give it another try if I ever finish this IR3 run and still have the itch to play.

Edit: And you could be right about Angel's vs. Bob's, I've just never heard of anyone doing just one or the other. They seem like they are kinda joined at the hip in the community.

Sydin
Oct 29, 2011

Another spring commute
I honestly wouldn't mind Pyanadon's at all if it weren't for the loving biological processes that are all RNG bullshit and take a million years to stand up/push to the next tier because you just need to let the wheels spin until you get enough rolls to go your way. Get rid of that tedious garbage and I'd actually quite enjoy the insane production chains and byproduct management/recycling you need to juggle.

Rynoto
Apr 27, 2009
It doesn't help that I'm fat as fuck, so my face shouldn't be shown off in the first place.
Angelbob's really shined on Seablock, imo, the quest for ever more complex refining chains makes a lot more sense when your input is limited to an incredibly inefficient source instead of essentially infinite fields. K2SE otoh has felt great with the normal oregen - probably because of the simpler refining process and more interesting component challenges so far.

LonsomeSon
Nov 22, 2009

A fishperson in an intimidating hat!

The Locator posted:

Do Pyanadon's. lol. I bounced off of that so hard... I do understand that they've made the begining somewhat smother these days so maybe I'll give it another try if I ever finish this IR3 run and still have the itch to play.

Edit: And you could be right about Angel's vs. Bob's, I've just never heard of anyone doing just one or the other. They seem like they are kinda joined at the hip in the community.

I 100% am consciously saving an attempt at Py’s for the period between when I lose interest in Angelbob and the expansion release, in case I get the itch again.

e: there were several multiplayer games started out of this thread which used just Bob’s, but this was like…six or seven years ago I think

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos

Xerophyte posted:

It shouldn't be that bad. A 3D closest entity query isn't that much harder than a 2D one, and they should be able to reduce the number of jobs processed per update by a lot while still being more responsive and closer to optimal than the current solution if they have to.
Its polling closest entity calls neutral in timing and amount, just moving the timing of it to the frame the job was created in the rare case you have more jobs than robots. I.e. the chunking trick could have already been implemented for basic performance gain even if you don't do queued work.

The problem comes where the database of travel legs and work units can get unwieldly technically and functionally. Pathfinding through a time dimension is fine, its practical stuff like biters eating something on the way, charging solutions failing etc. or theoretical stuff like the coded universal applicability of labor and travel time that are going to eat away at this solution. They are saying they have a handle on it with all of the textbook ways of managing it and and see some odd stuff but not enough that stands out and the losses here are made up by the chunking.

Seeing odd stuff in the textbook implementation of this stuff is a personal professional bugbear of mine in recommending warehouses implement predictive labor management software. I was mostly tickled by the Friday Facts because I had just finished reading release notes that the OEM developer I work with was adding the chunking trick to enable closest work unit assignment which was also something I helped mod on for a client 3 years back.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


Sydin posted:

I honestly wouldn't mind Pyanadon's at all if it weren't for the loving biological processes that are all RNG bullshit and take a million years to stand up/push to the next tier because you just need to let the wheels spin until you get enough rolls to go your way. Get rid of that tedious garbage and I'd actually quite enjoy the insane production chains and byproduct management/recycling you need to juggle.

In practice it doesn't matter because you unlock the new critters well before you run out of other things to do without them so you can set it up and forget about it for a few hours.

The new T.U.R.D. stuff is cool, dumb name notwithstanding.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





Sydin posted:

I honestly wouldn't mind Pyanadon's at all if it weren't for the loving biological processes that are all RNG bullshit and take a million years to stand up/push to the next tier because you just need to let the wheels spin until you get enough rolls to go your way. Get rid of that tedious garbage and I'd actually quite enjoy the insane production chains and byproduct management/recycling you need to juggle.

If you go for IR3, there is a single item like this - Rubber. You should actively seek out rubber trees and set up some rubber chunks as soon as you get the electric forestry things. I suppose you could do it with the bronze forestry but I waited for electric and setup 3 chunks doing rubber trees and by the time I actually needed rubber for anything other than one-offs like a vehicle or armor, I had a completely backed up buffer that I will never get through now that I'm actively using rubber for building stuff like heavy cable that goes into power poles and stuff.

Chopping down a rubber tree gives you 4 rubber. It takes 12 rubber and some stone bricks to make a planter tree so that you can establish your forestry thing wherever you want it. It takes 50 trees to give you a 100% chance for 1 rubber per cycle of the forestry. Basically it's a 2% chance per cycle per tree in the chunk, maxed at 50. Every day/night cycle there is a chance for new trees to appear if you are below 50 in the chunk. I am not sure whether that works off the percentage or what. I just planted like 20 trees, then came back periodically and it would have increased by 10% or so, I'd grab all the produced rubber and make more plantings.. rinse and repeat until 1 was at 100. Then go away, and come back and make another one.

The Locator
Sep 12, 2004

Out here, everything hurts.





My prototype arc-smelting array. This takes in iron ore on on the right, crushes it, washes the crushed ore, adds oxygen to create iron in the first 12 furnaces, then adds coke in the 2nd 12 furnaces and produces 15 'steel things' in the 6 casters. The casters can be set to output ingots, plates, rods, or gears.

On the input side this is only consuming 5 ore for the 15 output. If all 24 furnaces were just doing iron it would take in 10 ore for a full red belt output.

Compare this to the bottom half of the gold array you can see directly above which takes in 15 ore for 30 ingots out, and it's a single step. Iron to steel would use the same setup as above for iron, plus another array of 48 furnaces for the steel (plus coke input).

So the arc furnace setup goes from 1 ore to 2 ingots --> 1 ore to 3 ingots, and halves the number of physical furnaces. It does however add the casters at the end, and eats more energy, but not a huge amount more. Electric furnaces take 250kw each, vs. 625kw for the arc furnaces, so halving the machines it's an extra 125kw per arc furnace.

Tamba
Apr 5, 2010

New FFF, but it's kind of weird:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375

Everything has a quality now, so you can either just mass produce the normal stuff like before, or roll the dice to get a better quality.

e: Honestly, this could have been an April Fools' post and no one would have batted an eye

Tamba fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Sep 8, 2023

Rynoto
Apr 27, 2009
It doesn't help that I'm fat as fuck, so my face shouldn't be shown off in the first place.

Tamba posted:

New FFF, but it's kind of weird:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375

Everything has a quality now, so you can either just mass produce the normal stuff like before, or roll the dice to get a better quality.

e: Honestly, this could have been an April Fools' post and no one would have batted an eye

My first thought was 'why?' then I sat and had a think and y'know what I love it. More reasons to create insane facilities is a good thing.

Half-wit
Aug 31, 2005

Half a wit more than baby Asahel, or half a wit less? You decide.
One the one hand, cool, more options, good.

On the other hand, means blue circuits in multiplayer are going to be even more of a resource drain as every new player attempts to craft legendary power armor mk2.

Alkydere
Jun 7, 2010
Capitol: A building or complex of buildings in which any legislature meets.
Capital: A city designated as a legislative seat by the government or some other authority, often the city in which the government is located; otherwise the most important city within a country or a subdivision of it.



It's definitely a thing. I thought it was kind of dumb at first but now I love the idea. Just another layer of insanity to add to everything.

Also an official recycling machine will be nice.

Edit: Also Also this kind of cuts out the need for "Assembler 8" or whatever with some mods as you start working towards "Epic Assembler 2"

Also Also Also I imagine this means interplanetary transport, or just surface to orbital transport, will be expensive enough that you want to send only the best materials. Definitely going to want to focus on getting quality modules up ASAP though.

Alkydere fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Sep 8, 2023

K8.0
Feb 26, 2004

Her Majesty's 56th Regiment of Foot
It's definitely odd. The complexity increase from fully utilizing it is going to be huge. Good luck, people obsessed with perfect ratios of everything!

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos
There's mod sets that already make you balance probabilistic production and helmod etc. have it built in now. So the megabase perfect ratio peoples are barely going to blink making recycle loops.

I don't dislike the idea since it adds more vanilla reasons to actually use circuits or inserter conditions but I think I'm getting old enough to be instinctually allergic to yet another color coded quality system based on dice rolls.

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Truga
May 4, 2014
Lipstick Apathy
system seems fun to build around but the names are dumb

"this is a legendary green circuit" oh so you're making voodoo6 PCBs now?

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