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My favorite Dosh forbidden knowledge is the cargo wagon mall. I've compressed entire setups into lines of cargo wagons with filter inserters shoved between them. Watching that video was like having my third eye opened up.
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Dec 28, 2023 22:11
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Oh yeah? Well parse this, nerds! You can't - because it's an unholy abomination!  This poo poo took me six hours. I had to use 4 Helmod subfactories with manual production ratios because Factory Planner poo poo itself trying to figure out the byproducts. I have seen into the abyss! Fear me, mortals!  
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Dec 29, 2023 06:42
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Zeratanis posted:Speaking of Dosh designs though, how do you set up that warehouse mall exactly? I've never delved THAT much into circuits used like that and would like to learn. I'm to the point where I wanna phase white belts out completely but handcrafting undergrounds/splitters en-masse takes forever, so I wanna set up a mall now that I got green chips. Here's the blueprint string: 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 it's a single arithmetic combinator "each * -1 each" which inverts every value so the (negative) current contents is added to the desired value (from the combinator) and the remainder is inserted until the number is 0. The red wire from the destination warehouse (and transfer silo) goes to the input to be inverted, and the (green) output goes to the inserters that feed that destination warehouse, which are set to set filters, and then to a combinator which sets desired materials. In addition there's a red wire that only goes to the inserters where you can add additional "universal" requests via an attached combinator (not in blueprint) which does the same. The actual addition/subtraction is done via the way circuits work, where it merges all values in the line together. This is also how train station logic works, the train station transmits a negative value of the requested cargo, you grab that and add it to the current loaded cargo and set your inserters to filters so you know what and when to stop inserting into the cargo wagon. I haven't seen the wagon mall but I assume it's the same logic, and if you don't want to use wagons you can use a mod like https://mods.factorio.com/mod/WideChests which does the same thing. Bhodi fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 15:42
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The wagon mall actually cheats and uses the fact that you can filter cargo wagon inventory slots to limit items, so you don't need any circuits.
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Dec 29, 2023 16:10
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DarkSol posted:I hope you don't mind, but since I'm a member of Dosh's discord, I let him know about the mod and what your inspiration/motivation for the mod was. No problem at all
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Dec 29, 2023 20:38
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Bhodi posted:blueprint Thanks! I'll study it closely, and use it.  Using combinators for train stations is also something I'm curious about too, since I've seen them next to stations but never know what they're doing exactly.
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Dec 30, 2023 02:31
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An effortpost on train station circuit network connections (vanilla): Enable/Disable Note that you can also set this condition with a logistic network connection, and it will function the same way. This will simply turn the station on or off depending on the condition set. So, for example, you could wire the station up to the chests at the station, and only enable the station when there is less than 8000 iron ore in the chests. Trains treat disabled stops as if they cannot be reached which can cause problems if you turn the only station with a certain name off in the middle of a train's route - suddenly the train is looking for a valid station to go to, and can't find one, so it just stops in the middle of the mainline and now you have a big mess. For this and other reasons it's better to control stations with the train limit. Send to Train This will just send whatever's on the wires to a stopped train, for the train to use in its own conditions. This could be handy in some niche cases where you would want a train to depart the station based on a circuit condition, but most of the cases I can think of are better served with train limits at the destination stations or just regular cargo conditions. I suspect this might become more useful with interrupts in 2.0. Set Train Limit This is pretty simple on its face but has the biggest impact on your train network out of all these options. Unlike with disabling a station, setting a station's limit to 0 while a train is en route does not stop the train from continuing to go to the station - it keeps its reservation, and therefore will complete its current schedule until the next time the station comes up in the schedule. This is, generally, a good thing, but might require some extra planning. The biggest use case for this is having multiple identically-named stations. Let's say you have 4 different iron mines, and 3 different unloading stations at smelters. You can set all your mine stations to have the same name for loading, and all the smelter stations to have the same name for unloading. The main thing this lets you do is assign an arbitrary number of trains to an arbitrary number of stations, so getting a new iron mine online only requires you to set up the station with the same name as your other mines.  However, by default, this is a problem: Trains will generally try to pathfind to the nearest available station. So you have 4 iron mines, but all the trains are going to one, which has no buffer, since it can't supply all the trains constantly. So the thing to do here is wire up the chests to an arithmetic combinator, and divide the amount of iron ore by the amount a train can hold (8000 in the case of 4-car trains). This will give you the number of complete trainloads the station has available, rounded down. You could send this signal directly to the train stop, but then a lot of them will have a limit of 0, which is another problem - empty trains will be waiting at your smelters, and not leave for the mines until a full load is ready for them to pick up. This ends up being a bottleneck where you have ore-hungry smelters waiting for trains to make a complete roundtrip. So the main solution is to add a constant combinator to the pickup station, where you add in a fixed number (usually 1 is enough, but maybe you want 2 or more for really far away stations). Just wire this to the station along with the arithmetic combinator output and the supply side is solved. What about the demand side? Again, if you name all your smelter stations the same, all the trains will pile into one while the others sit dry. The good news is you can use pretty much the same logic, except in reverse - divide the station's contents by negative 8000, which will give you a negative number of trains, and combine that with a constant combinator having the maximum number, and due to how wire math works, the negative load number will get subtracted from the maximum, leaving the station with a limit equal to the number of trains-worth of materials missing from its buffer. When all the smelters are full of ore, the trains will just wait at the mines for an opening. Another use case for setting train limits is if you have remote wall supply stations looking for ammo. I set up my remote wall segments to have independent roboport networks, so each one only covers a small section of wall, but also has its own station, so ammo and other repair supplies are always relatively close to whereever an attack might come in. In this case I just have a few combinators wired to a roboport, using the subtraction trick, and the last one is wired to the station to set the limit to 1 whenever ammo (or any other supply) falls below the threshold set. I have another big effortpost somewhere in this thread about this whole system, you can look through my post history to find it. Read Train Contents Does what it says - takes the contents of the train, and outputs it from the station as signals. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could use this to dispatch trains in a just-in-time system so that another train arrives as soon as the current one departs the station. Maybe also could be used with some logistics system that lets you have multiple types of cargo coming into one station, where the inserters only pull cargo out of the train if the train is carrying something the local logistics network needs. The only thing I use this for is loading my ammo/defense supply train, by subtracting the train's contents from a constant combinator, and using that to set filters on filter inserters that load the train from requester chests. This can let you have a mixed cargo wagon without using filter slots, or a mixed cargo wagon that can carry different amounts of different items depending on what is needed. Very niche, this is something that you'll know when you need to use it and only use it in those cases. Less niche if you want flashy displays you could hook this number up to a combinator light display that shows how full the currently stopped train is, I guess. Read Stopped Train Each train has a unique id which is fairly meaningless except for knowing the number is unique. If you wanted to get really deep into the weeds you could use this to identify certain trains and enable/disable different inserters or filters to load/unload different things depending on which train it is, but you'd also need some kind of memory cell system to store the IDs of the trains and which items go with them. Almost everyone will have no use for this. Read Train Count This gives you the left number in the "train limit X/Y" display when you hover over the stop. I suppose this could be useful if you wanted to have smart stackers/intersections that prioritize traffic to reduce jams. Or again if you just want to hook up fancy lights so you can see if a station has incoming trains without having to look at the tooltip.
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Dec 30, 2023 03:10
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Xerol posted:Read Stopped Train
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Dec 30, 2023 03:47
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Xerol posted:Again, if you name all your smelter stations the same, all the trains will pile into one while the others sit dry. Pretty good breakdown but this isn't quite true. A station that has a train in it already has a fairly hefty path penalty (equivalent to 500 rail sections), and they will recalculate if they've been waiting at a chain signal every 5 seconds, so they should in theory try and move to a nearby empty station after a bit. Proper use of train limit will still get you better results of course.
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Dec 30, 2023 05:52
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Did you know, you can host your mapshot factorio save using github pages? Just push it to it's own repo and enable pages! Seablock: https://bhodii.github.io/seablock/ Space exploration: https://bhodii.github.io/space-exploration This is a really cool way to show off a base and it's not too much work if you know how to use a git repo. The space exploration is a completed game and that repo's almost a gig. Thanks for hosting, github! Bhodi fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Dec 31, 2023 21:44
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Dosh goes to the ends of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzpUQZIr15g It's great to finally see him make a proper infinite research ultrabase and a megaproject that warrants it
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Jan 1, 2024 01:08
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Pigbuster posted:Dosh goes to the ends of the world: He also put up a video of the full 3 hour, 20 minute ride to the edge of the map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU1DGFvHWuc The absolute madman
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Jan 1, 2024 04:53
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Finally a Dosh video I can see without feeling I'm getting spoiled on advanced builds in various mods
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Jan 1, 2024 04:59
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Pigbuster posted:Dosh goes to the ends of the world: The first half is a masterful example of how to build a megabase, and it proves to me that while I'm good enough to beat this game, I'm by no measure an expert. The second half is proof that Dosh is a mad genius who could take over the world, given enough logic combinators and a place to build them.
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Jan 2, 2024 02:48
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Solumin posted:The first half is a masterful example of how to build a megabase, and it proves to me that while I'm good enough to beat this game, I'm by no measure an expert. You don't need 100th of whatever the hell was going on in that video to beat the game 
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Jan 2, 2024 03:30
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What resources that base produced in Dosh's video is much more than the sum of every product I've ever produced in my 500+ hours of playing.
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Jan 2, 2024 03:43
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Xerol posted:Read Train Count SettingSun posted:Ultracube is progressing nicely, and weirdly. There's definitely a discovery element to the mod so I'll spoiler some of this. After the 3rd tier of science it seems to split into branches. One focusing on deep core materials, and one focusing on...transdimensional ghost tech? seiken posted:Simplest approach is to have some input/output buffer chests wired up to an inserter that puts the cube in and enable it when the chest are full/empty enough. If you have e.g 2 conditions you can use two combinators set to output 1 when their condition is true, wire outputs to inserter and set that to enable when the signal = 2. Oh wow that seems really simple indeed. Just take an inserter and wire it to a chest. And check for a thing.  Neat. Good enough to research basic tech. Then build a better base.  Oh. Oh no. I really underestimated how much travel time matters. Well ok, not gonna throw it away, let's build a bit of stuff for more research while I try to figure out a new design with the new recipes. With everything I need for blue science.  The new "production unit":  I even managed to attach something and without the dolly mod thing I would have probably quit the game while trying to make space.  Throughput is ok-ish enough to chill a bit and wait for all research to be done. I realized there should be a tank right next to the boiler too late, no way to change it now. Then build base number 3  I'm sure I'm nearly done with researching the current tech level because there's a lot of new stuff already and oh god why is there still more please stop  This is such a great mod (so far?  ), it's such a neat Factorio puzzle game. If Factorio is Hexcells, your mod is Tametsi.vvvv: Which reminds me, I wanted to link this the last time circuits were a topic, it has good examples of the basics: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook RabbitWizard fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 03:57
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Anytime someone builds something with logic to set off alarms based off of math in the automation is the most mindblowing part to me. I was happy just to get mining outposts working!
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Jan 2, 2024 03:57
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I was super pumped when I finally figured out how to manage two trains on the same track.
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Jan 2, 2024 04:02
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Speaking of cube progress I "automated" both branches of 4th tier tech finally. By that I mean the goods come off the line with some manual massaging of where the cube is and some junk output (so much calcium). The next thing I have to do is figure out a building whose correct inputs change every execution. Well, I couldn't avoid more complex circuit behavior forever... Deep core drilling was much easier than the other tech tree, mainly because of all the dimension folding I didn't need to do.
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Jan 2, 2024 04:11
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seiken posted:Since the topic is mod recommendations, I will take the opportunity to plug a new overhaul mod I just released today: Ultracube. If you thought there wasn't enough reason to get up to combinator shennanigans in vanilla, it might be the mod for you. I got to say I finally picked this up, and I'm definitely captivated by it. I've only just unlocked the third science tier, but I honestly love the logistic challenge of keeping the cube between factories as short as possible while still having the room to expand. I can imagine it may be a little rough to some folks as there are points of downtime where you're kinda waiting for the cube to come where you need it (like power) but its still its pretty great.
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Jan 2, 2024 11:20
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nullEntityRNG posted:I got to say I finally picked this up, and I'm definitely captivated by it. I've only just unlocked the third science tier Same, and I looked at what it took to make blue science and immediately noticed intelligent calcium and besselheim flasks which greatly amused me. seiken is clearly a man of culture. Now i just gotta figure out how to avoid the helvetica scenario
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Jan 2, 2024 11:54
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DontMockMySmock posted:Same, and I looked at what it took to make blue science and immediately noticed intelligent calcium and besselheim flasks which greatly amused me. seiken is clearly a man of culture. Now i just gotta figure out how to avoid the helvetica scenario Okay I’m definitely playing this now
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Jan 2, 2024 12:06
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I set up a (cargo wagon, lol) mall in Ultracube and it turns out that all these necessities require quite a few basic matter units. So many in fact I created a version of one of the title menu slides to create a couple thousand in a short amount of time.
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Jan 2, 2024 21:27
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I'm really glad those playing the cube seem to be having a good cube time 
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Jan 3, 2024 15:25
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I am, except once I couldn’t get rid of calcium fast enough now I can’t make enough of it! And coal liquefaction is mandatory to rid myself of enough of it so the deep ore powder can flow so I’m lousy with oil derivatives. And the logistic bots stack to one. 
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Jan 3, 2024 19:04
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Does anyone have a non-gigantic 4-lane balancer that also includes a 90 degree turn? I keep doing this: ... but it feels like there's absolutely a more space-efficient way to do this. Edit: I think this does it? 
Harvey Baldman fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jan 4, 2024 |
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Jan 4, 2024 04:16
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You only have four splitters compared to the "real" solution's 6, so I don't think your one is a full balancer. (For example, if you only have input on the two right lanes and only have output on the two top lanes, then you only have one belt of throughout in your solution).
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Jan 4, 2024 05:02
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Always play with partial and empty belts at various inputs for balancers. If you always have full inputs there’s no benefits to balancing. And yours is missing a bit from being an actual belt balancer if that’s what you’re trying to do. For busses I don’t even bother anymore. Priority balancers to shift materials down and compress the belts does it great.
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Jan 4, 2024 05:16
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If you do want a full balancer, I think this works and is reasonably compact:
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Jan 4, 2024 05:20
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I’ve always been curious about the theory of full-throughput non-balancers; that is, belt systems that are guaranteed to maintain the same total output throughput as they have input throughput, no matter which input belts are empty or which output belts are blocked, but which don’t try to balance that output across the belts. I usually don’t care about actual balancing, but this is a nice property to have if your inputs are coming from different places. In practice I’m usually satisfied without such a strong property, but it’d be a convenient thing to have, since I do see wonky behavior here occasionally.
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Jan 4, 2024 06:38
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nrook posted:I’ve always been curious about the theory of full-throughput non-balancers; that is, belt systems that are guaranteed to maintain the same total output throughput as they have input throughput, no matter which input belts are empty or which output belts are blocked, but which don’t try to balance that output across the belts. I usually don’t care about actual balancing, but this is a nice property to have if your inputs are coming from different places. In practice I’m usually satisfied without such a strong property, but it’d be a convenient thing to have, since I do see wonky behavior here occasionally. I think that's a contradiction - your throughput is inherently limited by the lesser of your input or output belts, and maintaining the maximum possible throughput independently of which belts are blocked/missing inherently involves balancing.
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Jan 4, 2024 09:29
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Olesh posted:I think that's a contradiction - your throughput is inherently limited by the lesser of your input or output belts, and maintaining the maximum possible throughput independently of which belts are blocked/missing inherently involves balancing. Yeah that confused me too - if you have have 4x yellow belts but don't balance them, then you have 4 independent systems with max 15 items a second. Regardless of input or output! If you're not balancing a bus then you need to manually calculate all inputs and outputs per belt line which seems like way more work than just slapping down a belt balancer blueprint.
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Jan 4, 2024 09:42
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PancakeTransmission posted:Yeah that confused me too - if you have have 4x yellow belts but don't balance them, then you have 4 independent systems with max 15 items a second. Regardless of input or output! If you're not balancing a bus then you need to manually calculate all inputs and outputs per belt line which seems like way more work than just slapping down a belt balancer blueprint. The simplest way of accomplishing what's being talked about is putting down a big block of alternating splitters across all your iron lines or whatever. They're not going to be balanced at the end, but every input has a path to every output and there aren't any bottlenecks. The idea is to find a solution for making sure every input can get to every output and won't get bottlenecked, but you're not particularly fussed about using every input or output evenly. I've looked for simple solutions to this before, but I usually end up just using balancer blueprints instead because they almost always do what I want.
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Jan 4, 2024 10:27
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So instead of a balancer you want... a bad balancer? Unless you're conflating lane balancing and belt balancing, but I can't imagine you'd accidentally be finding 4x4 lane balancers without being able to find the regular 4x4 bowtie belt balancer.
Darox fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Jan 4, 2024 |
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Jan 4, 2024 10:39
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That's basically what I've been doing with my 900 SPM no modules*/beacons belt base. With 10x tech cost. This is where I'm at with everything through yellow built out: *Still using prod mods in labs & silos though because I'm not stupid. 900 SPM is a full yellow belt (or half of a red one) so a lot of the quantities needed rounded out to full belt amounts, especially when you take a science pack at a whole. For example, here's the 24 red belts of copper plate needed for yellow science:  12 belts go to LDS, and 12 to green chips (red chips are stolen from the blue science RC build which is fine because I overbuilt that to begin with - but it will eventually cap my production around 780 spm if I don't supplement it later). I've managed to make a green circuit design I'm happy with that fits within my block plan, once these are upgraded to red belts they take in 6 copper + 4 iron belts and spit out 4 belts of chips (with 3 copper belts (90/s copper plates) feeding 2 output lines (60/s GC), so I've got 3-to-4 and 6-to-8 balancers all over my factory). This is my original GC build from the starter base that now feeds Red + Green science, RC for blue science, and the mall:  Similarly I've built out the RC factory to use 3 full belts of copper plate, plastic, and green chips as input, which makes 1.5 belts of output.  These extend slightly beyond one block but I still keep the path by running the belts underground (you can see on the minimap the extra section of built machines and the gap). But in general this entire base is made of completely separate systems, with a few exceptions. All the items needed for purple science come in as raw materials and only circulate within that set of blocks, same with yellow and military science. Blue shares a little bit of infrastructure with Red + Green for the red circuits, but has its own dedicated iron + steel lanes for the engines. So there's no bus to balance - most of the balancers in the base are just for balancing train output, or for distributing items in less than full belt quantities (as I did with the GC build). I did use a couple massive balancers for the copper needed for yellow science, but that wasn't really necessary - I could just feed 8 belts into each 8 lanes of smelters from one train station, and have three separate banks of 8 lanes for the 24 smelter lines. The closest thing to a main bus I have is the belts coming down from the original starter smelters that feed red + green science, and that's only because I feed the mall off those belts. One reason I was able to build the base this way was because of the map settings - very high frequency of patches meant there were lots of local ores available to have separate smelter banks for each science build. As those expire I'm transitioning to trains, mostly putting stations down where the original ore patches were. (Also switching all the smelters over to solid fuel, so I don't have to have coal in places that don't require coal as an actual ingredient - I can just pipe some light oil over and have a small local chem plant to make a belt of solid fuel). Building the base like this has been kind of freeing since every game was turning out largely the same - plan out the smelters, plan out the main bus, siphon resources off the bus and feed science to the labs. It's also turned out to be a bit more spaghetti this way, but it's somewhat organized spaghetti. There aren't a lot of different materials crossing over each other, and where they are is mostly due to lack of planning and not an inherent quality of the overall strategy - if I had figured out what I wanted to put in each block from the beginning, I could've left ample space and also had a nice outside-to-inside resource flow going. I did finally launch a rocket after 90 hours, but I'm already thinking about restarting with a better plan in mind - I really do not have any good place to put space science that I can reasonably belt the output to the labs, and for purple science I had to make plastic and steel remotely and train in the finished bars (steel in the top left, plastic way off to the south where there's a few big oil fields near a big coal patch). I would also want to plan things more around the overall base requirements and less around where ores happened to spawn. And there's a few places I can optimize space usage a bit more, with some smelter blocks having completely unused lanes and others having to steal small amounts from other builds. I'd also like to have dedicated resources for the mall (and especially a military/spidertron mall, which I never got around to making on this map). Those thick red and yellow lines on the map overview? Banks of belts. I didn't get a final count but midway through the purple build I took a look at the total production values and I was well in excess of 100k red belts. If I want to go for 1350 SPM on the next base (half a blue belt per pack) I'm going to eventually need blue belts, and while with better planning I probably won't need 100k (maybe half as many) that's still an insane amount of iron to be siphoning off from something else. Not to mention assemblers, inserters, bots (for yellow science I overbuilt bot frames by about 10% and just leeched off those on this map), furnaces (I have 2880 steel furnaces for making steel alone), solar panels and accumulators (also currently leeching off of yellow science materials). Also modules which I never had a real build for. The eventual plan would also involve moving to tier 3 assemblers just to save a bit of space, which is also somewhat handy since I can build to the final plan with tier 2 assemblers and red belt, get 810 SPM out of it, and then upgrade to T3/blue belt in place when I have the tech/production for it (just need to extend the smelter lines by 50%, which I do have room for, barely). Which brings me to the city block design - I've been working on this blueprint book for 3 years, and I'm starting to hate it. 128x128 seems like a fine block size until you start doing things that need a lot of space. The roboport grid was designed for 100% construction coverage while leaving a large space in the middle of a block for production, but the roboports still ended up in the way a lot of the time and the logistics gap meant doing bot-based builds was also a problem.  So I'm also going to be starting on block system 2.0 soon. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to use as a basis yet - 256x256 does seem like a bit too big, even if it does mean I can fit 16 smelter lanes in it, but it's also slightly bigger than what 5x5 roboports can cover (250x250), so I'm leaning towards 192x192, which will let me have a little bit of overlap. Also I'm going to be centering the grid system so that the middle of the first block is at 0,0 instead of the corner - this way I can leave the spawn/spaceship crash site intact and probably build the core mall around that for easier resupply when respawning. More than anything I want a better layout for trains. Right now you can only double-side unload from trains if you limit a block to 2 stations, and the roboports still get in the way of the output belts. And 2-8 trains are also about as big as they can get, so I'm limited if I want to go bigger. Larger blocks also mean I can have larger junctions, so my 4-way windmill might be able to accommodate trains bigger than 1-4 if it's in a larger block. I might even look at doing a 4-lane system?
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Jan 4, 2024 10:43
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Belt balancers are a bandaid on poor consumption design, and at best you should have one per item type to ensure the system inputs are not independent. They fix intermittent consumer problems, but by the point where you're worried about 4x4s you should already be hitting logistics bots for those in a mall. Everyone's play style is valid but if you're trying to be optimal balancers aren't good.
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Jan 4, 2024 13:53
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M_Gargantua posted:Belt balancers are a bandaid on poor consumption design, and at best you should have one per item type to ensure the system inputs are not independent. They fix intermittent consumer problems, but by the point where you're worried about 4x4s you should already be hitting logistics bots for those in a mall. Taking it to this extreme is insane. Unless you're an extremely fun and interesting person who only makes purely bot-fed factories with all the complex logistical problems of shift left clicking a requestor chest you're going to run into situations where a balancer only makes sense. Using one isn't a failure of engineering. Can they be overused? Yes. Are they strictly bad? No.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:01
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putting it a bit less acerbically, beyond aesthetics, balancers are complexity upstream for the convenience of splitting off the edge belt in a bus which can be useful. their popularity in general should show how people like and desire them.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:29
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I've only ever used balancers for ores at the miners so all my inputs output uniformly. But in that endeavor I've used fun ones like 8-4s so I'm happy.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:31
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