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IMO the only thing balancers do outside of ensuring symmetrical train unloading is disguise throughput issues. If you have enough belts, all you have to do is shift over after each draw. Doing that will make it perfectly clear under full load if you have sufficient capacity or not, where a balancer makes it confusing and potentially invisibly underfeeds things.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:35
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K8.0 posted:IMO the only thing balancers do outside of ensuring symmetrical train unloading is disguise throughput issues. If you have enough belts, all you have to do is shift over after each draw. Doing that will make it perfectly clear under full load if you have sufficient capacity or not, where a balancer makes it confusing and potentially invisibly underfeeds things. I'd like to see a wacky challenge run of someone trying to beat Factorio without using any balancers. Any splitter with more than two belts attached to it is a balancer, so it'd force some thinking in design. Or just lots of cargo wagon abuse.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:45
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My friend I can point to any of my first few wins to show you what it looks like to win without balancing. Or bots. Or solar panels. Or...[trails off forever]
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Jan 4, 2024 14:51
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Is there a reason to use balancers since they added priority splitters? Compress, don't balance.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:55
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Collateral Damage posted:Is there a reason to use balancers since they added priority splitters? Compress, don't balance. Equal priority loading and unloading of trains is the big use case I think. You can do it with circuits, but that has limitations. Even a circuit-controlled station will want some balancing of the actual belts to operate smoothly.
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Jan 4, 2024 15:06
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I'm about to start manufacturing what I think is the last tech card in Ultracube and soon I'll also be able to show what it looks like to win a mod designed for circuitry shenanigans with hardly any in practice. Also excited to export a picture of my factory as I don't think I've designed such a monstrosity of belts and pipes in a long time.
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Jan 4, 2024 15:10
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SettingSun posted: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. That is the ideal because miners are independent sources that need to be collated. Similarly with train unloading unless you do the circuit thing (which warehousing and loaders make infinitely simpler since you're not dealing with 6 chests per car)
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Jan 4, 2024 15:22
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Balancing your train stations is utilitarian. Balancing a bus is aesthetics.
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Jan 4, 2024 15:29
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Darox posted:Any splitter with more than two belts attached to it is a balancer, so it'd force some thinking in design. Or just lots of cargo wagon abuse. Disagree, "balancer" is only a splitter with 2 belts on each side. Otherwise it's not balancing anything, it's splitting 1 input into 2 outputs or joining 2 inputs to 1 output. The results may be evenly distributed, but you're not balancing the contents of 2 belts against each other. Because I've made tons of runs without any kind of real balancer, especially early on, they're not particularly difficult. Just silly and annoying.
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Jan 4, 2024 15:38
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Darox posted: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. The assumption I'm making is that loosening the constraints on the design would allow for a simpler, smaller device. K8.0 posted:IMO the only thing balancers do outside of ensuring symmetrical train unloading is disguise throughput issues. If you have enough belts, all you have to do is shift over after each draw. Doing that will make it perfectly clear under full load if you have sufficient capacity or not, where a balancer makes it confusing and potentially invisibly underfeeds things. In practice this is what I usually do and it's fine. I do agree that actual balancing is fundamentally pointless: in the long run, it will have no effect.
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Jan 4, 2024 16:08
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I hate building big complicated balancers so I just use wide-chests and loaders. If I don't want a giant buffer I just close off all but a couple of slots in the chest. I'm sure a lot of people consider it cheating, but I don't care. All my trains load and unload perfectly evening because they load/unload into a chest that is the same length as the train and I just tap that with loaders to however many belts I want to be coming from that station.
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Jan 5, 2024 03:14
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Can someone explain fluid balancing from trains to me? I have looked at a few blueprints and some of them describe the process as balanced unloading, and I am confused - surely if the pumps are unloading a train into tanks, and the tanks are connected, the tanks will self-balance? But I'm seeing these wildly complex circuit systems that seem to be managing or controlling pumps to establish balance. Like, in a test platform this seems to be working just fine?  Am I missing something fundamental about this?
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Jan 5, 2024 05:35
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Probably something to do with megafactory edge cases that 99% of players won't notice or see. Like you I really don't see much issues with fluid stations: just make sure the unloading pump pushes into a tank. Pipes have limited throughput, tanks have unlimited throughput.
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Jan 5, 2024 06:27
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Fluids won't draw equally from tanks. Fluids are weird, even with the newer optimized and more consistent sim code. The "best" design is two tanks per car with two pumps on the ends of the car. Those feed one pump each pair. Still no pipes. And each pump is controlled by the basic unload balancing circuit using a single arithmetic combinator per station. M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 07:00
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Harvey Baldman posted:Can someone explain fluid balancing from trains to me? I have looked at a few blueprints and some of them describe the process as balanced unloading, and I am confused - surely if the pumps are unloading a train into tanks, and the tanks are connected, the tanks will self-balance? But I'm seeing these wildly complex circuit systems that seem to be managing or controlling pumps to establish balance. If you're using a dozen pumps and tanks in an amalgam like that then there's no benefit. If you're using a 1 or 2 wagon train it doesn't matter. If you're using 4+ wagon trains with a compact design then you need some basic circuits to stop the system being dumb when a train is loading because otherwise as the outer tanks are drained the pumps will start stealing from the inner tanks to fill them and not fill the train fully.  That's what a fluid balanced station is and why you'd want it. Directly pumping to/from tanks is also a lot faster than trying to pump into pipes and waiting for fluid spread. e: the same is true in reverse, for unloading if you don't balance it the outer tanks start pushing into the inner tanks and block the train from unloading fully, significantly slowing down the unloading speed. Darox fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 07:39
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Darox posted:If you're using a dozen pumps and tanks in an amalgam like that then there's no benefit. If you're using a 1 or 2 wagon train it doesn't matter. If you're using 4+ wagon trains with a compact design then you need some basic circuits to stop the system being dumb when a train is loading because otherwise as the outer tanks are drained the pumps will start stealing from the inner tanks to fill them and not fill the train fully. I assumed the setup I had was sensible if only because I thought loading and unloading with a pump directly from a tank would be the most effective, but I'm curious about testing the differences now. Can you share a blueprint for this arrangement? I can copy it visually but I'm not sure how the combinators are set up.
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Jan 5, 2024 07:48
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I just prefer to keep the tanks disconnected from each other and load/unload them evenly using some basic circuit logic. I can grab a blueprint of this next time I'm in the game. Red wire connects all the tanks together, sends the total to the arithmetic combinator at the end which divides it by 4 to give the average (the second one adds a small buffer factor), which then gets put back on the red wire that sits on the power poles (the red wire between the tanks does *not* go on the poles, so there is no "crude oil" signal on that part of the circuit - this is important). Each pair of tanks has a separate green wire circuit wired to the pump (which is also connected to the red wire on the poles that contains the "A"verage signal) set to pump when crude oil < A. So the individual tank pairs only load up with oil when they have less than the average amount of all the tank pairs plus the buffer factor, which keeps all the pumps running when they're all fairly close in quantity and prevents the system from deadlocking if they all have the exact same amount of oil in them. The lights are wired to turn on with the same condition so you can see if the system is working. Unloading pretty much works the same way but with prioritization going to the tanks with greater than average oil and using a negative buffer factor. e: Maybe this makes the wiring more clear.  Red line contains the total amount of oil in all the tanks. Pink line contains the average(+buffer) value. Green line contains the "local" amount of oil for each tanker car. Right combinator is crude oil / 4 -> A Left combinator is A + (constant) -> A, I think I usually use 100. Xerol fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 09:17
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FFF today is about blueprint parameterization. This sounds like it would make combinators much nicer to work with/easier to blueprint and black-box https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-392
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Jan 5, 2024 13:44
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 This looks like it assumes that an item only has a single recipe. Which I think is true for the base game, but definitely not for any of the big mods where upgrading to more efficient recipes is part of the progression. vvv okay, that makes sense and should work Tamba fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 14:10
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the recipe picker lets you pick a recipe, not a product (so like for mods that have furnaces using the assembler prototype they'll have like 5 different iron plate recipes you can choose) and i assume it uses that
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Jan 5, 2024 14:13
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Its a Rolex posted:FFF today is about blueprint parameterization. This sounds like it would make combinators much nicer to work with/easier to blueprint and black-box I have wished for some of this for a while. The rest makes it even better. Space Age keeps looking amazing.
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Jan 5, 2024 14:20
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Tamba posted:
Not true for the base game either, 3 different recipes produce petroleum gas (basic oil, advanced oil, and light oil cracking).
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Jan 5, 2024 14:28
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I use that averaging circuit for my megabase smelter pick up stations. Train limits were a big plus because trains reroute with limit set instead of just stopping if the station was disabled enroute.
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Jan 5, 2024 14:37
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Xerol posted:Not true for the base game either, 3 different recipes produce petroleum gas (basic oil, advanced oil, and light oil cracking). Yeah, and thinking about it, another one is Urianium, which can be made normally or with Kovarex processing
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Jan 5, 2024 14:53
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Ok going to post some stuff about fluid stations to simplify your lives. The reason you want to have balanced draw is because otherwise the train cars will eventually end up filling and emptying one at a time rather than in parallel. This is just due to the way and tank or pipe network meshes together, fluids will end up being sucked from or pushed preferentially to the closer destination. The easy way to do this is with a single arithmetic combinator, in the same setup as you would use for cargo on belts, just swapped for fluid. You can do a slightly faster version of below by adding a third pump and tank on the other side per wagon, but it only makes it slightly faster.  How it works, Red wire connected to all 8 tanks, and there are 4 pumps drawing from the tanks that need to draw evenly, so the single arithmetic combinator is just a simple divide each by negative four (-4). Same idea applies for belts, but its just the negation of how many outputs you want balanced. Lets say you've got 1200 Oil, the combinator makes that into a -300. The second red wire (illustrated in blue for clarity above) sends that negative average to each of the pumps. The pumps are set to Everything < 5, but any non-zero integer works, depending on how tightly you want it to balance. That -300 in the example is clearly < 5, so they'd all want to be pumping. Now the green wires go between the pump and the pair of tanks they're pulling from. This gives the pump a separate, positive value that is added to the negative average. Pair of tanks have 400 in them? Well 400 - 300 is 100, which is not less than 5! Pump stops, that doesn't fill further. Pair of tanks only have 200? 200 -300 < 5! Fill-er-up! Then when a train pulls up, assuming you produce enough of it, the wagons all fill equally at the same time, which with 2 pumps per car really is down to seconds. To make it an unloader just reverse all the pumps and set it to Everything > 5 instead. This string is from a petroleum loading station, so you'll have to rename the stop. 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Jan 5, 2024 14:57
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M_Gargantua posted:Ok going to post some stuff about fluid stations to simplify your lives. Thank you very much for this. I’m gonna have to figure out how to make this work with Cybersyn since I’m using that to dispatch all my trains, but I think as long as I can isolate the signal for the quantities in the trains to a wire I’ll be in business.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:17
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Tamba posted:
In addition to what everyone else has said, the addition of recyclers means that there is always a "base" recipe for everything that it will recycle into. Because of this, Space Age will not have alternative recipes for anything beyond stage one intermediates that recycle into themselves. Mods can do whatever, but aside from alternative smelting recipes etc the expansion will not be introducing alternate recipes.
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Jan 5, 2024 17:19
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Tamba posted:
My bigger concern is some mods have recipes with a LOT of ingredients. What happens when I have 8 ingredients instead of 3?
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Jan 5, 2024 17:23
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Just read the part directly above that and look at the previous image. It's a blueprint he made for three ingredient recipes. There are enough symbols to support at least nine ingredients, and if whatever you're producing requires that many ingredients, I'm comfortable saying it's going to require a bespoke blueprint.
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Jan 5, 2024 17:40
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Can someone break down the latest FFF and explain it to me like I'm 5? It just isn't parsing in my head for some reason.
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Jan 5, 2024 20:53
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DarkSol posted:Can someone break down the latest FFF and explain it to me like I'm 5? It just isn't parsing in my head for some reason. If I hadn’t played another game recently that used similar terms I wouldn’t have understood either. The simplest way to use this seems to be, let’s say you had a filter inserter in a blueprint you made. However, you want the inserter to grab a different item every time you put the blueprint down. You can set, in the blueprint, to have the filter inserter grab only item X. Whenever you place that blueprint, the game will ask you “what do you want x to be?” in a way that’s a fair bit faster than just changing it yourself after placing it, especially if you have multiple filter inserters that you want to have the same filter. It can also do a lot more than that, but that will be the most common application I think.
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Jan 5, 2024 21:12
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DarkSol posted:Can someone break down the latest FFF and explain it to me like I'm 5? It just isn't parsing in my head for some reason. You can make a generic blueprint like "take in 3 ingredients and spit out one thing" and with the new stuff instead of having to make different versions of that blueprint for item A B and C separately, you can just make a generic 3 in 1 out, and when you place it it will give you a UI to specify what are the 3 in and what is the 1 out. That then plumbs through the rest of the blueprint. This is a simple example.
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Jan 5, 2024 21:13
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that is a loving based feature and I'll be using it all over the place, goddamn in fact between this and the other train improvements I think I will make a base where the core is just a massive refueling depot/train parking lot/high capacity interchange and all processing happens at remote stations on the periphery. the inside-out base Yaoi Gagarin fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 21:26
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DarkSol posted:Can someone break down the latest FFF and explain it to me like I'm 5? It just isn't parsing in my head for some reason. You can now have one loading and one unloading blueprint for every train station that handles a given configuration of engines and cars, regardless of cargo. Each time you place it, it will ask you what cargo you want it to load/unload, and automatically set the station name and filter inserters accordingly. So if you are building a new green circuit outpost, you just plonk a generic unload station down once, set it to copper, plonk it down again, set it to iron, plonk a generic load station down, set it to green circuits, and your stations are all built and configured automatically. It can do a lot more than that, but that is what most players are going to use it for. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 21:30
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K8.0 posted:Just read the part directly above that and look at the previous image. It's a blueprint he made for three ingredient recipes. There are enough symbols to support at least nine ingredients, and if whatever you're producing requires that many ingredients, I'm comfortable saying it's going to require a bespoke blueprint. Since its all LUA interpreted you can just mod in more than the 10.
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Jan 5, 2024 21:31
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Once more this game grows ever closer to what I do irl. Never thought I'd encounter variable parameterization outside of my report writing work.
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Jan 5, 2024 21:36
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K8.0 posted:You can now have one loading and one unloading blueprint for every train station that handles a given configuration of engines and cars, regardless of cargo. Each time you place it, it will ask you what cargo you want it to load/unload, and automatically set the station name and filter inserters accordingly. So if you are building a new green circuit outpost, you just plonk a generic unload station down once, set it to copper, plonk it down again, set it to iron, plonk a generic load station down, set it to green circuits, and your stations are all built and configured automatically.
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Jan 5, 2024 22:00
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Its a Rolex posted:FFF today is about blueprint parameterization. This sounds like it would make combinators much nicer to work with/easier to blueprint and black-box Oh wow that's brilliant
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Jan 5, 2024 22:07
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Finally I can mail merge my train stations.
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Jan 5, 2024 22:22
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darthbob88 posted:Dynamic values, too, so you can set the unloading station to handle copper plates with a stack size of 100, and the loading station to handle green chips with a stack size of 200, and the blueprint will properly handle setting the train capacity for the station logic.
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Jan 5, 2024 22:35
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