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Harvey Baldman posted:The new belt changes means there has to be improvements to train capacity coming too, right? Because otherwise it feels like this is going it outstrip train usage. 
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Jan 13, 2024 05:49
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Ah, clearly that’s why we got elevated rails, so we can stack them.
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Jan 13, 2024 06:14
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Out of the way Supersonic Locomotives, new drip just dropped
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Jan 13, 2024 06:20
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You'll just have to use more realistic 1-200-1 trains
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Jan 13, 2024 12:24
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The increased throughput of avoiding intersections with raised rails is probably equivalent of the difference between blue and green belts, but to get the equivalence of stacking maybe the trains themselves would hold stacks of stacks instead of individual items, if you loaded them with a stacking inserter. Packing more materials into stacks also makes sense for saving space on the space platform, and you might just have one belt of stacked iron plates (or 50/50 iron/copper) running around instead of a 2-4 lane bus.
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Jan 13, 2024 12:39
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I could see them introducing more specialized types of train wagons, like hopper wagons that can only hold raw materials, but maybe allow larger stack sizes within them and have corresponding loaders/unloaders that are really fast. Or maybe even crazy stuff like mobile furnace/foundry wagons that can process ore into stuff while you're shipping it to the destination. Especially fun if there's a matching planet where staying in one spot for too long is hazardous, so you need to keep your base mobile
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Jan 13, 2024 14:24
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Won't need circuits anymore for clocking steel output with bulk inserters.
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Jan 13, 2024 17:42
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Slashrat posted:I could see them introducing more specialized types of train wagons, like hopper wagons that can only hold raw materials, but maybe allow larger stack sizes within them and have corresponding loaders/unloaders that are really fast.
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Jan 13, 2024 20:27
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Renai Transport rotary dump ought to be a jump which makes the train do a barrel roll across the apex.
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Jan 13, 2024 20:51
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LonsomeSon posted:Renai Transport rotary dump ought to be a jump which makes the train do a barrel roll across the apex. I was thinking the exact same. The 007 slide whistle is optional.
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Jan 13, 2024 21:01
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darthbob88 posted:Give me a rotary car dumper. If not in vanilla, then in the Renai transportation mod. quote:In the mining industry, the long established standard for dumping mine cars was to run them into horns at the ends of the rails at the tipple. The inertia of the car would cause it and sometimes a short segment of hinged rail to tip forward, dumping the load out the end of the car. Turns out Renai Transportation wasn't all that unrealistic
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Jan 13, 2024 21:12
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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 had no idea a goon made this! I was browsing the mod list recently for a fresh run and this one immediately jumped out at me. I'm having a great time so far, although i'm extremely dogshit at factorio so i'm still slowly churning through green science trying to get my first proper cube logistic loop set up. Ultracube's constraints have been a good excuse to finally try to figure out circuit wiring, which i ignored entirely in my first vanilla run of the game.  I keep telling myself this was okay for a first try and my next loop will be perfectly modular and scalable with no problems whatsoever, but i strongly suspect it's going to end up looking a lot like this one except bigger
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Jan 14, 2024 09:53
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Are there any mods that let you play as some kind of tileman or chunklock mode? I remember there being a maze scenario that had barriers that would unlock at certain tech levels but can't find it.
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Jan 14, 2024 13:54
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Xerol posted:Are there any mods that let you play as some kind of tileman or chunklock mode? I remember there being a maze scenario that had barriers that would unlock at certain tech levels but can't find it. could you explain what these things mean?
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Jan 14, 2024 14:26
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They're mods/challenges in runescape and minecraft respectively. Basically you start with an extremely limited area in which you can do stuff and then unlock more tiles/blocks/chunks by reaching milestones (XP or items). It seems like a concept that would work decently well in a game like factorio where space is usually unlimited and (much like seablock) creating the artificial restriction on space changes how you have to play.
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Jan 14, 2024 14:33
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You can't buy to expand, but I seem to recall that one of the builtin scenarios is one with limited space
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Jan 14, 2024 14:38
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DangOreous is another example with a more vanilla experience than Seablock.
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Jan 14, 2024 14:39
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Dangoreus kind of has the opposite of what I'm after (and I've already played way too much of it). I'd like to have a limited amount of starting resources and have to use them to unlock my way to more.
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Jan 14, 2024 14:51
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Xerol posted:Dangoreus kind of has the opposite of what I'm after (and I've already played way too much of it). I'd like to have a limited amount of starting resources and have to use them to unlock my way to more. I don't know of any mods like that because they'd basically be efficiency gates where if you wasted too many resources, you'd have to completely restart - potentially dozens or hundreds of hours in. Seablock works because it technically has unlimited resources.
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Jan 14, 2024 15:21
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You could make a mod that combines it with something with unlimited resources (and with cube because why not) just have a cube recipe that returns a single plate and the cube for free and you can never truly softlock.
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Jan 14, 2024 15:42
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I just started diving into the mod documentation since I just want to see if I can make this work. The way I'm going to do it to hopefully avoid softlocks is that you earn points based on production, not counting raw resources, so basic iron/copper plates are worth 1, and everything else is based on the relative material cost and crafting time in some way I haven't decided on yet. Then you just spend points to unlock chunks. You wouldn't have to sacrifice anything, just produce things as normal, but with initially constrained space. Unlock costs will scale with the distance from spawn and the scaling can be changed in the settings (I'm starting with 4 settings for the coefficients of a cubic polynomial, defaulting to a linear scaling, but allowing it to be changed for more or less challenge). I think after I get the basics working I'm going to think about adding efficiency research that reduces the cost by a percentage, which might become necessary at higher coefficients but still give the player enough time to get a base established and expand outward before running out of resources. One challenge I'll have to figure out when I get to that point is how to deal with the starting area and ensuring the player has enough resources and water access to start. I might just spawn in some 1x1 patches with a billion iron/coal/copper/stone and a small lake (or make that a config option).
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Jan 14, 2024 15:42
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So when I was briefly working on Keeptorio before I realised that factorio PVP needed a lot more supporting mods to be fun, I was using script.on_event({defines.events.on_built_entity} to evaluate whether the entity or ghost being placed was in a legal position. What your talking about seems like something even simpler, just replacing the chunk generation logic with a blank and only triggering it when you buy. That does have the issue where you could be buying thousands of chunks to try to find oil or something though. I think that may wrap you back around to using the on_built_entity so that radars and chunk generation still work as normal but prevent any force from placing things outside the purchased chunks. Almost like RCT.
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Jan 14, 2024 15:59
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warptorio restricted space by using a separate dimension, you can look at factorissiomo code to see how that’s done. I believe there’s a separate dimension for each unlock stage and the door that you walk in dynamically gets updated to the stage you’re at. you could also create separate dimensions for each material and of course restrict how you get to them to gate them that way.
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Jan 14, 2024 16:27
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I was going to have chunks generate normally but prevent the player from moving into them until unlocked. That way you can see where you need to go, and getting radar coverage at the edge of your unlocked chunks becomes important. I might recommend pairing the mod with big brother or other radar-extending mods (I find big brother to be mostly okay but the tech progression is a bit streaky). Or figure out a way to add a directional radar which just seems like it would be neat. Still not exactly sure how the player will interface with the game to unlock chunks, the ideal thing in my opinion would be to crib off the pin/tag placement and add a similar button that acts as a toggle between normal and chunk-unlocking mode. So unlocking a ton of chunks is just clicking on the map a lot. When the toggle is on it should display the cost to unlock within each chunk. Stretch goal would be to unlock larger areas either with a landfill-style +/- input or maybe a drag selection. Would also like to have a way for a player to unlock a chunk that they're directly adjacent to (on the boundary) without entering the map, maybe through a hotkey or popup (popup seems like it would be annoying but also easiest to implement). Maybe if you walk against the boundary it gives you a chat message and if you press the hotkey within a certain time (and have the points) it unlocks the chunk you were trying to walk into. I'm looking at dangoreus code specifically because that did a lot of stuff with chunk generation and think I have figured out how to detect when a chunk is generated, and now just need to figure out how to add a bit of data to the chunk to indicate it is unlocked. Not sure what the best way to handle the blocking is but I think I can detect when a player moves and check if they're trying to move into a locked chunk and then just undo the movement? There's almost certainly a better way to do this. I remember there being a force field mod that may have blocked movement? Might look at that to see how they did that. Other thought I had was to just put literal walls on the boundary with a 1 year mining time and a billion HP, but then that overwrites trees and has problems with water and is more of a pain than I want to deal with. Xerol fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 17:08
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Bhodi posted:warptorio restricted space by using a separate dimension, you can look at factorissiomo code to see how that’s done. I believe there’s a separate dimension for each unlock stage and the door that you walk in dynamically gets updated to the stage you’re at. you could also create separate dimensions for each material and of course restrict how you get to them to gate them that way. Yeah that's done with what are called surfaces, each surface is effectively its own isolated universe.
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Jan 14, 2024 17:15
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Xerol posted:I was going to have chunks generate normally but prevent the player from moving into them until unlocked. That way you can see where you need to go, and getting radar coverage at the edge of your unlocked chunks becomes important. I might recommend pairing the mod with big brother or other radar-extending mods (I find big brother to be mostly okay but the tech progression is a bit streaky). Or figure out a way to add a directional radar which just seems like it would be neat. It would be simple to have a menu box, most mods have something similar, and you could have a toggle to allow unlocking chucks that the player enters automatically for like when you're trying to expand to a patch.
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Jan 14, 2024 17:16
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Yeah after I posted that I thought maybe you could just have a hotbar button for toggling walk-to-unlock mode. But that may not be compatible with the other idea I just had for locked chunks which is to just place a 16x16 hitbox entity in the middle and make it not mineable, which is apparently a thing you can do, and then remove it when the chunk is unlocked. Maybe an entity can detect when the player collides with it and then check if the toggle is on and if there's enough points and then delete itself? I've got dozens of tabs of documentation open and finding out new stuff every minute, just gonna take a breather and try to sort some stuff out first. e: of course the mod I'm looking at is from 0.12 so who knows if any of this stuff even works anymore. I should probably clean out my mods folder. e2: Extending the idea of making an entity to block chunks, this could also work if I wanted to have specific materials required to unlock chunks, rather than overall production. Give the machine some item slots, and when it's got enough to run the "recipe" it deletes itself. It would probably choose randomly from unlocked recipes, the quantities needed based on raw item cost and the chunk's unlock cost, and at certain distances add more ingredient slots so the recipes get more complicated. Xerol fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 17:21
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That idea really makes me want something like the islands in Forager, plots of land with new resources you have to unlock to proceed. I think that could work, might require a good bit of recipe balancing to keep things interesting with the limited resources you have
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Jan 14, 2024 17:28
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For updating the player's point balance, I thought I would be able to hook whatever event fires when an entity finishes crafting an item but there doesn't seem to be any such event, or if there is I'm not sure what it's called (tried searching all the obvious-to-me keywords). This would've been a dumb way to do it, because that would be an event that fires extremely frequently on a large enough factory, and the score doesn't need to update that often. Instead what I'm going to try to do is periodically read the production statistics for the player's force (within which are values for each data point on the production graphs), and credit points for things produced/consumed since the last check. This has a couple benefits: -Only need to check once per second (if that) -Doesn't need to run on every single assembling machine, chemical plant, lab, rocket silo, etc. -Since I'm checking by force rather than player entity, multiplayer works since all players are part of the same force normally. And it might even work in team vs. team scenarios, with each team having their own unlocked chunks (this might present a bigger problem later when I figure out how to store the unlocked status of chunks). In figuring this out I decided instead of giving points for every single item assembled, it might be better to give points based on raw materials consumed, since I have to choose what items to read off the production statistics anyway. Might be possible to game it if you just get points based on e.g. iron plates consumed, you'd just be able to amass points by making fuckloads of iron gears and storing them in a chest forever. (I guess this was always technically an option.) So instead you'll earn points for a couple of things: -Raw ores (and crude oil) consumed. Probably going to weight stone and coal significantly lower than iron and copper; science requires more iron and copper than stone and coal (even the plastic heavy packs) and this somewhat mitigates being able to game this factor by just making huge chests of landfill. -Science packs produced. Originally this was going to be packs consumed, but this might leave a player in a situation where they're out of things to research (because, for example, no significant oil unlocked and the single starter splotch I plan to spawn in is down to 2/s) and therefore being forced into making a huge buffer of gears that probably never gets used. So instead the player can continue to stockpile the science packs they can make, which is at least somewhat useful. Scoring for packs produced is going to be significantly higher than that of ores consumed. e: So I'm still not sure how to stop the player from entering locked chunks, and realized there's a lot of other things besides player movement to block - placing buildings, hand mining/chopping (if within the player's reach), deconstructing with bots, building with bots. I don't even want bots to be able to overfly locked chunks, tbh. Xerol fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 20:25
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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.
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Jan 14, 2024 20:28
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I have beaten your funny cube challenge strange cube man. It's overall good but man there's no real way to decrease that downtime between all the rare metals, tar and such huh? I loved the challenge with the qubits, though I wish the tool tip said that a valid combination could be 2 of the same quarks. Spent far too long trying to figure out why it was stopping working after a few operations.. I enjoyed it. Good 80 hours.
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Jan 15, 2024 01:20
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I would argue the whole challenge of the cube mod IS to reduce the cube downtime.
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Jan 15, 2024 01:28
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SettingSun posted:I would argue the whole challenge of the cube mod IS to reduce the cube downtime. I agree! But I found it really hard to reduce downtime while building enough buffer to keep production moving smoothly during its travel to the next module... like for example, I have the cube on a circular bus. I have 4 smelters for rare earth metals, each separated by a charger. To get it back on the bus I need to transport 60 or so blocks back if I build it perpendicular to the bus. If I loop the furnaces such that the start is the end, I need to make the bus longer to fit the vertical slice of furnaces. I could just have one furnace and simply feed it back in itself, but now I have to empty it before it returns or gets stuck waiting...which you can only empty fast enough with endgame unloaders...but at that point you're at the end game and it's just easier to wait than tear down and rebuild. Now multiply this problem 8 times while balancing the problem of keeping power going (before nuclear) and it feels a bit of a slog. I felt it mostly on tar production. Maybe I'm just dumb and bad at factorio, but it feels like as you go further in the tech tree the optimal solution to reduce downtime is tearing it down and rebuilding for each new recipe or just find that golden ratio of production that keeps shifting for each tier.
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Jan 15, 2024 03:31
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nullEntityRNG posted:To get it back on the bus I need to transport 60 or so blocks back if I build it perpendicular to the bus. If I loop the furnaces such that the start is the end, I need to make the bus longer to fit the vertical slice of furnaces. I could just have one furnace and simply feed it back in itself, but now I have to empty it before it returns or gets stuck waiting...which you can only empty fast enough with endgame unloaders...but at that point you're at the end game and it's just easier to wait than tear down and rebuild. Have you tried going with one furnace and returning the cube to the main loop rather than refeed it? That way it's servicing other needs while your single furnace is unloading and the cube is never waiting. The challenge is ensuring the main loop returns to your single furnace before a shortage develops, but that's an interesting problem. I don't think this is a silver bullet and may not be the best strategy, but it does seem like there are ways to go that are both effective and create some good emergent mini puzzles.
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Jan 15, 2024 15:26
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how do i transfer massive amounts of fluids at high rates? i've been enjoying CUBE but one thing that's been bugging me is like :::: the boiler can consume 13k/s water, but I can only fit 1.3k or so in a pipe. if anyone could link me to a guide on how to squeeze more throughput into the massive machines, or explain tricks on how to get my fluids all juiced up, that'd be much appreciated thanks!
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Jan 15, 2024 15:34
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You can bypass the pipe throughput by directly connecting to a storage tank. Also I supplied my entire cube factory's steam requirements including power with a single boiler and a single pump. Fluid throughput never really came up actually.
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Jan 15, 2024 15:45
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crime weed posted:how do i transfer massive amounts of fluids at high rates? I think 1.3k is the water consumption of the boiler with the Ultradense Utility Cube. It sounds like your boiler is working at full capacity - when it's active, check that the status is "Working" and not "Fluid Shortage".
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Jan 15, 2024 15:55
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I'm also playing ultracube, it's fun! My initial plan was to have every cube-required building attached to a single north-south conveyor, which sort of worked until I started unlocking "better" recipes (that end up being mandatory, due to cube-time-constraints). You can see where I replaced the initial basic matter and widget factories. Behold: Spaghetti  I've just made blue science and and unlocked trains, so I'm guessing I'm solidly midgame and my factory is due for a redesign - My nearby patches are running out so I'll need to move to import the materials from train stations. I intend to change from belts to the (far more cursed) direct insertion to/from cargo wagons, simply for travel distance speed. It'll be a bit of a combinator challenge to shift the cube up/down the wagon train but I expect I'll be getting a lot of benefit. I may also use wagons for storage. For now, I'll be getting/upgrading to blue belts and go from there. My notes on the run so far:
Bhodi fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 15:57
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There's no early way to get rid of calcium outside of the mass card recipe, other than to make concrete with it, which is what I did. I also buffered both calcium and intelligent calcium with boxes. Before long I couldn't produce calcium fast enough, ha. Vehicle fuel has a second recipe that makes it better, but imo vehicles should just not be able to use condensed fuel at all so they get some more use early (things already arbitrarily can't be fueled by certain things so I don't think this is much of a hurdle). I finished the whole mod with minimal combinator shenanigans but there is a lot of optimization you can do with them in places like
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Jan 15, 2024 16:16
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nullEntityRNG posted:I agree! But I found it really hard to reduce downtime while building enough buffer to keep production moving smoothly during its travel to the next module... like for example, I have the cube on a circular bus. I have 4 smelters for rare earth metals, each separated by a charger. As well as ideas others posted, you could try chucking it on a little dedicated 2-way train line to get it the 60 blocks back. Especially if you have the blue card cube train tech. Or make a loop big enough that the travel time becomes negligible. Bhodi posted:My notes on the run so far: Thanks for the detailed feedback! It might be good to have another early calcium sink but I'm not sure what. I tried to balance things with science production in mind so if you're only making science the amount of calcium you need changes through the game (the idea is to encourage automating switching between refined and non-refined metal smelting depending on your calcium status). The main advantage of vehicle fuel is you don't need the cube to produce it and it means trains won't be drawing from the same source as your cube power station. Maybe that's not useful enough to be worth bothering with but I thought not having it could be annoying if you were going for a big train base. crime weed posted:just wanted 2 say that this mod is insanely cool, lots of fun to explore and not overwhelming in the way a lot of overhauls are!! 
seiken fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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