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what are the good QoL mods these days? edit: posted on the previous page Afraid of the Dark Auto Deconstruct Big Brother Bottleneck Construction Drones (abandoned after early game and I get normal robots) Even Distribution EvoGUI Explosive Excavation FNEI (which I really don't use and should disable as it's a vanilla game as far as recipes go) Inbuilt Lightning Long Reach Max Rate Calculator Merging Chests (using this for the first time instead of a warehouse mod. I like it) Miniloader (gotta have loaders!) Power Armor MK3 Side Inserters Squeak Through TinyStart (really should have disabled it for this game with Constuction Bots mod, never used it) Train Supply Manager Water Well (I haven't used - should have disabled due to Explosive Excavation mod) YARM - Resource Monitor Lawnie fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 22:13
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Honk and Disco Science. Anything else is just superfluous. The mods I use are bolded below, but I'm going to look at the rest of these. Because vanilla is so... vanilla. After K2 I discovered I really really like loaders, long reach, even distribution (where you can choose which side of the belt the inserter unloads on?) The Locator posted:
Canuckistan fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 22:20
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Lawnie posted:what are the good QoL mods these days? From post right before yours on the last page, most of these are QoL in my opinion, but I'll give a brief explanation: Afraid of the Dark - adjustable personal lighting that is by default a circle around you like a normal lamp would give off instead of just the cone. Auto Deconstruct - Marks miners that have depleted the resource under them for auto-deconstruction, either by your base bots if they are in range, or when you run past them with your personal bots. Big Brother - Radar gets it's own tech for both range and scan speed. The larger the range, faster the scan speed, the more power they consume. Bottleneck - Shows a colored light on assemblers telling me at a glance if they are running, stopped due to lack of supplies, or stopped due to output backed up. Construction Drones - little derpy ground construction robots that beep and chirp a lot, get stuck on terrain, and magically cost no power and work very good for the early pre-robot days. Probably one of the 'cheatier' mods, but since I don't play the game for speed records, I just like them so I can not have to manually plop down hundreds of furnaces/inserters by hand. Even Distribution - Won't play without this. Drag your cursor across multiple machines to evenly drop coal/ore/plates/whatever into them (or containers). EvoGUI - Just keeps a display of the bug evolution number at the top of the screen, not necessary at all. Explosive Excavation - an 'upgrade' to explosives, with explosives as a pre-requisite component and research to blow holes in the ground where you can then plop water pumps. FNEI (which I really don't use and should disable as it's a vanilla game as far as recipes go) - Recipe lookup tool. Inbuilt Lightning - Adds a small amount of light to power-poles, turrets, and I think assemblers? Has some settings that can be changed to affect how much light. Long Reach - Extends your 'reach' for manipulating things in the game so you can do stuff farther away from your little dude. Range can be changed. Max Rate Calculator - Click the tool, highlight an assembler or any number of assemblers - shows you all the material needed for inputs and what the output will be. Merging Chests - Merge multiple chests (be default 'steel' only) into a single large chest. Can be a line of chests or squares or whatever. There are limits. Miniloader (gotta have loaders!) - replaces inserters for putting material into, or removing material from assemblers or containers. Runs at full speed of belt-color. Power Armor MK3 - Adds bigger power armor and an alternate power generator for end-game. Side Inserters - Allows inserters to work at 90 degree angles, and allows selection of near/far belt dropping for inserters. Squeak Through - Allows the player to move through tiny cracks between buildings/pipes/etc. Just makes getting around easier and I never play without it. TinyStart - Gives you a starting suit of armor with a small equipment space with a couple of tiny reactors and a pair of basic roboports and some construction bots. Also has 2 upgrades to the starting tinyarmor. Train Supply Manager - an alternative to LTN or other train logistics control/manager mods. Helps manage your train network. I like it so far. Water Well - tech that allows you to build water pumps using oil-pumps so you can pump ground-water out of the ground anywhere. Uses same graphic as oil-well I believe. YARM - Resource Monitor - Lets you select a resource patch, name it, and display it in a list. Shows amount of resource remaining in numbers, percentage, and estimated time to depletion at current rate of depletion. Edit: Fixed some stuff and highlighted mod names. The Locator fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 22:30
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Even Distribution: modifies CTRL + Click Drag to evenly distribute the items over multiple buildings. It's pretty much the only one I'd run if I were trying for a nearly vanilla game. Disco Science is a fun purely aesthetic mod. edit: And Helmod too, but all that's just book keeping and doesn't change the way the game plays. Galvanik fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 22:36
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Yeah even as a totally new player I'm using Even Distribution. The default full/half stack restocking is just not good enough.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:41
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Canuckistan posted:even distribution (where you can choose which side of the belt the inserter unloads on?) Pretty sure that comes from Side Inserters mod.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:43
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One thing I just thought of before I posted it on the official forums, to see if Im alone in this. But it feels like everyone uses double walls for everything past the early stages, but the current double wall spritesheet looks pretty terrible imho. Really makes me want either a stock 2x2 “large wall” entity out of concrete or just a modified sprite When you start packing walls together tightly.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:50
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Mithaldu posted:What's Rampant?
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Aug 4, 2020 22:54
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Most of the QOL mods I use have been mentioned already, but I don't think I've seen anyone mention these: Picker pipe tools: This has become maybe my favorite QOL mod. It let's you track your pipelines at a glance by color coding it when you hover over it. Red means it's not connected to anything, yellow means there's an unconnected pipe somewhere and green means it's all good.  Automatic Station Painter: Automatically paints your station based on the color of the items being picked up or dropped off. Automatic Train Painter: Automatically paints your trains based on the color of the cargo. Beastfinder: Let's you search for items and buildings and will put markers on the map for: production, consumption, chests containing the item and even building placement. Very useful if you're like me and can never remember where you built anything. Todo list: A simple todo lists, let's you make tasks, subtasks, order them, and even assign them to people for multiplayer. Very useful for breakings things down into simple tasks and keeping yourself from getting distracted by random things you want to fix. Honk Yes it's been mentioned before, but get Honk. Honk all the time. I have over 400 trains running around and it's glorious.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:07
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FNEI is honestly kinda ... bad. What's It Really Used For works much better. XkyRauh posted:It's a mod that makes the Biters much more plentiful and dangerous, and messes with their AI so that it is more difficult to wall them off effectively. It also comes with a companion mod to give you a variety of weapons to deal with the threat, but if you forget that part you can get overwhelmed! Neat, once my factory has recovered out of half-hibernation induced by adding the pyaliens mod i will have to try that.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:35
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Can someone confirm if I've got this right: 1. I should output products and base components into passive provider chests which will then supply them to logistics/construction robots when there's a demand for them within the network, and should also retain storage chests for when I'm deconstructing stuff so there's somewhere for the stuff to go. 2. The bonus about having the storage chest is that if my network requests something that's in both a storage chest and a passive requester chest, it will prioritise items out of the storage chest first, so rather than constructing an extra 50 miners when I plonk down a new mining site using a blueprint, it will take the miners from the storage chest that were deconstructed from one of my old mines, with any shortfall being picked up by production.
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Aug 5, 2020 00:24
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That's about it. The main use for active providers for me is when i have byproducts that i don't want to block my factory from producing the main product. Also the green chests are for when you have e.g. 10 requester chests for something and want to keep 10x the resources nearby, without having 10x the resources in each requester chest.
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Aug 5, 2020 00:32
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Mithaldu posted:That's about it. The main use for active providers for me is when i have byproducts that i don't want to block my factory from producing the main product. I've mostly used active providers in the past for only 2 things. Nuclear reactor waste to send to recycling, and the output of my little stand-alone Kovarex process units to push the extra U-235 into the network and again, not clog up the works eventually by filling up the output chests. I could also see using them for something that I want to get produced continuously forever without the possibility of backup, maybe solar if my output was very low and I intend to eventually go to a solar power setup?
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Aug 5, 2020 01:00
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Green chests are also useful for "upgradable" things like belts and assemblers - you can have an inserter placing products into the green chest with a suitable logistic network condition on it, have the green chest request a much larger amount of that same item, and have an inserter pulling out of the green chest to make the upgraded version. That way, you always have the basic version available for building with, but when you want to upgrade everything all that old stuff automatically gets brought back to where it was made to be turned into the upgraded version, rather than clogging up your storage chests until you manually do something about it.
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Aug 5, 2020 01:07
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Jabor posted:Green chests are also useful for "upgradable" things like belts and assemblers - you can have an inserter placing products into the green chest with a suitable logistic network condition on it, have the green chest request a much larger amount of that same item, and have an inserter pulling out of the green chest to make the upgraded version. To me this is the most useful application of buffer chests. I use them for all of my mall outputs so any stray items end up where they are built. If you depend solely on logistics bots to keep you full it's not a huge plus, but knowing exactly where an item will be for a drive by pick up is really nice as you replace old builds with newer ones.
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Aug 5, 2020 01:12
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Yup. Requesters to feed inputs, passive or active providers at outputs depending on if you want them to back up like a normal chest or stay empty, respectively. Buffer chests to keep a supply of items in specific areas like a mall, to buffer supply for requester chests, or to buffer output from provider chests. Storage chests everywhere to make things work. Where items from your trash slots, deconstruction, and active providers will wind up if there are no requesters or buffers for them. It's a system that seems more complex than it actually is, and more or less "just works". The only issue you can run into is storage chests filling up with garbage items that you have no use for anymore, but you can solve that by putting requesters asking for garbage items with inserters to move them into steel chests, and then manually shooting the steel chests to destroy the items any time they're filling up. Or get a mod that adds a way to destroy items. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 01:15
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necrotic posted:To me this is the most useful application of buffer chests. I use them for all of my mall outputs so any stray items end up where they are built. If you depend solely on logistics bots to keep you full it's not a huge plus, but knowing exactly where an item will be for a drive by pick up is really nice as you replace old builds with newer ones. I use yellow chests with a logistics filter set to the output of the assembler for this. Works perfectly. How does a buffer chest do this any differently?
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Aug 5, 2020 01:16
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Buffer chests are a higher priority than storage chests for depositing items. Say you pick up a bunch of an item that you produce really slowly, use some of them, and then trash the rest. If you're using storage chests at your mall, they'll wind up in random storage chests close to where you trashed them. Filtering a storage chest doesn't demand that specific item, it just bans everything else. Buffers function as a lower priority requester chest, so if you have buffers at your mall, the items will make their way back to the buffers. e - also using buffers means that you don't have to have any assemblers near your mall. It can be literally nothing but buffer chests and roboports, since the buffer chests will suck in items from provider chests wherever they're being produced, in the quantity you specify. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 01:19
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Thanks, learned some good stuff today!
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Aug 5, 2020 01:32
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Another way to look at buffers is in terms of things you have limited production of. A buffer is lower priority than a requester, so you can use buffers to supply lower priority things. Requesters for high priority low volume consumption of an item, buffers for low priority high volume consumption of that same item. You can even use storage chests with filters for even lower priority consumption of that item - but since storage chests don't request items, these will only get filled from active provider chests, trashing, or deconstruction. Like basically everything else in Factorio, it's a very elegant, simple yet powerful system that can be used in tons of ways.
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Aug 5, 2020 01:46
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Another thing buffer chests can do is pull from storage chests, so you're not limited to one chest of buffer. Not that you want to be buffering multiple chests of yellow belts, but if you pull up or upgrade a large section of bus you can easily end up with more than would fit in the storage-chest-used-as-buffer, and bots won't bring stuff from one storage chest to another, so you could end up with a situation where you're producing new yellow belts to make reds with, while you have thousands sitting in faraway general storage chests. Active providers are good for making compact train-based manufacturing outposts with high throughput. Requires a small amount of wiring, but you can set up some nice systems that use trains as buffers. As a quick example let's say you want to outpost a product that takes 3 ingredients:  Trains come in (ideally from a stacker) at 1. Each of the stations at 2 is for a single ingredient (plus one for bypass/fuel train). The station conditions at 2 are set to send the train if the amount of that ingredient in storage is less than a certain amount, otherwise the trains wait indefinitely. The next stop for every train is 3, which unloads into active providers. These take a short hop to storage, and then another short hop to your assemblers (4). The outputs presumably get loaded onto some train to the left. This has some massive advantages over unloading products at (2): -Bots have only a few tiles to travel on any given trip. -Trains always unload completely, unlike when unloading into passive providers. -With a stacker before (1) and enough trains in the system (and sufficient inputs where the trains load), there's always enough product in the system. -It becomes pretty obvious just from looking at the train display on the map when an input is short. This all does depend on wiring the stations correctly, which can be done pretty simply with a single constant combinator, and setting the right train conditions. As an example, let's just say we're making red science. We want 2000 gears and 2000 copper plate buffered in the storage chests. -Wire a constant combinator to a roboport. Set the combinator to -2000 (that's negative) gears and -2000 copper plate and the roboport to output network contents. -Take this same wire to all your stations at (2). One station will be for the copper plate train, and the other for the gear train. Set the stations to send signal to train. -Your trains will have three stops: A) loading product, B) waiting at (2), and C) unloading at (3). And the conditions are extremely simple: --At A, depart when full. --At B, depart when signal (product) is < 0. --At C, depart when empty. You could also set the conditions at B to just be "depart when copper plate < 2000" but then you have to reprogram every train if you want to change the value to buffer. By using the combinator to control the buffer size, you actually have a system that can be blueprinted and used for any product, since the only things that change are the constant combinator values and the train schedules. Just make sure you have enough storage to hold the amounts you want to buffer, and enough bots to unload the trains. Arguably the biggest advantage of this system is you don't need many bots at all, since they are all making short hops, and therefore you need fewer roboports. Space may be free, but charging time isn't.
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Aug 5, 2020 02:18
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Surprise T Rex posted:Picked this up last week or so, spent a few days slowly going through the .18 campaign thing, then jumped into a freeplay default game. I think I find the freeplay easier than the tutorials because I'm not constrained by someone else's layouts. This game scratches exactly the itch I want base builder games to scratch. Building things to run cleanly and efficiently is my jam, so I really hate my current base. :v Looks good! I would suggest one more thing to focus on - parallel train tracks that travel in opposite directions so that all your train tracks have one direction of travel. You want to be able to make an unloading area that can handle multiple trains because eventually you'll build out a giant network of inputs and outputs all over the place. Having the ability to have multiple trains unload in the same area is incredibly helpful.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:15
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I've recently unlocked nuclear weapons, and not a moment too soon because i have biters nonstop crawling through holes or gaps in my walls and into my base. while i'm trying to nuke their bases closest to my production centers (since that's way faster than the tank) i just realized that they've killed all 800+ of my construction bots. is there a better way to get the biters to back off, i'm under attack from virtually all angles now. i still have lots of logistics bots at least (they're the ones dropping off my atom bomb parts). i'd like to get things to stabilize but i'm worried i'm on the verge of collapse since they are really starting to inflict damage faster than i can repair it
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Aug 6, 2020 07:43
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Shut down production so that your pollution cloud stops angering them, run laps of your base on the tank to intercept any existing waves, clean out all the bases close by before ramping up again. Also, don't nuke every base at once. Nuke one base, then fight off the attack wave from every biter near that base charging you at once.
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Aug 6, 2020 07:49
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FNEI kinda sucks and thank you for reminding me I should uninstall it. Max Rate Calculator is good but I wish there was a way to shift click + add buildings, cause right now I just mass select my mining drills, look at their outpost, then run to smelters, calculate it, then run to assemblers.
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Aug 6, 2020 11:16
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Jabor posted:Shut down production No. Don't. You never recover evolution factor, and the time it takes for pollution to disperse makes this unrealistic. Unless you're talking "shut down all non-military related production" It really is about murdering the biter bases causing the attacks. =(
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Aug 6, 2020 12:25
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Can you not make a bunch of Big Bertha artillery thingies to just wipe out their nests from afar? Best way to handle biters like that is to just go all-out offensive. If you play the defensive game, you'll slowly lose bit by bit as they can endlessly throw units at you and chip away at your walls. Open the map, see how far your pollution spreads, and wipe out any nests piece by piece that are in the cloud. You'll slowly start giving yourself breathing room. Then the artillery turrets will keep nests from expanding back into territory you took back. Shutting down production just means you're gonna end up having two big problems: biters keep on attacking you and your base is no longer producing stuff you need, which equals you getting wiped out.
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Aug 6, 2020 12:34
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Without nests or trees to soak it up, normal ground tile pollution absorption is very low, allowing it to spread VERY far.
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Aug 6, 2020 12:41
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Half-wit posted:No. Don't. Evolution factor doesn't cause biters to attack you. Pollution eaten by biter bases does. If you're at the point of being overrun, less pollution being eaten means fewer biters attacking you, giving you breathing room to clear out the bases that are too close. Which is exactly what the OP was asking about.
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Aug 6, 2020 12:46
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I've recently unlocked nuclear weapons, and not a moment too soon because i have biters nonstop crawling through holes or gaps in my walls and into my base. while i'm trying to nuke their bases closest to my production centers (since that's way faster than the tank) i just realized that they've killed all 800+ of my construction bots. is there a better way to get the biters to back off, i'm under attack from virtually all angles now. i still have lots of logistics bots at least (they're the ones dropping off my atom bomb parts). i'd like to get things to stabilize but i'm worried i'm on the verge of collapse since they are really starting to inflict damage faster than i can repair it I wouldn't shut down production, but do what you can to reduce pollution. Stop science, don't worry about upgrades. Prioritize solar or other systems which may take away from your pollution cloud. Check your stats to see what's consuming most of your electricity and throw efficiency modules into them. Keep the lights on, and for the love of god keep ammo running. Spend plenty of time in your tank putting out fires and getting rid of nests. If biter expansion is a big problem, leave behind semi-autonomous outposts that can hold their own for a bit while you consolidate your defences.
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Aug 6, 2020 14:27
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I've recently unlocked nuclear weapons, and not a moment too soon because i have biters nonstop crawling through holes or gaps in my walls and into my base. while i'm trying to nuke their bases closest to my production centers (since that's way faster than the tank) i just realized that they've killed all 800+ of my construction bots. is there a better way to get the biters to back off, i'm under attack from virtually all angles now. i still have lots of logistics bots at least (they're the ones dropping off my atom bomb parts). i'd like to get things to stabilize but i'm worried i'm on the verge of collapse since they are really starting to inflict damage faster than i can repair it Bad news - you're on the verge of collapse. Short of eliminating all "non-critical production" (which you might not be able to do, depending on how your base is set up), to reduce the size of your pollution cloud, the only way to get out of the hole is to eliminate all the biter bases in your pollution cloud. Bolster your defenses as much as possible so that you can take trips out without losing chunks of your base, saddle up, and get to clearing bases. Nukes can help with manually clearing bases quickly, so if you already have a big stockpile you can drive around and nuke down a bunch of bases. If you can bolster your defenses long enough to go out and kill the biter bases that are being touched by pollution, you can dig your way out of the hole. If you can reduce your pollution generation by turning off science, you can buy yourself some time by reducing the severity of incoming attacks. Ultimately until you push all the biter bases outside your pollution cloud this problem will only get worse.
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Aug 6, 2020 21:21
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It's honestly a fun situation to work your way out of. On my first run through I decided biters went tough enough so find a way to up their difficulty. I got turbo hosed-- critical coal shortage, constant attacks, and brownouts whenever my laser turrets opened fire. Overcoming that was really hard but quite rewarding.
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Aug 6, 2020 21:28
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Biter nests outside your cloud do almost nothing. Biter nests inside your cloud poo poo out endless hordes. It's one of the areas in the game that could use improvement, but right now you REALLY cannot afford to have any biter nests in your cloud.
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Aug 6, 2020 21:42
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K8.0 posted:Biter nests outside your cloud do almost nothing. Biter nests inside your cloud poo poo out endless hordes. It's one of the areas in the game that could use improvement, but right now you REALLY cannot afford to have any biter nests in your cloud. Yeah this could be made less stark. Does the Rampant mod alter this?
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Aug 6, 2020 23:02
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K8.0 posted:Biter nests outside your cloud do almost nothing. Biter nests inside your cloud poo poo out endless hordes. It's one of the areas in the game that could use improvement, but right now you REALLY cannot afford to have any biter nests in your cloud. It does make sense, though. The biters are just bugs - they have no interhive communication
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Aug 6, 2020 23:10
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Thanks for the advice. I stopped panicking, used the handful of big bombs I had to stop the biter bases in one quadrant at a time. I had to sacrifice a lot of my base temporarily but I eventually cleared the cloud, thanks to the power of a huge inefficient stockpile of poo poo laying around! ultimately there was about twenty five biter bases and they set up another ten in the time it took me to nuke and clear the first set. guess i'll need to start setting up some trains and poo poo so i can expand to the edge of my cloud to make sure they don't infest it again. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Aug 7, 2020 |
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Aug 7, 2020 05:37
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Too late to help out now but I usually turn biter expansion off. I find biters fun in the early to midgame, but lategame they just become an absolute chore to keep tidy. It ends up taking away from the fun of the game when I have to keep going out on excursions to wipe them out.
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Aug 7, 2020 12:47
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the task of the game is to automate it instead of going to clean them up, set up artillery gun outposts supplied by trains
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Aug 7, 2020 13:02
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Qubee posted:Too late to help out now but I usually turn biter expansion off. I find biters fun in the early to midgame, but lategame they just become an absolute chore to keep tidy. It ends up taking away from the fun of the game when I have to keep going out on excursions to wipe them out. I've done that this game, but turned biter nest size up, along with the evolution factors. It's giving me a good balance in the early game so far.
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Aug 7, 2020 13:06
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 02:43 |
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Qubee posted:Too late to help out now but I usually turn biter expansion off. I find biters fun in the early to midgame, but lategame they just become an absolute chore to keep tidy. It ends up taking away from the fun of the game when I have to keep going out on excursions to wipe them out. Mithaldu posted:the task of the game is to automate it This really is the long-term solution - once you have access to artillery, you can very efficiently set up and leapfrog zones of artillery coverage out to the edge of your pollution cloud, and then encircle your pollution cloud with artillery bases (which will have the secondary benefit of passively clearing out a wider swath of biter bases and keeping bases from spawning within their zone of coverage. Prior to artillery, you can more or less accomplish the same thing by building a giant defended wall around your base and expanding it until it completely encompasses your pollution cloud, preventing biters from being able to expand into polluted areas, but it's much more labor intensive (although setting up dedicated combat robot manufacturing can make the process easier if you feel like manually clearing biter bases instead of relying on laser turret creep. If you're feeling particularly spicy, you can set up train gun outposts, where you have a train of artillery wagons patrol between various outposts around the edge of your base, eliminating the need to actually directly connect your outposts to your base (your military train can double as a supply/repair train to resupply outposts automatically with turrets/ammo/bots/etc.
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Aug 7, 2020 13:21
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