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Belt busses are more than sufficient for vanilla and even most modpacks if you're willing to embrace some belt chaos. If you dig into more complex modpacks I would really suggest crash coursing how trains and circuits wires work though as building your own modular rail bases both looks awesome and are so much easier to expand with.
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Oct 3, 2023 21:24
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| # ? May 25, 2024 01:03 |
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CapnAndy posted:Thank you all for the help. Military science is important but it’s only used for military stuff, unlike the other colors. If you’ve got red and green science up, you can research the techs needed to unlock blue (which you’ll need plastic for). I’d suggest having a general plan to ship coal and ores in to stations next to a permanent smelting area, so you don’t have to relocate your furnaces every time a patch runs out, and also so you don’t need to try and work out how to make sure a single coal patch supplies multiple other outposts. e: leave yourself at least one direction to expand the smelter area, eventually you will unlock furnaces which are 3x3 instead of 2x2 and want to put down some parallel capacity which is shaped differently enough that it won’t fit in the old area (and which you really want up and running before you disconnect the old furnace columns) Now, when you say “to feed the burners,” are you looking at building remote outposts with burner miners? If you’ve got all or part of one laid out can we see it? RE: robots, check out what you can do with blue science LonsomeSon fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Oct 3, 2023 |
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Oct 3, 2023 21:42
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CapnAndy posted:Thank you all for the help. There's two types of robots - construction robots retrieve materials from special chests hooked into the robot network and build/repair things remotely. Logistics robots are the ones you describe, which retrieve materials from the same types of special chests and bring them to you (initially) and you eventually unlock more types of logistics chests which do the rest. Part of the joy of Factorio is there's no Right Way to do things. All people can do is offer suggestions and ultimately it either makes sense based on how you think about and organize things or it doesn't. In very general terms whether you a: build smelters next to your miners and ship coal in to run the smelters, or b: build smelters next to your coal and ship ore in to be smelted, only matters based on which you prefer. You can design good (and bad) setups for both! Once you have robots, a lot of your design/complexity problems go away because robots ignore most of the challenge of how to get things from point A to point B. Getting fast and efficient use out of your robots is still a design challenge, though, even though they can simplify logistics tremendously, so don't stress about trying to immediately rework everything to rely exclusively on robots once you get them or drop everything and rush towards getting robots produced.
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Oct 3, 2023 22:14
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LonsomeSon posted:I’d suggest having a general plan to ship coal and ores in to stations next to a permanent smelting area, so you don’t have to relocate your furnaces every time a patch runs out, and also so you don’t need to try and work out how to make sure a single coal patch supplies multiple other outposts. e: leave yourself at least one direction to expand the smelter area, eventually you will unlock furnaces which are 3x3 instead of 2x2 and want to put down some parallel capacity which is shaped differently enough that it won’t fit in the old area (and which you really want up and running before you disconnect the old furnace columns) To feed the burners I meant the furnaces. They burn fuel; everything else besides the water boilers runs on electricity so far. So I can't just ship in the ore, I'll need to bring in coal too, which is why I thought it might be better to just build them next to the coal. And I don't have anything built yet to show you, no.
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Oct 3, 2023 22:24
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Building your first set of furnace stacks next to coal makes sense, yeah. But I wouldn't bother moving it when that first coal patch runs out.
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Oct 3, 2023 22:50
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Jabor posted:Building your first set of furnace stacks next to coal makes sense, yeah. But I wouldn't bother moving it when that first coal patch runs out. Yeah! By the time the coal runs out you oughta be at the point where it's pretty easy to add another train unloading station, for the coal to feed everything.
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Oct 3, 2023 23:03
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CapnAndy posted:Okay, yeah, that makes tremendous sense. The hobo solution to early furnaces is to have a chest hooked to each one and just siphon off a ton of coal to fill them manually. A full chest of coal per furnace will last you at least most of the way to electrics and save you a bunch of faffing with routing. Another early solution would be a mixed belt with both coal and the ore you want smelted but that means half the furnaces per split, obviously. Bunch of solutions available.
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Oct 3, 2023 23:04
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Rynoto posted:Another early solution would be a mixed belt with both coal and the ore you want smelted.
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Oct 3, 2023 23:05
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You can't feed fuel from furnace to furnace the way you can with science packs.
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Oct 3, 2023 23:28
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FISHMANPET posted:You can't feed fuel from furnace to furnace the way you can with science packs. 
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Oct 3, 2023 23:42
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Keep in mind there are electric furnaces too, which don't require coal. They are bigger than steel furnaces and not directly faster, but they produce much less direct pollution and they have module slots. For starters if power and pollution is an issue you can throw a few efficiency 1 modules in them. You're at the point in the game where there's a big benefit to scaling up a bunch, but getting bots after your first bit of scaling up will make doing more scaling much easier. You start unlocking a bunch of really expensive stuff, so both bringing in more resources and designing ways to more efficiently get them where they need to go becomes important. It's up to you how much you mix just doing stuff and planning ahead, I recommend not going too far either way. Bots will help you un-gently caress whatever mistakes you make, even if they take a bit of time to truly snowball.
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Oct 4, 2023 00:49
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I refuse to use electric furnaces. Must burn everything to fuel the factory
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Oct 4, 2023 00:52
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I spent tonight building an oil pumping and refinery station, which then stores the petroleum gas for transit to a sulphur station that's by the nearest body of water, and I can make sulfur now. To make batteries I'm gonna need iron plates, which means I'll need to make a train line in my main base, which I might as well also set up to bring ammo to the subisdiary bases, and... hooray! I have goals now. Is there a way to set up train automation with a bit more finesse than "full" or "empty"? I want to tell my oil->sulfur line "pull into oil station, take whatever petroleum gas is stored up in the storage tank, I don't care how much that is, then come back to sulfur station", but it doesn't seem like I can set conditions based on external storage.
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Oct 4, 2023 07:38
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You can tell the train to wait for a circuit condition, and then wire the train station up to the outpost storage to provide the condition. This is what the red and green wires are for. For example, you could set it to leave on "train full OR oil < 100" - so if there's plenty of oil at the outpost, it will fill up, but if it's running on fumes then it will take whatever amount got collected since last time and head off instead of waiting while more trickles in. You can then start working on even more complicated circuit conditions to address some of the deficiencies of this design!
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Oct 4, 2023 07:48
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You don't even need circuit conditions for that. In the train schedule you can say full OR 120s elapsed or so at the oil stop. An inactivity condition won't work there because you'll always be trickling in small quantities of fluid, but pumping from a full tank to a rail car takes only a few seconds to fill the rail car.
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Oct 4, 2023 08:19
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The third option is to just remove the need for such conditions by improving production to the point that trains won't have to wait for stations to fill up. This works for basically everything, just make more stuff.
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Oct 4, 2023 09:14
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CapnAndy posted:I spent tonight building an oil pumping and refinery station, which then stores the petroleum gas for transit to a sulphur station that's by the nearest body of water, and I can make sulfur now. To make batteries I'm gonna need iron plates, which means I'll need to make a train line in my main base, which I might as well also set up to bring ammo to the subisdiary bases, and... hooray! I have goals now. I rarely do more complex stuff. Fill up, unload. The most I do is enable/disable stations when they're full or empty. For reference if you have 3 stations with the same name (i.e. "Iron Mine") a train will go to the nearest available one that has space. If you turn your mines off until they have a full load you can reduce downtime. Alternatively this can be used to only deliver to a station that has room for a full train load.
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Oct 4, 2023 12:28
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Two things for trains: Set the train limit to a number where that many trains being at the station will not block the main track. Only enable the station when it has sufficient supply to fill a train. For fluid stations, accomplish this by setting up two tanks per fluid wagon, a red or green wire between all of them and the train station, and sending it to be enabled when oil is > 25k * number of fluid wagons.
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Oct 4, 2023 12:38
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If you disable a station, the train will skip it, meaning if you have a schedule like "fuel -> pickup -> dropoff" and you disable pickup when there aren't enough materials, the train will loop between fuel and dropoff forever. This is both annoying and a waste of capacity. Setting the capacity to 0 instead of disabling is slightly more complex circuit-wise, but fixes this.
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Oct 4, 2023 13:28
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Arrath posted:I refuse to use electric furnaces. Must burn everything to fuel the factory
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Oct 4, 2023 13:29
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zedprime posted:That's the beauty of it. Unless/until you start moduling electric furnaces or build hippy power plants they burn more fuel to make the electricity than if they were burning smelting directly. This is also true of burner inserters versus electric inserters iirc. e:it isn't, but burner inserters have no idle draw. Dr. Stab fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 13:55
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Please don't trick people into believing there is ever a reason to use burner inserters in vanilla.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:24
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Darox posted:Please don't trick people into believing there is ever a reason to use burner inserters in vanilla. Just wait until you need an inserter which only operates once every 5 minutes and then you'll see. Entire joules of energy wasted.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:35
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Burner inserters being able to fill themselves makes them bearable for mixed belts but just lol at using them for longer than the earliest phases. And electric furnaces always get placed down during the Great Overhaul once bots and trains get researched as throughput is much nicer than useless energy saving.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:36
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Darox posted:Please don't trick people into believing there is ever a reason to use burner inserters in vanilla. Self restart capacity without having to hand feed if you ever screw up your coal.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:37
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Wood disposal for megabases.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:39
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Using them in your power plant makes sense. That way the system primes itself after a blackout. I don't really see a need to use them in furnace arrays, however. Switching to electric furnaces early is usually a mistake. They're much more expensive and consume more power, in exchange for not needing to route coal. If you really have trouble getting coal to your furnaces, okay, but it can't be overstated just how expensive they are for initially worse functionality.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:43
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For all the joking about maximizing how much you're burning I save electric furnaces for when I have nuclear started. It's exhilarating having trains full of plates smelted at the mine but it's not needed till you're well into the lead up to the rocket with yellow and purple science if not afterwards. And then you wrap back around to training ore to central, moduled smelting arrays anyway so it's a short lived exhilaration.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:57
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Snapshot posted:Self restart capacity without having to hand feed if you ever screw up your coal. Dr. Stab posted:Using them in your power plant makes sense. That way the system primes itself after a blackout. I don't really see a need to use them in furnace arrays, however.
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Oct 4, 2023 16:23
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The boilers will run out of coal before the burner inserters run out, so they'll have the juice.
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Oct 4, 2023 16:39
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You still need power to run the miners, if you’ve run the belt out of coal. If you haven’t run the belt out of coal, electric inserters are still running but more slowly. The use case for burner inserters in a cold-start is when you’ve already got coal pre-staged as a backup and just need to slap a few burners down to start distributing it down the belt, then remove them once the miners are delivering again, and that comes down to a stylistic preference over ctrl-click-swiping the boilers after picking up your emergency coal stash. LonsomeSon fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 17:51
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I actually had a total power out last night because while I was off building my outposts, my coal miners all exhausted their patches, and I wasn't around to notice anything had changed until all the power suddenly turned off at once -- which is when all the coal that was originally on the conveyor belts was gone, and the boilers had burned through the last of their reserves. Luckily, I'd stashed some extra coal in my car for the car itself, so I used that to get things restarted. And now I'm saving an emergency coal reserve, because I didn't have one before.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:56
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I use burner inserters and burner miners to feed my coal powerplants for the simple reason that if your power gets low, the speed that coal gets mined / inserted goes down and you can get into a negative feedback loop where you can't get it bootstrapped again without disconnecting parts of the factory.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:17
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Simple fixes by mid game, have alarms hooked up to the coal conveyor belt/coal train stop to blare klaxons when coal is not stacked up on the belt.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:57
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The elegant solution is to use load shedding power switches. Yell at your factorisimos to turn off their AC with big clunkers triggered by a simple SR latch fed by accumulator level.
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Oct 4, 2023 21:08
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zedprime posted:Simple fixes by mid game, have alarms hooked up to the coal conveyor belt/coal train stop to blare klaxons when coal is not stacked up on the belt. This is the proper solution. You get circuits long before you are building enough to actually consume more coal then a few miners produce. Accumulators are IMO not particularly relevant because you can't get them until the point where coal power becomes largely irrelevant. And burner inserters are just plain bad. They consume a not insignificant amount of coal, at best they will keep your factory slightly chugging for longer, actually making the situation worse by delaying the full power outage that you will definitely notice.
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Oct 4, 2023 22:07
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I build up my base so slowly that any excess oil products make solid fuel and before I start making rocket fuel I have a cutoff switch to feed that solid fuel into my boiler feed belt, redirecting that coal for steam cracking into more petro gas. Is it remotely efficient? I'm sure it's not, but hey it's a fun exercise to set up
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Oct 4, 2023 23:02
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Honestly I feel one of the joys of Factorio is that there's so many different ways to solve a problem. There's the "best", the "idea", the "simple" and the "whatever the gently caress I did" to name a few solutions. So who cares if some people use a few burner inserters in their early coal plant?
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Oct 4, 2023 23:28
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I use burner inserters for bootstrapping power in the early game but by the time I'm really risking brownouts I generally have enough solar to put the inserters for the boilers on a separate (overlapping) grid, such that if the boilers all go down it'll bootstrap itself as soon as the sun comes up.
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Oct 5, 2023 00:29
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| # ? May 25, 2024 01:03 |
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I've had power outages s many times due to just leaving the game running while I walk away, so now I just set things up with two separate power grids from the start. I'll have a coal-power network with some coal-powered drills that fuel themselves with burner inserters, those fuel a boiler or two, and the power from those steam engines is then used exclusively to power some electric drills that prioritize the coal output back to the same coal-power network with priority input also from the electric drills, so the coal-powered drills last longer. Then the spill-over coal from the electric drills goes towards another set of steam engines that are connected to the main power network for the rest of my base. It's still not perfect since as soon as the electric drill patch runs out there's only a short time to get things fixed anyway, and honest I'm not sure if this is even really worth doing overall, but it ticks a checkbox in my brain and makes me feel good.
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Oct 5, 2023 07:32
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