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Dunno-Lars posted:Pictures please? I struggle with emptying trains onto belts fast enough. The trick is to not empty them on to belts. (Specifically, you want to empty them into chests to take advantage of the stack size bonus, then empty the chests onto belts. The chests can keep unloading after the train leaves, after all.)
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Sep 16, 2015 11:51
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Fleve posted:Does anyone have a neat solution for supplying outposts with repair kits and the occasional replacement wall or turret? I thought about making a service station at the main base, which is easy, but I can't come up with a way to unload at the outposts other than making service stations over there as well. If I use the existing stations, there's no place for unloading cause the full length of two wagons is already used for loading ores. You could probably spare one inserter on each train car at the remote end without compromising throughput too much - AFAIK a full set of maxed-out inserters will load or unload a train car in the 5 second minimum wait time with room to spare, so if you're sufficiently upgraded you might even be able to do it with no downside.
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Oct 6, 2015 12:57
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The math for figuring out furnaces, assembling machines etc. is basically just look at the recipe it's using. Take the number of items needed for the recipe, multiply it by the crafting speed of the building (the faster it crafts, the more inputs you need), then divide it by the time the recipe nominally takes. That tells you how many units/second of that ingredient you need to supply. I'm not sure where you see the math for miners off the top of my head.
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Mar 2, 2016 05:25
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It's a good enough start. I'd recommend just keeping on going with that - you might eventually run into some problems, but it's much more fun to identify issues and then solve them yourself. If you really can't help yourself, here are some things you might find you want to change later: - you'll probably want more than one belt each for iron and copper. - pulling stuff directly off the belt can end up starving stuff further along - if you use a splitter even for stuff right next to the bus, you know that this particular branch won't consume more than its allotted portion of the resources.
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Mar 2, 2016 05:40
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I don't really like most of the "make production chains more complex" mods because in practice all they really do is get rid of the varied and interesting ways to build factories, and instead turn it into "figure out the most efficient way to build logistic robots". It's really boring. I'd be all over something that, rather than going all-in on complexity, just bumped up the complexity moderately, but pushed back the "use logistic robots for everything instead of transport belt" phase right back to the endgame victory lap.
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Mar 3, 2016 03:35
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I tend to scatter firebases with a few walled turrets around the perimeter. Biters love to attack military targets, and once you get the "under attack" alert it'll usually hold out long enough for you to wander out there and reinforce it with more guns.
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Mar 4, 2016 00:31
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Roflex posted:I was under the impression this was just for containers (chests, trains) and wouldn't apply to assemblers. Maybe I'm wrong, but if it only applied to containers I don't see how it's that imbalanced. Inserters get stack size bonuses when moving from assemblers into boxes, but not when putting things from assemblers onto belts. So you could have one inserter doing the work of several by just pulling from the assembler into a box, and then belt-unloading that. In the stock game you don't really have anything (other than train cars) which would benefit from using this to really maximize the available throughput, so instead you're basically trading space right-next-to-the-assembler (where you could put more inserters to do that work) vs. space a bit further away from the machine, which could help you squeeze things in to a tight layout (remember: space is a resource!), but isn't exactly what I'd call "overpowered". In something like Bob's Mods you end up with single assemblers that have insane production rates, so you basically have to load/unload from boxes (and fill/clear out those boxes using logistic robots). This sort of thing theoretically could let you keep doing belt-based designs instead of having to transition into the snoozefest that is logistic-robot-based production.
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Mar 5, 2016 23:59
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Grow up, kiddo.
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Mar 6, 2016 13:03
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widespread posted:I meant the spare Copper and Iron I would get from the splitters. But if it's the same concept, then I can do that. There is no "spare" copper/iron there  either you're consuming it just as fast as it comes in to that branch (in which case you don't need any chests), or it's backing up all the way to the splitter and more stuff is going on to the main branch. Unless you're producing so much raw material that belt throughout is your bottleneck, you don't need to worry about it.
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Mar 10, 2016 07:58
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So how does everyone manage belt balancing? It seems like the usual way is that miniature side-loading design, which looks like it works but actually has a ton of bias once you start getting backpressure on one lane (perhaps because the inserters taking stuff off the belt are stacked on one side), as you can see here: (the loop back into the initial chests is there to simulate unbalanced load, and the extra chests simulate producing more than you consume) The smallest "true" balancer I've found is this monstrosity, which doesn't really fit in anywhere. Does anyone have anything more compact, or do you all just live with the bias? 
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Mar 12, 2016 02:33
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GotLag posted:I use this: Ah, very nice. I guess the underground "bypass" is only necessary if you're trying to push two belts through it? If you remove that then it's only three tiles wider and one tile longer than the biased side-loading one.
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Mar 12, 2016 03:38
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Agent355 posted:Sorry more questions, i keep running into new problems. The best way to use circuit networks is for wiring up smart inserters, pumps etc. to only run when you want them to. The most useful is with oil, so you can do stuff like only crack heavy oil down to light when your heavy oil storage is full. The combinators are more gimmicky (at least in the base game), but if you're clever you could use it to do something like prioritize giving flying robot frames to the particular robot type you have less of, or not overbuilding one particular input to something if the other input is being a bottleneck.
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Mar 13, 2016 05:37
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Ratzap posted:Actually building some useful modules is a completely different kettle of fish. They have up to 12 ingredients making me think they're designed to be hand crafted, otherwise just getting the bits into an assembler will be pretty challenging. I'm going to spoil the real solution a little bit - they're mostly designed so you stick a requester chest next to the assembler and have bots haul everything over for you. I'm not a big fan of this part of Bob's mods.
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Mar 15, 2016 06:20
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Elth posted:RE: Steel vs Electric furnaces, I think the ability to use modules and not having to reroute my coal lines vastly outweighs the disadvantages. I usually rush for electric furnaces, solar power and efficiency modules at about the same time to balance everything out. Yeah, not having to run a fuel line is really convenient when you're setting up new furnace stacks. Especially if you're running trains, since now you can smelt stuff right as it comes out of the ground and ship back plates instead of raw ore. What I don't get are the people who tear down their perfectly fine steel furnaces ASAP just so they ... can occupy more space and get half the efficiency out of burning their coal. That makes no sense to me. If you've already gone to the effort of running a fuel line, there's no reason to replace your furnaces until you're geared up to pack them full of modules.
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Mar 18, 2016 02:23
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Why stop there? Pump the water out of the sea at some other remote outpost, and train that over to boilertown first.
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Mar 18, 2016 06:08
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WhiteHowler posted:I don't understand what's happening there. I see the input and output, but can't figure out why that works. When you're side-loading onto an underground belt, one lane gets blocked by the side of the ramp thingy.
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Mar 18, 2016 17:57
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If you're not requesting the raw ores anywhere else, you could just plonk down requester cheats asking for them somewhere, and make the chests that currently have the ores into passive providers. That way the robots will just move them to the places you want them.
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Mar 20, 2016 02:21
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Use splitters. If you have four-wagon trains, three splitters will evenly split the incoming ore four ways, each of which can fill one wagon without it being stolen by stuff earlier in the chain.
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Mar 20, 2016 06:52
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peepsalot posted:Looking at concrete, its says walking speed 140%, but then "It can also be used to mine any kind of path." What does that mean? Normally you can't just right-click mine brick and concrete on the ground. (Because it'd be super annoying to pick up all your paving when trying to deconstruct something.) If you're holding on to a bit of brick or concrete, though, you can right-click to pick up bits of path on the ground. Which is what that text means.
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Mar 20, 2016 10:13
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WhiteHowler posted:I've gotten up to Logistics, but I'm still a bit confused about best practices for oil drilling and refining. The amount of crude each pumpjack produces varies depending on the deposit, and decreases over time, so there's really no good answer. Usually it's better to focus on the demand side - figure out how much petroleum you want to consume, and build enough refineries to meet that demand. Generally you end up cracking heavy and light oil down to petroleum, because you need way more plastic than lubricant. Maybe you end up turning some light oil into solid fuel on the side, since you also need coal to make plastic so that might be more of a bottleneck depending on your resources.
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Mar 21, 2016 15:44
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You can go seriously far without pumps if you're not really needing to push the throughput (assuming you're using underground pipes to cover long distance instead of making a wall of surface pipe). "Seriously far" as in, "multiple full radar scanning distances away". Once you get up to like 20 refineries you might start needing to think about pumping, but you're honestly probably never going to need that in the base game.
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Mar 21, 2016 16:15
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Produce sugars, process into ethanol,
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Mar 25, 2016 03:29
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Solumin posted:Oh, I see. (I don't think of these things and occasionally it bites me in the rear end.) The easiest way to filter a bunch of slots to the same thing is to take a stack of the item, place one of them in every slot, and then go through again middle-clicking all of them. Two clicks per cell, much easier than using the menu for every single one. Moddington posted:This is actually the simpler of the splitter problems: one splitter for each belt, send one from each to continue along the bus, and one from each to the output. Use splitters or side-loading to combine them back down to as few as you want. When you're low on material, this pulls literally half of your throughput off to one destination, which is going to severely starve everything further down. What you typically want to do is use a single splitter on one lane (pulling off 1/8th of your throughput), then using a bunch more splitters to even things out between the lane you took stuff off and the rest of them. You don't even need to rebalance them all immediately - just balance two lanes immediately, then rebalance three of them after passing a few stations, and then start mixing in the fourth lane about halfway down the bus. This effectively gives you a "bypass" which helps avoid the early stations monopolizing your whole production.
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Mar 26, 2016 03:33
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Solumin posted:
It's fake saturation though, because it's all backed up and hence not making full use of the available throughput. If you add another load to the end that consumes all those plates, it will thin out rapidly. More to the point, you could just remove the excess belts without any negative impact. Your maximum throughput is when you have the full four belts of material at the start of the bus. If you take material off the bus to build something, then the available throughput downstream of that point is lower than the initial maximum, even if you're still spreading it over four belts.
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Mar 26, 2016 16:36
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It looks like you only have one-and-a-half red belts of iron coming into the bus, so that's almost certainly going to be the bottleneck once you've burned through the stuff buffered on belts.
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Mar 26, 2016 17:28
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LLSix posted:Yep, that's my problem. I'm playing with RSO so I have a million miles of train tracks. Is there any way to fix the deadlock besides adding in a rail signal every other screen or so? I think I'm going to need chain rail signals to handle T-junctions, right? Any time you have a "block" of track that you want to have more than one train on at the same time, you need to put a signal in the middle to break it up. Good to practice is to space signals just a bit further than a train-length apart, so you can get maximum throughput on that line. You can space them a bit further apart on spur lines that don't need that much traffic (for example, if a spur only serves one station, and the loading time at that station is a bigger bottleneck on throughput than the time it takes to drive along the spur). You want to use chain signals for a T-junction, yes. Otherwise you'll have trains park there blocking the main line just because their branch is congested. While you're at it, you should cram the middle of the junction full of chain signals too, so that trains that don't actually cross each other's paths don't interfere with each other at all. That bit's not strictly necessary, and you can build the junction slightly smaller when you don't need to fit the extra signals, but it's good to do if you have the space.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:59
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Ciaphas posted:Are any other mods "required" (in the sense that gameplay will be rubbish without them) if I want to play a game with RSO? FARL is "required" if you want to avoid gouging your own eyes out manually laying all that track. Fat Controller is seriously nice for managing any sort of large rail network. I think that's about it - I initially thought that rail tankers would be useful too, but honestly barrelling up crude at the outpost and unbarrelling it at your base is fine and adds a neat logistical twist.
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Mar 27, 2016 02:03
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Loopoo posted:if the base has worms, don't try to take it out until you've researched poison capsules. throw a few poison capsules at the worms and wait for them to choke to death. Small worms will go down easy as soon as you get piercing ammo, or probably just with turret creeping them. Medium worms will go down with piercing ammo + turret creep, though you'll need to be on the ball with repairs. Big worms are a roadblock until either poison capsules or tanks, though.
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Mar 27, 2016 11:18
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Evilreaver posted:Turrets do base double damage, plus their specific upgrades. It's much more ammo efficient to have them do the heavy lifting of spawner/worm slaughter. It's worth pointing out that double base damage is even better than it sounds, since things like nests and worms have static damage reduction that still only applies once. A piercing round from a turret, without any damage upgrades whatsoever, will do 10-4=6 damage to a medium worm (which will kill it in 6 seconds, with a single turret). A piercing round from your gun under the same circumstances will do 5-4=1 damage (not happening).
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Mar 28, 2016 03:22
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I find that the balance of Bob's mods is really off if you're playing the game single-player. There's so much stuff to do that by the time you've finished setting one thing up, you've researched a half-dozen more, and there's little point to implementing fully efficient solutions because even the slow and naive ones will have backed up by the time you've finished your next task. It seems like multiplayer would fix those issues, because you both have more hands working in stuff (so you don't get so far behind the tech tree), and more people consuming items so that your factory actually gets to build stuff instead of constantly backing up.
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Mar 29, 2016 00:12
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Ratzap posted:It's actually ok, play Bobs with a science cost increase mod or just use less labs. Problem solved, you don't have to race to everything ASAP and trust me, once you hit his 2nd blue pack and into alien research, it slows waaay down. That's before you even get into the module research. I have 5 labs and 5 module labs, they churn through the tech tree faster than I can put things together. Am I just a slow builder? I've researched literally everything that doesn't require alien science, and I just got titanium/nitinol hooked up and started putting together some modular roboport assembly. Yes, Alien science can be a bit of a bottleneck to slow things down, but that's the opposite of helpful - it's yet another thing that's gated on something I need to do (instead of being something that the factory needs to do while I'm working on something else). I guess I could cram a bunch of pollution increasing modules somewhere and make a biter farm?
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Mar 29, 2016 04:07
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The easiest fix would be to send more than 1/8th of your iron production into your steel line. As it is, if you're producing 1000 iron plates/minute, you're going to end up making only 25 steel, which is pretty rubbish. Try branching off for your steel line before you split things out into four belts. Or take an entire belt (or even multiple) for steel instead of just half a belt.
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Mar 29, 2016 05:20
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Requester chests are easy, you just slap them down wherever you want robots to deliver showing in particular. Passive providers are used for places you want robots to take stuff from if they need it, but if it's not used it can just sit there. The output of your infrastructure-producing assemblers, for example. Active providers are similar, but the robots will empty it out even if nothing's requesting it. This is a bit more niche, but does have useful spots - for example, if you're emptying oil barrels, putting an active provider on the empty barrel output will make sure it never fills up and stops your oil production. Storage chests are just for storage. So if you stick stuff in your logistic trash slots, or tell the bots to deconstruct something, or it gets taken out of an active provider, then it will go into a storage chest if there are no requester chests asking for it. Just slap some down in the middle of your base and forget about it, usually. One neat thing is that storage chests are also higher-priority than passive providers when it comes to fulfilling requests, so it's not like they're a big resource hole - if you put something into storage, and then request more of it, the bots will go get the ones out of storage instead of grabbing from providers and having your factory make more.
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Mar 29, 2016 05:54
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Speedball posted:I suppose the appeal of electric furnaces is they require less of a supply line to set up, but they suck up SO much juice. In fact, if you're powering electric furnaces with steam power, they produce just as much pollution and use twice as much fuel as conventional furnaces. They're not really worth it until you've got modules or can power them all just on solar. Unless you just want the convenience of not running a fuel line.
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Mar 30, 2016 07:34
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Once you get speed modules, that turns into 0.3/sec even for depleted oil spots, so your 7 oil patches would be able to keep one refinery running at full clip, with a little bit left over. Which translates to about 1.5 plastic/second before using productivity modules to stretch it, which isn't amazing but will keep you going. Oil is definitely a major bottleneck though. You usually want to stick productivity modules in your refineries/chemical plants (and your wells before they're depleted, to maximize their lifespan), switch over to advanced oil processing ASAP (because that gives you more petroleum-equivalent for each unit of crude), and stay away from solid fuel if you have sufficient coal to use instead. Jabor fucked around with this message at 12:39 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 12:35
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Being near the lake seems like a trap, since there are no trees to suck up pollution in that direction. Once you're set up, you could probably carve a path through that small base on the left side to get inland. Or push through that tiny base to the north.
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Mar 30, 2016 13:55
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memy posted:Water absorbs pollution really well iirc It's a little better than clear land, but you only need 6 trees on a chunk before the land is absorbing more pollution than the water, and there looks like a lot more than 6 trees per chunk there.
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Mar 30, 2016 15:23
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Also notably, you'll need quite a bit of incoming crude to keep that many running.
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Mar 31, 2016 01:19
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The one time I've died to a train, I forgot how to close the interaction window and hit enter to try and do so.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:01
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Loren1350 posted:I feel like Long Reach breaks some challenge scenario possibilities, which makes it a balance issue, so I don't like it on that principle. In general, anything that just straight up makes an existing mechanic easier (especially for free) feels cheaty to me. For some reason I have no problem with Autofill, though it does make an already cheesy tactic even easier. I don't think I really agree with this. Making things more convenient without affecting the overall balance of the game is not cheaty. It's still not cheaty even if you can think of a hypothetical challenge scenario where it would break the overall balance. Now if there actually was a challenge scenario that used the limited interaction range as a key part of its balance, using it in that scenario to bypass that restriction would be cheaty. Autofill is actually way more cheaty by any metric, since it's not actually that much of a convenience any more (now that burner inserters start with enough fuel to immediately refuel themselves), and the situation where it actually affects the game balance comes up way more often in real play. But even then, if you have the self-discipline to not do cheesy turret pushes that wouldn't work without autofill, it's still not cheaty.
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Mar 31, 2016 04:02
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