|
drunken officeparty posted:This is the first time I’ve made it to oil. Is there a fluid pressure system or any reason I shouldn’t just make a 5 mile long pipe tube to bring it where I want it? Fluid flow is kinda annoying to deal with since it's a pretty opaque system compared to belts. You can get more mileage out of it by using pumps or underground pipes (the squares in between aren't modeled, so they always act as two pipe segments no matter how long the gap is), but both are more expensive than ordinary pipes. For longer-distance stuff, you'll want to use trains witt fluid tanks. Barrels aren't worth it most of the time, but they do have some interesting uses.
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2021 01:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 08:25 |
|
|
drunken officeparty posted:I feel like I’m spending way too much time traveling long distances to stop the loving bugs from breaking my poo poo. Or refilling turrets or oops missed a spot now they took down a power line. In the long run, you'll want to use two one-way tracks rather than one two-way track. It requires more track, but it vastly increases throughput and is much simpler to actually use. The fundamental rule of trains is that only one train can be between any set of signals. The track is divided up into sections of track called "blocks" based on the presence of signals, and the signals will only allow one train to be in their block at a time. So if you've got three signals in a row on a straight track, then the first signal will turn red (blocking any further trains) as soon as your train's nose passes the signal. The first signal will remain red until the entirety of the train has passed the second signal. Meanwhile, the second signal turns red as soon as the front of the train passes it, and remains red until the entirety of the train has passed the third signal. And so on. Any time any part of a train is between two signals, the first signal will be red. It gets more complicated once you throw intersections into the mix, but the same basic principle applies - signals divide the track into "blocks", and only one train can be in a block at any time. Typically, you want to have signals on all the entrances and exits of an intersection. This ensures that only one train can pass through the intersection at a time, while also keeping the block compact so that it doesn't stop trains that aren't going through the intersection. Lastly, there's chain signals. They only turn green when both their block and the next block are open. They're useful for various edge cases that pop up when your train traffic gets congested. For example, what if traffic gets backed up shortly after one exit of a four-way intersection, turning that exit signal red? With normal signals, the entry signal will be green while the exit signal is red, so a train will drive into the intersection and stop right in the middle - blocking up the whole intersection in all directions and making your traffic problem much worse. On the other hand, a chain signal at the entrance will detect that the exit is blocked, and prevent trains from entering the intersection if they're bound for the blocked exit. That keeps the intersection open in the other direction.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2021 23:10
|
|
|
Slickdrac posted:Did they ever apologize, or even walk back their bullshit from a while back? I couldn't find anything that indicated they did, but that's killed any desire for me to play anymore. And there's nothing else with really the same feel of simplicity and infinite expansion, always something limiting. Nope, not one bit. I wouldn't really expect them to, either.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2021 20:53
|
|
|
Solumin posted:I'm getting the itch again. I enjoy making complicated, twisty little factories, rather than the giant industrial mega-scale factories, and I recall there was an overhaul mod that leaned more in that direction. Py something? Pyblock? Sea block?? When I tried Seablock, I found it quite slow. There's a ton of constraints on your production, in a way that you can't just build your way out of, so it's pretty easy to find yourself stuck having to sit there just waiting for things, unable to build.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2021 04:48
|
|
|
The Locator posted:Hopefully my math isn't too bad here. This sounds way worse than Angelbobs.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2021 20:24
|
|
|
Breetai posted:I don't know why a whole bunch of mods for this game about automation seem to do their best to stop you from automating things, but it's utterly maddening. One of the best aspects of vanilla Factorio is that for the most part, you can automate exactly as much or as little as you want to. You can handcraft everything except for a few recipes that use liquids, or you can automate everything from the very beginning, or you can do intermediate steps like manually topping off a chest that feeds an assembler. For almost everything you produce, you can choose exactly what stage of automation you want to take it to. It's up to the player to decide when the time and attention cost of manually doing something outweighs the resource cost and planning effort needed to automate something further.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2021 07:16
|
|
|
Breetai posted:Does coal liquidation effectively increase the energy per unit of coal when cracking surplus heavy to light and light to solid fuel? The wiki says yes - it produces 8.7 MJ of solid fuel per unit of coal, so it slightly more than doubles the energy per unit.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2021 05:43
|
|
|
FalloutGod posted:I have the hardest time wrapping my head around unlocking techs and then integrating them into my building. DSP, Satisfactory and now Factorio I've all failed at. It doesn't make sense in my head and after awhile It all becomes too unwieldy and it makes me want to stop playing. Can you just not be smart enough to play games like these? The thing to remember is that you don't actually lose anything by building it "wrong". You don't waste resources by having an inefficient setup, things just move slower. When you decide to rework a section of your factory, you can tear up all those assemblers and belts and put them somewhere else for free - building doesn't cost anything beyond the resource cost of making the buildings, and you get those buildings back with zero losses when you deconstruct them. And by the time you get to the point where you might want to do large-scale reworking, you don't even need to, because belts and assemblers are cheap enough and resources plentiful enough that you can just build a whole new production setup without even needing to dismantle the old one. Optimizing and tinkering with your setups to improve them and make better ones is a big part of the game. You don't really need to plan anything long-term, except maybe leaving a little more space between stuff than you think you'll need so that it'll be easier to tweak later.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2021 20:58
|
|
|
FalloutGod posted:Can I get some advice on signaling this rail network? or a dead simple tutorial guide. I've done the in game signaling tutorial but things stop making sense when I can't visualize the entire "puzzle" in one screen. The basic point of signals is to denote sections where only one train can be at a time. The space between two signals is called a "block", and there can only be one train in a block at any given time. So if there's a train between two signals, signals will turn red as needed to prevent any other trains from entering that block until there's no longer a train there. The single-lane rail going from your pickup area to your dropoff area can only hold one train at a time, in either direction, so it should be treated as a single block: you put a signal on each end of that. It's a two-way track, so you do that on both the left and right sides of the track. The stations aren't part of that one-train zone, since each one can hold a train without blocking that main rail, so you put signals on the entrances to each station to signify that they're a separate block. Once again, this should be on both the left and right sides of the track. Each station can only safely hold one train, though, so you don't need any more signals beyond that. Now, we come to chain signals. The problem with a normal signaling setup is that there are some blocks where a train can safely stop, and there are some blocks where it'll seriously jam up traffic if a train stops there. In your setup's case, the question is "what if a train decides to go to a station, only to stop before it reaches that station because there's already a train there?" Depending on where your signals are placed, it'll either block the exit to the station and prevent the other train from leaving, or it'll grind your entire train system to a halt by blocking the main rail going between the pickups and dropoffs. Chain signals prevent that by looking ahead to the next block to ensure that it's clear. In theory, with something based on your current setup, you'd want to place chain signals pretty much everywhere so that a train doesn't leave its current station until its destination station is clear. In general, what Tamba posted is a good rule of thumb for visualizing it - if it would be a problem for a train to stop at a given signal, then you should make the signal before that one a chain signal. In practice, the exact setup you posted doesn't need any stations at all. Why? Because it's essentially impossible for you to have two trains going to the same station. Since there's no way for trains to pass each other or get out of each other's way, except by going to a station, you're very limited in how many trains can use the network. I'd say probably about three trains (one for each resource) is the limit of what you can reasonably have on that setup, and anything more than that will inevitably deadlock. To improve it, you need to add more rails, not just more signals.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2021 17:48
|
|
|
K8.0 posted:I don't think that mantra is really useful for new players because you really don't actually build by it. Most of the places that are really bad for a train to stop for a long time in fact ARE standard signals, since they get littered everywhere on straightaways, and especially for new players it's likely they'll have at least one or two segments where a single train stopping would deadlock the entire system. If someone tries to take your advice literally and make all the main line signals chain signals because you really only want trains stopping for a long time in diverted areas, it's going to dramatically slow down their network and they will probably have a hard time understanding why (especially because chained chain signals can shift the effect so far away from the cause). Typically, the worst place for trains to stop for a long time are intersections, loops, and station exits. With proper system design, straightaway blockages should be temporary and unlikely to result in a deadlock, and it's easy to add a passing track to circumvent areas with a lot of stops. Meanwhile, a train blocking an intersection has the potential to block far more traffic, and clogging up stations and loops can grind the system to a halt.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2021 19:57
|
|
|
Blueprints can be good for base-killing, too. In my last game with biters, once I had construction bots, I made a fortified pillbox and copied it into a blueprint. I'd just plop it at the edge of a nest's aggro range, put ammo and barrels into chests, wait a moment for the turrets to load, and then go lure the biters over. The turrets would make short work of the biters, leaving only the nest itself and a few of the worms to deal with, and then I'd have the bots deconstruct the pillbox so I could take it to the next nest. Yes, barrels. I included some flamethrower turrets in the pillbox design. A handful of oil barrels made a decent portable fuel supply for flamethrower turrets, and unloading the barrels in the field worked pretty well - all it needed was a single assembler and a few solar panels to run it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2022 21:52
|
|
|
Ihmemies posted:I made a train to iron deposit, and it feels a bit useless. I could have made a belt as well. Why do people use trains instead or belts, what is the advantage? How far away the deposits must really be for trains? How do you arrange defense in train outposts so they don't run out of ammo, with lasers? The main benefit is cost. Train tracks take less resources than an equivalent length of yellow belts would. On top of that, they're way more efficient: you can easily reuse the same track for multiple resources, and increasing your throughput and capacity is much cheaper in a train network than it is in a belt network. The difference starts small, but as your train network grows and as the amount of resources shipped using it grows, the savings can become huge. If you find a coal deposit near the iron deposit, you can reuse most of the train tracks you've already built - you just need to build a new station and a new train. On the other hand, if you were using belts, you'd need to lay down a whole separate belt all the way from the coal deposit to your base. That adds up, especially as you take more and more resources from farther and farther away. Similarly, if you want to increase the amount of iron being carried from the iron deposit to your main base, with trains you just have to scale up your station and add more locomotives or wagons; you barely have to touch the tracks themselves. On the other hand, if you were using belts, you'd need to upgrade or double up the entire length of belt, all the way from the deposit to your base. Once again, that adds up, especially over longer distances.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2022 06:17
|
|
|
khwarezm posted:Hi there, I was hoping I could get some advice here. Basically, you use signals to split the track into separate chunks called "blocks", and then each block can only contain one train at a time. This prevents trains from running into each other or colliding, because a train won't enter a block that another train is already in - the train essentially reserves a block for its exclusive use, and no other train can enter that block from any direction until the first train has left. You're treating signals as stoplights, where you just put them at a place where you want a train to stop and wait for the route to clear. But because of this absolute reservation system, you also have to place a second signal to mark the size of the area that you want to be clear. And if it's at an intersection, you'll have to place signals at the other rails coming in and out of the intersection too. You have to place signals not just at the entrances, but at the exits as well. Think of it as drawing a box with signals, and once a train enters that box from any direction, no other train will be able to enter until that first train has passed one of the signals marking the exits of the box. The colors that show up on the rails mark the sizes of these blocks. For example, in your original very first screenshot, all four cloverleaves were in the same block - all of the purple rail was contiguous with no signals splitting it up, which meant that only one train could be on any of the purple at a time. This is why things are better in your most recent screenshot: since you have signals at every entrance and exit of that square of track at the very center (as you can tell from the new color), you've created a dedicated block for all the rail crossings. The rest of your cloverleaf is all straight one-way rail with no crossings, and it's difficult for things to get too hung up on that. Before you redid the intersection signals, the cloverleaves weren't properly split into different blocks; now they are. There are other important effects that come from this absolute reservation system. For example, the distance between signals affects how closely trains can follow each other, because only one train can be between a set of signals at a time - so if you've got a really long distance between two signals, then once one train enters that stretch, no other train will enter until the first one has passed the exit signal. And if a second train is waiting to enter, then it's occupying a block itself, and no other train will enter that block until it moves on. If your blocks are big because the gaps between signals are long, then the trains lining up and waiting will take way more space than the size of the trains themselves. And if you're only placing signals at important places, then they'll all be sitting and waiting in important places. So even on a long straight stretch of rail with no intersections, you'll want to place signals every so often to help smooth out the movement of your rail network That's been another contributor to your issues - since you don't have any signals between your stops, only one train can be between your stops at a time. As it's currently set up, each cloverleaf can hold up to four trains: one at each stop, one between the two stops, and one in the stretch between the entrance of the leaf and the entrance of the first stop. Even though there's so much space between the entrance of the leaf and the entry to the first stop, only one train can be waiting in that space at a time - no other train will be able to enter the cloverleaf until that stretch of rail is clear. Lastly, there's chain signals. They exist to solve a fairly basic problem with basic block signaling: you have to place signals at the exits of an intersection, but if the next block after the intersection is occupied, those signals at the exits can become red lights and can cause a train heading that direction to stop inside the intersection to wait for the next block to clear. Chain signals are a very simple solution - they work just like normal signals, except that in addition to checking the status of their own block, they look ahead and check the status of the next signal. If the next signal is red, then the chain signal will turn red too, even if its own block is empty. So if you place a chain signal at the entrance to an intersection, then it won't let a train enter the intersection unless the exit to the intersection is also clear. And in cases where there's multiple exits, the chain signal will actually check which exit an approaching train wants to use, and will check only that exit when deciding whether or not to let the train through.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2022 00:30
|
|
|
Squashing Machine posted:I do find it funny that the expansion development team considers "game too long" a problem and not a feature in a game where the most popular mods pride themselves on insanely long completion times. A new addition that's accessible after an hour of play is, fundamentally, going to be seen by far more players than a new addition that's accessible after 100 hours of play
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2022 16:21
|
|
|
Mailer posted:I would have assumed (until you unlock lightning speed bots with unlimited speed boosts) that in the normal game the throughput of bots wouldn't be good enough to handle things like mining/smelting/long chains of production/etc. Granted, I never tried beltless but they didn't seem fast enough to handle huge throughput situations. Over short distances, the limitations of low-tech bots don't matter that much because bot networks are way more space-efficient than belts are. Even if each individual bot is slow, it's really easy to just add more bots and brute-force it. As the bots tech up, you can expand their range and use them for longer-distance hauling. I don't use logistic bots much myself, though. They pretty much blow away the logistics challenge, so I feel like using them is admitting defeat.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2022 07:18
|
|
|
It makes sense for the game to emphasize holding them off, because that's an ongoing production, automation, and logistics challenge in this game about production, automation, and logistics challenges. Dedicate part of your factory to producing ammunition, and set up belts or trains to take that ammo to your turrets. Personally, the part I hate about biters is the "clearing them out" part. It mostly has to be done manually, so it's annoying and repetitive, and you need to do a bunch of it when you're expanding your base.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2022 04:04
|
|
|
Mailer posted:Every mod I've read about is pretty much explicitly that - more friction. The positives of SE sound incredible but having to trick your way around the mod maker's changes sounds terrible. I can't imagine not liking bots to begin with, since reaching The Entitled Phase(c) where you're a lazy bastard pointing at a map and barking orders while the bots wipe your rear end for you is the best. Once you've got trains, it's pretty easy to scale up because you can bring in as many resources as you want. Establish a multi-lane train mainline (at least one line of tracks going each direction) that's connected to everything, and you can run basically as many trains as you want along those shared tracks. From there, adding new mining or production is as simple as plopping down a station. As long as you make sure that station is reachable from your rail mainline, the trains will find their way there on their own. And if you need to supply those stations with coal and/or ammo, you can put down another train stop that takes delivery of those. Though if you're going to go heavy on trains, it's helpful to learn a bit about the circuit network or use the Logistics Train Network mod.  Here's a look at the map in my current Angelbob's game. My core base (with all its early-game spaghetti) is over on the left side, with a track going around the perimeter so that a train from anywhere can go all the way around it. Any stations in that core area are off to the side of the loop, so that the trains will leave the loop, deliver their stuff, and then return to the loop. Off to the right, you see some more rail-oriented development: mining stations at the bottom and lower right, and processing stations up at the top right. I'm using the Logistics Train Network mod, which works basically the same as the base logistics system: requester stations will look for a provider station that provides the specified resource, and dispatch a train to carry the stuff from the provider to the requester. So that handles setting up trains to bring stuff where it needs to go; without that, I'd probably have to set up central storage malls for ores and plates to be brought to and then carried off from. Once the basic processing is done, the resources are brought either to the core base or to dedicated production stations near the base. A good example is Battery Station on the left - it requests all the resources necessary to make batteries, does the actual production, and then makes the finished products available.  Here's what one of those dedicated production spots looks like in practice: the train station receives all the resources necessary for a production chain, and feeds a detached factory area that just handles that one production chain. From there, it can deliver those goods to another train station to be carried somewhere else, or belt those goods over to another nearby production area that needs them as an input.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2022 07:00
|
|
|
Mailer posted:Is smelting still generally an on-site thing? I've seen a lot of designs where the ore is getting transported which would shrink the defensive blueprint by a lot (faster expansion) but possibly dick the throughput due to needing a two-step ride between depots. It depends on the recipes (and mods) you're dealing with. When deciding whether to process things on-site or transport them to a centralized processing area, an important thing to consider is whether recipes compress or expand the amount of material to be stored. For example, in vanilla, a cargo wagon can hold 4000 iron or 4000 steel. But although they both have the same stack size, each steel costs five iron plates to make. That means that a full cargo wagon of iron plates will only hold enough iron to make 800 steel. So if you want to make 4000 steel plates at a central steel processing area, you'll have to haul in 20000 iron - five cargo wagons worth. That puts a lot of extra traffic across your train network, compared to smelting the iron into steel on-site and putting the resulting 4000 steel into a single cargo wagon. This is something to consider for belting stuff around, too. From a trains perspective, it doesn't matter where you make your copper cables. One copper plate turns into two copper cables, but copper cables have double the stack size, so it makes no difference to your cargo wagons. But two copper cables still take up twice as much belt space and inserter time as one copper plate does, so it's still generally preferred to move your copper around as plates and then process it into cables on-site so that the cables never have to touch a belt. In vanilla, converting copper and iron ores to plates is a 1:1 conversion. But ore has half the stack size that plates do, so a cargo wagon can carry twice as many plates as it can ore. That means that it takes two train-loads of ore to make one train-load of plates, so there is some advantage to smelting on-site. Of course, that's not the only factor to think about. It's just the main argument for smelting on-site. You still have to balance that against the inconvenience of building, supplying, and protecting on-site smelting. It's also good to consider how many trains you have, how much traffic your network can take, how many trains your stations can afford to have lined up, how quickly you can load and unload your train stations, and so on. Doing smelting on-site generally reduces the strain on your train network by reducing the amount of trains needed to move your material, but you have to balance that against the conveniences and benefits of doing centralized smelting. So in general, there isn't a single right answer - it's all about where you personally want to strike that balance. And it very much depends on the mods you're running, too. I'm doing a lot of centralized smelting because the Angelbob's modpack makes the smelting process pretty complex, with several steps needed to turn freshly-mined ore into plates. I do the first processing step (ore crushing) on-site at the mining areas since it's easy and crushed ore is more storage-efficient, then ship it to dedicated processing areas to turn it into smeltable ore, then ship those smeltable ores to dedicated smelting areas. It'd be more train-efficient to do more of those steps on-site, but it'd also be a massive inconvenience that takes up a lot of space and involves several annoying intermediates. So instead, I accept the higher train load of hauling those raw materials around several times, in exchange for making the processing and smelting easier to handle.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2022 15:50
|
|
|
Duodecimal posted:Most products require a higher volume of input than output (volume = stack size and slot count), I think most of the reasoning in the post is irrelevant. In fact, it's when the opposite is true is it explicitly not worth transporting - e.g. copper wire, which isn't even worth belting in a main bus. Vanilla smelting is easy, all you need is a line or two of furnaces and a fuel supply. It's trivial to have that on-site and doesn't use that much more spacce With mods, it gets a lot more complex, but that's why I'm trying to dig down to the underlying choices and tradeoffs: do you want to optimize your transit system for maximum efficiency and throughput, or do you want to have less-efficient transport in exchange for reducing the size and upkeep cost of your outposts? Does the complexity of a particular intermediate step make it particularly desirable to have a centralized processing location for handling that step efficiently? How much traffic is your train system built to handle? Does your current modlist have recipes that heavily compress materials for especially easy transport, followed by recipes that decompress those materials on-site? That's one of the things that makes this game stand out among factory games: you have a lot more freedom to do what you want and choose your approach. How much do you automate, and when? That's up to you. How much do you rely on transporting intermediates vs doing everything on-site? That's up to you. There's pros and cons to everything, and the player feels those trade-offs as they decide where they want to spend their time and effort. Finding your own answers to those choices is part of the fun.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2022 18:33
|
|
|
Ideally, you won't really have anything near your main two-lane rail. Instead, you'll want to use junctions to split off a side route that goes to your station. It's fine if that side route is single-lane, as long as it loops back around and rejoins your multi-lane mainline. You can probably find blueprints for junctions, a lot of people use blueprints for them. They're not too bad to build manually if you understand the principles of the signaling system, but For a basic blueprint, the FARL (Fully Automatic Rail-Layer) mod comes with a basic 2-rail blueprint with power lines, and can be attached to a train to automatically stamp down or autobuild that blueprint (rotated to match the train's direction) ahead of that train.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2022 02:38
|
|
|
Count Roland posted:Are there any mods that increase complexity by adding waste products? Uranium processing is I think the only occurrence of this now. It might be neat to have stuff like slag from ore processing, or scrap iron from gears or various other broken bits that can be reprocessed, stored, burned etc. Having multiple outputs would dramatically change a lot of builds. Pretty much all of the big overhaul mods do, I think. I've only done Angelbob's. It has waste products which can later be reprocessed, and it'll often have different tiers of recipe for the same thing, so that you can do a simple recipe that produces lots of waste or a complex recipe that produces little to no waste. Lower-tier ore processing and some industrial processes will produce plenty of slag and crushed stone (which can eventually be reprocessed into more ore), most chemical refining will produce various waste fluids that can be reprocessed to extract useful materials from, and so on. Here's what mid-tier ore refining looks like in Angelbob's, for example:  Crushed raw ore comes in at the bottom and goes into ore washing plants, which convert crushed ore and purified water to washed raw ore, geodes, and different kinds of waste water. The washed raw ore goes into ore sorting plants, which produce various usable metal ores like copper, iron, etc. Each type produces multiple output ores, which get sent upward to a splitter-based sorting system that sends each type of ore to a train stop to be hauled elsewhere for smelting. They also produce slag, which is split off for reprocessing. The geodes get split off to an ore crusher, which turns them into crystal powder and crushed stone. The crystal powder goes off to the left and gets processed into crystal slurry. The crushed stone goes upward for reprocessing. The crushed stone and slag both go into the liquefication plants at the top left, which use sulfuric acid to convert them into slag slurry, which then gets processed with purified water to convert it into mineral slurry and waste water. The crystal slurry from earlier also gets processed into mineral slurry somehow, and all that mineral slurry finally ends up in the crystallizers at the very top left, which convert it into more usable metal ores. The various wastewaters go into those big white water treatment plants, which purify it to produce purified water and various chemicals. The purified water gets reused, since a lot of the above steps use it. The chemicals I'm mostly putting into dumps and storage for now, since I haven't gotten around to building out stuff to use that waste yet.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2022 17:19
|
|
|
Mailer posted:Pretty much everything I've seen from every mod, or at least the big ones people talk about, is about taking (fictional, hyperbolic example) the process of Miner->Smelter->Plates and turning it into Miner->50 other machines dealing with waste or whatever->Plates. It makes it more difficult/time-consuming, but in the end you're just adding more steps to get a basic resource. Some people are into the challenge there but to me it's just kind of boring busywork without anything new/cool at the end. It's not just that there's more steps, but that they usually give you a choice of how to proceed through the steps. It gives you a lot more flexibility to choose how creative or elaborate you want your logistics to be. The waste products and stuff give you the opportunity to feed your recipes and production lines back into each other and intertwine them in all sorts of clever ways - if you want to! There's not really a ton of room in the game to add new/cool stuff in the first place. Managing logistics and production is the main game loop, and in vanilla it gets kinda dull after a while since the base recipes are pretty straightforward and fairly samey, and you don't need that many basic resources so it's pretty easy to just build everything around a main bus.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2022 20:28
|
|
|
M_Gargantua posted:In my current run I've done something new: attempted to factorissimo heavily You can put buildings inside other buildings. Rather than a single bus-based layout, I think Factorissimo is best suited for a layout where you do a lot of pre-production on the spot. So instead of bussing circuits into your factory, bus in the raw materials and place a circuit-making factory inside the factory that's going to consume those circuits. It works well with something like Helmod, where you can plan out exactly how much each factory will consume and produce, so that you can determine exactly how much your intermediate-production factory blueprints produce and exactly how many of them you need to feed a given end-product factory. Personally, my favorite part is that it kind of forces your production areas to be somewhat self-contained and easily blueprintable. There's no worries about getting your spaghetti intertangled or placing things too close together, because each production area has its own dedicated surface, and if your input belts are getting tangled you can move the whole factory without having to rebuild everything inside. If you come up with a better design for intermediates-production or get a better recipe, you can swap out just the factories that do that, without having to shake up the larger design.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2022 14:54
|
|
|
verbal enema posted:wowie this game is overwhelming but goddamn if it doesnt feel good Without mods, an inserter will always place on the side of the belt farther from it. If the inserter is placed such that the left side and right side are equally distant, it'll place on the right side of the belt. To get two resources on a single belt, you can make use of that inserter behavior, or you can merge two belts without using splitters by just running them into each other. A belt that goes straight into another belt will dump all its resources on that one side of the belt.  An easy way to do it is to make a T-split: make an empty belt, and have your two resource belts come into it from different sides, which'll put each input into the lane on the side it comes in on. Here's an example, though with a single resource.  If you use a splitter to divide one belt into two, both output belts will maintain the lane positions from the input belts, so once you've got your belts put together the way you want them it's easy to maintain the split: 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2022 05:04
|
|
|
verbal enema posted:ok any like not too gamey tips for a newbie? Build however much you need. If you want science to go faster, build more science production. If you're happy with the current pace of science production, go do something else. If your lines are backed up, then that means you're producing more of those items than you're consuming, which means you can build more things that consume those items. If you want to, anyway! You don't have to! For optimum efficiency, it's usually possible to calculate out exactly how much of each ingredient you need to supply for a given recipe, and there's websites and mods that can do this for you, but it's largely optional. It's all down to how much you want to hammer on efficiency; there's nothing really wrong with having more ingredient production than you need, or even really having less ingredient production than you need (it just means you'll produce that item slower). One of the strongest points of this game is the flexibility it offers: you don't really NEED to do anything. It's a sandbox which offers some vague goals for you to work toward. If you've got biters turned on, then you need to be able to produce enough ammo, power, and walls to defend your base, proportionate to how much you've expanded and how much pollution you've spread. Aside from that, you can do pretty much whatever you want*. If you want to hand-craft everything that doesn't use oil products, go ahead. If you want to use assemblers for literally everything and avoid hand-crafting whenever possible, go ahead - there's an achievement for that, even! Of course, if you increase your science production, you might find that you need more of the intermediate ingredients that go into science packs. So you might need to increase production of those ingredients. Which in turn might increase consumption of earlier ingredients, and so on, until you find yourself needing to bring in more copper or iron or something. Or you could just leave it be and accept having science production at less than its maximum potential speed for a while. Nothing's going to break down or blow up. *Mods can introduce extra constraints and requirements, of course
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2022 18:55
|
|
|
Next time I start a fresh game, I need to ban myself from using trains with just one cargo car It is a power - and a curse - too great for me  
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2022 20:31
|
|
|
diremonk posted:Nah, I had those automated in the middle of that mess. Spent an hour today and finally automated yellow inserters, belts, undergrounds, splitters, and miniloaders. I'm kind of glad I didn't jump into also using Py with this runthrough. That might break my brain. Any new smelting/casting tech you unlock in Angelbob's will be a straight upgrade to previous techs, but at the cost of extra complexity. New ingredients, more machines, more steps, that sort of thing. Blast Furnaces and Induction Furnaces will stick around for quite a while, though. From where you are now, there's three general ways in which the metal production process upgrades in Angelbobs:
You have to unlock each method separately for each metal type, so you'll have to look at the tech tree to see what you have available at the moment. These techs aren't really hiding, they're all on the standard smelting/casting line, so it shouldn't be hard to find them.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2022 00:44
|
|
|
MerrMan posted:The reddit monthly map is bob/angel's so I guess I'm gonna try it. I bounced off the petrochem stuff the last time I treid it, but that was a couple of years ago. I'm hoping since I started using Advanced Fluid Handling it will help to streamline the absolute clusterfuck of pipes that I remember. You can try doing both - start out building in your starter area, and put train stops at the end of your buses so any excess production goes into the rail network. If something doesn't fit well in your bus-based starter area for one reason or another, build it off to the side and supply it by rail instead. Sooner or later, your starting area's resources will run out anyway, and then you'll need to have enough of a rail network to ship in stuff from more distant ore patches. I've done something similar and it's a pretty natural progression. 80 hours in and my starting area is still home to a lot of my small-scale production. Most of my heavy-duty smelting and crafting is done at dedicated production areas supplied by rail, but the original buses are still an extremely convenient place to just toss together production for something I don't need in large amounts yet.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2023 08:05
|
|
|
If they wanna charge more, they can just charge more. They don't really have to justify it at all. It's their game, they can charge what they like. It's not like it actually affects me in any way, since I already own the game. Yeah, there's probably going to be a non-zero amount of people who'd have been okay buying it at $30 but wouldn't buy it at $35. Wube are well aware of that, it's something they definitely took into account when making this decision. They can see how often people buy their videogame and they know how much they're making from it. As for the "cash grab" talk, I think that's excessive. This is an industry full of microtransactions poo poo designed to turn players into ongoing revenue streams. Meanwhile, all Wube is doing is slightly increasing the one-time base price of a successful game that's (presumably) still selling well three years after it came out of early access. It's not like they're locking roboports behind lootboxes or requiring us to fuel beacons with paid currency or something.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2023 19:13
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:What does point to multi-point mean? I haven't seen most of the tech tree yet. It means to just run your belts straight from what's supplying your ingredients to what's consuming said ingredients, using splitters to divide one ingredient belt up to reach several assemblers.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2023 19:57
|
|
|
Ultimately, sushi belts with more than two item types are a very niche solution with a lot of problems. They clog up or get unbalanced easily, so you need to use circuits to make sure it doesn't get too clogged up. And there's no way to directly count how many items are on the sushi belt, so you need to wire up all the inserters to combinators to count each and every time an item enters or leaves the belt, and do some math to determine when it's safe to add more of any particular item. And most of all, they've got poor capacity. You're dividing one belt's throughput among a bunch of different items, and you can't even max out the throughput if you're just adding and removing poo poo from the belt whereever. For me, they're not really worth the trouble. Maybe if I was running a mod where belts were really expensive and I was incentivized to place as few of them as possible, I guess?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2023 19:12
|
|
|
For me, what stands out about Factorio is the combination of simplicity and flexibility. Despite it being a game about automation, there are very few things that you actually have to automate. Almost everything can be crafted just fine by hand, and it's actually somewhat easier because hand-crafting automatically handles the intermediates for you. You don't automate because you have to, you automate because you want to. The game does a fantastic job at gently nudging you into it while still making you feel like it's at your own pace. When you first need an item, you can just hand-craft a few. As your demand for that item increases, you get annoyed by the limitations of hand-crafting and toss down an assembler or two, then manually load them with ingredients when you need more of that item. As your demand for that item increases, you get annoyed by topping off that assembler and having to wait for it to run, so you set it up with chests full of ingredients so it can build up a stockpile while you're busy elsewhere. As your demand for that item increases, you get annoyed by having to stop by every so often to refill the input chests and empty the output chest, so you hook up belts to supply ingredients and carry off the outputs automatically. As your demand for that item increases, you get annoyed by the spaghetti and rebuild it into a more planned setup. But in the entire above paragraph, you're never actually forced to move to the next step. The game doesn't force you into automating more. It's up to you the player to decide when the ongoing annoyance of running things with less automation outweighs the upfront annoyance of automating more. And automating at your own pace like that feels a lot more natural than being forced into it at the game's pace by hitting some arbitrary point in the tech tree or whatever... ...which is exactly what oil does. Unlike basically everything else in the game, oil products have to be automated from the very beginning. They can't be hand-crafted at all, and you have to set up a couple production steps fully automated before you get back to having solid products that you can handle by hand. They're a perfect example of being suddenly forced into automating at the game's pace because you hit an arbitrary point in the tech tree, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it's a stage a lot of people find annoying to hit for one reason or another.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2023 16:35
|
|
|
Sylink posted:Later in the game how do you deal with walking all the time? I'm about to restart in sandbox just for the rts view because walking back and forth to do things on a large base is getting annoying. I keep a dedicated train for my personal use, loaded with extra supplies and a modded wagon that can hold a vehicle, and ride it around to unused stops. Particularly dense areas get carpeted with concrete, and I use Factorissimo factories for much of my production so I can biuld the assembly lines in my main production area and then carry them to their final destinations. Place well-supplied roboports and radars near areas you expect to be doing a lot of building in. You can build ghosts remotely via the map as long as a radar or something is providing vision there, and the construction bots can do the rest. And of course, identify whatever's making you run back and forth, and automate it more so you have to run back and forth less.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2023 20:36
|
|
|
Mr. Peepers posted:I'm quite fond of Nullius's paving drones that you shoot out artillery cannons and cover a 128x128 square per shot. Is there a separate version of this? I'd love to have concrete artillery without adding on a full-overhaul mod.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2023 03:30
|
|
|
The General posted:Sounds like I am sticking to separate lines for separate trains. For a rail system, think of it similar to a road system. Ideally, you want a main railway shared between your trains, and stops should be off on side rails so they don't block the main rail. Generally speaking, all rails should be one-way - if you want two-way service, lay two one-way rails next to each other. Where it doesn't behave like roads is when it comes to signaling. To put it simply, only one train can be between any two signals at a time. If a train is between Signal A and Signal B, then Signal A will turn red, and any approaching trains will stop and wait there until the first train has passed Signal B (which will turn red until the train passes Signal C, and so on). So by laying down signals, you're marking "where only one train can be at a time". If there's a split in the road or intersection, you want to use signals to divide up the various paths. Aside from that, it's also good to place signals at consistent distances along straightaways - the closer together your signals are, the closer together your trains can be, which means you can run more trains through a route at a time. This recent traffic jam of mine (sent a train to the wrong stop) shows pretty well how signals work: the green dots are green signals, the red dots are red signals, and the blue dots are blue chain signals. The center of the image is two one-way rails going opposite directions, with offramps that lead to a series of train stops at the upper right. You can see how when the signals are far apart, the trains are farther apart, and when the signals are close together a lot more trains can fit into a given length of track. You can also see how that one blue chain signal on the far right is preventing a train from entering an empty block where it would stop and block part of an intersection.  Even though it looks like a hot mess, this was actually pretty simple to clear up because there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the signals or network - a train was just sitting there blocking a high-traffic stop because it was trying to fill a fluid wagon from a stop with no fluid inputs. I cleared its schedule and redirected it to the proper stop, and the rest of the jam cleared up on its own.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2023 23:40
|
|
|
MerrMan posted:That's a lot of 1-1 trains! Tbh, I'm not entirely sure what the point of longer trains are. I've never really felt like one cargo wagon worth of stuff wasn't enough for a single trip, and having different cargos for each car requires more up-front planning than I tend to bother with. Also, it makes for nice, compact stops that can be packed into some pretty high-density layouts if you don't care too much about leaving room for trains to line up. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2023 21:32
|
|
|
my LTN install got messed up somehow and now all of my stations are basically ignoring what they're wired to and just requesting poo poo without any regard for the quotas or limits I set between that and the Angelbob's update that changed the buildings needed for a bunch of recipes, I've been spending days just running around between my hundreds of train stations fixing up issues i'm in hell
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2023 20:34
|
|
|
LTN makes it fairly simple to do multiple goods at a single train stop, which feels like it'd still be a pain in the rear end in vanilla. That said, I've also been having weird issues with it, so it doesn't seem to scale that well anymore
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2023 16:17
|
|
|
zedprime posted:Angel Bob's yellow science is crushing my will to play in new and unexpected ways. There is a part of myself looking at it like "I am basically doing all of this, I just need to put it down and go" while another part of me argues "you're not going to remember where the hell this is all going unless you start documenting everything and that is basically work." I'm pushing my way toward Angelbob's yellow science now, and there really just isn't much choice but to build it one piece at a time. It helps that most of what goes into it are relatively standalone items with at least one other use. As for where everything is going, just saturate the hell out of the belts so you always see what's going where  It also helps if you use a mod that lets you place markers of some sort indicating what's what, and extra helps if you use something like Factorissimo that lets you easily divide the factory into coherent, separate pieces. And after all of the above fails to save you, just give up and embrace the spaghetti 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2023 05:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 08:25 |
|
|
Mailer posted:I finally had some silly reasons (build four reactors only, wood for burner power as I get out of coal) to build simple circuits and they're pretty great. Is there any super good guide to practical setups for these? Google has found a lot of very very specific examples that usually assume you already know what stuff does and how it fits together. Looking for more of a learn-by-doing thing. One thing that's pretty widely applicable is "wire up the inserters supplying your train station's so that the chests fill evenly". A guide for how to do it, with spoilers if you'd prefer to work it out yourself:
That's about the most complicated thing I do with circuits generally. Aside from that, it's simple math problems like measuring my stockpiles of two goods that share a major ingredient, determining which one I currently have less of, and then directing the ingredient to the assemblers for that item.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2023 01:59
|
|