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Nalesh posted:I've forgotten how painful it is to not have robots, any suggestions on an early bots mod? Nanobots is a pretty well balanced early one where it's just a consumable item that fires from your weapon slot. There's some upgrades to keep make them faster as you tech up through green and red science. Not terribly expensive but annoying enough that upgrading just basic construction drones still feels good. NCompanion Drones definitely feel more... cheaty. They build super fast and you can put a poo poo ton of lasers on them to wreck biter nests, too.
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Jun 23, 2022 05:49
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SynthesisAlpha posted:That early base phase is extremely clever and anxiety inducing and reminds me of warptorio which I may have to play again. I played this for the reddit monthly map last year some time and it was fun as hell. Definitely the most fun I've had in Factorio with biters on. The defense stuff gets less fun the bigger your base gets and Warptorio does a great job of sidestepping that problem.
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Oct 13, 2022 04:09
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Taffer posted:You can do this with vanilla now, it's arguably easier too. TSM is still nice but these days I only use it for train refueling, vanilla does basically everything else with similar power and much less friction. Are there any updated tutorials for vanilla trains since they made the updates to them? I learned LTN a long time ago and typically rely on that and have bounced off vanilla trains a couple of times. LTN is super powerful but having access to requester/provider type logistics from the moment you get trains feels kind of cheaty sometimes.
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Oct 16, 2022 04:15
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Taffer posted:Some good train stuff about stackers: What do the individual train schedules look like to get them to wait at a [item] Depot until there's room at [item] Unload. The centralized depot of LTN is the only thing I've ever been able to make sense of for large train networks.
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Oct 16, 2022 18:31
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Phobeste posted:You set the unloading stations to have train limit 1 (or dynamic limits as mentioned above) and the delivery train schedules look like drat that's really simple and good. Gonna try setting this up as soon as I add more trains.
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Oct 17, 2022 02:38
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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. Not sure if I should go straight to rails and get LTN pumping or spend more time in my starter area and set up an early bus. I'll probably want cliff explosives, too, so I can use my chunk aligned rails. Just not really comfortable with finding the sweet spot of small enough that I don't get overwhelmed, but big enough that I'm not painting myself in to a corner.
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Jan 4, 2023 01:25
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zedprime posted:Haven't touched overhaul mods in the past, still looking for something as comparatively crunchy as Captain of Industry but I think I'm ready to jump on something, anything Factorio at this point. IR is kind of the odd-man-out on the overhaul mods because it actually does more to the early game than to the late game. I haven't played since 2 but it wasn't really my cup of tea - it's definitely more crunchy but I found a lot of the intermediates they introduced to be more tedious than interesting. I don't think it's bad, but I do think it's not for me. Bob/Angels is... a beast. I think it's closer to CoI in terms of complexity, but CoI is more... integrated? There's a ton more poo poo in B&A in terms or raw products but I think the processes are less enmeshed than it was in CoI. I actually just took a couple week break from a B&A run to check out CoI. Pretty similar. Krastorio 2 is often recommended as a good introduction point to Factorio overhauls. It's not nearly as crunchy as CoI or B&A but it introduces some additional complexity along with some new toys to play with. If you're comfortable with CoI byproduct shuffling and bored of vanilla Factorio this probably isn't enough to close the gap, but I think it's worth mentioning in the conversation. I've only played about 5 hours of edit: Nullius lol (Nilaus is the youtuber) - it's got the crunch but it dives right in to piping hell which is one of my least favorite parts of Factorio. So many gasses to route around that I bounced off this one pretty hard. Also shoutout to Warptorio2. It doesn't add any of the crunch you're looking for but it does really juice the tower-defense aspect that is unique to Factorio in a way that I haven't found with any other mods. The time pressure of trying to maximize what you get out of your warps is great and the small amount of space you're forced to build in is very rad. MerrMan fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Feb 10, 2023 00:10
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Vizuyos posted: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. That's a lot of 1-1 trains!
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Feb 24, 2023 01:02
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The General posted:No payload. I just wanted to be done by that point. I think the last 8-10 hours was mostly just waiting for things to be constructed. My factory was so very fuckered up, and the idea of fixing it was too daunting, so it was mostly just limping along to the victory screen. Nice! Way to go! Tons of people bounce off their first playthrough around Blue Science (adding oil is tough) and even less make it through to the end. Launching that rocket feels so good! There are generally two routes people taking after launching that first rocket: Either stay Vanilla and start achievement hunting (with There is no Spoon being the big one) or mod the absolute gently caress out of the game. Both are super fun! Building blueprints and learning how to optimize poo poo for a No Spoon run is super fun - I did it and it's one of my all time favorite Steam Achievements I've ever gotten. On the other hand, there's so, so, so many great quality of life mods that playing strict vanilla is impossible to go back to at this point. If you're interested in achievements you might want to hold off on mods for a bit for that reason.
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Feb 28, 2023 00:43
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Has anyone played Exotic Industries? I'm looking for a big mod to try but it doesn't look like there's much in the way of new options. I've played K2 and Bob/Angels and there's no way I'm going to try Py so if you've got suggestions I'm listening.
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Jul 10, 2023 02:02
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The Locator posted:Yup.. that's one of the really cool things about the game, is that the engine is so flexible and mod-friendly that the community can make mods that turn it into almost a completely different game to appeal to all kinds of different people. I didn't mean to sound critical of people playing that mod, if that is indeed how my post came across. Yeah, I normally play with biters off to just chill and grow a sweet factory making widgets. But Warptorio is one of my favorite mods of all time for the way it flips the paradigm in to a space and time economy game from a grow-completely-out-of-hand game. Warping in and the biters go "REAL poo poo?!" while you try to take as much poo poo from them really tickled me. I haven't gone back top lay it again, mind, but I do think back fondly on it. I started playing Nullius and i'm about 7 hours in and oh boy am I in absolute Pipe Hell. So many fluids, so many of them not voidable, completely different ratios between them in terms of what is produced vs what I need to use in my early tech, needed in a bunch of different places in the factory. Even water is complex - seawater, saline water, water, brine, sludge, wastewater - each with different uses and all sorts of ways to shuffle them in to each other. guess I'm spoiled in Vanilla where I already know what industries to cluster together based on inputs and how they relate to each other and I'm just totally in the weeds here. Tried setting up Editor Extensions this morning for a test bed but it kept crashing. Not sure what that's about. Settled on Blueprint Sandboxes which seems like it is providing me what I'm looking for - a separate area to try to get a handle on what the gently caress is going on.
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Jul 17, 2023 17:27
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Been off Factorio for a while, but their expansion updates got me excited so I fired up a fresh game with Freight Forwarding. It's a light overhaul mod that focuses on long distance rail/boat transportation that fucks with stack size so that stuff doesn't stack as large but adds containers that hold 10x stack size. I'm really liking it! For me the most interesting part is that all the loading/unloading of the train are done with these Container Maker machines and then the trains have an inventory size of 5 so they pull up, an inserter swings like twice and a whole train load is on its way to wherever. It also adds an interesting logistical challenge that outposts need empty containers and production stops that use less containers than they require in input have to get rid of their empties somehow. Also the boats are neat even if they are just reskinned trains - I haven't gotten too deep in to them but I'm just getting in to the techs that are going to require more offshore drilling type stuff. As this is a train focused mod I also took this opportunity to check out Project Cybersyn. I've been using LTN for a long time and reddit has been gassing this mod up as the newer/better/easier to use LTN. It ... kind of is? I don't know, I find them to be pretty similar overall. At their base level of simple request / provide stations they are pretty similar in terms of complexity - number of entities needed and amount of circuit / wiring to set up. At the more complex end, Cybersyn seems to have more and easier options to explore - specifically with setting different request thresholds for different items making setting up mixed request stations a total breeze. It does lack some of the additional support that LTN has, though. There's no 'manager' type mods to get a glimpse in to your train network as a whole and it doesn't have as granular reporting on alerting you when requests can't be filled to let you know that something might be wrong somewhere. If you're looking for a Vanilla+ experience then I think I can recommend Freight Forwarding pretty strongly. I'd rate it at about Krastorio2 levels of difficulty, but in a different way. K2 adds more recipes and intermediates, but the increased difficulty in FF is more a logistical challenge.
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Oct 10, 2023 16:36
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LonsomeSon posted:lol Freight Forwarding sounds like everything I described for my reasons I hate barreling, but for solid cargo as well You're kind of half right. Barrels are annoying because they introduce a huge logistical challenge for basically no benefit - tanker trains do a better job of it in practically every case. But what if literally every item had to be put in to a barrel to get put on a train? Now you're solving that difficult logistical problem for your whole base rather than for some little niche use so it feels more fun? I've never hosed with barrels in vanilla or really in any of my modded runs either, I don't think. But trying to figure out how to collect empties where they gather and distribute them to where they are needed without just printing a billion of them and burning through steel has been a cool challenge. And, like, a different challenge than just adding a bunch of extra intermediaries to make building the next science pack more tedious.
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Oct 12, 2023 18:24
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Ok, Freight Forwarding has presented me with a problem that I have NO idea how to solve: How do I get rid of steam? Titansteel, the end-game resource plate, produces 500 degree steam as part of its output: Ok, fine. I pipe this in to some turbines, but it only gets used at a rate proportional to my used/generated power as a whole - and I way overdid power by building a 2x2 nuclear reactor so I'm only using about 30% of my capacity right now. Which means steam is getting used verryyyyyyyy slowly. I thought maybe I could disconnect it from my main grid and let it power itself - which is fine, but it's a pretty large power surplus even when handling the byproduct (slag) on the same network so it backs up just the same. I'm not sure how to prioritize this in particular, because if I put the nuclear plant on a switch then I don't have enough OTHER power to maintain the base. Not that I have any clue how to wire that switch since they are loving forever away from one another. The mod doesn't include any flare stack / chimney type building by default. I suppose I could just set up a non-necessary little factory to eat up the extra power - like that's where I churn out my Speed/Prod 3 modules, or something... I don't have a good idea of how much of the Titansteel I'm going to need but that might be my best solution in the short term.
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Oct 17, 2023 01:18
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Jabor posted:You could train it over to your nuke plant and shove it in those turbines. Set up some pumps to prioritize steam from the trains over steam from the reactor heat exchangers.  Oh jeez I always forget steam is a liquid that you can load in to tankers. I just grabbed a nuclear blueprint - not sure what'll happen if I import external steam, if that's even plausible. It has tanks that measure steam levels so that might work.uPen posted:I’d slap down about 20 of those ground pounding radars that take like 500 kw per. Circuit up a power switch to turn them on if stored garbage steam exceeds X. Also might just do this to keep it running for now. Thanks for the suggestions! Been a while since I hit something in this game that totally stumped me. And that the answer wasn't just "tech out" or "scale out"
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Oct 17, 2023 03:07
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Space Platforms look great. Love the no bots and incentive to keep the platform as small as possible. Space restrictions are actually really great in the game because they force you to think differently. It's one of the reasons that I loved Warptorio. Only expansion thing I've seen so far that hasn't been an immediate HELL YEAH is the quality stuff. Maybe it'll be fine, and it does fit in with "the factory must grow" churning out a billion widgets but it just kinda looks like... I guess it's the RNG that bugs me - everything else is so deterministic. In the base game is the only thing that isn't 100% getting Uranium-235 from Uranium Processing? I'm sure it'll be fine.
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Oct 21, 2023 17:31
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Finished my Freight Forwarding run. Great mod! It felt like they did a really great job of focusing on the logistical challenge. There were a few new recipe lines (Cobalt, in particular, was cool) but the big challenge was figuring out how to move stuff around and handle all the crates. I ended up finding a mega-continent pretty far away that had all the resources on it so I relied mostly on trains and only used the boats where I had to with Cobalt dredging. I didn't super care for boats, they were just reskinned trains that didn't do a ton for me. I also appreciated that it didn't overextend its end game: you need to launch ~10 rockets to unlock the game winning item, so just like 11 rockets to get the 'victory' screen. I thought about staying around to launch a few more but my chip production area was hosed and I couldn't be bothered to fix it. There was an annoying interaction with unpacking a box of goods and how that interacted with the stack size. The boxes held 10x stack size, so when you unpack one then the machine would stop because the output was full. But then it wouldn't start again until you'd removed all but one stack of that item so it had room for the next process to run. But the unpack time was so long that you'd end up with a downtime where you finished unloading the previous pack but the next one isn't ready yet so your belts run dry. Not terrible but just meant you needed to overbuild unpacking infrastructure compared to packing. A 1:1 would leave you with empty belts some amount of the time. Riding high off that victory I immediately fired up Exotic Industries. Regret? A little regret. Going from a fully automated rail network back to the dark ages is quite a surprise. I underestimated how much the research requirements would grow within a tech tier and am really slogging my way through the Steam age. It's been a while since I played a mod with a Steam age (I think maybe Industrial Revolution a long time ago?) and it's actually kind of interesting, so that's good. Piping the steam around and trying to build assembly lines with all these fuckin pipes everywhere is a different challenge. But I thought I could just hand feed some smaller builds and tech through to electricity before setting up a more 'real' bus focused build. Well, I'm on like hour 4 of handfeeding my Steam Age science pack setup and am crawling towards a (also hand fed) Electricity Age science setup. I think I should be over the hump in another hour or so but daaaamn is it slow. I did research rail early so I'd like to switch to that right away but I think power transfer will be a problem and I'm not sure where Large power poles are.
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Oct 24, 2023 17:47
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K8.0 posted:This week in FFF : Combinator Rework. These look great. The Decider Combinator always bothered me with how... dumb it was. Multi-condition operations were already in and done for Train logic but to put a similar thing together anywhere else you had to place a bunch of different combinators and wire them all up in a way that was: annoying to set up, easy to gently caress up and difficult to debug. Still can't believe the release is not until mid-next-year at the earliest. Basically with every post I'm just like NOW PLEASE?! Ah well. Cruising through my Exotic Industries playthrough. Using a city block design and really digging in to the meat of Project Cybersyn as the control for it. It makes multi-request stations very easy to setup and that's proving to be incredibly powerful. Some interesting stuff in Exotic Industries, just had to take a couple hours off to design my next power plant using their High Temperature Reactors and it was a pretty fun challenge. Interested to see what the later tech levels hold, there's been a few interesting design challenges so far - Uranium processing in particular was cool and different. My oil setup still loving sucks, it still gets backed up on a couple of the different outputs even with me doing my damndest to make sure it doesn't happen. Currently I'm way up on Petroleum and way down on Lubricant so I think it might be time to setup a Coal Liquefaction setup to inject a bunch more Heavy Oil. Not sure - I'm almost to needing to make Rocket Fuel which I think is going to drain the whole system but I'll need to think of some better controls when I expand it.
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Nov 11, 2023 00:45
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You're not going to be going to another planet until you're already generating white science. Presumably that means you'll be able to send a few stacks of cliff explosives with your first expedition (although I guess there's a cost to get them from Nauvis --> platform --> Vulcanus) and clear a usable starting area. I'm with Xerol - cliffs still on but low freq / high continuity. I don't think the Nauvis experience is enhanced too much by having them around, more of a nuisance, but if the new planet is designed with them in mind I hope they play a more interesting role. Still grinding my Exotic Industries playthrough, although I took a break for some Lies of P off game pass. Launching rockets at a steady clip and expanding all my basic infrastructure to meet demands to allow for that. Project Cybersyn has been really impressive for this run and is incredibly powerful. I was a pretty proficient LTN user before, but I'm fully converted to PC. Setting up a basic station is similar in complexity but doing more complex tasks (specifically different request thresholds for a station) is so much easier in PC that it's an easy winner.
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Nov 25, 2023 21:05
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zedprime posted:Yeah, cliff explosives were specifically called out as being from an intermediate planet. Oh poo poo I totally missed that. But cliff explosives are only green tech right now... Huh, that's kind of annoying
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Nov 26, 2023 02:33
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Abandoned my Exotic Industries playthrough where I do in most late-game oriented mods: at the expanding rocket infrastructure stage. There's some limit my brain hits where 'the factory must grow' loses to 'building another furnace stack is absolutely mind numbing'. Cool mod, though. I liked the new uranium processing and the energy crystal bootstrapping / replication but the tech cost scaling was a little too much for me. Switched over to Ultracube and holy poo poo this is wild. It feels like it fits the factorio mold so well - it's this super simple idea that just turns the whole game on its head. I've got my cube production bus that then shunts all the resources out to an ugly rear end not-cube-needing bus. But every process you add to the cube bus means it takes longer for the cube to circle back, so then you add more buffer but then the cube stays at each process longer which poses a similar problem. I just got blue science automated (limping along at like 20spm lmao) and unlocked cube splitting which seems neat in theory but I can't make too many products with it right now and it is a huge power hog. The very last thing I unlocked before taking a break was loaders (finally!) and I think those should be a really big help with some throughput problems on machines.
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Jan 20, 2024 20:30
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Much stronger narrative in this FFF than maybe anything we've seen from the Factorio devs before. I doubt they'll work that in to the game proper (they've relied exclusively on Show don't tell so far) but it was a cool change of pace for this post. Pretty cool way to introduce the new planet, but I'm obviously fiending for more details. Seems like a pretty good bet that this will be the recycling planet - digging through the ruins of some ancient civ to turn it in to iron gears or whatever. Also harnessing lightning as a power source is going to make this an accumulator-heavy planet that has big spikes of energy production that you'll have to weather (hawhaw) until the next storm comes around I would guess. Yeah, they said "at least a year" near the end of last summer, so I'm hoping for an autumn release this year. Every week my hype builds and there's still so much more poo poo to show - I'm incredibly stoked. Although I'm not sure I can even stomach a pure vanilla, mod free game - there's so many QoL things that I've come to rely on that almost certainly don't make it in to the base game. Stuff like Long Reach, and Squeak Through are probably the least game break-y but still too out of line with their vision for the base game that I would seriously miss playing without them.
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Feb 16, 2024 18:48
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SettingSun posted:Mod is good. Wish I had a head for cleaner fluid layouts. If you're not against powerful mods, I recommend Advanced Fluid Handling. The 1 segment underground connector, L and T junction undergrounders are all amazing at helping simplify layouts. Plus you can tell yourself it's good for UPS because it is less pipe entities. The configurable above-ground connectors get very powerful with how much space you can save and what kind of layouts you can pull off when you don't need to worry about as many normal pipes running in to each other. I don't think we've seen any sort of pipe improvements coming in the expansion so I assume they are happy with the moderately clumsy normal pipe and underground interactions. But also Vanilla Factorio only has 8 total fluids and you pass that point by green science in Nullius so I think the increased power level is fine to match the increased complexity.
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Feb 19, 2024 20:41
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necrotic posted:The FFF looks fantastic. Take your time, wube, I know it will be worth the wait. On the one hand, yes this is a reasonable take that I agree with. But on the other hand GIVE IT TO ME NOWWWWWWW. FFF is great, new planet looks great. The obvious things from last week's post came through (recycling as the main harvesting mechanic and lightning for power) but the island concept is pretty neat. I like the idea of the three distinct 'tiers' of islands forcing you to make choices about where to build - not soooo thrilled about maintaining several power grids on the same planet, though. You'll be able to tech out of it eventually so maybe it'll be an interesting short-term problem to solve. I believe. They are still real hot on the quality mechanic and I'm still not totally convinced. I think it's the new feature that's been mentioned more than any other so far so they must be sure it's good. Again I'm choosing to believe. Took a break from my ultracube run to play Helldivers 2 and just recently came back to it for a real "wait, what the gently caress do all these circuits do?" moment. It's an even messier plate of spaghetti than the average base.
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Feb 23, 2024 18:34
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Bummer they didn't reveal something cool for FFF 400 but that's fine. This search stuff looks neat and will save me from labeling so much poo poo on the map to help keep myself organized. The example video they have at the top of the FFF has a dedicated steam trains top. Has me wondering where all that steam is going?
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Mar 2, 2024 00:41
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Zeratanis posted:
Bobs is pretty good about giving you better tiers of buildings and more efficient (though usually longer production chains) recipes to pump out more of the mid tier intermediates. It's definitely a part of the mod that the first time you produce an item you're using a ton of buildings that are all slow and terrible to limp out like 10/min. I think it's something that bob/angel does pretty well, although I've never found upgrading Chem Plant X to Chem Plant X+1 to be that exciting.
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Apr 25, 2024 20:52
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I've no clue how I'm going to set this poo poo up for scale for a whole belt or two's worth considering to even get a yellow belt saturated I would need like, 100x the buildings.