Factorio: Captain Planet doesn't stand a chance.

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celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Been working on a save for awhile. Trying to get to 10K science per minute (mining prod research) without blowing up my potato laptop. Here's a sample of how I'm doing blue chips for yellow science. AMA

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# ¿ Apr 11, 2023 15:05

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:58

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

kanonvandekempen posted:

I guess you're new to the game? They are beacons, you load them up with modules and they will transmit the effect to everything within their limited range. Only needed if you get to the megabase-stage where you're measuring your succes in science-per-minute. If you're going for your first rocket launch they are not needed.

Accurate about beacons since their main role is to compound productivity bonuses when you have prod 3 in 99.9% of the machines that will accept them. You have "gently caress you" wealth before you get to that point. The build I had for my first launch in this save looked nothing whatsoever like this lol.

Although, I think beginners don't use modules enough. Efficiency 1 and Productivity 1 are terrific deals in the right machines, paying for themselves right away.

Prod 3 in the silo pays for itself on literally the first launch too.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2023 15:18

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

edit: reversed the messages so it's easier to read w/ the attachment

Chakan posted:

How tile-able is the stuff in that screenshot?

It tiles, but each cell consumes so much raw ore that you can't go very far before you have to weave in more belts.

Solumin posted:

10k spm?!? My current project is a 1kspm megafactory, and it already feels ridiculous.

How are you handling power?

I'm glad you asked! This is probably my favorite part of the whole base. Behold my solar field: guaranteed not to exceed 110GW! You're looking at I think 3-4 million solar panels plus accumulators to maintain supply at night.

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celestial teapot fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Apr 11, 2023

# ¿ Apr 11, 2023 16:57

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Thanks for the kudos

Since y'all are digging it, I'll post some more porn. Here's the bottom-right corner of my low density structures for making rocket parts.

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# ¿ Apr 11, 2023 20:16

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Breetai posted:

https://youtu.be/mgfwwqwxdxY

DaveMcW is the GOAT of Factorio :worship:

# ¿ Apr 12, 2023 21:33

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

The Locator posted:

Dude is both brilliant... and kind of insane.

Check out this writeup on DaveMcW's 1 RDPM base all the way back in 0.11. He does all kinds of amazing stuff that he doesn't publish to youtube, which is a big shame.

Here's his winning submission for a competition to do chemical processing with best performance.

Blows my mind. I asked him if he would stream on twitch or something but he said it would just stress him out.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2023 02:36

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Solumin posted:

Dear modules and beacons: I'm sorry I every said you weren't worth using. I didn't realize how useful it would be to cut the amount of copper my megabase uses in half without massively increasing the number of assemblers needed.

Productivity modules can be an insanely good deal in the right machines. I think beginners don't use prod 1 nearly enough.

Check out the payoffs: https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#productivity-module-payoffs

If you have prods throughout your supply chain, the savings compound! That's not being tracked on this chart, so it's actually way better than it looks.

Consider that 4x productivity mk3 in a rocket silo pays for itself on literally the first rocket launch. Speedrunners always use prod modules! That should tell you something.

I always get Prod 1 in all my labs ASAP also. It's a no-brainer.

ALT-F4 #25 has an awesome visualization of the power of Efficiency Mk1 also. If you play with biters enabled, you should consider putting them in your remote drills and other highly polluting machines.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2023 16:09

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

IMlemon posted:

Vanilla can become a bit boring though, with almost every build becoming very similar with 4 prod modules and 8 speed beacons. It's hard to do something else once you're aware this option exists and learn some common belt routing tricks to work with the limited space. I'm actually looking forward to playing SE solely because of the beacon changes.

Go down the rabbit hole of UPS optimization and you'll be introduced to a new world. 8 and 12 beacon is almost always wrong. Beacons themselves have a small UPS cost, but you have so many of them that you have to think constantly about how to get the machines laid out so that you can get the beacon affects you need without over-beaconing anything at the same time. And what counts as "too much" depends on what is consuming the thing you're making so it's always different.

It's not for everyone but I am having a lot of fun, and when people say "Beacons make everything look the same"... I know what they mean and I empathize, but to me it's just not true.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2023 18:37

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

A fun, if offbeat use for circuit logic comes from UPS optimization too.

Problem: inserters unloading steel plates onto a belt will wake up as soon as there is 1 steel plate in the furnace. But that's wasted inserter activity, which is a hit to UPS (and wastes power, if you care about that).

How would you design an inserter clock to ensure that the inserter doesn't wake up until there are 12 plates in the furnace, without sacrificing throughput?

If you don't want to figure it all out yourself, there's a YouTube video describing one reliable approach, and a python script that does the math shown in this video and spits out a blueprint.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2023 18:14

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Clocking inserters is definitely not always going to help in every context, but in bases big enough to give you UPS problems, some recipes should be clocked when unloaded onto belts. Steel and advanced circuits are common examples, because the recipes are often too slow to direct insert.

Belts got tons of optimizations between 0.16-0.18. Inserter activity is still a huge drain on UPS in a big base in 1.1.

But you can test stuff like this yourself, and I recommend that you do. There's so much folklore out there from gurus who have been playing the game forever and so they tell you about UPS concerns that have been optimized out long ago. For instance Nilaus did a video tutorial on UPS optimization that is full of misinformation that doesn't apply anymore in 1.1.

Scientific doubt is good! You should not believe it just because I told you, or anyone else on the internet told you. `factorio --benchmark` is powerful

# ¿ Apr 25, 2023 14:46

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Freaksaus posted:

I'm very interested to learn about UPS optimization, my curreny py base is becoming quite big and it's been a while since I've had a solid 60 ups. Right now it's usually between 55-60 depending on where on the map I am.

Now I've got a new PC coming soon, which should help a lot, but I'm still interested to know how to look for bottlenecks, both with mods that I'm using or specific entities. So far the F4 Debug screen does nothing but confuse me.

I took a quick look at the benchmarking, but how do I measure differences if I don't even know where to start replacing things in my current save to compare. Plus I assume a py base, which lots of moving parts but mostly lot output is very different compared to a more vanilla save.

It's easy to profile the UPS cost of mods by using debug options, yeah. Getting better hardware is always good too, of course.

As far as how to build a base so that the simulation is less computationally intensive to run... pyanodons is gonna make that hard

I haven't played it myself, but it looks like there would be a lot of reprocessing of materials.

I'm happy to answer questions about how a factory can be built in a UPS optimized way in the base game though. I assume a lot of it would apply in pyanodons, but I can't say what's different.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2023 21:56

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Someone posted this on the discord recently. That or something like it should be good enough to get you to bots I'd think.

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2023 20:45

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

M_Gargantua posted:

They're inefficient and a bandaid for poor demand planning

Technically correct! Although a main bus is pretty much an admission that you're not going to plan for demand. Even eight blue belts of copper on a main bus is ridiculously low in a save where you want to launch more than one rocket. But that's okay, because the main bus gets you to white science.

In other words a main bus is pretty much a mall that also makes science packs. It gets you to the late game, whatever that is, and that's fine I think.

It's worth pointing out that the way they are doing waterfalls is just strictly wrong and will lead to very unbalanced supply downstream. I considered editing that part out of the screenshot but :effort:

# ¿ Apr 28, 2023 15:48

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

GetDunked posted:

Ooh, what are those staircase-looking splitter setups? I've been playing this again recently and re-learning a lot of stuff from scratch.

It's part of main bus architecture basically. Check out the guide. Main bus has poor demand planning

, but it's very hard to box yourself in with your own spaghetti if you follow it.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2023 15:56

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

GetDunked posted:

Ahh okay. I've been following that guide in trying to set my stuff up. I've been doing the 4 lane balancer gizmo in between taking all the stuff off belts and was wondering if the chained splitters was an easier way to take stuff off.

Probably yes, although not like the screenshot I posted. Check out the wiki, it has some tips for splitting off the bus and description of the mechanics involved: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Main_bus#Split-off

GetDunked posted:

I had no idea you could configure splitters... Currently I'm fighting lakes, cliffs, and trees more than my own infrastructure which is a good sign? I think?

Yeah that's your life now.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2023 17:54

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Plug for Train Control Signals mod. If you find it annoying to refuel trains AND you don't want to buy-in on LTN, this is the way to go.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2023 01:37

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

"Optional feature"

Yeah, no, if you put it in the game, I'm gonna grind for it, even if I don't like to grind. That right there is why I don't play WoW in a nutshell.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2023 17:27

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Harvey Baldman posted:

I have a question - it feels like there's a smart solution to my problem but I might not have enough experience with the game to recognize it yet.

Your unloading setup is the safe and standard version but it's over-engineered for what you're trying to do here, and that's making this problem look more complex than it otherwise should be.

Since your end goal is mixed belts you could unload only half belts, which makes the mixing simpler. Here's one implementation I just threw together to try to illustrate the idea.

This also has the benefit of using fewer inserters and splitters. In your screenshot many of these stack inserters will spend most of their time idle, especially once you have maxed the stack size. You don't need that many green inserters to flood a red belt!

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# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 20:05

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

By the way, one green inserter can fully compress half of a red belt all by itself, if you have it unloading directly onto a splitter!

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# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 20:10

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

I'm not trying to shame anyone - sorry if that came off wrong.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 21:12

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Harvey Baldman posted:

gently caress, I have a few designs I have to go back and poke at with this approach in mind now, this is so much easier.

Full belt variations

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# ¿ Jan 17, 2024 18:47

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

meowmeowmeowmeow posted:

When building a bot-mall do you keep a separate belt fed production zone for high volume logistics stuff like belts, splitters, rails, etc to keep throughput high? Multiple assemblers in the bot mall and tons of logi bots to keep stuff moving? RN I'm setting up the bot mall with all the inputs belts going into a passive provider warehouse with circuit controlled filter inserters to load goods, then doing your standard bot assemblers for everything and im not sure if I should throw my belts and rails into this or keep it separate.

A good mall supports burst demand over max sustainable throughput. Use lots and lots of buffer chests, bot everything, and don't worry about it.

celestial teapot fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Jan 17, 2024

# ¿ Jan 17, 2024 22:15

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

celestial teapot posted:

Full belt variations

Looking at this again, I realized I can get four red belts per wagon. Blueprint string

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# ¿ Jan 18, 2024 17:12

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Is that commonly done? I haven't seen an unloader that pulls 4 red belts per wagon before :thunk:

# ¿ Jan 18, 2024 21:42

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

zedprime posted:

Inserting into splitters was verboten by the UPS police for being not optimized so you won't see it in the mass market blueprints. But you're beautiful just the same.

I don't think it's the UPS hit it used to be but it was memory holed so hard you won't see it till you go looking for it or reinvent it yourself.

Sadly, going from belt to train or vice versa is verboten by the UPS police. So is using red belts at all... I love focusing hard on UPS optimization and building as big as I can, but trains are fun too, you know?

Unloading onto splitters doesn't do much good with blue belts I'm afraid, since you can't flood a belt that way like you can with a red belt. The 3 blue belts per wagon unloader is also quite hard to balance, so if I need fast unloading I am content with this:

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# ¿ Jan 18, 2024 22:28

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

A lane balancer cannot increase throughput on the belt.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2024 03:21

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

meowmeowmeowmeow posted:

Thanks, I generally knew that but was concerned it could lead to uneven unloading of wagons more so than a throughput issue.

I balance unloading from wiring all the inserters together and set to hand read hold with 'everything = 0' as their condition so they only swing again once every inserter has emptied its hand and I guess that keeps everything even so I don't need to worry about it?

You're losing a lot of throughput that way. Put belt balancers after your unloading station. Check out raynquist's balancer book.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2024 17:07

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

K8.0 posted:

Are you certain the trains are coming in evenly loaded? The outcome you're describing should not happen.

That, or the buffer chests are unbalanced. You'd have to stop the process, get buffer chests filled up, then manually send the unevenly unloaded train back to a patch to reload.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2024 01:47

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

meowmeowmeowmeow posted:

pretty basic unloading station afaik. Only thing I can think of is sometimes with intermittent sinks the next train will arrive before the buffers empty and some kind of early unbalance in the chests is compounding or something, or I'm missing something obvious.

The circuits are completely superfluous I assure you

# ¿ Jan 21, 2024 16:41

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

M_Gargantua posted:

Using inserters and chest and splitters will always work, but without a circuit you can't always guarentee full speed throughput of both the train and the belts. A stack inserter moving from wagon to chest moves a full stack each swing, but if the inserters pulling from the chests are even slightly unbalanced, as often happens with belt-only systems, then at times you can be down one or two inserters pulling from the car. Now that car unloads slower, and the train has to wait for the one wagon to finish after the rest, and this starts compounding after hours of operation.

The standard balancer circuit avoids this by ensuring that each Train->Chest->Belt is always operating equally fast. The circuits are not superfluous, but you are correct in that they are not necessary as passive balancing gets you close enough.

The throughput-unlimited balancer at the end ensures this already without the need for circuits limiting inserter throughput. Your problem might be that you're not sideloading the belts like meowmeowmeow is, which privileges some buffer chests over others. Regardless, meowmeowmeow can certainly remove the circuits in that screenshot without any loss in performance - belts or trains.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2024 21:04

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Also, the buffer chests have to be even when the fully loaded train enters the station.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2024 21:15

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

TheFluff posted:

That doesn't really explain why the wagons get drained unevenly though

It doesn't explain it at all. There's no vulnerability to lane imbalances that are downstream from the station; the trains themselves balance these out. All we need is to ensure that the wagons are fully loaded and buffer chests are already evenly (un)loaded when each train enters the station, and finally that we run all the belts through a TU balancer before removing anything from them.

I'm creeping up on 4k hours in this game and I never saw a station get unbalanced unless one of those conditions was not being met. Much more often, hacks like circuit controlled inserters paint over mistakes upstream or downstream from the station.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2024 23:28

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

I don't know why this doesn't deadlock, but it doesn't no matter how long I run it, so I keep using it :shrug:

# ¿ Jan 25, 2024 17:50

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

I know how to attach images :v:

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# ¿ Jan 25, 2024 17:50

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Since we're sharing nuclear builds, here's the best tiling nuclear installation design I've found so far: https://factorioblueprints.tech/blueprint/0c7dc7a0-341c-4af2-8f56-f665c5bfb4fc

celestial teapot fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jan 25, 2024

# ¿ Jan 25, 2024 21:27

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Xerol posted:

At >50GW scales the heat pipe calculations start to add up to the point where it's worth replacing. Plus, why have infinite artillery range research if you're not going to pave the world in solar panels?

I like how you think. cf, my 110GW solar field:

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# ¿ Jan 26, 2024 15:39

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

VictualSquid posted:

Replace the bus with a rail system, and you got a perfectly fine megabase concept.

Behold the Train Bus!

# ¿ Jan 27, 2024 17:14

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

M_Gargantua posted:

They didn't answer the most important question: Is Honk now included?

Choleric cars should be a vanilla feature

# ¿ Feb 5, 2024 20:18

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Majere posted:

Yes, but use Rate Calculator instead. Max Rate Calc hasnt been updated in years

This. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RateCalculator

# ¿ Mar 1, 2024 18:33

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:58

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Didn't DaveMcW already solve the omnismelter?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiMJ156RZWs

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 17:14

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