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 What Is Factorio? Factorio is a WIP, early-access title from Wube Software nearing the end of that stage after over four years in development. The wiki describes it as a 'game in which you build and maintain factories'. I'd say it fits in the puzzle-solving/engineering/logistics genre. 'Minecraft Automated' is another phrase that is bandied about, and that concept played no small part in inspiring the developers. Why This, Here, Now? Short answer is 'because it's time'. Currently the 0.15.x version is essentially complete, and development is focused on 0.16, the final version before 1.0 release and the end of early access. There was one 'legacy' LP by Evil Reaver several versions ago, but a great deal has changed since then. There's still a quite active discussion in the Games section as well, and some of those involved in it are clearly more advanced players than I. Most of the planned changes between now and development being 'finished' are minor or cosmetic: it's time for Factorio to get the full treatment. Since nobody else has stepped up to the plate, it was an easy choice for this to be my next project. I've thought about it many times before, but wanted to wait until 0.15 was finished and stable. That's been the case for a number of weeks now, so I'm excited to get this show on the road. Spoilers There's nothing I'm worried about spoiling in this game; fire away without concerns. LP Details Mostly a SSLP here, with some video sprinkled in as brief demonstrations of gameplay aspects mostly. I intend at least two play-throughs. The first will be in vanilla, and be heavy on exposition at first as I explain the game and go through things in a methodical style that I think is appropriate to learning. I'll endeavor not to be too long-winded in that, but I like trying to make things accessible to anyone who might read this and not be particularly familiar with the game. Some will be new to me as well, as I've only beaten Factorio once and that was months ago on 0.14, so there are new features/aspects. Showing how to think your way through Factorio, so to speak, will be the goal there. The second I plan on doing will have greatly increased difficulty/complexity by the use of both settings and mods, most likely some version of AngelBobs for those familiar with the community. Versioning I'm tracking with the GOG version, which is currently 0.15.34. That came out three weeks ago. When a new major version is released, updates come fast and furious: 0.15.0 hit on April 24 of this year, and the first 'stable candidate' was 0.15.31, three months later almost to the day. .34 is the only one that's come out in almost six weeks and even that didn't include anything of major concern for our purposes here. Wube does a great job in support: they've had weekly updates known as 'Friday Facts' every week for over 200 of them, and I'm highly confident that there will be no significant problems. Cool Factorio Links ** Gameplay Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVvXv1Z6EY8 This is outdated, but still gives a good sense of things. ** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kry8lbrHjeY&t=30s Get rick-rolled, and like it. ** GreyGoo MK I: Self-Expanding Factory(or if you like, von Neumann machine) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM ** Speedrun by AntiElitz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6ybxDx8kOY&t= This is 0.14, the previous version, and it takes longer now. Still fascinating though for people interested in such things. Much of what's in those links is WAY beyond my capabilities. Might as well be Greek or Japanese or whatever. Useful though IMO to whet the appetite -- one of the great things about Factorio is the amazing variety of things it is flexible enough to potentially do. For those who choose to stick around at this point; you have elected to ingest the blue bill. Let's see how deep the rabbit-hole goes ...
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Sep 17, 2017 05:53
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 And so it begins. The protagonist, our nameless avatar, is alone on a strange planet. He's crash-landed here in his ship, and we frankly don't know a whole lot else. There's a significant random element to map generation: for this game I restarted a few dozen times until I found something convenient for our purposes here. Settings are the defaults; you can change available resources, danger level of the planet, cost of research, environmental factors, etc. but again no messing around with that stuff for the initial run. You can see the 'win condition' here, such as it is. Launch a rocket with a satellite. The basic idea here, although it's not developed in any detail, is that you crash-landed on this planet and were able to scavenge a very few useful supplies from the wreckage. The satellite would presumably be used to communicate with others of your civilization and request a rescue, inform about your situation, etc. You don't have to stop there if you don't want to. We will be for this game; the second one probably will involve other projects afterwards.  After getting rid of the intro message, the main interface opens up. Most of it is your basic top-down view where you can run around and interact with the world, as here.  This is the quickbar, persistently shown at the bottom centre. Juggling inventory is a constant thing, and this helps keep it sane. Generally it's used for items you need frequently, and you can lock them to a position, hot-key them, etc. Items here will re-fill automatically from your main inventory, if available. The two shown here are a burner mining drill and stone furnace. We'll get back to those.  This is in the lower right corner, and is for essential equipment. The only thing we have here, in the second column, is a pistol and 10 ammo magazines for self-defense. Better than nothing. Each slot can only hold a specific type of item in the equipment bar.  Here is the minmap, in our upper-right corner. The buttons above the map are fairly recent additions and we'll get to most of them later. The 'graduation cap', third from the right, is for Tutorials. The far-right wreath or whatever is for Achievements. Some acheivements we'll see here and I'll show when they come up; I've reset mine for this so they can be seen. Others are naturally for more advanced challenges.  This is the 'character' display. Note the sizable inventory on the left. This is rather massive and can actually be expanded later through research. You'll need it. Oh you'll need it. One more slot is filled here(iron plates), and that completes all the starting resources we possess: ** 8 Iron Plates ** 1 Pistol ** 10 Firearm Magazins ** 1 Stone Furnace ** 1 Burner Mining Drill As far as this display itself is concerned, items here can be moved to the quickbar, and vice-versa. That's all 'click-and-drag' functionality. On the right side is the Crafting interface. By Crafting we simply mean 'building stuff yourself'. In keeping with the spirit of Factorio, the goal will be to only craft what we must. There's an achievement for taking this to extremes(Lazy Bastard, crafting 111 items or less, with 101 or so the minimum so there's not much room for error). I won't be going to nearly that much of an extreme, but you're generally better off automating as much as possible. It's basically the point of the game. Even at the start, there are 31 different items that can be made(and so very many more will be added later); almost all of them can be hand-crafted. Most of them we need not concern ourselves with now. Notice I've moused-over the 'copper plate' to show the tool-tip details. The clock icon is how many seconds it takes to make, below that are the ingredients required(1 copper ore). The red background means it can't be crafted by hand -- most things can be, but the tool-tip tells us it's made in a building(furnaces, in this case). Raw ore cannot be turned into usable plates without them. Resources: A Strange, Bountiful Planet  Here is the zoomable, movable full minimap display. There are overlays that can be used for other purposes, but we'll get back to those another time. The black area around the edge are areas we know nothing about. The available exploring area is infinite up to the processing ability of your PC. We won't be testing those limits in this game. The lightest square in the middle is the area where we can detect any movement; the darker but still revealed area are places where we have knowledge of the terrain, but not of any hostile threats that might lurk there. The vanilla-colored circle is our avatar, the engineer protagonist. Notice the 'iron ore 144k' and the highlight of that resource field. That's a new and positive change in 0.15.x, telling us what resource and how much. Iron is the primary resource for building things initially and will always be needed in large amounts. I have also, and quite badly, drawn numbers on some areas for identification: 1. Amber-colored stuff is copper. Needed only in small amounts early on, it is primarily used for things that require electronics. More advance things need a lot of this. 2. Water. Good old H20. An inexhaustible supply of it in fact. It won't be long before this is a critical part of our factory. Also importantly, the 'natives' aren't amphibious, so it's an impenetrable barrier to them. 3. These splotches are the forests. Some players will say trees just get in the way. I've intentionally chosen a world with a good amount of them nearby though. They can be used for wood, which will be necessary in moderate quantities, but also absorb pollution. 4. The black is coal, the best initial fuel source and also useful for a few others things later. 5. I guess I'd call this off-white? These areas yield stone, a necessary building material. Also, note just below it the small bright green ore that is too small to be numbered. That's uranium, a 0.15 addition. We can't do anything with it yet. In fact, I've personally never used it, something that will change in the course of this game. 6. Plain old open terrain. There are no resources here, but stretches of open land are very much a valuable commodity in and of themselves. We need space to build without being too constricted. 7. The purple dots here are crude oil sources. We don't have the technical ability to do anything with petrol yet, can't even acquire it. Like uranium, that will change. We Are Not Alone There's one other aspect of the planet that we need to consider; the native population. An insectoid species, colloquially known simply as the 'Biters', will complicate our efforts. They do not appear to be capable of communication to the point of negotiating, and they are definitely hostile. Though there are none in the immediate vicinity(biters show up as bright red on the map), rest assured they are there lurking in the blackness of our surroundings somewhere. For now it is sufficient to understand three things about Biters: ** Biters are not static. They will actively enlarge their 'nests' or 'hives', and build new ones in nearby areas. We are not the only pro-active force on this world; merely the most advanced. ** Biters HATE pollution. Desecrate the airspace around their nests, and they will absorb a good part of it -- and send an attack wave against the general source of that pollution. The only such source is us, and our factory. ** Biters evolve. Pollution is the primary driver of this; the more pollution, the more 'biter evolution'. This takes the general form of larger, hardier, and more dangerous variants. Time also drives the evolution, but it is a much smaller factor. These facts produce some basic conclusions. First, time is against us. Standing around with our proverbial thumb up your arse plays into their hands. We must constantly be doing something to forward our goal and progress; if not, we are simply ensuring things will become more difficult later on. Secondly, don't over-pollute early on. The time will come when we are able to take the best they can dish out, and return it with interest. Right now, with a pistol and a few spare mags, is not that time. Some pollution is unavoidable, but be sensible about it. Third, don't ignore combat preparedness. There are lots of them, and only one of you -- screw up badly enough, and your end will come. That should just about do it in terms of understanding what's out there; now how do we pratically interact with and aquire these goodies? Mining Mining, in game terms, involves any act of removing something from the planet and taking it yourself. That includes things you might not normally think of as 'mining' per se, such as removing something you've built and previously placed, chopping down trees, etc.  As you can see here, coal has a hardness of 0.9(0.1 through 1.0 is the scale) and a mining time of 2. It also has a fuel value of 8 MJ(megajoules). Trees have the same mining time, but a hardness of 0.5 which means less effort(and time) is required to get them. They also yield four units of raw wood at a time, whereas coal gives only one unit at a time. The fuel value of wood is half that of coal, 4 MJ. The other point that matters here is that trees, as mentioned before, absorb pollution. Every tree you cut down means pollution will spread further before it dissipates. Goals Factorio is a sandbox-y beast, but for this game at least I'm going to approach it in a fairly logical manner. 1. The ultimate goal is building the rocket to 'win' the game. 2. That requires many things, including a large, expansive factory(at least by our very basic current reckoning of things, you'll find 'big' to be a relative term in the Factorio community), but aside from a lot of materials and buildings there will also be a need for a lot of research to advance our capabilities. 3. Research labs require power, with steam being our only power source option at the moment. 4. Minimally, steam requires stone(minable by hand), and more copper and iron plates. We can't craft these plates; they must be smelted from the raw, minable ore at some kind of furnace. 5. Making any kind of real progress in the game then will require, at some level, a smelting operation for both copper and iron. A reliable source of fuel will be needed for this. 6. Iron and stone, but not copper, are required for the equipment to get this up and running. 7. Wood is the quickest fuel source to acquire, and we'll need it for other things as well. 25-30 to start, or 6-8 trees, is usually more than sufficient. The first thing to do, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS, is craft an iron axe. Costs half of our initial iron plates, but it's more than worth it as it greatly speeds up mining. Here's an example of how long it takes to chop down a tree without, and then with, the axe:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCdSxDO6PC8 As you can see it's much faster with than without.  The damage relates to the fact that you can use the axe for combat. If it ever comes to that though, you're in big trouble. Mining Power relates to how easily the axe can 'cut through' tougher substances to mine them. 2.5 is much better than the player's starting natural ability. Also note the durability here. Axes wear out through use. 50 of the 4k starting value was already used up by chopping a single tree. It's a good idea to have a spare on hand, and once I get a few things going I pretty much always do that. Iron's the basic building block, we need it to expand operations beyond our initial drill and furnace -- everything points in the direction of getting that going first. Let's take a look at how all that works:  Furnace on top, burner mining drill on the bottom, placed on the edge of an iron ore resource patch. Both are flashing the red 'gas pump' icon, which indicates they need fuel. Also note the 'up' arrow on the drill, which shows where product will exit. This can be rotated to any of the four primary directions(up, down, left, right), before or after placing a building.  There are hotkeys for adding fuel to a building without opening up it's interface every time, but this is what the furnace looks like when you do open it. The three square boxes at the top all hold something. The top two separated by the progress bar are the Resource and Result spots: put something in the Resource spot that a furnance can use, and you will get the finished product in Result. The 'gas station' icon is rather obviously where you put the Fuel in. Below is my inventory again; 16 wood, 4 iron plates. Adding some of the wood by dragging it up there(or Ctrl-right-click to send half automatically) makes the flashing 'I need fuel' icon cease and desist.  The drill is even more simple: give it fuel to burn and I'll use it up producing, in this case, iron ore. Whatever it's placed on is what you get; you can't even place a drill on empty ground with no resources. It can use up what's within range for it to mine, but we aren't going to be using this one long enough for that to matter.  Now we need to deal with getting the ore from the drill into the furnace. Left alone, it will simply drop one onto the ground by the output chute as shown here, and then stop. That's not super helpful, as every few seconds you'd need to pick it up(using the F key) to get the drill to start again. A full-time job basically.  This is what I did my first few starts. By putting a wooden chest, easy to build for a bit of our lumber, at the exit point, the drill can run for quite a time. Every so often, get the ore from the chest and put it in the furnace. This is progress, allowing time to go do other things in between transfers. But there's a better way.  The drill can actually dump the ore directly into the furnace itself. That wasn't at all obvious to me initially, and it wasn't until seeing a couple youtube vids that I discovered it. There are many things like that in Factorio. Here's how it looks in operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fKuRhnGAvg As long as the fuel lasts and the furnace isn't completely full of plates, this will work indefinitely. It can hold one full stack, or 100 of them. With this setup, a small but important step has been taken away from mining and towards being a factory engineer. No manual labor is required to either mine or transport the iron ore itself; we need to supply fuel and pick up the finished product when it's done. Note the smoke coming out of both buildings: this is also our first pollution. Nothing comes totally free of cost. The drill pollutes much worse of the two(10 compared to 1.8). Now what? As mentioned, coal is a superior fuel source and I want to get that up and running. Getting that coal up and running. For that we need another drill(9 Iron Plates, 5 Stone). While the furnace produces the iron, I mine the stone.  The coal drill will simply dump it's product into a chest, available to be raided for supplies whenever I need it. The way the math works out, one unit of coal is enough to power this for long enough to produce about 7.5 units more. So some will be used here, but most of the production will be available to supply other machines such as our iron operation.  Here's how chests work(on the right). There are 16 stacks in a wooden one, 32 in the iron version. Another thing that's easy to miss as a new player is the purpose of the red 'X', shown here; you can limit how much of the chest is filled. In this case I want it to pump out as much as it can, but that functionality is very helpful later on. At this point the next task is to get everything running on the more efficient coal. I'll need the remaining wood for other things later, so there's no reason to waste it. Right away I put the first units produced back into the drill here. After there's a few in there to keep it running and a few extras, I start making runs to the drill and then the furnace at the iron operation.  Here's something worth noting. If you mouse over a drill, the right-side panel will display what's in it(just the coal for fuel in this case) but also the yield(expected resources). In this case, the drill can produce 2.5k before exhausting the coal within it's radius. It'll be a long time before that happens. The coal supplied here is significantly more than is needed to run the two drills and the furnace I've got going so far. After several more runs, there's at least a few units in all three machines, enough to give me time to work on expanding operations without having to concern myself with any sort of pause in operations. Exactly how much you'd want to build up to depends on how far apart they are of course, and this is very close together, on of the advantages of this start. The only real point here is 'enough so you won't run out'. Stone and copper remain in terms of resources. This is quite minimalist, but I actually don't think it's useful to set up a stone drill at this point in most cases. About the only exception to that is if there is a long distance to an available stone patch, and that's not the case. It simply doesn't take that long and you don't need very much of it, so manual mining is temporarily the way to go. Copper is a must though. Same idea as the iron, a drill with a furnace immediately next to it, to the west just past the big stone patches. Grab iron from the furnace, mine a bit of stone if needed, and then after the setup redistributing coal until there's a decent amount everywhere once again. The workload in keeping everything going involves refilling five machines in three different locations from the coal chest. Most of the work is being done for me, but I'm still doing grunt labor. By the time there's a few units everywhere, I'll be able to step away for long enough, and will have more than enough iron and copper plates, to get basic steam power going. Mostly I'll just be showing videos of key moments, but here's how that looks from the moment of startup to the point of being set up with iron, copper, and coal operations all underway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICCeVRyu9-w You probably noticed that for part of the video there the world got darker -- there is a day/night cycle to contend with has both gameplay and cosmetic impacts. Aside from the standard head-lamp there isn't anything to be done to brighten things up at night yet. We'll get to ways of doing that before too long though. In terms of time played in-game(tracked on each save), the count here is a little under four and a half minutes. You are probably already quite sick of watching me mostly run all over the place distributing coal, and without ore fields so tightly packed together, it would be a fair bit longer. Certainly this would make for a boring and tedious game if that was all there was here. The power of electricity(pun intended) will start to change things though. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 05:56
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Following the hell out of this. I love this game as it appeals to that weird part of me that enjoys automation for its own sake. How open are you to suggestions about what you've built so far with regards to efficiency and ease of use?
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Sep 17, 2017 07:02
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This game is a lot of fun even if you're bad and inefficient like me. I'm looking forward to the time when we'll see burning gasoline sprayed over biters. DoubleNegative posted:How open are you to suggestions about what you've built so far with regards to efficiency and ease of use? 
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Sep 17, 2017 08:59
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DoubleNegative posted:How open are you to suggestions about what you've built so far with regards to efficiency and ease of use? Go for it. Dialogue about that kind of thing is very much encouraged; there's so many ways to play and I expect to learn from others quite a bit during this. Poil posted:his current coal mining setup is appalling. That's insulting! You have no idea what appalling is until you see the setups that are yet to come as things get more complex!! 
Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 14:48
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The biggest Factorio pro-tip is to press alt.
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Sep 17, 2017 15:00
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Looking forward to this and also looking forward to people griping at you for less than optimal factory setups. The nice thing about this game is that you can have a lot of fun without building the perfect factory that builds 50 rockets per hour or whatever, but when/if you decide to go down the rabbit hole, you can go forever.
Kibbles n Shits fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 16:03
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Power! The minimal setup for steam power is a offshore pump(to get the water), a boiler(to heat the water), and a steam engine(to turn the steam into electricity). The combined raw/materials cost for this is 5 stone, 3 copper plates, and 40 iron plates. Iron continues to be the key. I've got 46 right now so it's no problem.  Take a look at an updated minimap. If you look closely, you can see small bluish bits on the coal, iron, and copper fields. That's where our buildings are. That lake to the south is our closest source of water. It's good to do a small bit of planning at this point. We need a supply of coal for the boilers, and proximity to water. For reasons I'll explain a bit later, I want a separate coal source for the power plant and a second one for everything else. Looks to me like the best approach here is to use that coal field in the northwest and transport it down south to the lake, and the one in the east that we are currently mining can figure as the second source.  Here we are. The offshore pump has to be placed on the edge of a body of water. The boiler can be rotated in any direction, but as it's set up the water comes in from the south and goes out the north if needed; steam goes east into the steam engine itself. The pipes are just there to get the operation moved a decent distance away from the lake. The flashing yellow electric icon on the steam engine itself confused the snot out of me when I first started playing. I thought it meant there was something preventing the power from working. It's actually rather the opposite: it means there is nowhere for the power to go. That is, it's not hooked up to anything. Of course, that's not the only issue to be addressed. We've added yet another machine(the boiler withe the fuel warning) that needs to be regularly refilled with coal. And we don't have anything that can run on electricity either. Burner mining drills, furnaces, boilers -- none of them can use that kind of power source even if they have it. There's nothing to be done about the boiler and furnaces right now, but we can make electric mining drills. For comparison, here are the key facts. ** Burner Mining Drills having a mining power of 2.5, mining speed of 0.35, mining area of 2x2 tiles, and consume 300 kw of energy per unit produced. The require 9 iron plates and 5 stone to construct. ** Electric Mining Drills have a mining power of 3, mining speed of 0.5, mining area of 5x5 tiles, and consume 90 kw of energy. The materials required are 23 Iron Plates and 4.5 Copper plates. It's a little more complicated than that since some of those materials must be first fashioned into electronic circuits and gear wheels, but that's the raw requirements for the process and the 'intermediate products' are automatically made when you queue up something. The electric drills cost more to make initially, but aside from that they are an investment we want to make immediately. Considerably more production at less than one-third the cost in terms of energy? Yes please. Now it's actually not as good as that on the energy front, because boilers are only 50% efficient; half the energy is lost in the process. But the electric drill is still 67% more efficient after factoring that in. To actually get the power to where they need to operate, we'll also need small electric poles, requiring a small amount of wood and copper each. The copper is starting become a little more important here. Not much, but a little.  Iron is closest and gets the treatment first. Note the electric poles: one is needed every few tiles in order to be properly connected. The faster electric drills will quickly surpass the ability of our furnaces to keep up. I could just leave things as is, but we're going to need the production especially in the case of iron. The current method of dumping directly into the furnace won't cut it though, since there's no way to dump it into two of them. As a temporary 'fix', I'll use the setup shown. As the drill spits out the ore on the ground, one of these two yellow contraptions called inserters will pick it up and put it into one of the furnaces as needed. They are basically robotic arms. On the high-lighted one note the straight line on the left and the arrow on the right. The direction of the arrow is where product will be moved to, and taken from the opposite side. They will only load in raw materials and take out finished product; for that reason I can't simply feed directly from the mining drill into one of them and then have an inserter move the excess ore from one furnace to another. This is almost a perfect production balance, as the electric drill produces almost, but not quite, enough to satisfy both furnaces. This means more coal redistribution but not that much of it given how fast we are producing it now. It can be loaded in en masse. Another short 'how it works' video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14uPpY2WuXw Before long, all three drills have been replaced. I've had to take a bit of time to cut down more trees in order to build the electric poles to get the power everywhere. Only the furnaces(three now) and the boiler now need to be supplied with coal, coal will get produced faster, and the boiler demand will be less than the drills would have previously required. It's almost time to delve into research, but in order to be forward-thinking there's a couple things to do first. We don't need any more copper right now, so I'll leave that be at a single furnace. The extra iron will definitely start coming in handy right away. Having gone as far as we can in terms of improving production at the ore fields, it's now time to work on automating delivery of our coal fuel. First up, another drill is placed on that coal field to the northwest, and this time we'll use transport belts to bring it down to the boiler.  This is an overhead view of the entire 'factory' at this point. It hardly deserves that name yet, but it's slowly taking shape. On the west side you can see the new coal drill in the north and the route of the transport belts taking the fuel down to the boiler. This took a bit to accomplish; each transport belt requires three iron plates to make. For automated material transport over any significant distance at this point though, it's the only choice. Had to wait a couple minutes on the iron in the furnaces. In terms of other materials though we're doing great. Well over 100 copper plates, almost at the century mark in coal surplus(not counting what's on that belt), so fuel runs are now only an occasional concern.  Here's a closer look at the south end of the coal delivery line. Notice the highlighted inserter next to the boiler: it's black, not yellow like the other one. This is a burner inserter, running on coal not electricity. It's inferior is almost every respect, requiring 188 kW of energy to operate; the standard inserter takes only 13 kW, less than 14% as much after you factor in the boiler inefficiency! For most purposes, once you get steam power up and running you wouldn't ever want to consider using 'burner tech'. The reason this can make sense is that in the case we ever run low on power, everything will slow down that is connected to the grid -- including inserters. If you feed the boilers with standard inserters, this will cause the coal supply to slow, which will further reduce available power -- a snowball effect. It's worth some extra energy usage to have these inserters 'off the grid'. That's also why I've got a dedicated field producing the coal for only the power plant; it keeps any coal production shortage elsewhere from slowing things down. Someone might ask, why not go one step further and use burner miners for the supply here as well? That could be done, but I don't think it's necessary. There'll be a considerable buffer in the coal backlog sitting on the belt itself here, and I can increase that buffer in the future if I want to. I'll definitely want to make sure that coal production to the power plant remains well above requirements though. That's going to be a priority for periodic checks as operations expand. Now that we've got some electricity consumers hooked up, let's take a look at one of the well-done reports in Factorio that help us monitor the situation.  At the top we've got three bars; we can ignore 'Accumulator charge' for now as Accumulators won't be invented for some time yet. If the 'Satisfaction' bar is not completely full, you have a big problem; that means you don't have enough power for everything that needs it. The factory won't prioritize in that case -- everything, no matter how critical, that draws power will slow down. This is a Bad Thing(tm), and should be avoided. 'Production' gives an indicator of how much power is being produced compared to the maximum capacity. Each steam engine, assuming a sufficient supply of steam from the boilers, can produce 900 kw(kilowatts). Our usage right now is just above a third of that. Below that we have time controls, I've set it to 10 minutes as that seems to be the best for viewing how we've ramped up our power usage. Then we've got the divided Consumption and Production display; this shows specifically where we are using power and where we are getting it from. Here we can see that almost all(98.5%) of our consumption is from the drills, with a very small amount going to the two standard inserters. And obviously it's all coming from the steam engine.  Here on the minimap is another useful display. This is one of six available filters that can be turned on or off: the electric network. The solid blue line shows the flow of power throughout the factory. Another filter that it's time to start keeping an eye on is this one:  The reddish tint can be hard to see at times, but it shows the spread of our 'pollution cloud'. Note that it's already beyond the area of our immediate vision. The effect of the forest to the west is also pretty clear: it isn't spreading nearly as far where the trees are thick in that direction. We know only the terrain in the 'middle', or 'Fog of War' zone; biters can expand into that area, get ticked off at the pollution, and launch an attack. The 'safe zone' around the starting area is big enough under our current standard settings that this isn't a problem yet, but it can lead to nasty surprises. For that reason, I start expanding our knowledge of the terrain at this point.  This here doohickey is a Radar station, available for the somewhat pricey(at this stage, it's all relative) cost of 25 Iron Plates, 7.5 Copper. They serve two purposes. Any movement nearby is spotted -- same distance that we can see on our own, as it happens. They also expand our knowledge of the terrain by scanning outwards at a much larger, but not infinite range, one 'sector' at a time. This is invaluable in locating resources and biter strongholds. It is also, particularly at this point, a power sponge. Each radar station(this one is named Elcajon, a name pulled from a list of early Factorio contributors) requires 300kw to operate, as much as all four electric drills combined. If they didn't suck up so much energy I'd build more to scan faster. As it is, this ups our power consumption to as much as 665kw, or almost three-quarters of capacity, at peak. That's a little too high for comfort. An easy fix of course; add another steam engine and our max increases to 1.8 MW. Now we're ready to get another power-sucking item going, the fundamental pre-requisite for point #2 in the initial list of goals. It's time to do some research. There are a couple of thing we need to discover before it's all that practical to start setting up much larger-scale operations and start morphing into a factory proper. To do research, you need a Lab(36 Iron Plates, 15 Copper Plates).  Here we go. An off-white dome. These are named also, Grubberdeck in this case if you care. The power usage is 60kw here, so it won't add much to what we are using already. Upon placing your first Lab, the Research screen will come up automatically.  Sorry about the distortion here, I shrunk this down for size purposes. The musky yellow backgrounds indicate what we can research, and the red ones what we cannot. The left panel scrolls down quite a bit: there are a LOT of things you can discover. 112 it appears, and it's actually quite a bit more than that because some of them unlock more advanced versions of the same basic technology once they are acquired. For the moment we are only interested in two of them, one of which is shown here: Automation. Note the cost: 10 'red vials' which take 10 seconds each to process. The other one we want, which is basically twice the cost, is Logistics. I'll get into the specifics of what these unlock a bit later, but they are the essentials to allow a proper, basic production line. For now, to get these going, I'll need to craft those red beakers, known as science packs, myself. 2 Iron plates, 1 Copper plate each, and we'll need 30 of them altogether.  Here's the 'inside' of the lab. Note that there are 7 different kinds of science packs. Barely scratching the surface right now, if that. I queue up the whole 30 packs needed as soon as I have the resources. I can make them in five seconds each, which is about twice as fast as the lab needs to use them. I could build another lab -- but the cost for that's a bit heavy right now. Something else needs to be done first anyhow. We're going to need a lot more iron to set up a bigger operation, so I do a simple expansion of that part while waiting on research.  Here's what it looks like at a little over 25 minutes in, with Automation and Logistics are done and we've got what we need to start expanding operations. Iron production has been tripled to a half-dozen furnaces now. This is a fairly good balance between the need to have more, and not doing a ridiculous amount of coal runs; I don't want to set up a coal supply line over to here because this is just temporary. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Sep 18, 2017 |
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Sep 18, 2017 18:45
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Jabor posted:The biggest Factorio pro-tip is to press alt. It's definitely crucial. I remember the light dawning in my brain when I first discovered what it does.
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Sep 18, 2017 18:51
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Your setup is already triggering me. Put that water in an underground pipe man! Unsure if it's true, but it felt like a lone burner inserter can't quite keep up with 2 steam engine's needs. There is one other way to transport your mineral wealth long distance. Which recently got an upgrade for certain resources.
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Sep 19, 2017 12:01
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 Underground pipes aren't needed yet, the iron is important for other things. As far as the burner inserters, we'll find out. Science!
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Sep 19, 2017 17:02
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As long as you don't upgrade the belts, a 1:1 ratio of burner inserters to steam engines can keep up with an endgame factory going full tilt. It shouldn't be much of a problem on the input side, either. Which reminds me... the miners on the power supply coal are still burner, right? If so, try putting two with their outputs facing each other. They'll power each other indefinitely until the internal buffers fill up.
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Sep 19, 2017 17:47
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That's an impressive-looking tech tree. All fully implemented?
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Sep 20, 2017 04:00
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DoubleNegative posted:As long as you don't upgrade the belts, a 1:1 ratio of burner inserters to steam engines can keep up with an endgame factory going full tilt. It shouldn't be much of a problem on the input side, either. I guess the inserter upgrades will help on that front too. What's a Factorio playthrough without some poorly remembered ratios, anyhow? All the tech is in, and works.
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Sep 20, 2017 10:52
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Veloxyll posted:What's a Factorio playthrough without some poorly remembered ratios, anyhow? Conveyor clogged with a particular resource or good? That just means I can make more if whatever's down stream from it.
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Sep 20, 2017 13:16
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DoubleWeasel posted:the miners on the power supply coal are still burner, right? If so, try putting two with their outputs facing each other. They'll power each other indefinitely until the internal buffers fill up. An excellent approach that most people use. I just don't produce that much coal in the beginning. I've already got an electric drill for both coal ones. Glazius posted:That's an impressive-looking tech tree. All fully implemented? Yep! Veloxyll posted:What's a Factorio playthrough without some poorly remembered ratios, anyhow? Indeed. Or even, ratios that you never really properly understood in the first place :P
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Sep 20, 2017 14:33
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 Pollution is spreading a bit further but not much. The radar is slowly expanding our knowledge of the surrounding territory; the ore fields in the north including a more substantive supply of uranium were previously unknown, for example. The 'Main Bus' Concept As one gains experience with Factorio, it is inevitable that they will migrate to some version of a main bus even if they don't really know what it is. The main bus is your 'resource highway'. In it's purest form nothing actually gets built directly from the bus itself, but it takes the most-used resources through the factory. They are diverted wherever they are needed to 'side streets' of varying size and length as required. Without this, any factory with early-game technology will very quickly degrade into an untenable spahetti mess. Now it's time for building the starting point of my main bus; iron and copper smelting, heavy on the iron. We'll run it south of the coal field for now, which seems to provide the most reasonable location. A lot more furnaces will be needed so I set up a quick temporary mining drill for more stone, using the 'dump-it-in-a-chest' approach for the moment. That'll give plenty of raw resources.  This shows the beginning of the setup to illustrate something; I'll explain the design of this later when it's done. Notice that I'm placing furnaces while at the same time in the lower left I've got a whole bunch of crafting going on. In this case, standard inserters to be used shortly. When tackling a significant construction project early in the game, if you have enough raw materials being produced, it's quite useful to place things while crafting other things(how your avatar manages to handle this miracle of multi-tasking is best not considered for too long). You'll get things done a lot faster. This is one of the cardinal rules of Factorio, which I always imagine, with all due apologies to the source material, as part of a lecture by this guy:  Remember your ABCs. If you don't need something right away, craft something you use a lot of. Transport belts are probably the biggest need at this point. Mining drills, furnaces, inserters, electric poles, a few chests maybe depending on your style. Spare boilers, pipes, or steam engines. You get the point.  It takes about 10-15 minutes for me to get everything operational. Here's the bird's-eye view of the whole thing. You can't see much detail from this high up though.  Copper ore mining is here, no furnace now though as the transport belts will take it to main smelting area. Why I have four drills going here will be explained in a bit. Important to note here are the two sides of the belt; that's why it's symmetrical, with two drills on each side. It keeps the line balanced. As an example of what happens when you aren't balanced:  This is back to the west, the coal line that supplies our power plant. Having a backup buffer filling the line is good. Having it on only one side isn't. This happens because there is only one mining drill, and no matter where you put them they will always be predictable. That is, they will always deposit the ore on the same side of the line every time. Line Balancing Balancing transport belts is a complicated topic all of it's own, and can get quite involved in bigger operations. Here, with only one belt to be concerned with, it's not that complicated.  The key is one of our newly researched toys, the Splitter -- see the right-side panel. Dividing our output into two belts(A and B) and then re-merging onto C, will end up with an equal distribution to both sides of the belt. This will only work properly if the final belt is perpendicular to the two merging belts, as shown. A comes in from the top and will put everything on the closest side of C, B comes in from the bottom. Line balancing in general is absolutely vital to maintaining maximum throughput; the amount of stuff that can be transported on a given belt. It will become more and more important as the factory grows.  Here's more splitting and merging over by the smelting area. Coal comes in from the north, and is split into two lines. One loops around to merge with iron coming from the north, the other to join the copper coming from the south. This results in the two lines heading east. Each is half coal and half ore; one with iron, one with copper. This provides the raw materials for our smelting.  Ultimately it all ends up here. 6 Copper and 10 Iron furnaces for the time being. As I mentioned before, each electric mining drill produces enough ore to roughly supply two furnaces. Roughly, but just a hair short. I have one extra drill of each type to make there's enough supply; 6 Iron and the 4 Copper. Also note that I have furnaces emptying finished plates from both sides onto a central belt for both metals. Another step forward, as prior to this I had to go by and grab the plates out of the furnaces by hand every so often. This central built is in place because inserters always put things on the opposite side of the belt; if you only have the furnaces on one side you'll have a backup on one side of the belt and the other side empty, just as we saw with the coal a bit ago. The chests at the very south end will be moved soon, but the inserters there serve the purpose of pulling the plates off the line and giving me an easy spot to go grab some when I need it.  Here's another toy from our research that is necessary to do this sensibly: the underground belt. It has quite a limited distance, but it's the only practical way to deal with situations like this where we need iron and coal to cross without merging or intermingling. The arrows are quite helpful in avoiding confusion about which way stuff is going.  After any major expansion, it's always a good idea to check the power supply. 1.3-1.4 MW used here, almost 75% of capacity. That's a little too close for comfort as we expand, with the increased drilling the primary culprit. Time to expand our steam plant. As it happens, we'll need another boiler to do that; each can support exactly two steam engines at full capacity. So we'll just double up on everything:  In general I'll just keep adding another row like this whenever it's needed.  In the middle of all the heavy mining we can see pollution is definitely getting worse, with a more pronounced reddening. Thankfully we have magical protective gear of some sort which protects us from any harmful health effects.  Pro-Tip: If you think you've built big enough, you only have a fraction of what you need. That might well be the cardinal rule of Factorio. Here, I've run the copper & iron plate lines much further south to allow for more smelting in the future when I need it. Not if, WHEN.
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Sep 20, 2017 21:21
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Isn't it better to combine the coal and ore to one belt after you've split them down for a line of smelters?
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Sep 20, 2017 21:52
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Poil posted:Isn't it better to combine the coal and ore to one belt after you've split them down for a line of smelters? As a starter smelting area, it's solid enough. Sure there will be bottlenecks later on if coal output isn't increased as well. But at that point, you'll be eyeing electric smelters anyway. Basically when it becomes a problem, there will be ways to fix it and make it more efficient at the same time.
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Sep 20, 2017 22:02
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Isn't it less efficient to burn coal for steampower than in the furnaces?
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Sep 20, 2017 22:06
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Electric furnaces and alternate power sources are a long way off, so it's a moot point. Right now, we need both furnaces and electricity, and coal is our most efficient fuel.
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Sep 20, 2017 23:11
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DoubleNegative posted:As a starter smelting area, it's solid enough. Sure there will be bottlenecks later on if coal output isn't increased as well. But at that point, you'll be eyeing electric smelters anyway. Basically when it becomes a problem, there will be ways to fix it and make it more efficient at the same time. Why would you not increase coal output later anyhow? Besides it having other uses down the line. That coal helps nobody when it's in the ground!
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Sep 20, 2017 23:32
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Veloxyll posted:Why would you not increase coal output later anyhow? Besides it having other uses down the line. That coal helps nobody when it's in the ground! Oh, definitely expand. Expand for the sake of expansion, and then expand some more! I'm a firm believer in mining stuff for the sake of having it at some point in the future. There's no better sight than a field of warehouses full of ore being distributed to endless fields of smelters that output into another array of warehouses that then feed the rest of the factory complex. Also I forgot that the electric furnaces mod wasn't a part of the base game.
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Sep 20, 2017 23:49
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Coal isn't really the issue - more important is the fact that production is being capped at half a belt worth of iron, since there's only half a belt of iron ore going in. If you split the inputs first, and only then put them onto the same belt as the coal, you have a full belt worth of input ore (and hence can produce a full belt of output). As an aside, lane balancing a single belt doesn't really have an practical purpose, it's purely aesthetic. Once you start having multiple lines of something and want to merge them down it starts actually mattering.
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Sep 21, 2017 00:10
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jabor posted:more important is the fact that production is being capped at half a belt worth of iron, since there's only half a belt of iron ore going in. If you split the inputs first, and only then put them onto the same belt as the coal, you have a full belt worth of input ore (and hence can produce a full belt of output). But there's half a belt of ore on each side. That's more than enough to supply the furnaces to saturate a single output belt, it's not capped at anything other than the speed of the belts(once enough furnaces are in). To put it another way, the furnaces will run out of room to put plates on the central belt before they run out of ore supply. I also don't really agree on single-lane line balancers. Balancing still improves throughput compared to having one side that doesn't have much on it. Poli posted:Isn't it better to combine the coal and ore to one belt after you've split them down for a line of smelters? I'm not sure exactly what you mean, therefore not sure if I answered the question or not. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Sep 21, 2017 |
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Sep 21, 2017 00:32
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Thotimx posted:But there's half a belt of ore on each side. That's more than enough to supply the furnaces to saturate a single output belt, it's not capped at anything other than the speed of the belts(once enough furnaces are in). To put it another way, the furnaces will run out of room to put plates on the central belt before they run out of ore supply. Immediately before the splitter, you have half a belt of ore. It doesn't matter how much available throughput there is after that, the bottleneck is what limits the overall throughput of the system. For a similar reason, lane-balancing a single belt doesn't help with throughput. It's still limited to the throughput of the belt at the moment just before the lane balancer. Lane balancing becomes useful when you're combining multiple partial belts together, since you then don't have that bottleneck.
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Sep 21, 2017 00:41
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Jabor posted:Immediately before the splitter, you have half a belt of ore. It doesn't matter how much available throughput there is after that, the bottleneck is what limits the overall throughput of the system. Totally agree as far as it goes, except for the very last part. What limits the throughput of the system isn't the ore/coal belt at all; it's the amount of smelted iron plates that can fit on the one belt being filled from both sides. Jabor posted:lane-balancing a single belt doesn't help with throughput. It's still limited to the throughput of the belt at the moment just before the lane balancer. I think maybe I'm using the wrong words here. Possibly throughput isn't the right one. Let me explain differently what I mean(and then feel free to tell me I'm still wrong :P).  This coal mining drill is idle, because it can't put any more coal on the belt. Whole top side is empty, but it's not going to do anything because it's trying to put more coal on the bottom side, which is full and backed up.  Same situation here, but with a balancer. Now the coal is divided onto both sides of the line. It's not backed up as quickly 'upstream', so more coal can get 'downstream' before another jam occurs. This happens quite a bit when you've got more product being taken off a line from one side as opposed to another as well; one side might be 'backed up' for quite a ways while the other side is maybe a third full. I don't know if throughput is the right word for what I'm talking about, but more overall product is going to move in the desired direction of the belt with a balancer than without it.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:12
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I think what you're trying to say is that it gives you more capacity for a larger backlog of input material.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:35
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Thotimx posted:Totally agree as far as it goes, except for the very last part. What limits the throughput of the system isn't the ore/coal belt at all; it's the amount of smelted iron plates that can fit on the one belt being filled from both sides. One ore turns into one plate. If you have less than a full belt of ore, you're not going to get a full belt of plate out of it. It might look visually like you have a full belt once everything backs up, but that's a purely aesthetic thing - once you start actually using iron, you won't be able to continuously supply more than half a belt of it. quote:I think maybe I'm using the wrong words here. Possibly throughput isn't the right one. Let me explain differently what I mean(and then feel free to tell me I'm still wrong :P). What you're describing is buffering - making it so that more currently-unused stuff can fit on the belt. Note that your throughput of coal is still just a single miner's worth. The thing about buffering is that it's actually a bad thing in most cases - for example, suppose you add another consumer of iron plates, that means you're using up more iron than you're producing. Without buffering, you can visually see that now you're not getting enough iron, prompting you to go and improve it. If you have a large buffer, though, what happens is that your buffer silently starts shrinking, and after you go off and do something else you come back and wonder why nothing in your factory is getting done. Small buffers are useful to smooth things out if you have inconsistent supply or demand (think buffer chests at a train stop), and larger buffers can come in handy if you explicitly want them (for example, you can buffer coal for your steam engines, and use combinators + a speaker to give an alert when it starts decreasing, giving you enough time to fix it before you go into a full brownout spiral). But buffering more on belts just to make them look even isn't a good thing. Now, if you're doing a speedrun, big buffers are really helpful because you know exactly how much stuff you need and you want your machines working all the time to produce that stuff. But that's not what most people are trying to do in the game.
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Sep 22, 2017 01:37
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Jabor posted:One ore turns into one plate. If you have less than a full belt of ore, you're not going to get a full belt of plate out of it. I'm very aware of that. Went back and read some things though, and I think I understand where the screwup was. Changed the setup to this:  Messy, but I've got the ore and coal split before combining them now, and got rid of the downstream splitters. I think this should accomplish the intended goal now(half-belt of ore on each side of the furnace array). Jabor posted:If you have a large buffer, though, what happens is that your buffer silently starts shrinking, and after you go off and do something else you come back and wonder why nothing in your factory is getting done. You must have seen some of my later-game factories! I'm very skilled at the above, though I think it might happen anyway regardless of the buffer size. It offends my moderate OCD tendencies, but I'll get rid of the 'single-lane buffering' as well. *stifles internal groaning*
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Sep 22, 2017 02:22
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Thotimx posted:I'm very aware of that. Went back and read some things though, and I think I understand where the screwup was. Changed the setup to this: Yep, that's much better - no bottleneck any more, you have a full belt of ore -> two half-belts of ore -> a full belt of plate. I'm sure you'll be able to compact that more when you need the space for more blocks of furnaces (unless you were going to rush electrics?) I wouldn't worry about the lane-balancing thing too much - it's mostly just a pet peeve of mine, and I was mainly objecting to the claim that lane-balancing a single belt improves throughput. Certainly, lane-balancing doesn't actually hurt throughput at all, and if you're okay buffering a little more for aesthetic purposes that's just fine. (As an aside, lane-balancing a single belt is actually useful later on - but I'll mention it again when we get that far, unless someone else points out out first.)
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Sep 22, 2017 02:58
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Is http://factoryidle.com/ by any chance based on Factorio or is it just a coincidence? (Watch out, factoryidle has the risk of eating all your time)
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Sep 22, 2017 06:28
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If your raw material buffer chests aren't close to full, you need more trains.
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Sep 22, 2017 08:00
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Veloxyll posted:If your raw material buffer chests aren't close to full, you need more trains. I expect this thread will need a full-time mental health professional on standby by the time we get to these. Let's just say, though I've seen it done, my win in 0.14 was done without a single raw material buffer chest at train stops. I had like three of them, and used them only for transporting crude. The other stuff I had on obscenely long belts. Basically, by the time I realized it wasn't the best idea, I didn't feel like ripping it all up.
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Sep 23, 2017 01:38
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For our next segment, another individual best expresses what we're going for here. It's probably the central theme of Factorio, so he might be considered it's ambassador, perhaps? Well put, Mr. Weaving ... err, Smith. We've been smelting ore into usable metal for some while now, but metal plates on their own aren't particularly useful. When we want to do something with them, it's been done by hand. It's time for another crucial, recently-invented toy to take center stage: the Assembling Machine.  Here's the start of what I call the 'basics line'. On the right, the main bus consistently for now of copper and iron plates(more items will be added later), is split off. Everything to the west here because the east is forest. Also note the underground belt on the copper line as it goes south -- this allows the flow of copper to keep going and will be a much-used technique to allow some to divert in one direction while the rest moseys on down. It's already been mentioned how important 'Alt' is. Pressing it toggles the icons you see on the assemblers and chests here. Shows what's in the chests, and what the assembling machines are producing, at a glance. We've got four things being built here. ** Iron Gear Wheels at the bottom. Key intermediate product. Requires 2 Iron Plates. Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but in Factorio terms 'intermediate product' means somethign that is used in making something else, but not necessarily useful on it's own. Lead and wood in a pencil, for example, to take an everyday item. ** Transport Belts beside them. They need iron plates and iron gear wheels, so they can just take what the gear wheel assembler builds; that's why they are placed side-by-side. Right now we need a LOT of transport belts as we expand. Soon I won't be needing to craft any on my own. ** At the top above the copper lane, Copper Cable. Another intermediate product, and a cheap one at two per copper plate. For that reason, it's generally considered to be a BAD IDEA to put copper cable on the bus. Reason is, you are basically wasting space -- you can get twice the copper plating throughput as you can cable, so build the cable where it's needed, at least for the most part. Note the red inserter below it: these aren't needed all that often but they are useful. They are 'long-handed inserters', meaning they reach two spaces away instead of one. That allows it to cross the copper belt and place cables into the assembler below it. Which is: ** Electronic Circuits. An intermediate product requiring another intermediate product(here we go with the production layers), three copper cables, as well as iron plates. I've got one iron chest for each of these, limited for how many i want -- that part is important or they'll chew up all of your product early on. You can always just produce more of course, but why use up your metal with stuff you don't need? These chests are a buffer. I won't go through iron and copper as quickly now with gear wheels, cables, and circuits in my inventory. I'll show how I handle those once I get a supply built up. I can run here and pick up whatever I need from the chests when I run low, and also the transport belts to lay more of it. Not perhaps immediately obvious also is the fact that it will make my crafting much faster. When I need an inserter for example, I don't need to craft the circuits first. I'll just grab the ingredients from my inventory and put one together in a fraction of the time.  Here's the inside of an assembling machine. Across the top we've got iron plates(2 currently) and iron gear wheels as the required ingredients. That's determined by the next button, that circular line with the arrow. Click that, and the crafting screen comes up again to select what you want to build. We can see at the right that we are making transport belts here and 1 is currently in the machine. The internal buffers for these, unlike furnaces and the burner drills, is quite low -- it will stop building once it has two full production runs. I.e., two items for many things, some recipes like transports belts produce 2 at a time, so it'll stop at 4 there, etc. Makes it important to unload them so they will keep working; hence the use of chests. Also, even though we've got the iron available here, the assembling machine can't use it to craft the gear wheels, then use those in making the transport belts, etc. It can't do multi-stage crafting like the player can. This necessitates the use of a proper production chain. This one -- iron plates to gear wheels to transport belts -- is pretty simple. Others will not be so simple.  Right-side panel here again; details on one of the assembling machines. We can see the energy usage here ... and then notice the 'drain' part. Most electrical machines are 'vampires' to an extent. The drain is the power used when it is sitting there inactive. This is one reason why you don't just want to have assemblers for everything. Iron axes, for example, I need a new one of every once in a while, and it's a super-quick crafting job. Not worth it to set up a machine for that, because it's just going to sit here draining power ... which means using coal and causing more pollution ... forever. One machine doesn't drain a lot, but inserters also have a smaller drain(400W). So ... if you don't need it to build something you'll use often, don't make an assembler for it. Crafting speed of 0.5 means this level of technology isn't as good as I am in another way: it will only craft half as fast. I like the attention to detail in the next line, which I think was added fairly recently. Tracks how many products each and every assemble you place has made. That's pretty cool IMO.  A bit later, I've added an assembler for magazines in case I need more ammo, and I've got a chain for small electric poles at the top. I've got to supply the raw wood(chest at the top left), but I simply throw that in there, one assembler makes the regular wood(panels) out of it, another combines that will cable to make the poles, and those are ready for me. I had to cut down more trees to supply this, and I'll need to keep doing that every so often, but now I can snag a hundred or two of the poles at my leisure so long as I keep up my end. To the north, I've also got one set up by the stone mining to build furnaces. No chest for those as I don't need that many, but I shouldn't need to make those by hand anymore. This is pretty much everything I want to have assemblers for right now; I added underground belts as well but showed the rest. There's nine different assemblers all happily crafting away until they meet the quota I've set for them. This can now properly be called a factory. It's only building things for me to expand it with(other than the ammunition), but it's a start and still going to make my life easier.  I've still got lots of room here. From left to right, top to bottom, there's transport belts, small electric poles, a random unit of coal that I'll throw in a furnace somewhere, iron plates, copper plates, copper cable, iron gear wheels, and electronic circuits. The basics are covered. "But what about inserters and assemblers?", someone asks. I'll use enough of those for sure, but they can't be built in these entry-level machines: more than two ingredients required. I extend the bus a little bit, but I'll wait on the next step because we're almost at the 1-hour point. I'd like to do a quick review every hour at least for a while here to show the evolution of the factory and check on the numbers. Here's the power situation.  1 hour settings on the graph. Most interesting thing here is that the drills aren't using nearly as much power as they were 10-15 minutes ago. That's largely because of copper: we simply aren't using as much as we are producing, so there's a constant backlog. We can see that the max. there didn't last very long. Overall, 1.6 MW is our peak usage right now, just under half of capacity. Power plant is doing just fine.  We've made a bunch of crap, basically. Graph is a jumbled mess and we can't even display everything we've made at once. 34 different items, with a combined quantity of 23,749. Most of it is always going to be the basics; top ones here are iron ore/plates, with copper and coal stuff also well over 2k.  Here's an update of what we know about the world. Radar still plugging along; this will be a perfect square when it is done. The tan or vanilla lines are the transport belts, visible as long as you don't zoom out too far along with the blue electric network. Still no sign of hostiles. Also worth noting that resources are getting more sparse as it expands outwards. Sometimes they are spaced fairly evenly, sometimes they cluster. Pollution hasn't gotten much worse, and the forest continues to keep it's spread in check. So far. Resources It's good to keep an eye on how much we have left of our key non-renewables. The ore fields we are mining right now have the following amounts remaining: ** Iron: 493k. We mined out nearly 6k in the first hour; at that rate we have a supply that will last 82 more hours. We're going to increase usage of course; I doubt it lasts more than ten, but we're not in imminent danger of running out. ** Copper: 152k. Another 50 hours roughly at our current pace. I'm even less worried here because we have two pretty close fields at more than 600k each that we can tap; by comparison the only other iron field in the area is less than 150k in size. ** Coal: 375k for the factory field, 306k for the one feeding the power plant. Again no concerns here, could last literally 150 hours or so at the current pace. ** Stone: 428k, and another one very close by it of almost 200k. We're using it only rarely at the moment -- this will change. So we're in great shape right now, hilariously oversupplied.  I also forgot to make this early on, which I should have. On more dangerous settings, I might have even paid for it. This is the initial light armor which is initially available. Costs a bit at 40 Iron Plates. Every time it takes damage, Durability is reduced, so it won't last forever. Should last far beyond the time I need to use it though, so I only need one suit. Below are the four types of damage. "Physical: 3/20%" indicates that the first three points from any physical attack are absorbed, and the rest reduced 20%. This provides significantly more protection than wearing no armor, which I was foolishly doing. You only live once, remember. Safety first.  This shot had to be taken somewhat after completion, due to it being the middle of the night when I actually got this up and running. Quite a bit south the bus has been extended, in keeping with allowing room for expansion. Here, we'll extend the automation process to our research. Red vials are manufactured and then fed into the Labs -- all I've got to do is pick what to research next. We are limited to those which require only red vials ... we have the capability of making green vials as well, but not fully automating the production chain for them. This brings up another point Factorio Stages In terms of general advancement through the game, Factorio can be thought of in terms of what kinds of vials your factory is capable of producing. 1. Burner Tech/Pre-Research. Early mining and smelting, assembling our first steam power plant, etc. 2. Red Research. Where we are now. Various activities will follow, largely driven by the discoveries from technologies requiring red vials only. 3. Green Research. Probably not a surprise to anyone that this is next. By the time we have exhausted the red-only options, we'll have the ability to automate green vial production. 4. Etc., repeating the general pattern of #2 and #3. There's nothing saying you have to research everything in red, then everything in green, etc. Speed-runners win the game while leaving the great majority of techs unresearched, getting only what they need. Often you will want to target a specific group of important advances, coming back to other less important ones later. For the methodical approach I'm doing though, we will exhaust one level before going on to the next. There is benefit to this; you increase your capabilities as much as you can before doing a big re-design. Although there were only four of them before and it's different now, each different color/type of research vial brings with it increased complexity in some way, and it's a lot easier to just grab the next 'little thing' before 'going big'. Ok, so how'd I come up with the red research area? A little math. First, we've got the iron gear wheel assembling machine, which a simple calculation will quickly convince you that we need only one of. Assuming sufficient supply, they can produce a gear wheel every second; each red vial assembler needs only one every 10 seconds. A 10:1 ratio; 10 red vial assemblers fully supplied by a single iron gear wheel assembler. We won't need that much. After that it's a case of how fast you want to be able to do the research. Early in the game -- I'll probably increase this somewhat later, depending -- I like to have the # of labs fairly equal to the square root of the typical research job requirement. Right now the range 10-50 red vial required for each available one; four labs would be the square root of 16. It's really whatever you want here; this is what works for me. I'll probably eventually double that to 8 before we are 'through' with red. The typical time required to process each vial is 10 seconds in the lab. So, to satisfy four labs, we need a vial every 2.5 seconds. Assemblers produce one every 10 seconds, so it's an easy 1:1 ratio. Four red vial assemblers, four labs. and we can scale this up easily.
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Sep 23, 2017 01:56
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You can automate research. How far off are you from a grey goo scenario?
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Sep 24, 2017 00:34
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That won't be happening here. Grey Goo uses a couple of mods that extend capabilities of the vanilla game, and I don't think it can be done without them. Aside from that, it's a big fundamental leap. Building increasingly complex production lines will continue, new products and capabilities will be discovered, etc. Telling the factory to think on it's own; to expand, decide what resources to ship and what ones to store in place, when to expand, etc. is a rather large order of magnitude more difficult. And that's saying nothing about dealing with the hostiles, which I believe were disabled for Grey Goo. It's not particularly hard to build a factory which is essentially immune to their attacks once you've reached a certain point. However, left to it's own, you'd eventually run out of resources and get swarmed when that happens. A factory which expands on it's own to new resource areas, eliminating biter resistance on the way? I don't think the mods even exist to allow for that. There's no RTS concept allowing you to take a battalion of mechs or whatever and have them go into search-and-destroy mode(though some in the community want the game to head that way).
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Sep 24, 2017 18:10
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What To Research Again you can go for something specific; here I'm just going to knock off the quickest ones first. That means Turrets are next. While we are going through the quick ones, there isn't much lag time in between so I don't research the next one until I'm ready to go on the tools we just researched. It takes less than minute, literally, to get Turrets. 3 down, well over 100 to go . Grab that Snickers bar. Gun turrets use the same kind of magazine ammo that my trusty pistol does. They have a higher range(18 to 15), shoot more than twice as fast(10 rounds/sec. compared to 4/sec.), and most importantly, they are our first automated defense which means I'm not exposed to danger if something attacks. They require no power, working on some sort of mechanical magic, automatically sensing and attacking any enemy that comes in range(frankly I think this is rather absurdly OP for this point in the game, but it is what it is). All we need to do is fill them with magazines, and at this point there's not even a need to have them delivered automatically -- they won't get used up that fast unless there's a big sustaind attack which we aren't going to see yet. Usually I can get to the 2-3 hour point before any hostilities emerge, and we're only halfway there. But as Cicero said, if you want peace, prepare for war. Let's be ready. The bad news is the price: 8 seconds each to craft, 10 gear wheels, 10 copper plates, 20 iron plates. It's important to note that when biters do attack, they tend to attack things that pollute ... and radars. They HATE radars. Generally at this point I want about 10 turrets placed at various strategic locations. They'll be more than enough to deal with any over-enthusiastic interlopers.  The green circle here shows the range of the turret; anything within that is going to be appointed hostile intent, in the form of high-velocity trans-cortical lead therapy. I've got 8 of them up, with two more to place; each of the active turrets has about 10-15 magazines with a few dozen still left for myself. This is a solid initial step towards a functional factory defense. There will come a time when it will be hideously inadequate, but it just needs to be good enough for now and it's all of that. So, what's next? Stone Walls. I'm on way back up to get those started, restocking my basics on the way, when I notice that iron production is starting to lag behind demand. Probably temporary at this point, but even so it's time to give it a boost. I place 8 more furnaces, up to 18 of them now so almost double. That means four more mining drills also. It's up in just a few minutes thanks to the materials I've got stockpiled in my inventory. Now back up to the stone field to make some walls. They function much as you might expect: a protective barrier against attackers. However, they can hit what is in the space directly behind the walls, which is good to remember. Anything you put near them should be two spaces back. Biters cannot climb over them or dig under them though. They have to destroy the walls, which can take a decent amount of punishment, in order to get past.  Here's our new production line. Same deal as the smelter before, except each furnace uses 2 stone per 1 coal to bake the stone bricks. Here the volume of stone needed would eventually overwhelm the ability of the belts if we made this much longer, but we won't need to(famous last words; if so, I'll redesign it with a full line of stone on each side. Using more stone means more drills; we now have eight electric mining drills there as well. Coal is keeping up fine still, haven't really had to expand that -- mostly because iron has now caught up with demand. Will have to watch it though. Anyway, the assembler on the right turns 5 stone bricks into a wall section. The chest there is set to allow filling more than halfway, up to a thousand wall sections. I'm going to be use a LOT of this, it's going to be my first megaproject. A new type of inserter as well, the last one currently available. Let's take a look at our little blue friend:  They are well-named, moving multiple times more product in the same time as standard variants. The energy requirement is also 3.5x as high, so it's a case of using the right tool for the job. Regular inserters can't keep up here, with the assembler needing 5 bricks a second. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79jdqNGbcYg A brief bit showing the blue hero in action. We'd need almost twice as many furnaces to fully supply the assembling machine here, but it'll be enough for our purposes. By the by, you can use stone bricks to pave pathways and whatnot. This has the benefit of adding 30% to travel speed in those areas. However, there's a slightly improved option coming up soon, which is why I haven't done it yet. We've just added a crapton of pollution, and are about to add more. Power usage is nearly double what is was not that long ago, breaking 3 MW on occasion. Definitely time for another pair of steam engines.  It's getting worse in our neck of the woods, and spreading further. And we've got our first biter sightings in the northeast corner there. Long-term defense can be handled multiple ways. I like the approach of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure -- and I want a lot of prevention. Hanging out here with turrets would be leaving it all up to cure, and when the biters get to where the pollution is, they'll start coming at us. Instead, I invest early on in building walls roughly around the area where there is pollution. These walls will protect radar stations and guard turrets behind them. The radar stations are largely the point of the exercise, providing constant real-time coverage of everywhere that we have pollution, meaning we'll need a grid of them. Knowledge is power, and this method will keep the biter threat under control and well away from the factory. It will also take a considerable amount of time, and require even more steam power to run the radars: ergo yet more pollution. We'll eventually need the space we are claiming here though. It's front-end effort, an investment in the future. That's where I'm going, and the reason for the walls. It'll be a bit before we have enough of them to make it worth setting up a section though, a few hundred at least. So let's do more research! Optics takes a bit longer, but not long.  Now we have 5kw lamps that can be placed anywhere on the ground within our electric network, shedding light on the subject. As this high-altitude view shows, we can still see where we're going at all tims of the day. This will make it easier to get things accomplished during the dark, and of course makes the images a lot better also. Military is up next, our last really cheap one. This allows a submachine gun, which is basically like carrying a turret(same range and firing rate). A shotgun is also available, which has even longer range of 20(18 for the other two), fires only once a second, but does a lot more damage despite it(60 damage/sec., 50 for the SMG or turret). This needs it's own ammunition, interestingly enough known as shotgun shells. So I make myself a SMG and a shotgun, and set up a new assembling machine for the shotgun ammo. Electronics brings us Filter Inserters(purple), which can be programmed to grab only certain items from a belt. They are excellent for sorting, and we have no need of that at the moment. It's more a stepping-stone to other things. Now we're up to a bunch of things that require 50 red vials each. I think it's time to double our labs and assemblers down there to eight apiece for this increased requirement. Then Steel comes in. This is a big one. Steel can make better axes, the best and fastest ones available. Steel chests hold twice as much as iron ones. There will be other applications later. They are iron sponges though, requiring 5 Iron Plates and 5 times the smelting time of iron as well: 17.5 seconds. Pro Tip: Do NOT simply divert iron off your bus to make steel. It can work if you simply just make more, more lanes of it, whatever -- but it's a much less of a headache to simply have a dedicated operation for your steel eventually. Separate iron mining, separate coal mining, separate everything, then sent your steel from there to wherever it needs to go in your factory. That is not really feasible for us yet. And we don't want a lot of it. I do want some though. As I'm pondering this ...  Oh YAY! Our first Factorio achievement!! 37 to go *cough cough cough*. There's only a few of them, and it takes like one magazine for a turret to put them down. They don't get close. But it's a nice little reminder, a bit earlier than usual, that we haven't got all day here. As far as steel goes, I'm tempted to just say it's not worth the effort right now and move on. Moving on though, I find that I really want to be able to build the next thing we're going to get -- which requires steel. Heh. So seriously then, what's a sensible way to do this given the situation?  I've probably seen more elegance in the comments on the walls of public restrooms, but here it is. Split a line back west from our primary coal field, north of the iron one for the fuel. We've got a half-dozen mining drills on the west end of that field feeding this; the others on the east end are feeding everything else. Gonna eat it fast that way, but what else is there to be done? Anyway, there's a chest a ways to the north to store it and keep this from ever getting backed up. A little different pattern here, because the coal needs to keep going past the iron furnaces to the steel ones. Long-handed inserters to reach further, and a couple gaps between the furnaces to facilitate having enough space for the electric poles. In the time to set this up, Heavy Armor research was finished, which was the main point; it's much better than what we have, but also takes a bit of material to craft. 100 Copper, 50 Steel. I've got a decent amount of wall sections ready, but I'm not going adventuring until I get it. We also have some bullet upgrades, increasing damage and firing rate for our standard magazines. I've gone through a couple of those, and more are coming. ** Note: I realized much later that I had done something simple but stupid here. Should be one iron furnace here for each steel one. I forgot that the steel takes 5x as long to smelt; and therefore I have way too much iron here. I then went back, got rid of most of the mining drills, reduced the iron setup to four and added a couple of steel furnaces so that I would have what I need. I then imagined slapping myself upside the head for being a moron. Had a literal headache at the time, so I stopped short of actually doing it.  I use the time to check the power. Good thing I did. This is not good. The problem is coal supply; I just didn't put enough drills down. Everything was oversupplied not long ago. Oops. Doesn't take long to fix it, but I still need to check it more often. Or learn the ratio of mining drills to boilers. That might help too(I would later discover that this is about one electric drill per pair of boilers or 4 steam engines, and save myself future troubles. That's about ... I didn't get precise with it. Might take just a hair more). Once everything is up and running again, I'm waiting on steel and research so I run around and restock, clear some boulders, cut some trees for wood, just a bunch of side-work tasks. Just before I get the steel needed for the armor, the last research job for the Red phase is finished(80 vials, most expensive yet, but they go quick). Automation 2, allowing for a more advanced assembling machine. Creatively, it's known as assembling machine 2. But before I deal with that, it's time to go take down some biters for the first time and start establishing a perimeter. There are two basic ways to deal with early combat. First up, I'll demonstrate the easy, IMO cheesy way. Ladies and gentlemen: Turret Creep(this one is a few minutes, and is the furthest thing from a display of expertise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUZcRD6Q2Gs ** Note: I realized afterwards that sound did not record on these. I'm not sure why, but I apologize for that and will try to get that working properly. I screwed up there at the end, and I certainly could be faster getting the ammo into the turrets. It's a 'leapfrog' method though, which has very limited exposure to the player and only the long-range 'worms' there are any real threat to the turrets. Safe, and you don't lose much. Just need several turrets and plenty of ammunition for them. There's plenty of cheese in Factorio to begin with(hauling around enough supplies on your person to build a decent-sized city comes to mind), but I just think this is several orders of magnitude OP at this point. I like to let turrets be turrets(defensive static structures), not constantly repositioning gun emplacements that do everything for you. Kind of takes the point out of your own personal weapons. So, here's how I would handle this normally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbm7_CPSNpU Controls here are Tab to switch weapons, Space to fire, and then you can use the mouse to aim at what you'd like to shoot at. A few things to note about this combat sequence: ** First phase is always the Rush. Biter bases have a number of enemies around them, roughly proportional to the number of spawners. Gotta take them out first. Used the shotgun at first here because it has slightly better total damage if it hits ... a crowd at fairly close range is a good target for them. Once they are mostly surrounding you though, the SMG will be better as you aren't going to hit a lot of them with a blast. ** Then the spawners. These have some protection and periodically send more enemies at you, so you want to switch back and forth. Theoretically the shotgun at close range would kill the spawners faster -- but then I'd be in range of the worms. No thank you. Note the red and green targeting indicators; green is within range, red is not. ** The worms suck basically, doing quite a bit of damage from range. The approach angle I took allowed hitting the second one some with the shotgun. Could have done almost as well with the SMG really, not quite as much damage but more accuracy. Either way, I would have died if not for the heavy armor. It's up to 30% resistances across the board, and absorbs 6 physical, 3 acid, and 20 from explosions. These entry-level biters and spitters didn't do much damage. The worms on the other hand are more of a pain. It's generally heavily-advisable to get the heavy armor before going base-clearing.  Here's where the fight took place; I'm the vanilla-colored circle again here. This is where the mentioned attack came from, just within our pollution's reach. We won't have any more problems from this location for a while. This base was NOT on our minimap beforehand; reason being that it wasn't here when the radar scanned it. They're expanding, and we've got a put an end to that. \ For the wall, I like to build them about at the edge of the pollution cloud. That way radars placed just behind the wall will be able to see some distance further -- it gives you a margin of error. This is as good a place as any to start. Came out here with almost 800 sections, and used nearly 300, but found we've got to go through a bit of forest now to push this to the west. Going around it to the northeast means dealing with biters we don't need to mess with yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMkBwSi7s4o This is just a brief one showing the process here. By standing exactly in the path you want to build and holding down that direction, most of the trees that are in the way will get cut. In particularly thick areas you might want to make another pass one step in each direction. Here, I was a little off on the initial line, usually there isn't much additional cutting that needs to be done. Then put down the wall sections, and you've got everything set. Definitely don't want to miss a section and give them a way through.  A couple more cutting sessions later, all of the wall sections were in place -- and I'm carrying around 500 raw wood. Won't be needing to cut any more of that for supply purposes anytime soon! There's a couple hundred more ready, not nearly enough to finish this. We need to get some radars with turrets to guard them out here anyway. That part is easy; connecting the power poles all the way back to the factory takes a little more time. While I'm here, unloading the wood and restocking is a sensible thing. I also add another pair of steam engines, because these radars are going to suck down quite a bit of power. I'll show the new reach of our stations when completed, but for now it's time for another hourly review.  That ugly dip is our brief power outage. Those SUCK. Also, we haven't needed the drills as much over the last 20 minutes or so, due to a backlog of supply pretty much everywhere. Factory isn't doing much right now. The stone bricks and walls are running non-stop, but the basics stuff is at capacity and there's no research going on. Which reminds me: I also take down the whole research area while I'm in the general vicinity. It's a bit of a hike, but why pay to have everything draining -- and polluting -- when we aren't going to use it. Served it's purpose until we start getting the green stuff up and going. We were up to nearly 4 MW at our peak usage this hour, but it's down in the mid-2s as you can see. Can produce 7+ MW with the recent addition, so we should be good here.  Time to show off the filters here I think. You can set the graph to display only certain items. The others are greyed out. Blue is iron ore here, orangish is raw stone. You can see the stone ramping up as we got the bricks and walls going, the fluctuations esp. in iron which include the unfortunate power situation, and then iron dipping recently. This ability to show whatever specific items you want to see is really excellent and can be quite useful. Here's how the numbers look overall for this hour: # of different items: 40(up 18% from 34) Total Production: 64.9k(up 174% from 23.7k) Almost three times as much total items being made, but mostly the same stuff. Resources ** Iron: 479k. More than doubled our extraction to 14k, leaving 34 hours' worth. Not a problem yet. ** Copper: 149k. Just three thousand used here, only slightly more than before. It's not started ramping up yet, but it will. Oh, it will. ** Coal: 372k(3k used), 304k(2k used). Still all kinds of time. ** Stone(: 418k, with 10k being pulled. Once the wall is finished this will go down to almost no usage. More will be required in the future, but for current projects we are totally set. Iron continues to be the top concern but only as a really long-term thing.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:32
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Thanks for the LP! Been lurking here for a while, and I'm starting to get a better sense as to what I've been doing wrong early game. My main problem with Factorio has always been "Late-game looks fun, what the hell am I supposed to do early-game?" Maybe I'll pick Factorio back up and follow along if I can manage my time well enough. I don't really have the kind of spare time I feel I need for massive time sinks like Factorio these days.
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Sep 27, 2017 01:17
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Are walls taller than turrets, or can turrets shoot over walls?
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Sep 27, 2017 04:07
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