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Holy Crap! This looks to be the start of a long, possibly torturous, LP. I'm looking forward to every minute of it. Please don't burnout. Edit: Start of awesome mod LP on last page.
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Jun 10, 2018 23:34
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This would be an ambitious game for someone very experienced with Factorio. Godspeed, you You've only played one Factorio game to completion, right? Thotimx posted:** Satellite Radar - The most elegant solution I've seen to the need for better late-game scanning. Each rocket launch with a satellite adds a synergistic bonus, with radar capabilities leveling up depending on how many 'communications satellites in orbit' there are. This is genius.
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Jun 11, 2018 04:32
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ashnjack posted:I'm looking forward to every minute of it. Thanks! I've been waiting long and done enough prep work for this that I doubt burnout will be much of an issue, though it is always possible with a big project. Hopefully it meets expectations. redleader posted:You've only played one Factorio game to completion, right? Two, but the difference matters little in this case. Both were vanilla so you're definitely right, I'm diving in headfirst at the deep end of the pool here.
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Jun 11, 2018 15:54
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My brain is already drowning in the depth of the pool you've sunk into. Freakin' ore crushers.
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Jun 11, 2018 21:51
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https://youtu.be/iFnfgsTirkk Electricity So what next? I could(eventually) transport coal to the ore fields via belts, but that's somewhat pointless since I've only got one mining drill and one ore crusher and can't make more of either yet. Since I have to move them around anyway, it lacks much of a point. But I can at least get the nearby lab and assembler supplied with the dirty dark fuel without too much difficulty.  This didn't take all that long to set up; just needed about 75 more iron and a bit more assembler fiddling. From here, the assembler and lab can load their own fuel, and in between them there's an inserter fueling another inserter that will move any completed vials over to be used in research. The continous loop ensures nothing falls off the belt, and I can pick up more coal as needed. Without being able to get more mining gear in place, I think this is the best I can do at the current tech level. Time to take the next step.  I only recently discovered that this would work. It's kind of a esoteric nook of the Factorio world, since you don't normally have burner tech for long enough to bother with burner inserters feeding burner inserters, and all other kinds just draw their energy from the electric network and don't need to be fed anything directly. But it works, and I like it here.  Aesthetically, I know this is a hideous image in most respects. Serves only to illustrate scale of movement here. The copper mining operation(drill-crusher, furnace) shown previously is up in the east; the coal loop is in the west. The important point is that copper mines so slowly that I can do a bunch of stuff in between and the furnace will quickly get caught up again on the smelting when I reload it; it takes just over a third the time as the mining does, and I need a sizable amount this time. This is over half an hour after the coal loop was setup. In that time I got about 200, then the same for iron, and now I need almost 100 copper. So I was busy - or rather, the mining drill and other machines were busy - but it was anything but exciting. Very necessary though.  I left a bunch of coal on the belt here because it's going to be needed. The lab and assembling machine will be quite busy, esp. the latter, and more than a token amount is required. Now it can grab what it needs whenever.  Also a suitable point to show what happens if I don't do a loop. The Belt Overflow mod isn't as painful as it was prior to 0.16, due to a change in the game code that affects how it functions. But you still really don't want to do this. Especially once things get more involved. It, uh, makes a big mess.  Here's our next goal. There's an absolutely stupid amount of stuff that comes with Automation as you can see, although a lot of it is recycling recipes. Still, our first electric-powered assembler, the ability to build more magazines and our first armor, etc. It's unavailable because we need Electricity(25 red vials) first. Electricity on it's own gives us our first taste of electric power; but the only thing we can power with it is a standard inserter. It's not at all worth building a generator just for that. Altogether, that means we need 75 reds to get to the first real useful electricity-powered machine, which is the reason for this resource grind. That's a sizable amount of iron and copper required.  Which brings me back to this. We need 75 of these electromagnetic cores, and then after that a bunch of the coils. Loading a stack of iron into the machine, combined with the coal on the belt, allows for it to be left completely alone and just whirr away for a while. So it's back east to the copper mining operation. It's not often you get perfect timing, so I'll take it when it happens. The run of cores are completed as I return with the furnace having caught up and 30-some copper plates. Now it's time for some coil assembly.  These work slowly, as they build 8 at a time. I need a total of 150, but 50 will do to get the Electricity research. So this is a decidedly yawny couple of minutes waiting for it. 10 seconds each job for the assembler.  It uses most of the copper, but here's the reward when it's finished: a partially, nay mostly-automated research operation. The vials get fed into the lab by the burner inserter, and I can just walk away and ignore this for a while. Time to go yawn back at the copper area. The lab works a fair bit faster than the assembler, so nothing will slow this down. It also gives me an excellent gauge for when to come back: when the research is mostly done, it's time. By then, most of the copper mining is done. I estimate how much coal the drill will need to get the required amount and leave only that much in it, then come back to throw more in the assembler for the coils Automation research requires. After that, it's another wait, twice as long as the first one.  Well before Automation finishes, I've got the mining drill back producing more coal. I grab some of it from time to time, keeping plenty on the loop to feed the research but also getting ahead on stocking up fuel for the next resource grind when this is done.  Just about exactly the time that Automation research finished, the coal location was exhausted so I needed to get a couple more belt sections and extend the loop just a bit.  Time to build some stuff, starting with this. Inefficient as can be(even worse than vanilla standard boilers) and it takes what is a significant resource investment for this point in the game, but it's the only way right to electric power, and we can't power better assembling machines without electricity, so it's definitely a necessity.  It's already a four-stage process to get the turbine, because we need iron plates and gear wheels to get a motor, then I need copper cables to combine with those to get the electric motors we need for the turbine. In other words, it's time for assembler-recipe spam.  Pretty big sucker. And it chomps down several units of coal to get itself up to speed.  There is no water source required for this, it's just magically generated to make this building work within the Factorio engine, because internally it's steam power. I think it's just supposed to be a thing that burns coal directly. Either way, the important thing is; enough coal in, and it works.  Being able to build things out of a variety of materials in many cases, instead of just having the one option, is very much a Bobs/Angels thing. Here it's quite helpful, as we have no automated source of wood - but iron we do have.  Rather important to get all the other ingredients made before picking up our burner assembler which we'll need to make them.  And now the familiar yellow standard inserter. Looks like everything that runs on electricity needs an electric motor. Go figure.  Now the new research area is as good as I can make it, for now. As long as the turbine has fuel, it will continue to have some drain from the assembler and the inserter -- which is actually a really good argument in favor of just taking all the coal with me when I go off on the next mining expedition. This assembler has the same graphics as the burner one once built, so if you don't see the difference; well, there isn't one. Energy usage is basically identical as well, just doesn't have the 10% efficiency penalty. So it might not have been worth making, but since I had to build one anyway to get to the second-tier version, I figure it didn't hurt to do it now. At the very least it breaks up the early-game montony here.  Here's the next goal; the end of the push towards self-replication. That yellow one on the left is the assembling machine 2; the blue inserter is still the fast inserter. Those are the two main prizes here, with the assembler much the more important. Of course it's more expensive research, and of course I need something else first; Electronics. From which I'll get nothing that is immediately useful, but a sizable handful of items unlocked that will be needed later. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 20:28
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How much of a problem are biters gonna be with these handicaps and our starting area?
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Jun 13, 2018 01:50
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Probably a significant one. In my test game which went a little over twice this far in, they were starting to become an issue but it was manageable. Ore fields were also closer together and I had a more festive biome with a fair amount of trees, which is the preferred situation. It's not at all out of the question that this attempt could fail to alien attacks and I'd have to start over in a more friendly biome. The RNG is finicky though when it comes to that, particulary with early attacks. So it really could go either way. ETA: It's very much a race against time, getting enough of a bootstrap 'factory' up and running before they start coming in force. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Jun 13, 2018 |
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Jun 13, 2018 06:05
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This may turn out to be nothing, but Windows 10 hates me. Err rather, hates Factorio. Rebooted my system and it was time for an OS update apparently. Everything else still works. Factorio crashes a brief way into the loading screen, because of course it does. Seems like every other software I have runs smoothly. So just basically an FYI; there's a delay here in me working on this. Could be very brief, but who really knows.
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Jun 13, 2018 09:09
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So it turns out that Windows was stuck in an 'update and restart' loop. Which eventually it got out of, thankfully - didn't want to properly install whatever it was trying to, but after breaking out of that all is fine again. I like Windows 10 . .. except when I don't.
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Jun 14, 2018 05:25
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Yay. Thanks, Bill. Also - pretty sure you're certifiably insane. Because my god those logistics chains. Though I do like the idea of burner tech lasting longer.
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Jun 14, 2018 09:51
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https://youtu.be/TUnEKyJa8eA Replication & Nanobots The next resource reaping needed to be somewhat larger: over 300 iron and 130 or so copper. On the other hand I basically had half the required coal already mined out so there was a head start to make things a little less painful. Time played so far was approaching two hours, which is important because usually in vanilla that means alien attacks could start at any time. Time pressure is definitely becoming a thing here. Same approach as before: coal and iron first, then get some stuff built in the assembler while the copper is mining away and doing it's thing. Before I got going on the research though, I took a moment to get a suit of light armor done. As far as I know it's exactly the same ingredients(40 Iron) and capabilities as vanilla. Modest protection is better than none, and I'm surprised I haven't run into any hostiles yet. And then it's the already-demonstrated grind of back-and-forth between research and copper areas, getting the vials made for Electronics.  Now literally nothing in here to be made is vanilla, and there are several new items. None of which we can even make yet, because while they are unlocked, we haven't unlocked the other tech requirements to produce them. So the only purpose right now is to be intimidated by what is yet to come.  By the time I get this unlocked, it's already been over an hour of grinding since the last update ended. But nevermind that, this gets me to the first major goal of self-replication. Really not much to it since we have the basic electronic boards and the assembler 1. We're only going to get one of these for a long time, but it sure adds a bit more color:  Everything else is still quite drab(if you can forgive my stupid purple get-up), but a bit of yellow goes a long way here. So what next? Well, more research of course! I mined enough materials to keep going a bit. At least these coming projects are short:  There are two techs called 'Basic Logistics' in this mod setup. How's that for confusing? And both are required to do normal Logistics, which is usually the first or second thing you research in a vanilla game. And I'm three hours in here, and I don't even have it unlocked yet. Super-great. Anyway, this one gives us basic undergrounds and splitters. Both of which require wood, which I can't automate production of yet.  Standard transport belts. And hey look ... tin plate?? Yeah, we don't even have the technological knowhow to make that. We haven't researched enough to even make the materials for the normal, bottom of the barrel, baseline vanilla transport belt. Although these are actually twice as fast as our current basics, and a 50% boost on the vanilla speed. So there is that.  Here's 'normal' logistics. Standard undergrounds and splitters. Look how expensive stuff gets here. Quickly.  Here's the prize, and the next goal for me. I'll save some of the details for the next update so you can see it in action, but basically nanobots will allow me to stop placing things on my own. The Nanobots mod is a well-done addition that allows for handing over that function ... at a price.  With the boost in crafting speed, the new assembling machine 2 gets quite a bit ahead of the burner lab. That speeds up this whole process somewhat. Getting back to the nanobots, there's a fun little chain to get those going. The emitter needs basic circuit boards(basic insulating boards and copper cable). Basic insulating boards then require wood(from raw wood ... I've got one left) and stone tablet(from stone brick ... from raw stone ... from crushed stone). If my math is correct there that would make the Nano Emitter the end of a seven-step chain. Which is about as long as things got in vanilla. And I'm on red science here. Thankfully the bots are easier to make.  One final thing to throw in here; this is, as far as I know, the most expensive research in the game. It's basically the 'winning tech' from SpaceX, allowing for completion of that program. 800,000 vials required. Each group of eight needs a two-minute base processing time. And the FTL drive itself only needs 500 each of four different highly advanced components, plus the usual low-density structures. Just as a 'this is how insane we are going to get' thing. There are, at present, almost 500 visible tech options, almost all of which need some else before I could even research them. But hey, I've got 7 in the 'done' column! So that's something. Oh, and there are options for boosting the above SpaceX tech requirements. Which I didn't enable. Because there is a limit(a remote, high one, but a limit nonetheless) to my insanity. Also why I didn't implement Marathon settings or Death World or any such gobbedygook. Next up: Nanobots in action, and what passes for my first nearly self-sufficient smelting operation. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jun 17, 2018 |
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Jun 17, 2018 00:49
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Thotimx posted:One final thing to throw in here; this is, as far as I know, the most expensive research in the game. It's basically the 'winning tech' from SpaceX, allowing for completion of that program. 800,000 vials required. Each group of eight needs a two-minute base processing time. And the FTL drive itself only needs 500 each of four different highly advanced components, plus the usual low-density structures. Just as a 'this is how insane we are going to get' thing. There are, at present, almost 500 visible tech options, almost all of which need some else before I could even research them. But hey, I've got 7 in the 'done' column! So that's something. According to your screenshot, the cost is 8 million vials total. Are you sure you didn't boost the SpaceX tech requirements? I checked the mod file and that tech should run 125,000 cycles, not 1,000,000.
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Jun 17, 2018 21:36
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Heh, I missed a zero in there. That's even more terrifying … glorious!! *Ahem*. Anyway, no I didn't boost SpaceX … at least not directly. I checked this after reading your post. What's going on is that ScienceCostTweaker(SCT), as currently configured, has the default costs for low-level tech and increases the higher-end ones. I've got it on 'normal', there are lower and higher settings available. So that has the effect on inflating the numbers needed for anything that uses the late-game science packs.
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Jun 18, 2018 05:47
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https://youtu.be/Mk0hOzqS6f4 Metal Connections  Here's my first use of blueprints. Of course the normal reason for them is for easy placement of things you need to use repeatedly, but it works here as well. You need to 'ghost-place' items to make the nanobots work anyway. This is at the only sizable saphirite patch in range, southwest of the coal area where the lab/turbine/yellow assembler are. And interestingly enough, there's some coal here as well. Not a lot, a little under 2.5k, but enough to get things started. That saved quite a bit of time as I didn't need to make a bunch of extra transport belts. I also made this bigger and more convoluted originally, with two coal drills to keep up with everything. I eventually redesigned it smaller to this, which only needs one. There are a couple of issues here; there's nowhere for the crushed stone in the ore crusher or the finished plates in the furnace to go. Their internal buffer storage is enough for my immediate purposes however. I particularly like how the burner inserters bracket that tree which is annoyingly in the way.  Nanobots in action; the construction ones that is. I think the purplish haze as they put a new entity in place is pretty cool. A canister of 10 of these things requires 2 Stone, 3 Copper, and 7 Iron ... and of course also the coal to supply the energy to make all of that. That'll become less relevant over time once I'm able to increase production, but right now it's a significant price in terms of overhead. Each nanobot produces places one thing and is consumed in the process. There are also these:  This presents a bit of a conundrum though. In order to clear trees out of the way and not get any wood from them, I need wood to produce these. So that's out for now, I just need to work around them. Once this small little operation is up, I have self-sufficient iron smelting for a time. Takes a bit to prime everything with coal once again, and now I have two coal drills to keep an eye, making sure they've got enough but not too much in their particular loops.  My current equipment. Making the nanobots work is a simply matter of activating the emitter as my 'weapon'. They will then automatically build any 'ghosted' entities within a modest range. This also means that if you are trying to work out something, you want to switch to the pistol or whatever. They'll start building immediately whether you are done with your creation or not.  Here's the next bit of progress, a lot cheaper and easier than running transport belts all the way back up to the power & research area. For the price of a few inserters, a dozen power poles, and the nanobots to place everything I've moved the assembler down here. It needs iron for most things and copper for only a few things, so I still need to do runs for that. Here though I don't need to move ingredients around on my own. The furnace puts the iron into the assembling machine directly, and that chest to the right of it serves multiple purposes: ** All the extra crushed stone goes there. ** Any crushed saphirite if there's ever a backup as well, which will then eventually get emptied into the furnace. ** Any other intermediate products. By flipping around that right-side inserter I can do all the inserting/removing of stuff I need into the assembler, and take only the finished products; stuff like nanobot canisters, transport belts, etc. Copper cable, iron gear wheels, iron sticks, motors, yada yada yada get moved for me. Of course I've got to stand here and micro the thing to make that happen. Every once in a while I'll go on a run to fuel/unload the copper area, where I've got a basic setup again, and I can always set this up to make gear wheels which we need a lot of. That doesn't need to be tweaked; iron in from the furnace, and gear wheels out into the chest.  The labeling here isn't the best but I couldn't find a color that worked consistently. There's all kinds of shades on this map. Anyway, you can see that we've got a faint amount of pollution, but that isn't stopping it from spreading everywhere, including off the map to the west. By the way, the squiggly brown lines in the southeast are cliffs, a new 0.16 feature. We'll get to those. ** Starting Iron - This is a small saphirite patch where I got the iron from initially. I used this one precisely because it's relatively useless for long-term operations. 6.4k remains. ** Coal/Power - Where the lab and turbine are, fairly near my starting point. ** Copper - As it says. ** New Iron - This is where I've got the iron and assembler at right now. 93k at the moment, this will last a while but it's not a big vein by any stretch. Moving the assembling machine there is risky. Everything else can be replaced, but if we lose that we're in trouble -- it'll take a lot of highly aggravating(and slow) buildup to get to the point of being capable of rebuilding it. And during a couple of iterations I had significant biter attacks there, but for whatever RNG reason not when I built the scaled-down version. It's imperative for me to to be very careful and not leave it for any significant length of time.  A group of biters surprised me during one of my copper runs. I couldn't recreate the battle, I had a save just before it but it seems I deleted it inadvertently. In any case it wasn't all that fascinating a fight. About a dozen biters and a few spitters. They seem to be calibrated at this early point to an amount that you can handle as long as you don't do anything stupid. Takes a bit of time to kill them with a pistol and I absorb some damage but it's doable without armor, and fairly easy with it. Also, with Bobs there are artifacts that drop - which are apparently needed to build stuff later on. So we're back to that, although I have no idea what for. But I got a few of those. These biters also seem to attack dead trees and rock formations on occasion. They're kind of aggressive that way.  After slogging my way through well over a half-hour of nanobot and transport belt-assembly, I manage this. The primary coal loop is extended way over here to the east, approximately 100 squares each way, to deliver fuel to the same basic burner-based setup. Now all I need to do on this end of things is to come pick up copper from the furnace. Meanwhile I've had to move the coal and saphirite drills in the iron area multiple times to keep them running, which is more overhead in terms of nanobots and other materials.  The next initiative is shown here. As mentioned the drills setup has been slightly modified, but the main thing going on is that storage and iron plates are getting moved back to the initial starting location.  Then I added a belt to bring in copper from the east as well. In this shot it's just been connected so the supply isn't yet arriving. Still, with this addition I've reached the pinnacle of what I can do at the current point. Everything I need to build things comes to this central location. I have two coal drills, one copper, and one iron to manage. If I get too much of something, which is really only going to apply to copper, I can go shut that off by turning the inserter there as well. Other than those activities though I'm able to pretty much stay here and 'mind the store', building whatever I need. No more research here, it's been about putting this infrastructure in place; and it took a bit over two hours to do so. Looking a bit longer-term here, I need to get to the point of having a stable, defensible base as soon as possible. Survival Goals ** Basic Intermediates -- Automate construction of stuff like iron gear wheels, copper cables, motors, etc. Basically I want to try to out-source anything that only takes two ingredients or less so the yellow assembler can focus on the more complex items. ** Wood Automation. This is needed for fast/filter inserters, any kind of turrets, electromagnetic labs to get us away from burner tech on that, any possibility of making more assembler 2s, termite bots to clear trees, underground belts/splitters, etc. Bottom line is we're not going to get very far and it's going to be painful so long as I don't have automated wood production. ** Walls + Turrets. Permanent defenses, to be upgraded over time of course, can begin to be contemplated once we have a regular wood supply.
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Jun 22, 2018 00:16
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I thought that base factorio was madness enough 
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Jun 22, 2018 18:19
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It can get worse. Add on Sea Block, the Factorio's version of Minecraft's skyblocks. You get everything from dredging the water for sludge and algae then endlessly processing it!
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Jun 22, 2018 19:47
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Fat Samurai posted:I thought that base factorio was madness enough In the world of modding, there is always more madness.
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Jun 23, 2018 02:10
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There's a few things about it that are appealing to me. ** I just generally like challenging/hardcore scenarios. ** As was discussed a bit in the first game, vanilla doesn't really require you to use trains much for example. You don't need to go much beyond what might generally be considered a 'reasonable' transport belt length. Here, both by philosophy but also by necessity, I'll be using them a ton. Eventually. ** Vanilla can also seem old hat after a while. When you can set up the areas for all of the key intermediates(starting with gear wheels and green circuits) in your sleep, there's really not much else to most of the game. Of course I could have just gone bigger and megabase at that point, but there's roughly a million megabase vanilla videos out there. Stuff like Bobs/Angels, esp. when you are new to it like me, makes you think about how to setup areas and production lines because all of the flows and chains are different, ratios aren't the same - I expect to be figuring stuff out for the entire journey here pretty much, and figuring out logistical issues pretty much is Factorio. At least IMO. Sage Grimm posted:It can get worse. Add on Sea Block, the Factorio's version of Minecraft's skyblocks. You get everything from dredging the water for sludge and algae then endlessly processing it! Yeah, I really like that mod. It doesn't really fit with the whole 'Factorio Way' approach I'm doing as you have to do a ton of stuff by yourself at the beginning, but I like how extreme and different it is. And there's at least two other major mods(Py and Yuoki) that I didn't cram in here either.
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Jun 25, 2018 19:48
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https://youtu.be/epFNehwXlZ4 Electrification  Here's a quick look at where we're at on some production stats, although it's still greatly varying. A little over 1k per hour on the key items; ore, coal, etc.  And power usage. Basically peaking at 25 kw with the turbine capable of as much as 2 MW. That thing should last us quite a while longer. A few new research projects were now necessary.  In the name of surviving. Like vanilla, the SMG is our first significant effective firepower upgrade, capable of a much higher rate-of-fire than the pistol. As hostilities inevitably increase, this will increase my chances of avoiding an early demise - and killing the aliens before they wreck my stuff.  In the absence of the wood supply we need for things like splitters and undergrounds, this is the only way available for any flow of items to 'cross' transports belts. That makes this is a logistic necessity for any type of expanded operation. I can only build them at the central yellow assembler, but thankfully they are reasonably cheap.  Not pictured here is the Ore Crusher, an electric-powered version of the Burner Ore Crusher which features a 50% increase in speed. And more importantly of course, can operate off the electric grid without needing coal. The Ore Sorting Facility shown here is a bit on the expensive side as can be easily seen, and also opens the door a crack to better and far more complex chains of ore processing. Another benefit of this research is that it unlocks crushing recipes for bobmonium and rubyte. That means we can now produce tin and lead if we so choose, in addition to the current iron and copper from saphirite and stiratite. While all of that is very well and good, the reason for getting this now is the electric-powered crusher will simplify logistics, and it's cheap. After that we'll need the sorting facility for the best & quickest way I know of, among several options of course, to get wood automation up and running. So this is definitely a vital project.  Assembling material for one final, larger research project, but still this is pretty full. The inventory of the chest at the yellow assembler. Some of this is just bits of odds-and-ends, but clearly we would be helped by doing something with all that crushed stone. I picked this time to do so because we've now emptied the chest down by the saphirite-mining area. It's all re-consolidated up this way.  The long inserter makes it's debut. The assembler here turns the crushed stone into regular stone, and I've got one chest there on the left for holding that, another for stone bricks. With this setup I can keep myself supplied with those two items, outsourcing them so the yellow assembler doesn't have to do that work. This is another temporary, quick-n-dirty approach, but it should handle at least a good part of the backlog. We'll be needing the bricks in larger numbers as we go into more mining, and even moreso when it's time to start building walls.  I readjusted the coal drill, but there is no fixing this without dealing with the crushed stone, which the stiratite ore crusher is crammed full of. A proper solution to that means routing power over here, and we've got enough copper plates for the moment so I'll pass on that. The saphirite location is running dangerously low on coal, so there's no point in worrying about that drill either.  Finally, there's this. A lot more expensive, but it's another step in the same direction; getting as much stuff on the electrical grid as possible. With this added, we can eliminate coal from everything except for: ** Burner inserters ** Burner Turbine that generates the power ** Burner Lab ** Furnaces for smelting Mines, crushers, most of the inserters, and assemblers are all able to go electric. The benefit of this is mostly about simplifying and streamlining logistics; there's a bit of pollution reduction and some speed gains but those are really just ancillary at the moment.  This is mostly the same, except the new mine and crusher for the saphirite. There are now two inserters removing the product from the crusher, as productivity has increased due to the improved mining speed. In fact, this combo now slightly out-produces the furnaces, and we will gradually see a backing-up of the crushed ore.  At this point, I've used up all the copper I have at the assembler, and can't produce more because this is clogged up with stone. That's led to this setup; there was just enough left to get power poles over here and get a couple of standard inserters to deal with the stone, so this will get sorted eventually but it'll take some time to deal with the backlog. Eventually I need to add more to move the crushed stone back west, get electric mining operations going out here as well, etc. Waiting for this to sort itself out created some down time. I made some stuff that would be needed later out of iron(electromagnet cores, gear wheels, iron sticks).  While research is ongoing via the yellow assembler and lab, the standard one switches from stone work to build others things I need. It was somewhere in this area that I quickly snagged Stone Walls research just because I can.  This setup is west of the yellow assembler/lab, and north of the saphirite field. It was necessary to handle this now because the minimal amount of coal in the saphirite area was nearly dried up. I might not need the third furnace here, but basically this can handle everything the electric mine/crusher combo can throw at it. The coal line was extended to run over here, so most importantly I now have one expanded coal loop that services the turbine & lab in the middle, copper mining in the east, and iron smelting here in the west. Everything is now fully connected up.  This is my solution to the amount of stuff coming in from each side. Frankly at this point I can produce more than I can use, and also more than I can off-load into the primary storage chest with just one assembler. So these loops maintain a buffer, and whenever the volume gets too heavy on either side I can go turn something off. I've got a lot of maintenance stuff to watch here; stone coming from both directions, and plates, and mines running out of stuff, and the fact that I need a second coal drill now so those need to get moved around more often, and oh by the way building things I need to expand/research as well. This is another time at which I really have sort of hit a chokepoint. I'd really like to build a bunch more assemblers and start outsourcing some basic stuff, but I really need some vague semblance of a bus to do that, better/faster inserters, undergrounds/splitters, etc. And to even think about doing any of that I'm going to need wood. So that's the next item on the agenda.
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Jun 30, 2018 22:40
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https://youtu.be/-zV1MBPi3wk Wood There are at least two different ways to get automated wood production. The Angel's BioProcessing way involves exploring and finding special tree(there's also gardens for different purposes) resources, then building a production chain to make seeds etc. culminating in an arboretum. That's an option but I'm not really ready to explore yet, and it's also more convoluted and difficult than a second option: Bob's has Greenhouses.  This comes first. All manner of pipes are available here; we can make them from any resource so whatever's most expendable. Stone is a popular choice but I'm actually not all that certain we'll have extra once I get to making walls, so I'm choosing iron. Basic fluid handling also adds the offshore pump, which is not a startup item like in vanilla.  Also not too expensive to get. Essentially the Greenhouse turns seedlings(which can be made from wood) and water into wood. So we'll need water and a small startup supply of wood to prime the thing. The kicker is the glass requirement here. For that we'll need one of our more recent developments.  I almost overlooked this. We need Bobmonium to get glass, and I thought the only source of the amber-colored ore used mostly for tin was that patch in the northeast, almost directly above our stiratite setup. But I found this tiny bit of it much closer by. There are trees in the area but there's a spot where I can get a mine in for almost 60 of it, one of those tiny squares. As it turns out, that's enough for my initial purposes.  Here's the next step in complicating ore processing stuff. This whole thing is temporary; the only reason it's here to get the glass I need. The trees block it, but there's a mining drill and ore crusher at the very bottom. I've got coal running down there partly because there wasn't room for an electric drill. There's also a stupid-looking long inserter there at the top, the only way I have right now of getting the glass across the coal loop. But the star of this operation is that monstrosity north of them. That's the Ore Sorting Facility, and they're not small. It takes apart the crushed ore and three different products come out: ** Silicon Ore(this is what we want for the glass. Smelting it is an inefficient use, but it's by far the easiest way to get glass and the only one we have right now) ** Tin Ore(a slightly better ratio than than the crushed bobmonium for making tin) ** Slag(we have no use for this yet, so we'll just store it. It's essentially the film made of impurities that is separated from liquid metal heated to sufficient temperatures) Four crushed bobmonium go in, one silicon, two tin ore, and one slag comes out. We get nine glass out of this, enough for just over two greenhouses. And then it gets taken down.  Just as I'm wrapping up producing what I need for this next project, we get a small group of uninvited guests. The SMG shows it's worth here and cuts them down easily.  I had to cut down just one more tree by hand to make this happen, at our nearby ubiquitious lake to the southeast. There's a lots of room to expand this but I won't need to do that anytime soon. Wood goes into the assembling machine which spits out seedlings onto a loop. It takes the greenhouse over a full minute to spit out a new batch of raw wood, which is pretty darn amazing when you consider it needs to grow a decent-sized tree in that time. The chest by the assembler will buffer one stack of wood, the rest goes north to join the copper line feeding into our main assembly area. After some time building up that buffer to prime the system, we'll have ourselves a good supply here. Also, this offshore pump requires power, it doesn't just work by magic, which I rather like. That's courtesy of AAI. In order to do that though, we still need more research; the same research that will let us build more yellow assembling machines is needed to get fast/filter inserters as well, and that's going to be required soon. Let's walk through why in a bit more detail. Basic Electronic Boards are the key, top-level component here. As previously discussed we need them for yellow assemblers. Filter inserters require them, and so do fast inserters which are also need for filtering ones. The circuit progression so far:  ** Basic Insulating Boards(wood and stone). We have wood now, so we can make these. ** Basic Circuit Board(Insulating boards and copper cable) ** Basic Electronic Boards(Circuit boards, solder, basic electronic components) That's where it gets fuzzy. Solder would just need a new logisitics setup; it requires resin(made from wood) and solder plate(made from tin and lead plates), which we can get from bobmonium and rubyte. Would just need to set it up. But those basic electronic components are different. Let's all just laugh together at the word 'basic' being used to describe this convoluted stuff. For those, we need: ** Tinned Copper Wire(Copper cable and tin plate). Ok, doable. ** Carbon(Coke & Carbon Dioxide). What the actual ... To get coke, we need to do a couple more moderately-priced research projects, then crush coal, then turn that crushed coal into coke. Carbon Dioxide also comes from coal and the same research, and requires a new building, etc. Ok then.  This unlocks a bunch of stuff we don't need, gives us access to the next research we do need, along with a carbon dioxide recipe and this Liquifier which we'll need for the job.  At least it's something not called basic. I'm starting to get a complex about how much time I'm spending figuring out 'basic' things. Carbon, crushed coal, and coke recipes are unlocked.  More expensive, but we're going to need it. Gives us the ability to have inserters choose what to move, which is going to be vital. That's particularly true for ramping up mining, as we won't be able to just pick 'clean' mining areas where the ores aren't mixed in. Need to have a way to separate them out. Another big one was the circuit network. That's the next major priority in terms of improving control over what's going on. Beats the heck out of doing more and more inserter-turning manually.  The iron loop was extended to make plenty of room for this; we have Steel Processing now. Steel will be needed for some buildings I'll want to use before too long, and of course upgrading to a better axe, having larger chests available, etc. is not a bad idea.  This here is for the purpose of making carbon. The two machines on the left are Liquifiers. The far-left one makes carbon dioxide from coal. The crusher on the right makes crushed coal, which is then put in the furnace to become coke. The coke and CO2 are then combined in the second liquifier to make carbon. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Jul 8, 2018 |
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Jul 8, 2018 06:37
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Thotimx posted:
:bobsmod: Filter inserters are slightly less critical now (in base game) since you can also filter via splitters. Also, are you not using customisable grabby arms? Or is that just a later tech? (where you can set them up to grab from and deposit up to 3 squares away. and pick which side things deposit on)
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Jul 8, 2018 06:52
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First image seems to be a duplicate of the second - presumably you were intending to show the pipe research option there?
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Jul 8, 2018 07:09
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Thanks, corrected that; somehow I managed to upload the same image twice. Veloxyll posted:are you not using customisable grabby arms? Or is that just a later tech? (where you can set them up to grab from and deposit up to 3 squares away. and pick which side things deposit on) I think I can change where they drop but I haven't done any of that research. One of them at least is a red-science tech that I just haven't bothered with yet. I'm still in 'if I don't need this basically now, then wait' mode. Dropping stuff at right angles etc. is something that probably won't occur to me naturally for a very long time. I'm so used to 'pull stuff from here, drop it opposite' that it's hardwired into my brain.
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Jul 8, 2018 20:27
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https://youtu.be/RREP4kHsFGc Minibus Preparations  This was first on the agenda. It was time to see a little more of the surrounding area for planning purposes ... and also start to get a bit of a better handle on the biter threat. It's also another 'oh, we have to actually research that?' since radar is a standard, game-start item in vanilla. Here, it has three prerequisites. One is Optics, which will allow for the building of lamps for lighting purposes once night starts to fall. No point in bothering with them now.  While working on that and other basic production, this happened. For the first time, the biters destroyed something. There's a corpse on the coal loop, and they took out this inserter here. Not a big loss obviously but another sign that trouble is coming. That artifact on the transport belt is particularly hilarious IMO. When I killed that biter, it just joined the parade.  Not long after, I finally got off my arse and went electric at the copper operation. There's an extra inserter there that would get removed soon.  The iron drill ran out and there were no more good places to put it ... without getting the trees out of the way. Here's the 'termite nanobots' in action. Now that I have a reliable wood source, it's no problem to build these. We get no resources from them, but after several seconds time they eat through any tree in range. And it turns out that they also like electric poles. Even ones made from iron, with no wood in them at all. Powerful things, these termites. Apparently they can't tell the difference. Seems that was a bug recently fixed in the Nanobots mods, as it doesn't do it anymore but it was still rather amusing. With a couple of applications, the trees obscuring this ore field were reduced to stumps, and I had a lot more choices for relocating the mining drill.  Radar, thy name is flaydo. It can call itself whatever it wants. It's going to give us valuable information ...  and also cause a significant drain on our coal supplies for power. Nearly a doubling, as can be seen here on the right. Which is a good reason to not have done this sooner, but we need it now. The burner turbine now eats a lump a coal every 2-3 seconds, split pretty even between bursting and silence instead of spending most of the time inactive. It's at about 13-14% capacity right now.  A batch of small research jobs went next, including heavy armor which I had overlooked. I also got myself a shotgun and some ammunition for that, ditching the pistol.  Then another expansion in the east; it's time for bobmonium(north/amber) and rubyte(east/red) to join the fray. Really the only place for this; we have no other significant bobmonium source.  And this here is the why. Undergrounds here help with smelting the tin and lead. The blue furnace on the left is known as a 'metal-mixing' variant. It's more expensive, requiring stone bricks instead of just regular stone, but it is a 'smart' furnace. You set a recipe there just like at an assembler and it will only grab what it needs. That way, it won't take stone or copper going by; only the tin and lead plates it will need for the solder plates. Solder is required for basic electronic components that we'll need for a few things, and with this I think we have all of the resources coming in that are required for going forward with the minibus. It only took a little shy of 12 hours ...  There's 'good red' in the east; we have lots of rubyte. 'Bad red' in the northwest though. There we can see our first significant biter concentration; with the way they swarm on Rampant, that's much more than are needed to take me down on foot. Believe me, I tried. Heavy Armor + SMG is fine for early-game vanilla biters. It's not even close here. They field a lot of spitters, more than I can take out fast enough. A few other small, fledgling nests could even do that, some visible on this map and some not due to the limited radar coverage. I'm going to have to deal with them now and carve out a little more space to place walls and the expanded operations. Bobmonium looks to be an eventual concern; hopefully we don't need more for a while because we only have that one field with just over 100k, plus whatever's scattered through the other ones. The highlighted saphirite field isn't even the biggest one; 3M is available in that area just to the north of it, and the stiratite in the west is just under 2M. We've used some of the coal where we are but have those two other equal-sized fields a bit to the north. So unless we run out of bobmonium(i.e., tin), we should have plenty of resources for some while. Dealing with the biter threat can wait no longer though, and that will be the next objective.
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Jul 14, 2018 22:48
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This has been a fascinating read, thank you for writing it. Seeing if I can get factorio now myself 
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Jul 16, 2018 20:39
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Loel posted:This has been a fascinating read, thank you for writing it. Seeing if I can get factorio now myself Good luck!
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Jul 17, 2018 02:27
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https://youtu.be/2FcXskYMgvI Proxy Combat  I really had to pay close attention here, and it's easy to screw up, but the next project would be aided by me managing inserters for both assemblers simultaneously in order to get stuff built more quickly. Here, I want a bunch of electric motors, so the bottom yellow one is building regular motors while the top one works on the copper cable I'll need to make those into the electric variety.  I took a step halfway towards building some basics here. The assembler to the left of me is building ammo magazines, but when it doesn't need to that I can switch it to gear wheels, which well get fed into the one to the left and allow transport belts to be made. Still basic ones of course. I need of lot of ammo for fighting, and a lot of belts for the coming minibus. Then, in the lower right here, I added an assembler to make stone wall sections out of some of our spare stone bricks as well, so that some of those will be ready when needed.  It's time to get into some actual combat-related tools. The description isn't wrong here; the pathing is somewhat derpy. But more importantly, this allows what is not possible in vanilla; directing multiple vehicles at the same time. This device is available at the start of the game, and for super-cheap. If you ever played with an RC car or anything similar as a kid, that's basically what this is for.  These are not. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Chaingunner. This is essentially a gun turret with tracked propulsion. Top speed is a whopping 20 kmh, or slower than I can run. What's that, you can't run 20 kmh? Slowpoke. I think I can hit upper 20s. I need a turret itself, then several motors and a moderate-sized batched of additional iron to build these, so they aren't super cheap. At red science level of advancement though, they are basically what we have available. Two small projects(Basic Vehicles and then the Chaingunner itself) to unlock them. What's going on here is an improvized way to get fuel to them. Coal of course is what we have. They need that and ammunition. It's rather better to give them the coal first though, because they aren't going anywhere without it.  I spend a fair bit of time waiting for the ammunition to get finished. With whatever iron still trickles down the line, and the surplus that was built up, I do get some other things produced that will be needed. One is this fast inserter, which is useful at the moment for any large projects as I can get the materials into the assembler a lot ... well, faster. There was also a significant amount of just standing-around time, not seeing a real good way to scale up iron supplies this side of getting the minibus rolling. I don't want to run out of ammo in the middle of a fight.  Once I'm ready to go, here's a shot of me giving orders to my squad of a half-dozen Chaingunners. The minimap doesn't work for this purpose, so it has a limited range. I've found it best to be zoomed out to the maximum, so I don't have to make a bunch of small-range hops. Then I can follow just behind the convoy, and give another order. The green lines, and the circles at the end of them in the north, show the pathing of the vehicles. Yellow at first, then green when they start moving towards a destination. Pathing through/around obstacles like forests works badly. It's definitely a good idea to stick to open terrain. But never mind that; we've turned Factorio in an RTS!! I head for the biggest infestation in the local area, to the northwest by that big saphirite field.  Here they are laying waste to the cluster. One is destroyed in the process; there were three worms here. This was starting to become a sizable infestation for this point in the game. Yes, that's right. The biters, in defending their homeworld, are an 'infestation' into 'my' territory. Factorio has a way of encouraging you to talk your way into this kind of brilliant logic. I don't have to -- in fact I can't -- give specific 'attack this' orders. I just tell them where to go and they'll fire at the closest thing ... even if it isn't the biggest threat. So it's a good idea to approach from whatever direction will have them attack the most problematic enemy whenever possible. As soon as the local bands of marauding biters came in range, they fired automatically. So I just need to make sure I tell them where to go, and give them enough fuel and ammo. There will be more advanced versions of this. Eventually my goal, which is entirely possible down the road, is to have all defense of my holdings completely automated. Deployment, construction of combat assets, move orders, scanning for threats, producing the necessary fuel/ammunition/etc., resupplying and repairing in the field, all of it done for me. But for now, this is what I have -- and it's sufficient to the task. I should also mention that AAI has some other stuff, namely miners/haulers/etc. I think the mining vehicles are really overpowered though compared to vanilla. And yeah, the fighting vehicles are as well, but that's because they fill what IMO is a hole missing in the core game. Any kind of automated combat vehicle is going to do that compared to a circumstance where there aren't any. For this project, I'm ok with that, but not ok with trivializing the resource gathering that's part of the logistics that make Factorio what it is. Also visible here are the multi-colored artifacts we get from destroying a spawner. Those will apparently come into play later, as they'll be needed for various things. For now, it's just one more thing to take up storage space.  I had hoped to put this off until getting the minibus going, but there were just too many different things I needed. So I did this, moving everything to a bigger steel chest from the iron one. When placing something manually, you can just put a new chest over the old one and everything will magically make it's way into the new container. That doesn't work with nanobots. So this is an almost 10-minute process of moving ... and then moving it back into a new steel chest in the right location. But since I'm still in the mode of waiting on iron to get essential things built anyway, I'm not really losing much by doing this.  Here are the 28 things we've already done the research for. That's a nice little chunk really, I was surprised it was that many.  And here's what's current available to research. So we're not yet half through the red tier, but we've also got a significant amount of things available that require green science.
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Jul 17, 2018 17:41
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Loel posted:This has been a fascinating read, thank you for writing it. Thanks for reading!
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Jul 17, 2018 17:42
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This reads like diary of complex madness and I'm loving it. Once upon a time, Factorio team showed a prototype for Spiderbot!  Is there anything in mods that implement that beauty and horror?
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Jul 18, 2018 21:59
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Walking turrets, nice. Can you get them to do full patrol routes ad infinitum? I take it robo-miners are faster than a miner-belt setup or somethiong that makes them OP?
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Jul 19, 2018 04:20
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I don't think there's a mod that implements Spiderbot, but I could be wrong. Frankly there isn't much that there ISN'T a mod for. Veloxyll posted:Can you get them to do full patrol routes ad infinitum? Yes. I'll eventually get into the automated AAI stuff as we go(and as I learn it myself, frankly) but it has buildings that you basically combine with circuit network commands(some vanilla, some added by the mod) to have them do pretty much whatever you want. As to the miner stuff … a few numbers: ** Burner Mining Drill: mining speed 0.35, energy consumption 150kw ** Electric Mining drill(first one): mining speed 0.5, energy consumption 45 kw. This is where I'm at right now. ** Mk I Miner(the first automated vehicle, mod defaults to actually start the game with one for free): mining speed 3, energy consumption 25 kw, efficiency 200% ** Mk V Miner(top-tier, endgame version): mining speed 48, energy consumption 80kw, efficiency 200% ** MK V Electric Mining Drill(best stationary one in game, at least without the infinite productivity research stuff): mining speed 4, energy consumption 960 kw. These do have increased mining power which, because of the way mining works, closes some of the speed gap … but not that much of it. So basically the AAI ones use several times less energy for several times more output, plus you can automate where they go, they can unload their massive(multiple chests worth) inventory instantaneously to either a Vehicle Depot or a Hauler(another vehicle which serves as basically a transport for what they mine). Mobility, ease of use, productivity, energy footprint, logistics of transport are all highly trivialized compared to vanilla. That's not necessarily a bad thing for people who just want to really get going quickly, but it totally breaks the type of buildup that I'm doing here and that is typically part of a standard Factorio game to a lesser degree. You can improve the 'normal' mines eventually with modules of course, so it may not be as bad lategame(esp. because at that point resources are in general more trivial to acquire).
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Jul 19, 2018 06:08
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A funny thing happened a day or so ago. Every time I boot up Factorio I check for mod updates. The latest one involved two, one of which we haven't gotten to yet. The second one was Rampant, which it seems was having a bug with biters not attacking enough. It, uh, was an effective fix. As in, within a half-hour I found the factory overwhelmed and swarmed from multiple directions. It was kind of amusing watching them rip apart what I'd built, but it seems I poked the bear a little too hard. I looked into what Rampant does and my best theory is that when I took down that one cluster shown in this last update, it triggered a more aggressive response. Along with the vanilla pollution and the higher aggression in general, player proximity to their clusters cheeses them off. First time I've had Factorio kick my butt -- it was actually rather impressive. So I'm forced to roll back to (at least) the timeframe of the beginning of the last post here, and instead of going hunting with Chaingunners I need to take a more defensive approach. It's going to delay the point of getting a minibus rolling significantly, but the indigent life of this planet has left me no choice. Also going to delay the next update, as I grind through several hours of previously-accomplished play.
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Jul 21, 2018 20:00
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Thotimx posted:the indigent life of this planet has left me no choice. Also going to delay the next update, as I grind through several hours of previously-accomplished play. Indigent, or INDIGNANT
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Jul 24, 2018 04:37
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Yes/both.
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Jul 25, 2018 06:28
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Today, I admit to an element of defeat. The Factorio cocktail cooked up here is, I am not convinced, not possible. With a new and more friendly starting situation, streamlined build order, etc. I was able to cut down the startup time significantly. Even this was not enough though, as at about the 5-hour mark, give or take, I still get swarmed under by biters. I'm generating a lot more pollution this time around with a bigger mining operation, but this of course just ticks them off sooner so it's a catch-22 as I need the resources to get things moving faster. There's a marginal chance that it may be possible to achieve on a 'utopia' quality map with just the right size starting area surrounded by a lot more trees to absorb more of the pollution -- but probably not and I'm not interested in going into what would be required to investigate that. So this leaves me with a need to change something in the mod setup. It's a lot more important to me to retain the various logistical challenges which are the heart of the Factorio Way then it is to keep the biter swarms. So I'm going to move forward with the Rampant mod completely removed. Vanilla biters, which as we've seen in the first run are still quite capable of being annoying but won't be expected to present a major long-term threat. Rampant's limited 'grace period' at the start of the game just isn't enough to handcuff myself with the kinds of limitations I'm using here and still succeed when 100 or so of the jerks start ripping apart everything I've painstakingly built. I expect to be able to get things rolling again in the next few days, hopefully this weekend but we'll see.
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Aug 30, 2018 20:23
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Personally, my primary interest is in the added logistical challenges. Expanded biters were certainly interesting, but I feel like this run will be every bit as entertaining without them set to nightmare mode. Welcome back, and greatly looking forward to the next update!!
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Aug 30, 2018 22:40
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Yeah, fighting aliens has always been far less interesting in this game than more and more intense 
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Aug 30, 2018 23:38
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You can have Factorio without the biters, but you can't have Factorio without the logistics. Will we see the legendary braided double-wide sushi belt in this playthrough?
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Aug 31, 2018 00:05
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Hugs to you; biters are just some additional hot sauce on already mind-bending content. I will enjoy seeing the update
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Aug 31, 2018 11:26
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 17:39 |
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Thanks everyone for the support. I'm glad we're all on the same page with the change. I should mention to clarify that the biters won't go completely vanilla; Bob's enemies changes some things including tougher spawners, a few new enemies, and(I think) they are a little smarter as well. Restart Video  After about a half-dozen maps were rejected, though most were as good or better than the one I chose initially, I settled on this. Another start I rejected because it had massive natural gas and oil nearby ... that would actually have been in my way more than anything but I also didn't want such an absurd close amount of more advanced resources. Coal field is less than 60k so it's pretty smallish and there's no others in the area. There's a lot of other things that could be better; beyond the initial fields there's a bunch of open space. Secondary saphirite and stiratite locations could well be very hard to come by. Pollution will still spread quickly due to the lack of trees, even though we appear to be on the transition edge between biomes here. This isn't a utopia by any stretch, but it should help in making that compact, faster startup that I'm looking for. It wasn't long before I realized one way I could do things better is by multi-tasking more; finding as many ways as possible to do something useful while I was waiting for resources. I was able to craft the stone furnace and burner ore crusher while the initial coal mining was going on. As soon as I had enough fuel to do it, I also got some stone bricks baking.  I also managed to improve this a bit. First time, I didn't have a loop; I had a second burner inserter feeding a chest for the coal. This requires one more belt section but eliminates an inserter and the chest. Combined with more crafting-while-mining stuff -- I had the burner lab done before finishing copper mining, for example -- I was able to cut the time required to get to this point nearly in half. Had a handful of iron plates to spare but coal and copper were right on the money; I literally used the last bit of coal to prime the drill to get one to use in the burner assembler to build the inserter and belts here. It's much smaller than last time due to superior placement of the coal drill relative to the buildings. It's also 'sideways', which messes with my head a bit, but I'll suffer that. At this point I decided on a slightly different approach going forward.  Last time I grabbed Electricity and Automation, going to electric power for the assembler. Unfortunately, it's actually quite a bit more efficient to keep using the burner assembler; it's 10% less efficient than the electric one, but we lose almost 60% efficiency from the burner turbine. Even regular steam power(50% efficiency loss in both the modpack and vanilla) is not nearly as good. This bothered me enough that I actually went in and changed the stats of the burner assembler to be 35% efficient(so that it's still slightly worse than the electricity-powered one, and the gap grows with the move to the more efficient standard steam power). I really think this a hole in the way the mods I'm using interact. For example, when you go to electric mining, even with the inefficiency accounted for the electric option is still a third better than the burner option, again with better power sources eventually increasing that gap. I also want to make sure I go electric for the inserters. They require more resources to produce, but are a whopping 14x cheaper in terms of energy. There is the minimal energy drain when they aren't active, but it's still a huge gain. The assemblers actually use only half the energy of a burner inserter. They are just coal hogs, so I only want to use them where necessary(i.e., on the coal drills and burner turbine, so that coal doesn't stop coming during a power shortage). Practical result of all this blather is that I need to mine out a few extra coal during this period to get the burner assembler the energy it needs. So essentially I made things a little bit harder on myself, but otherwhise it would have been superior to just have burner assemblers all over the place eventually(literally until solar power shows up). Don't like that.  First time I got to this point in just under three hours; I managed to shave about 25 minutes off total here, mostly by multi-tasking. As can be seen it's starting to get lighter out. I also made kept the coal loop as small as possible, which is why the burner turbine is where it is. That's probably temporary.  Running around throwing minimal amounts of coal in six machines, moving crushed ore from both crushers to furnaces, and trying to get stuff done in the assembler in between ... yeah that's basically a game of whack-a-mole that isn't a whole lot of fun. Here's the first step to making it easier, extending the coal loop to the iron area. This is all familiar of course from the first time through, except that this time I skipped the whole burner-inserter part. Seemed best to just save the energy/power and go straight to the standard ones. The biggest priority in all of this was to make sure I kept the drills going without stopping. So long as that happens, everything else can 'catch up' eventually. By this point we I'm very near the line of not having enough coal come in from the one drill there, so I needed to add a second one. Even before getting the copper belt hookups done, I built a second, 'standard' assembler for improved multi-tasking, to get things done more quickly.  Less than 3.5 hours in, I had both saphirite and stiratite mining operations hooked up. This is one section where having the resource fields close together helped a lot; in the previous run it was about 100 belt sections in each direction to reach the ore patches, and just a small fraction of that here. I also made a significant 'rudder adjustment' here compared to the last try. Going for electric mining, though it's somewhat more energy-efficient, doesn't seem worth the 75 red vials it would require. I don't think I want that until I can just slap down the drills anywhere and filter out the bits of other ore types. The burner drills are smaller and easier to fit in ... but also require me to keep belting the coal around everywhere I want to be. That all made this a key decision point. Some more research will be needed soon and I still need to get wood going, but it's also time to ramp up iron production for use in the turrets, ammunition, transport belts, etc. that I'm going to need a lot of to form a defensive perimeter. I haven't so much as seen a single biter yet thankfully, but time is always against me. The main debate I had in my head here was to go with 3 or 4 drills for the iron. In any case, I ironically was going to have an iron shortage ... while building the apparatus for the setup to streamline getting more stone and stone bricks ... to get the drills I needed for the iron expansion, primarily. Gotta love Factorio irony. 'Irony'. See what I did there? Oh, nevermind. Anyway, I used the Factorio maxim 'When in doubt, go big'. Now before this mind you, pollution covers almost everything I can see(with no radar yet) and a decent area I can't from the looks of it. And I'm about to make sure it spreads a lot further. That might be poking the bear, but I really think I need this boost to get rolling on the defensive perimeter. So it's a catch-22.  I moved up to two drills first to expedite having enough iron to actually build the infrastructure, then doubled again here to four. I've upgraded to electric-powered ore crushers to the west of the saphirite field here; I put them over there in case I need to move the drills around eventually. Basically the way this works is that I made sure I'd have plenty of furnaces to smelt all the ore, then the main storage chest will take it's cut if it needs anything; if not I'll turn the inserter so it all goes by. Everything else gets gobbled up by the assemblers. Copper supply is still fine at about 140 plates available at the moment, and I need to boost coal mining operations with at least a third drill at minimum now, but I've got enough iron coming in to really start pushing towards the next objective: greenhouses for wood. It took about 40 minutes to build everything I needed for this, and I'm over four hours in now and polluting up a storm. It's definitely time to see to my personal armor and weaponry as well. Meanwhile I ran out of coal briefly, and had to double that operation to four drills as well.  After doing a bit of research, it was time to set up a beginning bobmonium operation. This just grabs a bit on the edge of one of the ore fields. We'll need to move it before long, but all I want out of this is a bit of silicon and tin. Keeping it close by is essential and makes the setup somewhat cheaper. I'm just storing the slag and tin ore for now, I can always change things around a bit later, but the silicon for making glass is all I want right away. With this in place, I could proceed to a greenhouse setup and secure a permanent wood supply. We've already mined out over 10% of the available coal in our starter field, so it's possible timber may have to double as a stopgap fuel source.  With just under five hours in, we got the greenhouse rolling. Biters started to show up about 10 minutes ago, but now I had the tools to build a rudimentary defensive perimeter. I had just enough ammunition for a starter supply, about 280 magazines in total. I had no turrets yet, not nearly enough transport belts, and we'd need inserters to feed the turrets as well as power poles also. And as always, more nanobot tubes to put everything in place. So it was time for the final leg of the initial race.  In between the greenhouse shot and here is where I got swarmed under finally. If you want to see it, I added a section to the video with Rampant enabled when it really started to hit the fan. Timestamp for that is 16:55. After that I nuked the Rampant mod, which is going to result in a period of peace as biters figure out what to do now. We're at the 'can't really fit everything in one shot' point here, but you can see most of it. While building this I started to be victimized by own productivity, so to speak. The stone backlog, despite a good deal of it being dealt with by dedicated crushed-to-raw stone assembler(well over 1k produced and stored so far) clogged up the main storage chest and forced me into doing less multi-tasking so I deal with clearing some of it out. . I also turned off the saphirite mines for a while, as I had no immediate use for all of the iron they were producing, which reduced the amount coming in to reduce pressure on the system. There are 11 Gun Turrets here, each with their own inserters and dozens of power poles to run the inserters. I thought I'd have a problem with a bunch of ammo being stored in the turrets, but it turns out they only load 10 magazines. Been so long since I did a setup like this, I'd forgotten about that. So the transport belt circles with fresh ammunition, and I'm using the lakes in the west as a natural boundary. No wall yet, and the turrets are spread out, spaced so that there's nowhere to approach without being shot at by a turret. I'm sure I'll eventually want to at least double them up. This is a start, but we have a defensive perimeter at long last, doggone it! So building the wall needs to be done, I need to get a radar up(not researched yet) so I can get another source of coal which is 20% gone(largely so that I can get more radars to expand scouting to get even more coal so I can power more radars, etc). I haven't done any of the chemistry and related research, I can't do anything with circuits, fast inserters, the electronics to build more yellow assemblers, all that I need to get on eventually. Electric mining, more efficient steam power ... the list of things that could be done is nearly endless. But I'm in position to actually work on those things, with at least a vaguely defensible setup.
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Sep 2, 2018 03:52
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