|
I also have never used nuclear power, this being my first 0.15 game. I know that it exists as a thing, and that it uses uranium, but that's all -- previously going 'full solar' is what you did because it was the better of the two options; there wasn't a third one available.
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2017 13:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 12:12 |
|
|
ousire posted:words really cannot do justice just how much space solar takes up Yep. I'll try to put in a shot or two every once in a while to show how this is growing. Also as PSA, might be sporadic updates for a while. Factorio isn't a game I can play(well, at least not sensibly) for large amounts of time, because my brain basically wants a break from all of the thinking periodically. Case in point, a couple days ago I was working on the next update and I just had to take a break as I wasn't going to be able to productively move forward at that point in time. It'll keep going, just perhaps not as swiftly as my other LP.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2017 02:05
|
|
|
Faylone posted:I am far more likely to end up planning to play only an hour and realize five or six have gone by, but I'm more okay with working with less than perfect ratios. I tend to play that way more when I go solo then when I do something like this. When it's for an LP, I'm a little more restrictive in what I permit myself to get away with. Not sanitizing screw-ups or anything like that, just need to be in the right frame of mind and make sure I'm doing something vaguely sensible. Xerophyte posted:I usually argue that ratios are mostly a trap before the late game. Agree with this too. For any large-scale production I think they should be fairly close. Beyond that -- it's for people with more OCD than me. I have enough.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2017 18:15
|
|
|
After deploying the tanks, I did a big solar expansion, and got this: Another sign of progress. I then started throwing down some accumulators. There's a ratio for this which I don't know, but mostly I just wanted a ridiculous amount.  Zoomed-out for scale(you can see some assemblers for the solar panels and the coal field with drills to the east of it). This has eight of those 64-panel sections I showed in the video, plus a roboport with a few dozen accumulators in the middle. This size can generate 15.4 MW in daytime. That's not bad. I want four of these. Basic rule of thumb I'm going to go with here: if I'm ever using more than half of capacity, for any reason, I need more. Next up was expanding the logistics network. Here that is almost finished -- this is another minimap mode, and another new-to-0.15 feature:  15 roboports now, and I need one more to cover everything. As before, the yellowish area is where logistics bots can operate, construction bots in the larger greenish zones. Getting the roboports in place is just the beginning, the foundation of the infrastructure. Even at this point though, I gain the benefit that I don't have to go to a small area to be brought supplies; the robots can reach me in most of the places I'll be hanging out.  Here's the next step. Instead of long conveyor belts bringing everything to a central location, the bots will do that job and bring me what I need. The rub here is that I can't do this with everything; I have only so many logistic slots available and everything else will still follow the conveyors. Still, it's a step away from spaghetti and towards having the robots take over on transportation. Everything oil-related is now barely moving -- we aren't producing nearly enough petroleum gas for our needs. But I have other fish to fry yet. Next we need to get those accumulators working. Power Prioritizing Factorio will draw power in the following order: solar panels first, then steam engines, then accumulators. The first part is good; that means the steam plant is already working a bit less hard during the day already. On the second part though, you can end up with waste once you get accumulators going; it won't use the energy they've stored as long as the steam engines are up to the night-time task. The solution I'm using here was ripped shamelessly from a youtube video made by another, quality content from the Factorio community:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEOXGBYR6oM&t=325s With that in place, we can get a handle on how well our accumulators are keeping up and more importantly use less coal. Next up is modular armor gear and the combat robots, after I throw another batch of efficiency modules around. I decide to repurpose the research area as it's the most convenient spot -- and I've got to tear all that stuff down eventually anyway. No bots for this since I don't have any roboports to spare and production of them is virtually nil, so I've got to do it by hand. How archaic. I only take down enough(basically the green vials part) to create the room I need. There is ridiculous spaghetti here but I can clean up later and since the labs aren't running, the power overhead shouldn't be significant.  Piercing round magazines, green circuits, gear wheels. These don't take much to make. I even go with the dumbed-down method of just throwing a few stacks into a chest, rather than bothering with running a conveyor back down to central storage. Once I clear out enough biters to get to the oil and start getting more product flowing, I can throw roboports up here and have them bring me what I need. This is just quick-and-dirty to get me to that point. The assembling machine 2 will take almost 11 seconds each on these, so it'll be a bit until I have a decent amount ready -- but combat won't be quick so they'll have time to build more while I fight, then run back for a re-supply, etc. Shortly afterwards, I've got some modular equipment which I crafted. Slowly. While this was going on.  Here's how it looks. What is all this crap? Well, upper left green things are batteries to store energy. Below that, the 'binoculars' are the night-vision equipment. Generally that's not considered to be worth using, but I'm going to try it out anyway. Point is to show off the gear, right? In the middle are portable solar panels, each of which require several regular ones. These are the only option for gathering energy -- and right now I don't have any at all. I'll wait and see how long it takes them to fill up. Then on the right I've got a couple of energy shields to increase the damage I can take. Once I've got this powered up -- I'll add my portable solar if I need to -- and have a good supply of Defender capsules, I'll be ready to go on the attack again. Enough to capture that big oil field? I don't know. We'll see. I then realize that my solar blueprint has a flaw; slightly too big, meaning there's not enough room for the roboports to 'connect'. I'll deal with that later -- for now I just throw more panels down by hand while I wait for this thing to charge. When daylight comes, the equipment charges quickly but the batteries are taking quite a while. One of them could probably handle the load but I decide to max out on solar panels just to be safe. Soon I've got nine of them on there(90 kw power acquisition, 40 MJ capacity from the batteries). Yeah that'll take a while. 240kw each for the energy shields, 10kw for the night vision stuff. There's absolutely no reason to have more than one battery, so I remove one of them and get a 3rd energy shield. Takes me down to 7 panels.  I don't think I can do any better than that(well getting rid of the infra and adding another shield would probably be better, but I'll deal with that). Then I realize I made a minor mistake and the defender capsule assembly had stopped running, so I've gotta wait a bit more for those. Not really covering myself in glory here. I throw down some more big solar panels and accumulators, and notice during the night-time cycle that the steam engines are still being used, but only very briefly. Full solar is nearly here. Up to 30 capsules now. That's enough to start. But start where? Well, our pollution footprint has reduced dramatically. There's no bright red anywhere. There would be if we were seriously mass-producing much, but most of the smelters are silent. So the next step is press eastish to the oil.  This is what we need to take out to get the oil, in order. 1 through 3 are just knocking out small ones to avoid them 'reinforcing' the other nests -- and because just leaving them would let them grow. We want a clear path. Then it gets interesting. 4, 5, and 6 are all roughly equivalent and they'll be a lot harder to take out, bigger than anything we've dealt with so far. #5 is of course actually two bases but they are close enough together that for all practical purposes, it's one. The first three literally took three minutes total, and I could have done it in two if I'd really wanted to. Piece of cake. The biters have evolved a bit but not all that much. Now things would get interesting though. With the flamethrower you have to be careful of terrain. Here's what happens if you're not:  Some trees on fire, started intentionally just for demonstration.  A couple minutes later, as it spreads through the forest. It will eventually die out, but a lot of trees will get burnt in the process. Note that I've also shown the biter progression, the Medium Biter on the right here. More health and also more resistance to physical damage, so they are harder to kill. IIRC they are also more dangerous in terms of how much damage I'll take from their attacks.  Burning trees don't just do damage(the fire will also kill biter nests); they also cause pollution. A lot of pollution. This is just a relatively small fire, they can get a lot worse -- but as shown it would tick off all of the biters in the area resulting in more attacks. No thank you. The moral of this story is: don't use the flamethrower in forested areas. In clearings though, it's a fine tool. And it just so happens our next barrel of joy is a sizable group of nests out in the open. First up, let's see how these robotic capsules work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll8Qb0_sF3g A few things to remember here: ** Capsules are easy to use. Just click anywhere nearby and they'll follow you around. ** As discussed, there's a limit. In this case five of them(as shown by the number to the right of quickbars at the bottom of the screen turning green when I hit that number). I did a couple of extra, and it used them up -- but they just replaced 'older' ones. Extra clicks here basically just mean using up more capsules with no benefit, so be careful not to spam-waste them. ** Until the very end, I did not fire at all. The Defenders will shoot at whatever is nearby. You can 'swing' them into the enemy base if need be. ** They also can take damage(one was destroyed by hostile fire) and after some time has passed they will self-destruct. They'll need to be regenerated from additional capsules for longer engagements. Finally, notice the purple bar above the quickbar. That was green in previous combat videos; the purple is the amount from my energy shields. Until it's depleted, I will take no damage. So what to do with this information? Well, the five defender capsules I can have at any one time add significantly to my firepower without being overwhelming. In a situation like this, a combination of those, the improved modular armor stuff adding to protection, and circling the hostile base with the flamethrower at the ready seems a sensible approach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8VuxkQXzi4 This was done FAR from expertly, esp. at the beginning when I couldn't seem to figure out what I was aiming at. The benefit of the flamethrower is that you do damage for several seconds well after you hit something, so circling the perimeter while hitting the outer defenses of the nest cluster can be quite effective. The defenders and my increased protection were also on display here; those big worms that I took out with rockets at the end would have killed me very quickly without the improved armor and shielding. An effective demonstration that we can in fact do this. Bases of this size and somewhat larger can be handled reasonably well with my current tech. There is a price of my screwing up parts of this though; I drained basically all of my power and have to wait for some recharging. Running out of energy in the middle of a fight like this would be ... unpleasant. Quite probably fatal. The flamethrower still does some pollution by the way -- that's going to happen every time you use it. But it's not nearly as bad as turning the thing loose and accidentally(or even purposefully) creating a massive forest fire.  Less than 15 minutes later, I stood amongst the smoldering, charred, and decaying corpses of my slain enemies -- and a rich oil field. Success!! Or rather, the foundation of it. Getting out here was one thing. Now this location must be secured and exploited. That meant more fun with logistics. New power grid or connect to the old one? Refine the oil on site, or ship it back to the base? And how to ship it if we do so -- pipe or train? Etc.  Here's the location relative to the east of our base where we currently have all our operations. You can bridge almost any distance via pipes, but it seems a lot more sensible to not do it that way. A train station seems better. We're going to need radars out here. And turrets. And walls(it's a bit far to extend our main fortifications around the base/factory, so we'll just make an 'island' here). First up, that train route though is worth sorting out. The best way to send it seems clearly to be around the south end of the big lake -- and that means I'll want to get rid of that base which is to the south of me and northeast of there, it's sort of in the way.  Here's what night vision looks like, compared to the image I put up just after the battle. You can see the 'vision cone', but outside of that instead of being almost total blackness you can still see things almost normal, just with less color than usual. Essentially I don't really even need lamps with this thing, though they still help of course. It takes just over a dozen big electric poles to string power out here -- no problem at all. In the meantime I got the 14 additional pumpjacks we'll be needing crafted.  Here's what it looks like with 14 new pumpjacks(we have two back at the main factory) connected to power and basic piping. The oil isn't going anywhere yet, but the pollution from just this little bit of activity has made it clear I need to take out a few more bases nearby before they cause problems. I need to make another supply run for more capsules -- and in the middle of that something occurs to me. I never set up concrete when I changed the stone line way back when to build rail sections. Concrete is a long-term project because of the sheer epic crapton of it that I want, so I should really take care of it now. Because of the location where our stone brick furnaces happened to be set up, this resulted in a stupid-long and convoluted process of getting the water and iron ore(water esp.) over to the proper location. The concrete formula is 100 water + 5 Stone Bricks + 1 Iron Ore. From that, we'll get 10 units of Concrete every 13.3 seconds, or 45 of them a minute. Here's how that looks:  It'll fill this iron chest to capacity, and believe me that will NOT be overkill. For the amount I'm going to need, we will require an epic crapton of the stuff.  I'm now going to 2-hour increments for updates, so that I have more stuff to report. Here's how things look like then, 15 hours in. You can see here the extremely regular spikes in accumulator draw as they save up energy each 'morning' -- that's the orange on the graph. On the production side, we used 9.8 MW of solar, 1.6 MW of stored accumulator power, and and 935 KW of steam over the past hour. That all works out to 7.6% of steam, 92.4% solar. Not quite to full reliance on solar power, but getting close.  This is interesting; we're using more copper cable than anything else. The economy is definitely shifting. This is still very much a lull in our factory as we work on getting more oil production up and running; everything depends on it including moving to the next research phase. At that point there'll be a relative explosion in a lot of products and pretty much everything will need to be reassessed. The usual numbers: Item Count: 35(-5) Total Production: 152k(-37% from 241k) Yeah that's a steep drop. Resources ** Iron: 214k primary(3k used), 17k steel(26k used), 33k supplmental(none used), 304k western backup(24k used). Heh. Guess what I forgot to do. We need to divert some to the steel area. ** Copper: 44k(None) old, 678k(38k used) new. Changed the belt setup and obviously made it worse -- we're drawing everything from the new field instead of using the old one up. As can be seen, I'm not super at these kind of logistics. ** Stone: 377k(no change). There will be now that concrete is powering up. ** Coal: 180k power(4k used), 313k factory(3k used), 591k steel(2k used). With the switch to solar, coal is now a complete non-issue once again. ** Crude Oil: 6.9/sec(-1.7). Down to about a third of the original output. This doesn't include the new pumpjacks, because I haven't got the transportation set up to get that supply into the system yet. I did check and see just how much we'll get though. Initially, the maximum will be an additional 210 units/second!! One of the fields is 22.8, well over what our current two were when they started. I don't know how that even compares to the pipe throughput, but suffice to say we won't have a crude supply problem anymore.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2017 21:57
|
|
|
Veloxyll posted:You can go one deeper with train debate, and go barrels v fluidic oil. Since it affects how it loads/unloads for trainlogic I did barreling in 0.14(everyone did, since there were no liquid wagons). However to me I just looked at the way things are now -- it seems not the best to build a bunch of barrels that you don't need. I don't see an upside to it that makes it worth considering anymore. Gully_Foyle posted:After buying the game because of this LP, I just finished my first game - took me just a bit over 24 hours to launch the rocket. It's interesting how much of the game isn't necessary for getting to the "win" condition Congrats! Took me 40 hours on 0.14 and 0.15 takes longer -- I doubt very much this ends by 24 hours. Maybe you should be doing the LP :p. A lot of stuff is really in the beneficial but not necessary category and can be taken or left depending on your style. EponymousMrYar posted:If they're not hacked off at pollution or Radar's then generally they'll only hit your stuff if it's in the way of an expansion party. It's still true based on everything I'm aware of, and the attacks I've seen so far in this run.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2017 23:04
|
|
|
 I could always just keep going with oil, but I think I'll be better off fixing the current, obvious logistics issues before creating new ones. So, I yanked four exhausted mines off this field and there are only five operational ones left. A fraction of the original and only enough to keep maybe a third of our steel furnaces running. On my way up to take care of that, I made a somewhat spaghettified, but effective and temporary, adjustment to how the copper ore feeds in together, ensuring that the majority will now come from the older field. Shouldn't take long to drain the rest of that now. On the iron side, I diverted the flow of several iron mines to the south -- their output will be added in to the steel draw.  I'll need to regularly revisit this situation, but it should handle things for now. Heading back to our new oil project, I decided I wanted to divert the train further south, so I took out a couple more smallish bases to make room for that. Then this ...  Another achievement. Also, the locomotive is on the track, train stop just to the south of it. Then I hooked this up:  Took a bit of doing to figure it out, but that's a liquid wagon with a pump to get the oil from the pipes into it. Pumps now require electrical power, which I think is new. Checked the pumpjacks, and a few of them needed a pipe connection which I'd neglected. Once those were all up and running, I could work on getting this train situation going.  Or not. Forgot to deal with this. To the northeast and east, we have some more business to handle. Can also the new train station and it's stupid name indicated on the minimap there. Off I went with the same plan -- but this time I had to stop in between to recharge and go back. Even died a couple times. Bastards were packed together more tightly and had more worms. These bases are close to the limit that I can take out with this approach.  This is something that I'm not real good at and can get tricky in terms of placing the rails, but the next step was to make a loop like this so the train can turn around. After that, a lot of track to lay all the way back to the base.  Once we get back, I use one of these handy-dandy things. A fantastic modern invention we've had for a long time. It's called a 'gate', and with no power whatsoever, it will magically go down via some sort of sensor whenever I or a train get nearby. Seamless entry back into the factory.  This is where everything will get unloaded. The location here is intentionally semi-remote, the very southeast of our current factory with room to add things as needed in all directions. A second train station, and you can see there's another pump here which I'll assumedly need to get the crude off the liquid wagon. To the left of that, I've set up a single mining drill on a massive coal field just north of here for fuel(already loaded some solid fuel in the locomotive). Eventually I may want to go with all solid fuel for the extra acceleration, but right now I don't really care and just want to get this up and running. Now I need another loop so the train can go back the other way(I could also use a second locomotive so it could go both directions, but I don't like doing that).  Here's how you set down the track -- pick a direction and then it's several sections at a time. Note that this will just end up in things crossing and won't actually complete the loop.  Either they've made this less fiddly and easier to work with, or else I've just gotten used to it. Either way, this is how it needs to look, so that it connects up fully with the previously laid track. Now I just need to send the crude northwest to where the crude storage is, and it'll get added to the system. Gotta pick some more pipes up, and while I do that I start playing with concrete: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_dsOs9Or9I&feature=youtu.be The basic idea is to 'paint' the ground wherever you want it. Some people will make really interesting designs and just put it where they want to walk. Me, I like to put it everywhere that I control(that is, everything within my walls). Claim the planet from the aliens and make it my personal concrete 'jungle'. Now this will take some time. What you just saw was 900 slabs, and it's only the tiniest fraction of what will be required. The last bit was a demonstration of how much faster you can run on concrete than normal terrain; 40% is the number. This is of course not at all necessary, and will make things take somewhat longer and use up some resources. But that's sort of the Factorio way. I'm keeping the needless building to a minimum in this game, but I am indulging somewhat here. Gradually it will get faster to move around the base as the concrete coverage expands. And of course, this wouldn't matter nearly as much if I designed things with good pathways for driving the car. I didn't, and as previously established I suck at the car. So this is what we've got -- different strokes for different folks. For storing the black gold, each wagon-load brings 75k, 25k per storage tank. We need three tanks then for it, and why not go some extra? Doubled that amount to six now. Going to abuse our poor little refinery here pretty soon, because we're all set up to get the train going. Of course, it can be used for things other than delivering oil ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOHSrVgstpI&feature=youtu.be Well, takes some practice to control as you can see, I need to brake a lot sooner. Nonetheless, it can get me out here and back a lot faster than just walking if I so choose.  Having established how good I'm not at dealing with controlling moving vehicles, what say we turn things over to the power of automation? This is the train scheduler, easily accessed by clicking on any locomotive. On the right, a zoomable minimap so you can see where you are, where the stations are, etc. On the left, we give the thing orders(or change the color and load fuel on the other tabs).  You can make these as complicated as you like, but this one is simplicity itself. Stay here until the cargo is full(crude on the liquid wagon). Then go to the other station and wait until it's empty. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The coal will get loaded for fuel much, much faster than it will get used up, so there's no need to add any instructions for that. Then once the orders are set, I switch the control from Manual to Automatic and away the train goes. Ain't technology grand?? So now we've got oil. LOTS of oil. I'm still whittling away at those two nearby bases bit by bit -- one down, one just started -- but eventually that matter will be handled. I decide to hitch a ride on the train next time it comes by(just get in and don't switch it to manual) but then it occurs to me. Dork, this would work better if you had enough storage for a couple of trips out here as well, so that the pumpjacks would be able to work full-time, at least until they got a decent amount ready to ship. So another half-dozen tanks set up it is. With that up, it's going to take a while(wagon's only half full) so I hightail it back on my own. First order of business is to upgrade refining capacity, as we've got crazy-go-nuts level of supply now incoming. For now I just add one more refinery and get rid of the power switch. It's served it's purpose -- now we're going to be cranking out a lot more petrol products, measured in numbers of refineries, not fractions of a single one. Gonna overwhelm our light and heavy oil storage soon. I could just add more -- but better refining tech is on the way. Another one of those things you wouldn't know on the first time through. It seems though that the next thing to do is finish the process of taking down the old research area, and expand the bus further to make a new one.  Heh. Look at all that wonderful pollution from our pumpjacks. Going to need to do a lot more fighting. To the south of that there's some trees, and then a nice big open space. If I run the bus south of that lake, that'll make a very nice place for our latest research 'outpost'. Of course I need to get more radars out this way. And expand the wall. Which means more turrets. And clear out more biter bases. And get more solar going to run everything, including an improved blueprint for proper spacing. And place the new roboports we're producing now. And take down the old research area. And take down the steam power plant that won't be needed anymore. And keep laying concrete. And figure out what the heck is going on with blue research(and another vial type soon). And ... and ... and ... my brain hurts! I WANT MY MOMMY!!! *Ahem*. Having the oil secured is top priority. It also seems best to me to fortify against attacks and improve combat abilities before going much further in taking out more bases; seems more useful than the alternative of grinding through more of this fighting. In doing so I'd like to transition to laser turrets, which means enough solar power to have a large buffer of that, and that means a better blueprint with proper roboport spacing. Having more oil should help crank the occasional roboport, at least for a bit here. Eventually I came up with a design that is once again not a perfect ratio, but I don't really care at this point. It's a 15x15 grid instead of 18x18. While the bots clear out more space, I wanted to figure something for getting laser turrets made -- but that requires batteries so I decided to stick with conventional ones for now. Just don't want to mess with expanding oil operations more until we get the next level of tech going. At this point I realized I may have gone just a wee bit overboard on the solar panels -- I've got a few thousand of the things ready -- so I limit the chests they are going into. I've also got efficiency modules almost everywhere. As we reach the 17-hour mark I feel I've just gotten the oil secured; very little is being produced now as we've got all the storage saturated. Of course that will change soon, but the station, train turnaround, and pumping area is all surrounded by walls. I'll add more turrets as need arises. Next up I'll need to expand our wall to the east so that the bus can go out to the new research area. That's going to take some time. Meanwhile, it's time to check in with another summary.  The production side is by far the most important right now. Specifically, how much the steam is getting used. It's less than it was early on in the past hour -- there was some disruption as I took down the old solar and put up the new blueprint. Right now we've almost got the 4th 15x15 grid up and running. Still this shows a sixth of our draw coming from the steam. I won't touch that until we are easily functioning without it.  Stopping solar panels from being built knocked out a significant amount of what we are building. Another case where I'll need to keep a close eye on pretty much everything when we get the bus extended and start knocking out the next research tier. Item Count: 37(+2) Total Production: 191k(+26% from 152k) Iron is back in it's normal top position. Resources ** Iron: 179k primary(17.5k used per hour), 3.5k steel(6.8k), 33k supplmental(none), 273k western backup(15.5k used). Soon the field down by the steel smelting will be completely gone -- I've already shifted more production from the 'main' field down that way. ** Copper: 18k(13k) old, 663k(7.5k) new. Looks like the belt setup adjustments worked this time, another resource field about to be drained. ** Stone: 371k(3k). Concrete is drawing some off this but not enough to be a concern. ** Coal: 177k steam power(1.5k), 309k factory(2k used), 588k steel(1.5k used), 1M train(none). All is still fine here. ** Crude Oil: 197/sec. Way more than we need; everything's stopped because we have a backlog of light oil stored(and heavy is close). All the more reason to get on the whole process of getting the next tier of research going.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2017 17:51
|
|
|
Gotta try not to think too hard about this kind of stuff. Factorio is semi-realistic in the sense that trains can't turn as sharp as the car can, they can't stop on a dime, etc. But if you really think about it, you never eat/drink/sleep, lots of stuff doesn't require power, the number of things you can craft in a ridiculously short amount of time, carrying a small city's worth of supplies with you everywhere without so much as slowing down ... you'll go mad if you get too picky.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2017 02:14
|
|
|
 I start pushing the wall east, and have to do some fighting to get it as far as I want it. Nothing major, I think the largest base had 7-8 spawners. But I did run into these bastards. More than 4x the size of a medium biter, and look at the physical resistance there. They take just over a third of the standard damage from my SMG. It takes a while to kill them. I'm taking this as a sign that I need more research, because going up against a larger base with a bunch of those blue things would be ... unpleasant.  There's no radars or turrets up yet, but here's the new wall expansion to the east less than 15 minutes later. I think it'll have to go further east than this, but it's a start. Another 500 or so sections into the grinder for that, and the entire train route is now contained in our territory. Also, note the oil fields on the extreme east of our current scanner range. That's actually a hair better than the one we just tapped. Depending on how much we need in the future, it's another good reason to keep on heading out this direction. Each of our 15x15 solar panel grids is producing about 10.5 MW; we have four in place and there's enough clear space there to get two more in position. That'll get us up to abou 63 MW -- at the current fairly minimal level of production we're using 10. Then I finally got around to spending some quality time picking up all of the old research area. This is not at all necessary, but serves two purposes(three if count just simply tying up loose ends). I'd like to use that spot for more solar later on, and by removing some of the splitters(defender capsules are the only thing being built there anymore) the bus will flow more smoothly. The whole process required several trips back and forth to storage. I shouldn't have to do this again though; I'm hoping the next research area will be the final, permanent one. After stringing radars are gun turrets along our wall extension, I was ready to extend the bus. We've now got another four radars, 25 total. The power requirements are really very trivial by this point.  A couple thousand sections of transport belt and a modest amount of tree-cutting later, here is the new bus churning to the east. It goes south a bit around the lake, then cuts north and finally east along the top of that new section. From to bottom this is red circuits, green circuits, gear wheels, iron, copper, steel, and coal. Seven products on the bus for now. We're ready to set up the new area to include blue(and eventually other types) of vials. And that's means it's time for ... drumroll plz ... MORE MATH. Currently available projects range from 50 to 300 vials needed for the most part -- but can go as high as 1000. I'll eventually want to feed as many as 50 labs I think, double our current number. That'll allow for doing high-end projects at more than a snail's pace. The majority seem to be at 30 seconds per vial, though some go as high as a minute. Using the 30-second time as our benchmark, that means up to two vials/second will be needed(50 labs/30 seconds each to use is 1.67). Might be overkill, but that's where I'm headed. In order to get that kind of supply, we'll need the following: ** 14 Red Vial Assembling Machines ** 16 Green ** 14 Black ** 16 Blue We can already see here that this will not exactly be a small operation, even before expanding into other types. I'm going to start smaller, but I need to leave space to go nuts here. As for the new blue ones, they require Advanced Circuits(the red ones, on the bus), Engine Units(steel plates, gear wheels, iron, not difficult), and Electric Mining Drills(green circuits, gear wheels, iron). The only problem is the need for red circuits. First things first however.  I've got to extend some belts here and feed them into a lab area further south, but this has expandable to the point I've calculated I'll need it production of red, green, black, and blue vials. Further types will be added to the east. We're pretty close to the eastern wall here, but a more pressing priority is that there's an inconveniently-placed lake to the south. Time for another fairly recent Factorio addition: landfill.  Another example of what the the slightest error can cause. Somewhere along the line I severed a connection in the circuit network. The copper cables and small electric poles were no longer properly hooked up, so now I have a truly obscene amount of them. Well over a thousand poles, and more cable than that. The cable I'll use up eventually, but I almost never use small poles anymore. Then there are the downstream effects; in this case, overproduction of underground belts as well, since they were all stuck behind this on their way to central storage, and the network kept reading low on them, so they kept coming ... and coming ... and coming. Stupid. The reason I came back was to build this; landfill. And then I over-wrote the picture stupidly so I couldn't show it. But it's simple: 200 raw stone per unit, we can fill in any water areas. Chest to store the output from the assembler. Basic stuff. I won't need a lot so I've limited this chest to a pretty small amount, but it's pretty much vital.  Here we go. Having spent nearly two hours on this(other stuff like concrete and the network mess in between), I'm finally researching the first blue project: ** Advanced Oil Processing(75 Red, Green, Blue each). Not particulary expensive. None of the feeds are hooked up yet, but basically red/green are going to be on the left and right of the labs, blue/green in the middle, leaving room for two more vial types. I can also add a second lane on the outside if needed. I had enough red circuits stored(though not by much) to feed those into the blue assemblers; gotta fill in that lake before I hook those up. Don't need black yet, but it's coming. This whole thing is a hike south of the bus, to leave room in case future vials need more intensive production(have a feeling that might be the case). It's nice to be moving forward again though. Research Progress Not sure if I already showed this information, but at the moment: ** Completed: 53 ** Available: 40 ** Locked: 19 Not quite halfway up the 'tree' basically. While the oil processing research grinds away, I head back and take a look at some resource issues; I've left thing unattended for quite some time.  The iron field that originally served our steel smelting is gone. I'll probably eventually extend the smelters down this way to the east. Steel's only coming at a trickle, and I'll want to up the iron supply heading this way. I don't have time to do any more before we get our new oil processing finished, and I need to deal with that immediately. ** As a review from before, standard oil processing converts 100 crude to 30 heavy, 30 light, and 40 petroleum gas. ** Advanced Oil Processing requires 50 water, but results in a much better output, 10 heavy, 45 light, and 55 petroleum gas. I say 'better' because petroleum gas is what we want right now, as I need it in obscene quantities for sulfur and plastic, which form the foundation of a lot of products -- including those red circuits I need for the light blue research. ** Additionally and just as importantly, it also allows for cracking heavy oil to light, and light oil to petroleum gas, with the addition of water as well in both cases. This allows me to use all of the refining by-products as petroleum gas eventually, and is the reason I didn't just want to tack on more, and more, and more storage. To get the system running again at a minimal level, I need to relieve the pressure on the light and heavy oil by setting up cracking for each of those. I've changed to the advanced recipe on both of our crude refineries, but that's not going to do a whole lot since they are still pumping out some heavy/light oil and there's nowhere for it to go.  First step: chemical plant for cracking heavy to light by the heavy storage. Water and heavy go in, light comes out, and heads south to the tanks that store that. This still accomplishes nothing without the next step:  Another chemical plant takes in water and light oil, then sends out petroleum gas to the pipe network that uses it. Now it's just a case of balancing out the system, which is best done by observing and seeing where the chokepoints are, whether more capacity is needed anywhere, etc. It's soon clear that we need more light oil cracking. That makes sense, since a lot more of that is being produced than heavy oil with the new refining recipe. A second chemical plant is added to crack light to gas. Now the chokepoint is crude-refining capacity.  On the right here, there is no longer a backlog of light oil: all of it has been sent out early on in the refinery process. Eventually I'll use up all of the stored light and heavy oil, which could be a problem if I want to use it. I can always cut power to some of the chemical plants at that point and change-up the balance that way, but right now I want everything going into petroleum gas. These three chemical plants are enough to keep things going so that we have at least some level of production heading downstream. There are now some red circuits heading down the bus. Very few, but some.  I go to work with landfill for the first time. Works pretty much just like concrete. The greener part of the ground here was lake, but has been filled in. Now the blue vials can come down the distance I need them to. After merging them with the black ones to the left, then running them south to the research area:  Rather obviously we need more blue vials, but all four types are now fully connected; red, green, black, and blue. Progress. Time to trouble-shoot the system. First problem is obvious; I only had a couple assembling machines for blue vials in place, just to get things going. I up that to a half-dozen, leading to:  Red circuits. I figured as much. Time to trace that backwards. Steadily we are getting one every 10 seconds, a fraction of what we need. More than that are being produced, but efficiency modules have started back up, roboports need making, there's a lot of stuff that uses them. I'm surprised to see the area fully supplied with plastic(and green circuits and copper cable). I just need more. A lot more -- I've only got four assemblers, and will need at least a dozen probably. More than I think I have room for. It's time for a dedicated, expanded, and definitely moved red circuit area with some semblance of decent design thought going into it. For the moment though, I've moved on to the next research tier, albeit with some kinks to work out, and it's a hair shy of the 20-hour mark.  I've also neglected the power situation; we're still using some steam, so solar will need more expanding soon.  Iron's spiked to a new high and you can see all the cable that came out with the screw-up in the network. There's going to be a lot of continuing to work backwards through the factory and cleaning up various issues, needs for more of this or that, coming soon. Item Count: 41 Total Production: 215k(+13% from 191k) Still down somewhat from our peak(241k) but that will change, and soon. Resources ** Iron: 111k primary(12.7k used per hour), 31k supplmental(0.7k), 218k western backup(21.7k used). Down to three sources, and we used a lot more in the last hour than we had been. Between the current mining operations we only have about a six-hour supply. Safe to say I'll be a taking a closer look at that before I worry about end-product production. ** Copper: 1.2k(5.3k) old, 627k(12k) new. We're almost completely off the old field now, and the new one has enough to last us a while(25-30 hours). ** Stone: 351k(6.7k). The landfill took some of this, and concrete production continues. Still a very safe supply though. ** Coal: 173k steam power(1.3k), 295k factory(4.7k used), 584k steel(1.3k used), 1M train(negligible). No issues. ** Crude Oil: 206/sec. I must have miscalculated last time; it was a little lower. Double-checked this one. The train is actually having to make the occasional run now, but we're using far more than it can transport. Crude supply is not an issue for the forseeable future.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2017 20:02
|
|
|
quote:Have we started manufacturing grenades yet? I find they are indispensable when laying out my tracks and need to cut through some thick woods or rocky areas. Forgot to answer this, but only for the military vials. I cut through stuff like that by ... actually cutting through it. I know, I'm a Neanderthal. The grenades aren't bad for what they are, but I don't use them.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2017 20:03
|
|
|
Eponymous Mr Yar posted:Red circuits are SOOOO SLOOOOOOW. It's inane. Truth. Veloxyll posted:I am really bad at lategame stuff though. Never enough production. Though even with 2 copper lines and 3 iron, I never seemed to have enough of both at the same time. If you have enough of everything, you aren't building enough crap yet. Right?!? But yeah, not that far away from feeling the pain of this.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2017 02:27
|
|
|
One of the lessons I'm taking away from that last update is that three hours is too much. Gonna stick with two to make sure I stay on top of all the resources. The red circuit issue will get pushed to later, because I want to take a good look at iron(and probably throw up some more solar while I'm over there, by which I mean tell the bots to throw up some more solar).  Here's the iron belt heading from our initial iron field east to the smelters. As you can see, it's no longer full. Close, but not quite. As noted before, we also don't have enough going to steel. We just plain need more iron, period. I went out to check on the western field(doing just fine, only one drill exhausted), put another solar section down -- and discovered that the reason the steam keeps coming on is that I severed another network connection on accident, this one when I redid the solar from 18x18 to 15x15. It's way too easy to miss stuff like that. *Slap self*. I figured out what I wanted to do in terms of expanding our iron resources -- and then the next research came in. ** Advanced Material Processing 2(250 Red/250 Green/250 Blue). From now on I'm just going to call that color Aqua(the third stage of research vial after red and green). That way there's no confusion(RGB means RedGreenBlack, RGA RedGreenAqua). Hope that makes sense. Anyway, this one was a must because ... drumroll please ... we now have another vial type. Purple(production science packs/vials). These require electric engine units(joy), assembling machines 1(no big deal), and Electric furnaces. That last one we just invented. Once we are real secure in our solar supply I'll start putting those in. They run on electricity, not fuel like coal, as the name implies. Major pollution reduction obviously. Crafting speed of 2, energy use of 180kw. That's the same as our current steel furnances, so they work just as well while being fuel-free. However, if you haven't gotten off of steam power it's actually a net negative -- because the boilers are only 50% efficient. That means you'll use twice the coal to power an electric furnace via steam that you would to run a steel furnance and just burn coal. So yeah, we're just going to sit tight on research for now because there's lots of stuff to work on here. The new furnaces will require basically reworking all our smelting, but getting rid of the pollution and, even if you don't care about that, further simplifying the resource chain by eliminating the need for fuel, is worth the effort. First we're off to tap our biggest iron field yet, at over 800k. Even at that size, we're only talking about extending our supply by maybe 13 hours, possibly not even that if demand increases. I'm starting to reach a point where this is going to need to be done more and more often.  Near the north-northeast wall here. And hey look, there's some trees in the way. Not too thick at least. 28 mining drills required here.  Here's how the new iron supply looks right now. ** 1. Original iron field. Everything here runs south to the steel smelting. ** 2. Western field. ** 3. Supplemental. This will probably drain quickly now, as it's all being sent to join the original field, and get made into steel. ** 4. Northeast(new) field. If you look closely, you can see where the belt from this comes from the east and joins the western one. At that point it becomes a fast transport belt iron highway. Equal amounts from both sides. This makes for an nearly-full fast belt and it's not perfect, but it should be nearly-full for a while yet. Just this side of the lake in the northwest is another good-sized field -- but pollution there would easily drift across and aggravate the biters. Don't feel like dealing with that right now, and I don't have to yet. The seven big solar sections in the west, and the grey area in the middle and east that is covered by concrete, are also pretty easily visible here. Ok that's handled. Next: electric furnances. I'm going to want to build them a little closer than way out by the research complex. Ingredients? ** 10x Steel Plate ** 5x Advanced(Red) Circuits ** 10x Stone Bricks You just knew that the red circuits were going to pop up again here. I've got two problems here. Steel is already on the bus. So we're going to use more of it. Big freaking surprise. I need the new red circuit area, and I need to figure out the best way to deal with needing stone bricks a ways east of the stone area, and then also a freaking journey east of that, to the far end of the research zone where the new vials are going to be made. Yet another product that I need to make available on the far end. Further complicating this is the fact that electric furnaces are 3x3, not 2x2. So the spacing of every place I'm currently using furnaces is going to change. Depending on the playstyle, you can just keep shipping coal everywhere and say 'screw the electric option', since there's certainly enough of it. There's a not-bad argument to be made for that, but it's not the way I tend to do things. I spend a bit considering other options, but the bottom line is this: I need a significant amount of stone bricks in at least three spread-out locations(and who knows what else I'll need them for in the future). There's really only one answer IMO; it's time for an 8th lane on the bus. Stone freaking bricks are going on it. Never did this before -- but production vials weren't a thing before either. Factorio's up and complicated stuff. AGAIN.  This is basically due north of our oil refining/sulfur/plastic/etc. area, on the other side of the bus and just west of where we build inserters and and efficiency modules. Supply belts run south-to-north, output in the opposite direction to the bus. Tripled the previous production to a dozen assembling machines and I could multiply it more with little hassle. Room to the north and west to keep going for quite a while, so I think this will work nicely.  Not far to the east, the electric furnace setup is put in. Taking three items from the bus and putting them together is not at all difficult, and once again we're hooked into the circuit network to maintain approximately 50 furnaces, with a somewhat convoluted belt taking it back west to central storage. Now for the 'fun' of reworking furnace arrays. All of them. A little before-and-after:  Steel smelters and belt spaghetti, basically.  My groove was interrupted with another achievement. That's a decent little bit of energy. It's the only solar-related one(other than one for winning without using any at all). Back to what it looks like after the electric furnaces are put in and things generally cleaned up:  I had to shut down both iron and copper for a few minutes while setting this up, because the whole thing got wider and taller. That's why you leave room though, and it was only temporary. One thing I'd forgotten, or maybe never knew; electric furnaces, unlike their predecessors, having two module slots. That means the energy bill will only be 40% of what it was before(-30% for each of the two standard efficiency modules in each). And of course the coal now just goes directly to the bus, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. Less belt craziness, less energy going to power the coal miners, etc. At 22 hours I'm almost done with the new furnace setup, with the iron part of the steel line up and running and working on the steel-smelting end of things.  That zero by the steam is a beautiful thing. Amazing what actually having everything hooked up properly can accomplish. We are using on average right now about a quarter of what we can produce at peak, so we're good for the time being. It's reasonable to now consider putting laser turrets in play. The new electric furnaces are 5th on the consumers list at over 2 MW, and they aren't even all in place yet. One of the things above them are the accumulators, which don't really count because they are just storing energy, not really using it. The 25 radar stations use 7.4 MW/hour; nothing else uses even quite a third of that. For now. Keep in mind that this is a period in which no research was done, and that will of course be picking up along with adding new stuff we build from the discoveries made there into the mix. I'll definitely want to be monitoring this, and at the moment I'm leaning towards keeping the steam plant in place as a backup system. I can't think of a good reason not to, taking it down gains nothing other than satisfying a desire to make things look a little better. I don't need the space for anything else ... I think it's staying there. Unless I change my mind. . Just go ahead and imagine the production one because I forgot to save it. Wasn't THAT interesting anyway. Item Count: 23. Don't think it's ever been that low before. Total Production: 192k(-11% from 215k). This is another 'yeah, that's all going to change' thing here. The iron and copper usage and pretty much everything else(because they depend on it) went all over the place on the graph. Most of that is due to when I had to replace the furnaces. This should be the last time for that though, unless I decide I just need a massive amount of more space for it and put a different operation in place somewhere else. I think I've going room to expand quite a bit if I need to though -- I don't expect that to be a problem. Much more likely to be an issue is continually having enough ore. I'm actually rather shocked that the total production number is as high as it is with no research and the smelting interruption. An explosion may well be coming. Resources ** Iron: 75k primary(18k used per hour), 22k supplemental(4.5k), 180k western(19k used), 807k northeast(first usage). I like the current belt setup, but we still are going to have a problem with getting enough iron to the steel area. I want another source in order to make this more sustainable. 26+ hours at our reduced usage overall, but that won't last, and that small supplemental field's going to be gone before long. ** Copper: 580k(23.5k). The original copper field is completely kaput. This'll do for now. ** Stone: 338k(6.5k). In 0.14 stone was not used at all for any research that I recall. We've got plenty, which is good because we're going to need more than before. ** Coal: 172k steam power(0.5k), 285k factory(5k used), 581k steel(1.5k used), 1M train(negligible). Didn't use much and we're going to use even less now that we no longer need it as smelter fuel. The period of needing to be concerned with this pretty much at all is probably over. ** Crude Oil: 201/sec(-5). Still looking very good. I don't think our current supply is enough to make us secure for the rest of the game, but it's not something to concern myself with anytime soon.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2017 02:36
|
|
|
TheLoneBadger posted:If radar uses that much power, do you turn it off during major Biter assaults when the lasers need it? (You don't need radar at that point since you know where the bugs are) Nope. I don't think there's a real good way to do this, but also my playstyle is such that major Biter assaults are really rare. I'm more of the attack-them-first mindset. I could have a control somewhere to shut them down, but the odds that I'd get to the switch soon enough to matter aren't high. Putting such things all over the place would be a major pain. In thinking about this, it could definitely be useful for radar, once they've extended to their full reach in scouting new terrain, to be off most of the time and just turn on once in a while to double-check things. A combinator system to do that could be rigged up I'm sure without too much hassle. Really comes down to 'is it really worth it?'. IMO the answer is usually going to be no, because you can just build more power capacity fairly trivially. Keetron posted:Where is your nuclear power? Not researched yet. It's one of the more expensive projects. Keetron posted:you need so much copper, iron and concrete for the above that you are best off just mining everything, produce/smelt it and stick it in chest buffers to allow you some flexibility in production expansion. I find that's more hassle than it's worth; if I'm using more than I'm producing I'd rather it be more obvious. But this is another good example(along with upgrading furnaces, etc.) of the fact that different playstyles are quite usable. Glazius posted:Or is the only option to just smash them into oblivion? You can do this -- there's no use for them -- but I just store them somewhere and forget about them for the rest of the game. Otherwhise, throw them in a wooden chest or something and shoot destroy the chest with a shotgun/grenade/etc. Akin to the DF atomsmashing routine.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2017 22:23
|
|
|
I set myself the following goals for the next couple of hours: ** Finish electric furnacing in the steel area. ** Get laser turrets going. ** Mine the iron deposit by the northwest lake. ** A few things still need efficiency modules. Refineries I noticed don't have them, and I need to take a bunch over to the research zone. ** Double or more the red circuit assemblers; throughput to the research area on those is better but it still sucks. ** Get production vials(purple) going. ** Keep throwing concrete around; I pretty much have a path to get everywhere important at least. Little chance that all that gets done, but you never get everything done in Factorio. When the steel area is finished 10 minutes or so later, I have 16 furnaces there and I think I can fit another 8-10 in this area before I have a problem with space. Don't know if I'll need that much or not. So, laser turrets. Those require steel, green circuits ... and batteries. Turns out that near where I have the robots built all those components are fairly close together already. An easy setup. While I'm over there, efficiency modules get thrown in all my refineries and chemical plants -- and I notice that we have too much ... petroleum gas. That's hilarious. Heavy oil is down to about 20k(from 100k) in storage, but both light oil and the gas are maxed out. Sulfur and plastic are backed up also -- we simply need to use more downstream. That ... can be arranged. After throwing together the laser turret assembling machine, I head north a ways and add another dozen red circuit assemblers. While there, I notice this:  Not even enough green circuits to feed the ones I already have. Okay then. Back to the other end of the factory, snagging some concrete on the way. I knew this was going to be a problem eventually; I'm still laughably using the same TWO assemblers that I had automated shortly after I got the initial bus going like 15 or so hours ago. I triple it to six; let's see how much that makes the copper smelters groan. Giving that some time to play out, I head up northwest to get that other iron field set up. It's an easy one to do, not far from existing power lines, clear space all around. Being on the edge of a lake is a bit fiddly, but no big deal, and I put a few laser turrets at the nearby walls, including both radar stations in the vicinity. We'll see how that holds if they come attack us. It's probably a when. I set up a very stupid-looking ore interchange, but basically what it does is send what the two big fields in the north make to the main iron smelting area, while the smaller ones feed into the steel.  That's just -- I don't even have the words. But it works, darn it. I then discover, to my total lack of surprise, that I now need more copper -- some of the green-circuit assemblers aren't doing anything because they aren't getting any. Next fix is to up the furnace count there from 14 to 24, and upgrade the first part of the copper lane on the bus to fast transport belts like I did with the iron. I'll give that some time to percolate through and see what happens: back to the research zone to add in the purple stuff.  Well ... maybe I won't do that quite yet. To make room I need to clear these bastards out. I think it's time to fire up those labs and see what we can get -- I expect we'll run into some things that can help us fight better before needing the production vials. ** Personal Roboport(50 RGA) -- Starting with the quick ones as always. For the stranded space traveler on the go, the Personal Roboport draws power from modular armor suites and allows the convenience of worker robots(construction/logistics) anywhere. I throw this in place of one of my energy shields, but the power draw is a lot for this suit. ** Worker Robot Speed 1(50 RGA) -- They now fly around 35% faster. ** Exoskeleton Equipment(50 RGA) -- Increases movement speed and also plugs into armor. Enough of these and you'll be saying car?? Who needs a car??? Unfortunately they require processing units, which I haven't invented yet. ** Speed Module 2(75 RGA) -- Like the first speed module, only better. +30% speed, +60% energy. This is not the module I'm looking for. ** Productivity Module 2(75 RGA) -- Also not the one I want. +60% energy required, -15% speed, +6% productivity, +7.5% pollution. ** Efficiency Module 2(75 RGA) -- There we go. I don't need these yet, but it's enough to make me stop making the regular ones. -40% Energy Consumption with no negative effects. Also need Processing Units. Grrr. That's 10% better than the first ones though, allowing anything with even two slots to get down to the minimum 20% energy footprint. ** Braking Force(100 RGA) -- An upgrade for trains, it improves brakes by 10%. Less time slowing down means more time at top speed and faster delivery. ** Electric Energy Distribution 2(100 RGA) -- The latest in electricity systems developments brings us the Substation, which supplies power to a much wider area(18x18) than anything else. Definitely worth having around. Steel, red circuits, copper are required. There's a pattern here. Anything worth having lately needs red circuits. ** Character logistics trash slots 2(100 RGA) -- +6 to the number of trash slots I have to put things for the bots to store for me. ** Worker robot speed 2(100 RGA) -- Another +40%. Now they can move around a lot faster, greatly increasing bot efficiency. ** Battery MK2 Equipment(100 RGA) -- An improved battery to store suit energy. Requires the processing unit, but has 5x the storage capacity of my current model(100 MJ to 20). ** Military 3(100 RGBA) -- Three new toys here. The Poison Capsule creates an area-affect cloud that does a small amount of damage to anything in it; the Slowdown Capsule makes any enemies it hits slower; and the Combat Shotgun has double the fire rate of the standard variant, and does 20% more damage. ** Tanks(75 RGBA) -- I've never bothered with these but I may this time. A car upgrade that can take a lot more damage and has two guns including a heavier one that gets special ammunition. Cannon shells pack a serious punch(200 physical damage, 100 Explosion each). Excellent against hardened targets. ** Explosive Rocketry(100 RGBA) -- Take a standard rocket, add a couple explosives, and get an improved version that does an additional 40 explosion damage on top of the usual 100. ** Cannon Shell Damage 1(100 RGBA) -- Upgrades for the tank guns. ** Cannon Shell Shooting Speed 1(100 RGBA) -- Another one for rate-of fire. The research area is going ahead full-steam. ** Laser Turret Damage 3(100 RGBA) -- +30%. This should help our wall defenses, which are all getting switched out from standard to laser models. I've also added a couple more solar sections as the steam's been switching on a bit at night again. ** Personal Laser Defense(100 RGBA) -- This very useful toy is basically a personal laser turret that plugs into the armor. Once again I can't build it(req. processing units). We'll have ourselves a few things to do once I get the ability to build those. ** Discharge Defense(100 RGBA) -- Another personal defense system which stuns and damages with electrical charge. I've never experimented with this. At this point I made it around to the research area and noticed the aqua vials were falling behind, so I upgraded from 4 to 10 assemblers there. ** Character logistics slots 3(150 RGA) -- This will make things easier; I can now request 16 items to be refilled instead of 10. ** Auto character logistics trash slots(150 RGA) -- Here's an example of this:  I think this is new to 0.15. Either way it's pretty cool. Just set a limit of any inventory item here, and the extras automatically get removed. This is really useful when you are taking down a bunch of stuff to re-do an area ... all the extra material you collect just gets stored for you. Another set of cannon shell upgrades follows(150 RGBA for each).  Average usage is up to a little over 28 MW. You can see here that the electric furnaces are starting to rival the radar stations for the big users spot. We used some steam power due to a missed connection with the solar add-ons. That's fixed now.  A slow, steady rise for the iron ... and that copper cable isn't far behind. Item Count: 37 Total Production: 351k(+83% from 192k) Another way of looking at this expanded use of ... lots of things ... is that there were 23 different items that we made at least a thousand of in the past hour. We hadn't approached 300k before so this is definitely a new peak. Resources ** Iron: 52k primary(12k used per hour), 18k supplemental(2k), 158k western(11k used), 756k northeast(26k). Won't be long until everything currently feeding steel(the two smaller fields) is history. ** Copper: 515k(33k). It was even more than this the last hour. I don't think we've got much more than 10 hours to go here, but it's still going to be quite a while before we have to worry about it. There are two fields pretty close at over half a million each. ** Stone: 329k(4.5k). The concrete filled up once, which slowed down the usage here. It'll be interesting to see how the steel bricks go once I eventually get the production research going. ** Coal: 170k steam power(1k), 277k factory(4k used), 1M train(negligible). The old field that was feeding steel isn't connected. I'll eventually hook it up to the bus if needed, but I may not even ever have to use it. ** Crude Oil: 199/sec(-2). No worries. It's going to be all about the iron and copper for a long time I think.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2017 08:37
|
|
|
Poil posted:Flame turrets are wonderful though, especially if the biters are charging through, what used to be, a thick forest. I like flamethrower turrets. I just don't like them enough to pipe the oil for several miles around a perimeter when other turret types will work just fine. But they are definitely quite cool. Glazius posted:You can set yourself up with an overflow that automatically gets pointed to master storage? Not sure what you mean here by automatically. It won't go there unless you direct it there(splitters, inserters, belts to transport it). If I wanted to store a bunch of extra iron, for example, I'd just split off however much from the smelting area. Wouldn't be that hard to set up a refill belt to merge with the bus whenever there was a shortfall.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2017 17:21
|
|
|
I really want to push out to the east more and get those other vials going while I have the time -- but that would be a miserable grind at best right now. Need some of the research that'll be coming in soon. I observed the power draw on an overnight cycle, and noticed that over 80% of the accumulator storage was used up; from 2 GJ down to less than 400 MW. It's enough, but we could use more. We've got 9 solar sections, it wouldn't hurt to work that up to, say, a dozen or so. At this point, any such additions means rerouting power lines and/or ore transport belts and/or clear-cutting forests. Sometimes all of the above. Very doable but it's not just fire-and-forget. ** Braking Force 2(200 RGA) -- Another 15% improvement to train brakes. If I really try, I can almost care about this. Some of the solar stuff just forces me to improve things, such as here:  On the left, big power poles replace the small ones on the right; that line is removed. Both work -- but one is definitely cleaner than the other.  I also thought it'd be a good idea to have another source of iron for the steel smelting going. I think that's going to be the next big raw resource issue. Here there's a 400k-strong field in the research area that's pretty much just in the way, and another one worth almost 100k in the forest to the west of that, between there and our oil operation. Minimal effort to set up and it would future-proof things a bit. We're already taking from five different iron patches; this will up that to seven. I don't even know what to call all of them at this point, but I do know that we need to keep expanding our sources and these are the options left within the walls. It's a straight-shot basically due west from these over to where the steel is, so it makes a lot of sense. ** Worker Robot Cargo Size 1(200 RGA) -- Logistic and Construction bots can now carry two items at a time, instead of one. Naturally this doubles their effectiveness at whatever it is we have them doing. Takes about 20 minutes to get the new iron line running, and while I'm over in the research area I take a look; we're up to about half the labs running at once. That's better, but not good. The holdup is still the third-tier Aqua-colored vials, and this time we just need more mining drill assemblers. I triple those from 2 to 6. ** Power Armor(200 RGA) -- Here's one to make you stand up and take notice; for multiple reasons. First, the bad news of the cost: ** 40x Processing Units(which we still can't make) ** 20x Electric Engine Units ** 40x Steel Plate That's a little bit of material. For that we get an upgrade over our current armor, with the following specs: ** Acid Resistance(7/30%) -- up from 5/30% ** Explosion Resistance(40/40%) -- 30/35% ** Fire Resistance(0/60%) -- 0/40% ** Physical Resistance(8/30%) -- 6/30% ** +20 Inventory bonus -- +10 ** 7x7 Grid Size -- 5x5, half the size. ** 15k Durability -- 10k This is a pretty big jump. Once we get that Processing Unit spec, there's going to be a lot of toys that are opened up for us. Next on the research path are a whole bunch of 200 RGBA military upgrades. Rockets, bullets, laser turrets, shotguns, regular turrets, combat robots -- all in all, ten of them at that price that I'm just going to hammer out here. All upgrades to current capabilities, none with anything new to build. Definitely going to focus on making sure research is running smoothly, and this is a good time to keep expanding solar, make sure logistical issues are handled, etc. So, after slapping down another 1600 slabs of concrete, another drop in the bucket there, it's back out to see how the labs are faring. The answer unfortunately is 'about the same'. Here's why:  I'm actually getting even less out of this than before(two of the six assemblers working, and those only part-time). We have an iron shortage, one of the most common and feared Factorio maladies. Each of the mining drills takes 15 plates each, so we need a crapton of it to keep the aqua vials running. Back we go to trace the problem to it's source. Some gets taken off at various points and those drills for the aqua vials are the last stop on the bus, but even tracing it back before the research area, before the oil area, there still isn't that much ...  Little more than a smattering or a trickle.  Here's a bit clearer picture of the problem. As the iron comes around the bend here from southbound to westbound, it's over half a red belt full but not nearly saturated. Then some goes off for iron gear wheels, more goes off for the green circuits, and there just isn't enough left. Half a standard yellow belt of it at most. I don't have a throughput problem; I have a production problem. Almost 90k iron per hour right now, and it's not enough. Alrighty then. All 30 electric furnaces on the task are running non-stop: I just need more than that. I can put a few more in the column but not enough; it takes about 46 to saturate a red belt. So basically I need a second iron-smelting column. Time to chop some trees, move some water piping, fun stuff like that.  That thar is a few smelters, by golly! 60 iron ones now. Only about 35 or so have modules, and the total energy bill went up to about 31 MW once they were switched on. I checked the overnight accumulator performance: just barely enough, with 90% of the energy drained. I'd rather not build any more standard efficiency modules; I want the 2nd-tier ones, but those need processing units, which I can't make -- so it's more solar. We have 11 grids in place. 1700 panels. 441 accumulators. Not enough. Gotta love it. Added a couple more, and it took a while for everything to trickle on through, but this was nice to see.  I'll have to see how everything balances out, but for the moment we've got enough now to supply all 20 Labs. That's where I want to be at the moment, to get our research going at a reasonable pace. We still could use more iron flowing down the line though, and I've got time ...  Here's a throughput problem. Where the belt switches from red to yellow, it's backing up now. Just started doing it as I got back to check. Need to push the red sections further down the line to increase the flow. For most of the line this time, as there wasn't significant iron usage at this point until you basically get down to the research area. I think we're going up to a full red belt of iron all the way through the bus now. This was interrupted by attack warnings blaring. The very east end. By the time I got there ...  Our new iron field, feeding the steel, has annoyed them. One wall section, two transport belt sections, two mining drills, and a medium electrical pole were the losses. Not bad, but if this had been a bigger attack there would have been more trouble. I put up another laser turret where they came through.  I think it's time for a brief expedition. If I'm careful, I can probably take out the smaller outposts circled in white here without aggravating the bigger ones. The increased activity out here with the drills and the ramped-out up research output is pushing the pollution outwards, they don't like it, and I'm not ready for a major offensive push yet until I get the new armor and other toys so I've got to put up as many turret defenses as are necessary here. It was fairly routine, with one exception -- an unusual concentration for such smallish clusters of larger worms at one of them. They did too much damage for the 'flamethrower circle' to work, but the defender robots were able to take care of the biters, and picking the worms off from afar with rockets did the trick quite nicely. I had to recharge the armor once, and used the time to finish out putting the red belt all the way through on iron. Vials of all colors are now backing up at the research zone. That isn't to say all is well -- but all is certainly well enough for current needs. As I'm looking at what to do next while update-related research proceeds, this happened:  That's a fair amount of things. Lately they've been bringing me a lot of new red(fast) transport belts, which means more iron had to be diverted there for replenishing that supply -- improving the iron flow meant using more iron for stuff other than where I want it to flow to. A perverse, if temporary, issue.  After doing a little mining maintenance and laying down another batch of concrete, I turned my attention to this. I've got to decide how to handle getting ready for end-game level smelting. I don't know how much will be required ... but I do know it'll be a lot more than I've got now. There's coal and the stone production to the north, and I can't extend far enough to the south. This has worked for most of the game and can work a while longer, but it won't work forever. The most I can stack up is about 18 'high', or 36 smelters emptying onto a belt with one on each side. The capacity of the red ones requires 46, and that's without even considering any future changes in furnaces or belts that are coming. So we need a big area where we can put whatever ridiculous amount of copper/iron we might need, then transport the plates from there to here. Thought about tilting it sideways and coming in from the east -- that forest could go easily enough but the oil would be too close and there's not really room.  I think right in the middle of this, basically north of there, is where I want to put it. The solar can expand to the west as needed, but I'll reserve this area, where we had green/black research once upon a time. It's fairly clear except for some inconsequential stone and coal fields that there's basically no reason to care about. I don't want to mess with this yet; I'll wait until it's time to take another research break because it's going to require a lot of time and basically shutting down factory production for a while to make this happen. Much will need to be put in place. I've reached a moment where there really isn't anything that needs to be done. I could do a variety of logistical things, but I'd just end up redoing them later anyway. So it's time to simply wait for more research to finish up. A small tweak here or there, but nothing substantive. Three more upgrade projects to get through, then I'll start getting some new stuff again.  33 MW average usage. Over 9 MW of that is the electric furnaces, our top consumer now -- and they aren't all running -- there's more smelting capacity than ore coming through right now.  I'll have to go to red belt on the copper ore to increase that any more. It's ok for now. Ore throughput is the limiter on iron now as well, which has spiked more after the new furnaces were laid down. I expect to pretty much keep up this level until we get further on in the research. Item Count: 34 Total Production: 440k(+25% from 351k) Almost double what we were doing a few hours ago, and not far from a half-million items an hour. We've now excavated over a million units of iron alone. Resources ** Iron: 1.44M primary, 559k steel. To shorten this list, I decided to just add up all the iron patches that are being fed to each area. 'Primary' now refers to everything being fed into the main smelting area, iron for the bus, as distinguished from steel. 18 hours worth here based on the current rate of production. Good for now but we can't get comfortable. Another good argument for expanding our 'borders' -- every inch of available ore within our walls has a mining drill on top of it. ** Copper: 436k(39.5k). We'll need to get another field set up for this soon. That's as good a way to spend the waiting time as any, most likely. ** Stone: 329k(4.5k). The concrete filled up once, which slowed down the usage here. It'll be interesting to see how the steel bricks go once I eventually get the production research going. ** Coal: 170k steam power(1k), 277k factory(4k used), 1M train(negligible). The old field that was feeding steel isn't connected. I'll eventually hook it up to the bus if needed, but I may not even ever have to use it. ** Crude Oil: 199/sec(-2). No worries.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2017 17:34
|
|
|
MechaCrash posted:If you want to get flamethrower turrets set up, but don't want to deal with a bunch of oil pipes, why not use barrels? Interesting link btw. On this, I'm now adding a bunch more stuff to produce that I don't need, and more importantly I tend to do a fairly low-pollution style. Flamethrower turrets are going to pollute some on their own -- and when they get hold of a forest as mentioned, they're going to pollute a crapton. It doesn't matter after a certain point, but I've not yet reached that(biter evolution is most of the way there, but I haven't seen any of the real big boys yet and I'm ok with it if I never do). MechaCrash posted:t some point, what I'd like to see is just "the train picks up ore at all these different fields, dumps it off at the Grand Processing Station, and then that iron is put on the bus." I suspect that when you get enough different fields and they're sufficiently wide spread, this may be more appealing than trying to belt it all back. I'm starting get close to this. I've never done it before, but it may be coming. EponymousMrYar's point about it being more efficient to smelt on site is well-taken, but that also has the downside of more set-up and tear-down as you exhaust various resource patches. I'm leaning towards doing something this in the late-game. As far as when, well, as a general rule I think I'm going to do it when all the iron within my 'borders', aka walls, is exhausted. I expect to screw it up badly at first, but that's half the fun then isn't it?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2017 03:20
|
|
|
The 'walled enclave' approach is what I did with the big crude-oil area before I extended the base perimeter out that far to the east, and that's definitely the approach I would use for iron as well when necessary. It was barely necessary in 0.14, but I got away with a single iron lane(not well, but it worked) in that game. Clearly that's not going to cut it here.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2017 02:46
|
|
|
Re: paving, I can't improve on those answers. I did a thing on the concrete setup and what I'm trying to do with it(cover all of my territory basically, but that clearly isn't going to happen as I'm not making enough and don't really want to throw any more effort into it), but I didn't make a big deal of it.  After setting up the new copper field, I did this little combo thing. Here's how this spaghetti demonstration works; the current(old) copper field sends it's ore in from the west here, before it eventually turns north and splits to feed each side of the smelting column. Coming in from the north, and then splitting to intersect from each side, is the new supply. In this way we'll use up the old mines first before starting to draw on the new ones. Then I notice we've only got 3-4 active research labs again. Once more the problem is iron.  This is the main fast-belt line that takes ore to the smelters. It's close to full, but there's enough missing to make a significant difference. Without doing a major reworking of things, the best I can do is get this saturated. This took a very small change, from this:  To this:  This adds a third source which is enough to fully fill the belt. It also means less iron is coming from the north to the steel-smelting array -- but that just means it'll use more from the patches in the southeast. The bigger and more complex a factory is, the longer it takes any change to filter through and have an impact at the end. It took more than ten minutes, but eventually the research started to pick up. Meanwhile, we'd finally reached the end of the update projects.  Even with what I think are all the kinks worked out, we're still only using ten labs here, half of what I have placed and would like to be running at the moment. The only solution is a second belt of iron on the bus to increase flow, which I can't do with current input -- we need to expand to get more ore sources, I need to set up the new smelting area, etc. So for now, I'm just going to accept things being on the slow side. ** Combat Robotics 2(200 RGBA) -- Our first new toy in a while, the Distractor Capsule is basically a Defender upgrade; more expensive, 50% tougher, and higher damage. Due to having more than double the rate-of-fire, the Defender is actually still the better choice right now. ** Energy Shield MK2 Equipment(200 RGBA) -- Far more expensive than the ones I'm currently using and yet another thing that needs processing units, these absorb 3x the punishment(150 HP instead of 50). So they're basically a bargain at ten times the price. ** Lab Research Speed 3(250 RGA) -- Another 40% increase; now we're up to almost double the standard rate. ** Inserter Capacity Bonus 3(250 RGA) -- Stack inserters, which I'm not using yet but I don't think it will be all that far away, get another +1 to the amount they can move at a time.  Our iron field in the west is drying up, and when it goes the ore supply problem will return. As a stop-gap, I decide to move our wall out just a bit here. It's only a little over 100k, so it's only going to extend things by less than two hours overall. Better than nothing though. After a couple of flamethrower upgrades which strangely both cost the same amount, we finally get to the next big breakthrough: ** Advanced Electronics 2(300 RGA) -- Two really important inventions here: the Processing Unit(blue circuits), and the Hi-Tech research vial(yellow). We'll get to the second one later: for now, the blue circuits are our concern as they will allow better combat capabilities, giving a better chance against the larger biter clusters. They require green circuits(20), red circuits(2), and sulfuric acid(5). That last requirement means I can't fashion them by hand. I want a big production area for these as far west as possible: they need to go on the bus given how many things will require them. If you thought red circuits were slow -- the blue ones take almost twice as long to make(over 13 seconds each at current assembler tech). Just east of the oil area is that lake that the bus detours around to the south. That seemed the best place to build the processing units; I started setting it up before the research finished.  Red and green circuits come off the bus, while sulfuric acid comes straight east basically from where it's produced. None of that is difficult. The hard part is going to be making enough of it -- esp. the green circuits. I started with a dozen assemblers here, which will output just under one processing unit per second. I'm quite sure I'm going to need a fair bit more than that -- and yet, even to satisfy that much, we're going to need to expand green circuit production to the point that a red lane on the bus will be needed to carry it all. Again, that's bare-minimum. Which means a LOT more copper is going to get used. Still, we've taken the next step and will get some of these made. Another batch of military upgrades was next on the research docket, while I was focused on other things. Power Armor was first on the agenda, followed by other equipment for it. I also wanted to get Efficiency Module 2s up and running as soon as possible. With those, anything that is module-compatible could be reduced to minimum power draw. Once that was going, it was a question of whether to try out the tank, or keep fighting on foot. The tank has 2000 HP -- each of the Mk2 energy shields affords me only 150. I don't know how it compares to the power armor in terms of resisting damage, but it seems that kind of durability is worth at least trying out.  It was pretty easy to put together the resources to build it. Looks very early 20th-century. I'm not as impressed at the moment. Let's look inside.  That's a lot of trunk space. To do this, I'm going to need fuel for the tank itself(800 KW consumption, 75% efficiency), which is more efficient than the car but also requires more than triple the energy. It's not like coal or solid fuel is lacking though. I also need ammunition for three weapons; cannon, machine gun, and flamethrower. Already keeping a supply up of the last two, and the first just needs plastic and explosives. I just grab a bunch and craft it for now -- I'll see how this thing runs before committing to a permanent assembly operation. After one trial run, I'm sold. The main thing is the destructive power of this machine. The three weapons: ** Cannon -- Range 25, Rate of fire 0.94/second, 280 physical and 140 explosion damage for the standard shells I'm using(explosive ones are somewhat different). Also has 300 piercing power, which basically means armor is irrelevant. This is the anti-worm mode. ** Machine Gun -- Range 20, doubles the standard damage of magazine-based ammunition, and most importantly fires 31.5/second. 21/second for my trusty SMG that I carry. ** Flamethrower -- Range 9, 60/second firing rate. Actually is a much lower range than the hand-held one, which fires out to 15. The flamethrower doesn't appear to be particularly useful. I felt like I was doing best using the machie gun to deal with the swarms and then switching to the cannon to take out the spawners/worms. That cannon and the punishment I can survive here is the main thing that sells me on the tank; being able to take out the worms safely at a distance, at least some of them anyway. So ... really the next thing I need to do is build a bunch of cannon shells and wait for another round of upgrades, as boosts to that damage and rate of fire are coming before long. Then I should be able to push expansion. I'll also want repair packs for fixing the tank from time to time, but that's easy to put together. The shells are easy(steel + explosives + plastic), and I make a small adjustment to get more copper ore flowing and increase our output of that some while waiting. And then it's time. I think the next update will feature some tank-fighting though, which should be entertaining.  Pretty much the same power requirements overall.  The spike in copper-cable is the most interesting thing here; about 80% of the total copper is going to that, mostly for use in the green circuits which are getting swallowed up like crazy. It'll need to get higher. We're also cranking out 3k red circuits an hour now, and have used 1.3M crude oil so far to date. Item Count: 38 Total Production: 446k(+1% from 440k) Resources ** Iron: 1.37M primary, 529k steel. Switched up which patches send their product where a bit. The bottom line though is we continue to chew through it at a rate of a million per nine hours, which gives us about 15 hours worth of supply. That's acceptable, but no better than that. ** Copper: 369k old, 639k new. We're not going to get much above 50k usage with the current smelting column, even with a few furnaces added. Since we're sitting just above 1M here with the newly added patch, that's at least 20 hours which is plenty sufficient. ** Stone: 329k(4.5k). The concrete filled up once, which slowed down the usage here. It'll be interesting to see how the steel bricks go once I eventually get the production research going. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 251k factory(13k used), 1M train(negligible). Eventually I'll need to draw coal from a new patch, probably the old steel one, but there's plenty around. ** Crude Oil: 196/sec(-3). I'm satisfied that our 'floor' on the pumpjacks has indeed changed now to 2/sec. each. We have a total of 16 in place, which means we should never drop below 32/second. We're using a bit more oil now that we are drawing off the sulfuric acid for the processing units; the two refineries are nearing but not quite yet at their capacity.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2017 01:37
|
|
|
Great information, thanks! Hilariously, this was posted shortly after I finished most of the tank combat I needed to do, including recording a short demo of how I ended up doing it. Let's just say I didn't know I could use combat robots along with the tank, I thought it was one or the other. That makes things, uhh, a lot easier.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2017 14:30
|
|
|
Two priorities now, in order: ** Clear out the biters as much as needed to expand, mostly to the east making room for new research. ** After the walls have been extended, set up the new smelting area. Neither of these are small projects. Once they are completed though, the stage will have been set for a push towards the endgame. There's still some significant stuff left but we're getting close to the end of third-tier 'Aqua' research. I decide not to wait any longer, grabbing what supplies we have and heading east with the tank. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IckuhZLgpp0 This is the easier of the clusters in the east to handle, but the basic routine will remain the same. It's the way I've worked out to fight them that seems sensible to me. 1. Machine-Gun down the initial biter rush, prioritizing the spitters. 2. Use the cannon on worms and spawners. 3. Switch back to the machine gun as they swarm again. 4. Repeat #2-#3 until the tank is getting beat up. 5. Retreat and repair with repair packs. I used up about 25-30 cannon shells there, and 80 mags of piercing rounds. So I'll be burning through the ammunition, but this seems to be pretty effective. It's just enough to expand the wall if I want, but further on into this cluster there's an iron patch bigger than any I've yet tapped. A full 1M. That's worth continuing to push. After getting a fair distance that way, I turned my attention to the larger, denser cluster to the south. It's reached the point though where larger doesn't mean more difficult, but merely more time-consuming. Only so many spawners and worms can ever be within range. It's just a case of learning to drive close enough, but not too close, do your damage, attack-retreat-repair, lather.rinse.repeat. And then go stock up on ammunition again.  Super. We have now done a third of all the achievements. Many more we can get, including several relating to mass production. I also seem to be burning through ammunition for the tank about as fast as I'm producing it; that's a good balance I think.  After I'd been at the biter-clearing for approximately hour and it was starting to get rather annoying and tedious, this was the situation. That big cluster by the lake there is the next one I want to eliminate: I also need to do some work to the north and south of the base. This is going to take a while but it'll be worth it. The copper patch that it's guarding, for instance, has almost 3 million! We've got three million-strong iron patches in the not-too-distant vicinity; one we can get to right now, the others without taking out any clusters as big as this one. It's coming ...  Heh. This is the 'bad driving award'. I tried the 'circling' tactic I had used with the flamethrower after a while. It did end up being a lot better: I thought I wouldn't be able to aim well enough to make it work, but with a little of practice it wasn't too bad. Allows for a lot more of them to be taken out at once. Just be sure you bring enough ammunition to finish off a lot of stragglers. REALLY sure. ** Mining Productivity 4(400 RGA) -- Up to an 8% bonus. ** Follower Robot Count 2(400 RGBA) -- Upgrades the number of combat robots you can have from 5-10. Which I'm not using anymore. ** Mining Productvity 4(500 RGA) -- Another 2%, now at an 8% bonus. Here's an example of the encircling tactic, executed not particularly well; there's a reason I'm a 'strategy' guy, not an 'arcade' guy. For reference, this is near the end of this update, just short of the 30-hour mark. We're at the northeast end of the base; just to the west of where I start out here is the train station and the big crude oil pumping area. I wanted to finally clear out some of the clusters here, both for long-term safety of that operation as the activity of(and pollution from) it will increase over time, and also to get access to a little more iron. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1saCRiH18I&feature=youtu.be I could have gone further east, for that second cluster I'd ticked off, but generally I've found that at a certain point it's best to lead the pack you have trailing you on a wild goose choose and gun them down, then set up a new run at the next section. I'm still messing around with this, but that's a decent demo on how I'm going about it. Sometimes I do better, sometimes worse. Key is to have lots of space to run away from them in, and whatever you do don't stop. As this segment comes to an end, everything I need to get rid of for now in the east and north has been handled; there's still some work to do to the south though. I'm almost ready to do what I intend to be the last big wall expansion of the primary factory/base, slowly getting better at tank-fighting after two hours of it(more than that actually, I reloaded a few royal screwups). It's going to be worth it though, creating room for the rest of the research area to be built.  Power usage has gone down a little. Combination of iron supply starting to slow up a hair and efficiency modules trickling out there. I really should be throwing out more roboports and whatnot, but I simply can't be bothered at the moment what with the other priorities.  At this point, tracking the circuits is a decent gauge for how things are going. By that measure, 24k green, 3.4k red, 500+ blue. I think we've got a backup on the blue processing units since they aren't being used for a whole lot of anything. Yet. Another thing that stands out here is the consistency of the graph. No peaks or valleys, mostly because I've been out in the hinterlands slaughtering biters by the hundreds. At least that means there are no super-huge supply problems. Item Count: 40 Total Production: 510k(+14% from 446k) Just over a half-million. Resources ** Iron: 1.20M primary, 529k steel. 15 hours left basically. I think we're going to really be wanting some more by the time I'm ready to be mining out new patches. ** Copper: 294k old, 573k new. Draining almost an equal amount off both which is not really what I want; I'll take a look at that. Either way, we've boosted up to well over 50k an hour in total usage here, half of what iron is pretty much. That puts us at 17 hours' worth. The days of only using a little bit of copper are definitely history. ** Stone: 312k(8.5k). I think this is a new high. It's close if it isn't. Still pushing 40 hours' worth, but I will want to make sure I've got extra drill set up here. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 233k factory(9k used), 1M train(negligible). Still looking good. ** Crude Oil: 191/sec(-5). As expected, we're churning through it faster now. Still far more supply than we need, and for quite a while longer I think.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2017 20:57
|
|
|
Olesh posted:e tank's flamethrower is _really good_ at clearing out the huge packs of biters that trail along after you because it does much higher damage while also hitting multiple biters close together. I don't like the really short range on it. But I will give another try. Olesh posted:f you're using Combat Robots and/or Personal Laser Defense, your robots/personal lasers can also thin out large chunks of the herd, and they'll also murder buildings /worms you get close to. Yep. After the second video there is when I noticed your post on that issue. I've been churning through the remaining Defenders which made things easier(esp. as I upgraded how many I could use). Veloyxll posted:gular cannon shells are piercing. So you can shoot them into large swarms like you had at the end there (aim at the far end of the swarm) and they will inflict a decent number of casualties. Worth trying. It's getting a lot less tedious as I get better at the tank. As for personal laser defense; I've got a problem there. Armor is low on power because I'm constantly using the one Exoskeleton I've made. It's worth it, I just need to upgrade to a better power source(haven't invented it yet) so that I can really start outfitting it properly. As it is, I'm still running around at night at 'normal' speed too often.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2017 04:13
|
|
|
New goals: ** 1. Finish clearing out the too-close biter clusters. ** 2. Expand the wall with new radar stations and turrets to provide coverage of all polluted areas and room for enlarging the research complex. ** 3. Put new smelting area in place. ** 4. Research add-ons, enlarging the bus and production of various intermediate products as needed. By the time we complete #4, we'll be well into the endgame. Already I'm down to a handfull of things that can still be researched with the existing set-up; they're going slower at several hundred a pop. Still plan on completing each tier before moving on to the next; that means everything Aqua and Production(purple)-related before going into the final Hi-Tech(yellow) section. But first, #1 on the list. More biters must die. ** Lab Research speed 4(500 RGA) -- Another 50%, putting us at 240% of standard. This still doesn't matter until we get the vials flowing fast enough to use all the labs, but it's still good to have. I suppose there's a minor power savings from doing the same amount of work with fewer labs even now, but that's really not worth considering. I did take a quick tour first, removing exhausted mining drills and checking on a couple things. Aside from the small amount of pollution & power savings from not having them there and inactive, the more important issue is getting the efficiency modules and throwing them into active machines. The stone drills are still looking fine for now, and I made one small adjustment to improve the flow from the older copper patch. Then it was on to more fighting. ** Follower robot count 3(500 RGBA) -- The number of combat robots is doubled again, from 10 to 20. ** Mining Productivity 6(600 RGA) -- 12% boost now. Getting more out of what resources we do have, bit by bit.  The new and enlarged east end of the factory, after almost an hour's work. Almost 4 million iron ore has been added, and what should, I hope, be plenty of room for the rest of the research. Now for the new smelting area, which will probably prove to be a lengthier undertaking. That's interrupted by an attack in the south almost immediately. Looks like there's a decent-sized base too close to our new walls, so I'll need another tank expedition first. After that, it was time to do the math with regards to the smelters. I definitely want this to be a permanent solution. There is yet one more belt-speed upgrade coming, which will boost to the final max. of 40 items/second(13.3 for the standard yellow ones, 26.7 for the fast red ones). Assuming no speed modules(I'm planning on sticking with efficiency), the smelting speed of an iron/copper plate every 1.75 seconds means I need room for stacks of 35 smelters: 70 total, but 35 on each side. The current array is less than half that tall. I'll also want room at each end, particularly near the top end for an unloading station in the event of train service to bring in the ore.  This, again, is the general area where it's going to be put. Leaving enough room on the south end to not interfere with the bus and be able to do whatever belt spaghetti might be necessary, I found that a 35-'high' stack would basically reach to exactly where the north wall is here. That's not even close to enough room, so we've got to expand more. Which means more tank combat. Quite a bit more, to really do this right. And a lot of forest is going to have to go eventually as well. I don't see a better option though, or a good reason not to be nice and thorough about it and just make sure there's plenty of room. Several modest-sized clusters will be no problem, but there's one big one that will also have to go.  Somewhat more dangerous and more close-quarters fighting with a lot of trees, and as a result I got this. About 25 minutes of fighting later, and the area I wanted was cleared out, including a resupply run. Then on to the new walls. ** Follower Robot count 4(600 RGBA) -- Prices are definitely getting hefty. Another +10 increase, now up to 30 followers if I so desire. There are only two tasks left that don't require at least production vials; more mining productivity, and another one that has been mentioned a few times.  Here's the latest after the new wall is in place, and three more radar stations set up around it(and power reconnected to one that got inadvertently disconnected as well). Should be plenty of room -- and incidentally, more uranium that we still aren't using is within our reach also.  Power usage has gone down in spite of the new radars, mostly because of copper furnaces not being needed as much. This is temporary; we've recently hit a backlog of processing units, which means not needing as much of others stuff back through the whole factory. Once we start using those, things will open up again.  Copper fluctuations can be seen here, and also the very consistent iron flow is starting to develop just a bit of a hitch over the last roughly 15 minutes. That's just ore supply. It's still coming, just not quite as smoothly as it has been. Item Count: 41 Total Production: 485k(-5% from 510k) Again, down just a bit overall. Resources ** Iron: 1.03M(85k) primary, 472k(28.5k) steel. Nothing really changed all that much. ** Copper: 240k(27k) old, 536k(18.5k) new. Churning through both of them at a solid rate. ** Stone: 298(7k). Had some more wall sections built for the first time in a long while. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 218k(7.5k) factory, 1M train(negligible). No problems yet. ** Crude Oil: 188/sec(-3). The processing-unit backup has also lowered the usage here.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2017 04:17
|
|
|
This run will not be; I assume that 0.16 breaks 0.15 saves, that's been the case with pretty much every major revision so far. However, if there is enough interest in a Crazy-Go-Nuts modded game after I 'merely' complete the rocket-launching task this time, the timing could be right to migrate to 0.16 for that. Mecha Crash posted:what are you burning to make your tank go? You can throw anything burnable in it, but better fuels give you better performance. Solid fuel shouldn't be too much of a hassle, and I think you have the lines set up for it (but I'm not sure). I am making solid fuel, and I've used some of that, some coal when I couldn't be bothered to run all the way back for it. I might end up going with more solid fuel for the trains when I start shipping in ore. Or I might not. I'm undecided about that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2017 03:31
|
|
|
Yeah I definitely agree with that -- I've thought how much easier that would be from time to time.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2017 00:42
|
|
|
So last session I made it halfway through the goals; new smelting area and expanding research to the final two vial remain. On the smelting, I wanted to get a stack of each(iron and copper) in place. Once I do that, and get the ore lines feeding into it hooked up, the output plates hooked into the bus, I can expand the operation whenever I need to. ** Mining Productivity 7(700 RGA) -- This is the final one of these we can do for now. +14% is a pretty significant yield. Next one requires the production vials. This whole smelting operation is a great example of something that would be done easier, and probably faster, if I bothered to use blueprints. Building roboport connections all the way up here is the only reason I haven't, but it definitely would be more of the Factorio Way*. I'm also getting more frequent attacks on the walls, one about every 10-20 minutes now. They aren't getting through; laser turrets are taking them out effectively, and based on the numbers they look to be expansion parties for the most part.  Here's the first part of it; new stack of iron smelters, with output hooked up to the bus, inserters, belts for ore, and power. I've only placed two out of every three furnaces because that's all we can use until we get the final belt upgrade. I haven't yet re-routed the ore here to the top of this though, which is all that remains to get it operational. It was important to do that first, because as soon as I start re-routing, less product is going to come from the existing smelters as their supply of ore will dry up. As an aside, don't play Factorio absent-mindedly. Stuff like this happens.  Yep. Sent the raw ore straight now the finished plates line. Because I'm an idiot. If you do this and don't notice, thankfully I did right away, you'll have a nice lovely mess all throughout your bus. Once I did it again, the right way, I end up with this:  Here, the finished iron plates enter the top of the old smelting column. Not that many yet but more are coming. Now, I need to finish connecting the rest of iron ore belts to the new area, and then take all of the old one down. ** Nuclear Power(1000 RGA) -- And here's the research I can build without the new vials. This hit in the middle of finishing up the iron ore connections, and I needed to handle that first. I don't know jack diddly squat about nuclear power. I know it's an involved process, and I know it needs uranium. And, uh, that's about the size of it. Let's see what stuff we have to work with here. New components: 1. Nuclear Reactor(500 ea. of concrete, steel plates, red circuits, and copper plates). That's, uh, a bit of material. 2. Centrifuge(100 Concrete/Red Circuits/Iron gear wheels, and 50 Steel plates) 3. Uranium Processing(10 seconds to process 10 Uranium Ore. Yields 0.7% of Uranium-235, and 99% of Uranium 238. 4. Uranium Fuel Cell(10 of these can be built with 10 Iron Plates, 1 Uranium-235, and 19 Uranium-238). At least there's some use for both isotopes. 5. Heat Exhanger(10 Steel plates, 100 Copper Plates, 10 Pipes) 6. Heat Pipe(10 Steel Plates, 20 Copper Plates) 7. Steam Turbine(50 Iron Gear Wheels, 50 Copper Plates, 20 Pipes) Ok then. Research goes silent for now, but this is of higher priority. We don't need this at all, but it would pretty terrible of me not to at least give this toy a whirl and see what I can do. I definitely did not just experiment here: I looked up some tutorials on this because I am not particularly interested in going through hours of trial-and-error to figure it out. For anyone interested, here's one that I think is good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izJOVMQyLCc As far as we're concerned here, the long and the short of it is that this going to be a multi-stage process, and I'm not going to be able to just set up nuclear power anytime soon. That means it's not even necessarily going to be that valuable for this run, but let's take the plunge anyway.  This is the small, roughly 9k-strong uranium mining patch right where we started off this grand adventure. The drill looks weird on this surface, and here it is powered --- and doing nothing. That's because the mining process itself requires 1 sulfuric acid for each uranium ore that is mined.  After running some fairly stupid-long piping(with more to come), it works. Rather obvious step 1: get the radioactive green crud out of the ground. Next, we need to refine it, and this is where we're going to need a more involved operation. Definitely can't do that here.  So here's the plan; shove everything in the north. The New Smelting area shouldn't have to go any further up; I've already spaced that out. Off to the east where it says Ore Operations is where I'd have the great unloading/re-routing station for ore in the future. The 'Nuclear' section is a good open space, and you can see there's sizable uranium patches to the east and west. Those are by far the biggest ones we have access to, something like almost 400k combined. So I run belt from the lone miner which by itself can excavate the smaller area I just showed, mine these other two fields which involves truly ridiculously long piping of sulfuric acid, get conveyors moving that product to the south end of that clearing, and so on. The northwest field could not even be seen from overhead, so thick were the trees that covered it. There was quite a bit of hacking to do, and no good way to route it to the southeast to join the others without making a path through thick forest either. So this took some doing. Our turrets had done well against the last couple of incursions, but just as I began the tree-cutting there was a warning of a new attack. Southeast corner of the base. Exactly opposite where I was. They'd broken through an unprotected section of the wall.  I found this when I arrived. Another expansion party. They weren't interested in attacking me, just expanding. This is due south of the east end of the bus, southeast of our labs(though there's water between the two). No fellas. No pests allowed. Three wall sections damaged badly, five more destroyed as they came through. I put a turret up in case they decide that's a good idea again. Then it was dark, and my suit was out of energy(I've got an Exoskeleton to make me faster, which is great as long as it has power. The portable solar panels aren't up to the task anymore).  I ended up cutting down almost 200 trees to get everything in order. The last 20 or so of them, I was reduced to the ignominy of using an iron axe, since the steel ones wore out and I didn't have any steel on me. What you see here is that last patch, a dozen of what are now 23 operational uranium mines, all belts set up and converging roughly where I want them to. So that's Part One of the nuclear process; getting the uranium out of the ground takes an extra step(the sulfuric acid), but it's mostly the same deal we're used to with other mining. Now we need to process the ore.  These lovely green-glowing things here are the Centrifuges. This is Part Two, and will take a WHILE. Wasn't sure how many we'd need, so I built four. In retrospect, it might have been easier to just do the math. I'm going to need closer to ten. Uranium Processing produces over 99% uranium-238, which is useless for the moment, and 0.7% uranium-235. It also takes 10 ore to produce a single uranium isotope, and each centrifuge takes over 13 seconds to process each load. To get usable U-235 ... we're going to be here a while. That's why, as people mentioned earlier in the thread, you want to get this processing started ASAP. For reasons that I'll explain later, I'm just storing all the output in chests for the moment. Each Centrifuge, as mentioned, needs concrete, steel, red circuits, and iron gear wheels. And a pretty good amount of them. I grabbed up enough to expand this operation to 10, which should be about enough to handle our mining capacity. By the time those were in place, I was up to four U-235 produced ... along with over 300 U-238. I could at this point build a few uranium fuel cells and a reactor, but it would be unwise to do that just yet. We'll build up some more and let this run. There are more advanced processes coming. I returned briefly to the matter of tearing down to the old iron-smelting furnaces, since we've got a new column in place and operational now.  With research shut off for the moment, nothing is working as hard as it was right now.  This tells that tale as clear as anything. Still lots of copper cable since I snagged up a bunch of red circuits to make the centrifuges, but otherwhise we built about half as much as we were of the other main products. Item Count: 37 Total Production: 263k(-46% from 485k) Resources ** Iron: 920k(66k) primary, 413k(29k) steel. Still drawing just as much for the steel really, though that's backed up now as well. The original iron patch is finally gone, and a couple others only have about 40k left. In related news, we've got about 13 hours or a bit less on the clock here once we go back to the level we were at before the smelting change. ** Copper: 191k(26k) old, 526k(10k) new. Same 13 hours here. Tick-tock. ** Stone: 294(2k). Part of this is because concrete has stopped; I don't have any iron heading there yet at the moment. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 211k(3.5k) factory, 1M train(negligible). ** Crude Oil: 185/sec(-3). Uranium mining plus the new research will eventualy spike how much of this we use. ** Uranium: 396k(new). I expect this to be our last resource to add to the list. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 21, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2017 00:42
|
|
|
MechaCrash posted:how feasible would "bring in iron and sulfur, produce acid on-site" be? Since you'd also need water, I'm going to guess "not very." Maybe using barrels to transport it instead of pipes? I'm not a barreling fan, but it would be better than the pipes. The main issue with this is that it basically needs to transport directly through(or it could go around) my factory. Directly between where I make the sulfuric acid and the uranium fields is stuff like the smelting array, concrete, etc. So making a loop around for what isn't really a huge distance(still long for piping, but very short for a train) wasn't really something I was a fan of. EponymousMrYar posted:I made a dedicated train that pulls a tanker and a single cargo wagon. The tanker train (currently) gets one tank's worth of acid from my main base, goes to the uranium field, tops off the acid store there, loads up on uranium, then goes to the uranium processing station to dump that and cycles between those three stations. This idea I like, but it's probably something more for the next game. We'll see, but I think I'm going to get minimal nuclear use here. I'll build a reactor near the end anyway even if I don't need to use just for demonstration purposes, and I do think I will need the power. Probably. Not going to build any more solar, but by my calculations I have enough to produce 132 MW of power. That's pretty much exactly four times what I am currently using. I'm going to use more ... but very possibly not that much more. So all this nuclear stuff is probably in the proof-of-concept category since this is just a 'finish-the-game' run here. Also, thanks for all the nuclear details everyone. I don't even have to figure out ratios and whatnot when I get to that point.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2017 23:50
|
|
|
Lots of *Blah Blah Blah* in this update. You've been warned. So what next? While the uranium mining and processing continues, getting rid of the rest of old smelting stuff and putting a copper column in place next to the new iron one is first on the agenda. Went a little faster than the iron switch, now that I knew what I was doing a little better; maybe a half-hour was involved. Then I started upgrading the copper lane on the bus to red belts, which is going to need to happen pretty soon anyway. Finally, it was on to the research zone to put in purple(production) vial stuff. It's been long in the waiting. Before I do that, here's we stand: ** Research Completed: 71 projects ** Research Available: 33 ** Research Locked: 8 There's not much left we can't do; we're at about two-thirds of the tree completed now. The majority of what's left needs yellow(Hi-Tech) vials as well, but there are 10 things we can proceed with once purple is in place. Production Vial Ingredients ** 1 Electric Engine Unit ** 1 Assembling Machine 1 ** 1 Electric Furnace The last two I can make with stuff that's already on the bus. The only issue here is that the Electric Engine Unit requires Lubricant. I could be wrong, but I don't know anything else that needs it. It seemed the most sensible thing was to keep building them in place where they are(oil area), and bus them down here. It's either that or bus lubricant itself. Not sure if I'll need to re-work that area eventually, but for now I just expand to four assembling machines(and four more for the standard engine units feeding them). 10 lanes on the bus now. All of them are different products. Thing is taking on a life of its own. Once the production vials were hooked up(ensuring they only go on one half of a belt, as the other half is reserved for the Hi-Tech ones), the labs powered up again. The costs range from cheap(150 vials of 3-5 types each) to the obscene(ten times that much). Any logistic/production issues keeping research from happening is the first goal now; secondary to that, getting Hi-Tech vials produced eventually. It would take a while for any shortages to filter back through the bus, so I took at look at the needs for our final research type: Hi-Tech Vial Ingredients ** 1 Battery ** 3 Processing Units ** 1 Speed Module ** 30 Copper Cable Once again I need to expand the bus. Either batteries, or the sulfuric acid to make them. Again I think the best option is to build the batteries themselves in the oil area, then ship them here. I've already got a pair of assemblers set up there. I add four more for a total of six as a temporary stopgap. ** Automation 3(150 RGAP) -- P stands for purple/production of course here. This is an important one. The final step in assembling-machine progression, the Assembling Machine 3 can work faster than even a trained engineer such as myself, with a crafting speed of 1.25: that's two-thirds faster than the 0.75 we get from the previous version(the blue ones). The battery project is on hold while I deal with this. Essentially it's going to involve another example of moving stuff to the east. Currently assembling machines are built way back close to where the bus starts. The new ones require speed modules, which need red circuits, which require oil, etc. On the way back, I deal with one problem; red circuits are short on plastic. Another chemical plant for that; I'll likely need more but that'll double our output for now. ** Character logistics slots 4(150 RGAP) -- Another six spots added for new items to be supplied with. ** Worker robot speed 3(150 RGAP) -- Another 45% speed for the 'civil servant' bots. ** Coal liquefaction(200 RGAP) -- Yet another 0.15 addition. Basically this trades a modest amount of coal and a good amount of steam for some of each of the three oil products(Heavy, Light, Petroleum Gas). I don't anticipate using it, but it's another option for using that coal that's everywhere.  I discover that I broke a circuit connection while setting up the engine unit stuff. Same mistake -- AGAIN. This is the result. We, uh, won't need to build any more inserters. Ever. I've decided that in my next factory, I'm going to build redundant network connections intentionally so that I don't run into this problem. Who knows, there's a remote chance I might even be disciplined enough to do such a fail-safe. Equal chance of me just loading a bunch of crap I don't need in a chest off somewhere and either leaving it there or blowing it up.  Here's your latest entry in the 'Crap Thotimx Should Have Done Hours Ago, But Procrastinated On'. Aka the Factorio Way(tm). It seems that churning through stone bricks for the electric furnaces, in the production research vial effort, exhausted three of my six operational drills here. That made a barely adequate supply no longer so. Who could have predicted this? What's that, you over in the corner there? No comments from the peanut gallery needed. Yes, I did predict it myself a while back and said I was going to take care of it, then didn't. What's your point?? Err ... *AHEM* ... what was I doing? Oh yeah, new assembling machines need a production line. Roger that. ** Worker robot speed 4(250 RGAP) -- Starting to ramp up the costs more. Another 55% increase. They can zip around pretty decent now. The new assembling machine line is soon in place, at the end of the now-obsolete inserter line which already had all the required products in a convenient location. And isn't getting enough green circuits to do a darn thing. Hey, there's my next project! But also, a couple of other specs of the new assembers: they use 210kw of power(60 kw more than the previous, more than made up for by the increased speed) and can make anything with up to six ingredients instead of four(meaning basically anything). Essentially I now want to replace almost all of the tier-2 assemblers with the new tier-3 types. According to the electricity report, there's only 169 of those connected to the grid. Scattered all over the factory. So it's not like that will take long at all. In all seriousness, some don't need to be replaced, such as those making the inserters or transport belts or what-have-you. But all the research ones, those for the red circuits and blue circuits that take freaking forever, etc; yeah all those are getting replaced.  Here we go. Fix one problem ... and create another. We have enough plastic at the red-circuit line, thanks to having a second chemical plant on the job there. So now we don't have enough green circuits, and we aren't getting jack flowing downstream from here. Okey-dokey. All the green-circuit assemblers(six of them) are running full-steam. So what do we do, class?? That's right, we build more. Let's go for a dozen(which means a total of 30 including the copper-cable ones feeding them). That'll push us up to basically a full belt on the bus instead of just one lane. That was getting put up as we hit the next session-end.  33.4 MW average usage, which is about as high as we've been. The top few items here(below radar stations) are worth watching for the next few updates as we start ramping up again.  Raw stone, plastic, green/red circuits should all boost up soon. Copper cable is making a play to be used as much as iron. Item Count: 45(a new high) Total Production: 538k(+11% from 485k) Also a new high, and we'll leave it behind soon I'm sure. On the uranium front, we've got 40 U-235 now. And almost 6k of the U-238, but we are gradually getting the good stuff. Resources ** Iron: 829k(??) primary, 412k(negl.) steel. Steel was backed up, but has now broken loose again. Either way I clearly miscalculated the numbers here last time -- looks like we still have about a dozen hours. ** Copper: 150k(20k) old, 501k(12k) new. About as expected. ** Stone: 279(7k). This one will be worth watching now that we are drawing more for research. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 202k(4.5k) factory, 1M train(negligible). ** Crude Oil: 180/sec(-5). ** Uranium: 340k(28k). So basically with our current supply of ore we're looking at the same 12-13 hours. That may be enough, or it may not be close. I'll have a better handle on that once we start actually using it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2017 14:24
|
|
|
That's pretty prophetic, as in an update or two I did in fact deal with that issue; somewhat differently though.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2017 02:17
|
|
|
I could start getting nuclear power going, but I'd rather have more U-235 first. We'll get into why a little further down the road. I'm also going to need to mine some more iron and copper, add another smelting column for at least iron which is at capacity, etc. eventually. But I think there are other logistic issues that are more pressing. That was only true for a few minutes. After getting the expanded green-circuit production going and handling a couple of smaller issues(red circuits were running short on copper cable now), it became clear that we needed a second iron line on the bus to handle demand. That ... is not going to be a small task. Another smelting column and more ore are needed. I don't think it's quite time yet to set up the train station for them, but it sure won't be too long. ** Inserter Capacity bonus 4(250 RGAP) -- Another +1 to stack inserters. ** Logistics 3(300 RGAP) -- This comes in just as I've got a new iron field mined, and the yield flowing into a partially-assembled second iron-smelting column. Now we can make it all go faster. Express belts(blue), and their companion splitters and underground versions. That means we can fill it that last third of furnaces(two out of each three are placed right now). Eventually -- we'll need a crapload of the new stuff first. And uh ... that's going to be interesting. They need the red versions, plus a crapload of iron gear wheels(more iron down the drain) ... and lubricant. Which isn't available anywhere near there. This is one of those 'Oh. Crap.' moments, since I was able to get away with not building any express belts in 0.14. I can either move the whole belt assembly line to the east, or make another stupid-long pipe, this one carrying lubricant, to the west. The infrastructure over there really doesn't fit for building the new belts though; a more complex line is needed. ** Braking Force 3(250 RGAP) -- Continuing to improve train efficiency ** Worker Robot Cargo Size 3(300 RGAP) -- They can carry up to three items at once now. I'd be getting a lot more research finished if we were satisfying more than 4-5 labs at at time, but first things first.  This slightly convoluted -- ok, more than slightly -- thing is really too far up to see exactly what's happening, in order to fit everything in. But basically, nine assemblers and several support products shoehorned in at various places to get the three express-belt products built.  Back to the iron smelting column ... which I've screwed up, as you can see. No room for inserters on the left side. Grrr. Time to tear a bunch of it down and move it over. While that was done, but before I powered the whole thing and hooked it up to the bus, we had a couple more attacks.  The new iron patch, in the north here, was 655k strong when I set it up. That's significant because it means I needed red belts to connect it to the smelting area. And by skippy, that's a lot of red belts. Also, the pollution is aggravating local clusters. I need to go clean them out. On the east end, we're getting expansion-party attacks too often for my liking as well. It's just time for a little more clearing-out with my good buddy the tank. That way I can stop getting interrupted -- at least for a while. I've strengthened to 2-3 laser turrets at their most common attack points, but they are still being more of a pain than I want to deal with. Best defense is a good offense, and all that crap. Out east, the clusters were bigger and closer together. This first part was simple and quick.  By the way, here's a shot of the centrifuges at night. They have an attractive -- and obviously, uh, unhealthy -- greenish glow. Turns out I've got the right amount here, as nine of them run non-stop, the 10th part-time. Ore never backs up. It's nice when things work out that way. ** Inserter Capacity Bonus 5(300 RGAP) -- Another +2 to stack inserters. One of the clusters out east was the biggest one I've taken out yet. It was interspersed with sections of trees which I banged the tank into repeately, and after using up 80 cannon shells and about 50 defenders(on that cluster only) it was only mostly gone. There was also a ridiculous part of it which was basically just a worm center. There's a reason I hadn't taken it out before. Still, it didn't take that long now that I have a better idea what I'm doing, and on the plus side I've mostly cleared the way to the next big group of oil fields, should they be required. On the way back in, I noticed we have a red circuits problem again ... because we have a plastic problem again ... because we have a petroleum gas problem ... because we have a refining capacity problem. I knew two wouldn't last forever.  Here's the worm cluster, after I finished them off. A number of big ones in there. Bastards. Anyway, it was worth getting more refineries going because I'm basically not going to get much of anything done until I do and it's a fairly quick setup. When I say I'm not getting much red circuit production, I mean one every 10-12 seconds is making it down to the research zone. So it's pretty close to zero happening at the moment.  Pretty much exactly as I hit the end of this update, I was comfortable with the new refinery situation, and got rid of three of the four storage tanks, since we aren't needing to save up much gas. It looked fairly balanced overall with four of these and a third chemical plant added for producing plastic. The gas was holding pretty steady. This means we're doubling the amount of crude we chew through also, so that'll bear watching.  Actually down slightly to 32.7 MW usage.  A rather humorous usage profile there for the copper cable(green). I think that's related to the petroleum gas/plastic issue and will go back up, but we'll see. Item Count: 44 Total Production: 535k(-1% from 538k) Pretty much stagnated here. Resources ** Iron: 1.33M(?, added more) primary, 354k(29k) steel. I'll need to re-evaluate this, and probably find an additional patch to wire into the steel side of things, once we get the second column up for a while. ** Copper: 114k(18k) old, 436k(33k) new. We can wait a little longer here -- but not much. ** Stone: 266(7k). Holding steady for now. ** Coal: 170k steam power(--), 192k(5k) factory, 1M train(negligible). ** Crude Oil: 174/sec(-6). ** Uranium: 308k(16k). Not sure why this has slowed down -- maybe my math was faulty, but more likely we've just used up a few mining locations.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 25, 2017 12:59
|
|
|
We've still got quite a few things hanging in the air here. ** Uranium is on the back-burner, largely because I'm not close to needing it yet. ** Connecting the battery production to the bus as the first step towards Hi-Tech research vials. ** Getting the second lane of iron smelting going. ** Upgrading assembling machines to the latest tier-3 where needed. ** Upgrading belts to the express speed where needed(iron and copper smelting only now, for the bus). ** Expanding copper mining. ** Continuing to throw Efficiency Modules 2 basically everywhere. And then there's getting some iron sent to the concrete area again, which has stalled. There's some small patches that would do well for that purpose. And throwing out more roboports finally, which I've procrastinated on. And getting a few things that would be useful, such as substations, set up for production. Plenty to do for sure. What to do first? I decided to go grab some more iron ore to feed into the concrete operation. The fact that I'll need it for nuclear reactors was good enough reason for me. One of our current patches has 20k left. That'll work fine for a while. Then I slapped down a bunch of the new assemblers, and hooked the new iron line up to the bus. That was the easy part. Getting this to work all the way down the line is going to be fairly time-consuming.  Here I've got it down to between where I make iron gear wheels and green circuits. Each time a new product joins, I've got to move stuff over, re-lay new belts, etc. In this case the iron gear wheels have gotten pushed 'down' a spot, and the circuits are about to. Having twice the supply will mean a lot more than twice getting to the end, so it's well worth it -- but I'm essentially re-doing a significant part of the entire bus. And it's a pretty long bus at this point. It's also real easy to screw this up, and have, for example, circuits and gears get mixed up on the wrong exit ramp, creating a whole new problem. When the junctions get complicated, it's enough to make your brain hurt. This whole business is the main reason why you want to have a good swath of space on either side of the bus; as painful as it can be, it's a lot LESS painful than having to tear up and move all your production lines out of the way. Of course it'd be a lot better if you knew how many lanes of everything you need, and where, so you can make it that way from the beginning ... but I'm not that experienced with the game. ** Productivity Module 3(300 RGAP) -- I pretty much don't care. +10% productivity for 10% more pollution, 80% more energy consumption, and 15% less speed. Again, these are useless unless you absolutely need to maximize resources.  Every so often, after splitting off resources for one line or another, it's good to put one of these in. Why have a splitter when you aren't diverting anything? It keeps the load even. Any shortfall on either lane will be distributed evenly, so that we have an equal amount available for the next stop. This whole re-doing the main bus thing is a new Factorio issue for me; another case where the first time I went through the game, I simply put up with the slowness of one lane. It's better to know how big you want things to be at first, of course, but I had no idea about that. And since it, like everything else, depends on the flow of materials, research had ground to a halt. That's as good a reason as any to get this done. As I got further down the bus, things got more complicated with more and more stuff being added, and more lanes needing adjusting. I was interrupted some by biter attacks but not all that much. The whole process of adding the second iron belt took nearly two hours from start to finish. Thankfully, it will be much simpler and faster if I have to do this again; I don't need to put any more early on, so I should be able to just route additional lanes to join much closer to the research area. Also, I can upgrade from here with the express(blue) to increase the throughput quite a bit. Afterwards, research wasn't doing anything even so. Soon I discovered why. I had inadvertently, while 'fixing' the circuit network, attached a wire to an inserter at a pipe assembler. So it wasn't operating ... which meant no pipe went out, no engine units got made, no electric engine units got made, etc. etc. etc.  Once that was fixed, the next step was to Go Blue. So far what's been done here is to replace the output lines for the plates in the smelting arrays with blue express belts, and fill in the every-third-furnace gap. There's not enough ore supply coming through yet: I'll have to upgrade at least some of those to red belts in order for that to keep pace, but first things first. Replacing three lanes(two iron, one copper) with express belts for the full length of the bus will take a bit of time. There's a lot of backup now from the previous long-winded bus maintenance, so I don't need this right away; but there's no good reason not to get it in place. Research has noticeably resumed, and this gives me something to do while I wait for other issues to make their presence felt. It soon became clear we could do this a lot faster with more engine units. Doubling that, to start, was fairly simple. ** Braking Force 4(350 RGAP) -- Another 15% improvement. A fresh supply of the newest assemblers was soon available, and as soon as they were put down in some more key areas including the red-circuit production line, progress accelerated quickly. ** Inserter capacity bonus 6(400 RGAP) -- +2 more for the stack inserters, which can carry a ton now. Then a new problem: running low on lubricant. I don't use it for many things, but those things are important: express belts and electric engine units for the research. To solve this, I first stopped cracking heavy oil into light. Only a minor effect. I switched one refinery to standard oil processing(less gas, more heavy oil). Still just enough to run one Lubricant plant, which is at best only half of what I need. More drastic steps were required. I added two new refineries, both running Basic Processing; this makes three on each process, six refineries total. ** Braking Force 5(450 RGAP) -- Continuing to unnecessarily improve train performance. With the new refineries in place, and a second lubricant plant(I added a third as well, but so far it's completely redundant and not getting used), it looked like there was enough to keep everything running. I also added a third plant for cracking light oil to petroleum gas, since we'll have more of that now. It looks like we have a light oil and gas surplus now -- which means the supply of heavy oil/lubricant might well slow down once we get 'full' on those.  Too far up to really see much, but this is the 'oil processing' area now. Six refineries along the left, lubricant plants in the upper-right, light oil cracking in the middle, sulfur and plastic operations on the lower right. We're definitely expanding here, and the pressure on the crude supply is definitely going to increase -- I still expect us to be well below what our current production maximum is though. ** Character logistics slots 5(500 RGAP) -- Another welcomed addition of six more spots. Up to 30 now, and I've been gradually expanding what I'm asking for. I notice two things at this point. One, we're up to 12-14 labs active nonstop, which is better. Not good yet, but better. I want to let things run a bit and see how that shakes out. Also, it's time to start building logistics bots again. I've got a bunch of construction ones in storage. I started 'blueing' up the bus lines a little further, and I also realized it was past time to spread the roboports out further. Really no reason not to at this stage. ** Lab Research Speed 5(500 RGAP) -- Another 50% increase. Missed a screenshot here, but basically it showed the bus -- and that our supply of steel and gear wheels is quite lacking right now. It seemed useful to take a break from upgrading this, that, and everything in between to increase our production of those. That's really the best way to describe what's going on now. Not many tasks left to research before we make the final jump to Hi-Tech. Some of this I've already stated, but in the meantime, I'm ** Upgrading iron/copper bus lanes to blue as those components become available. ** Upgrading to tier-3 'yellow' assembling machines(almost done) ** Extending roboport network and building logistics bots; I'm putting four storage chests at each roboport, just because. This is a 'self-replicating' thing; as more logistics bots are added I get refilled faster; as more roboports are added I get refilled more frequently; therefore I have less to concern myself with going to get, esp. now that I've got logistics slots enough for most things I need. ** Slapping down more concrete from time to time. ** Checking on logistics issues such as the just-mentioned bus shortages. And so on. I'm basically doing a lot of maintenance/upgrade stuff to improve the overall smooth-running of the factory. Steel was simple to increase production 50%; eight more furnaces of each. To do more would be somewhat problematic now, but it'll be a lot easier once we get more room -- that means using up the older of our two copper patches, which won't take long. So that's in the 'coming, just not yet' category. Gear wheels need more iron, which is an issue because ore is starting to become an issue. And that one is a real red-flag concern. Very quickly, it has become enough of an issue that we have one operation research lab. ONE LAB. So, pun intended, we're basically spinning our wheels at the moment. After doing a tour of all our major sources, I came up with three conclusions: ** A handful of drills are done, and eliminated. This is no surprise, but shouldn't have caused such a dropoff. ** I did something stupid. With any major Factorio issue, that's really the usual cause. One of our more productive patches was directed towards the concrete assembler, when it was supposed to be one of the dying ones. I fixed that with a quick and simple redirect, but that's really just putting my fingers in the dam. ** It's time for a big mining expansion. As in, NOW. After looking at where that's going to come from, I added in one more: ** It's time for the the big train station I've been threatening to do.  Spread out north-to-south on the east end of our territory are several iron patches. I estimate the combined yield to be 3.5 million. To put that in perspective, we've used 2.7 million total iron from the start of the game to now. So this is kind of a big deal. Not only are they spread out north-to-south though, but they are about three times as far away from the smelting array as our current train line for the crude oil runs. So basically, it's just time: time for a more involved train system. This is another one of those 'I've never done this before' moments. After thinking about it for a while, a few things became obvious: ** I'm going to need multiple trains on the same network, so train signals are going to need to become a thing. And I've got to figure out how to use them(checks the tutorial laid out in the LP thread). ** I want to refuel the locomotives at the main drop-off station. Solid fuel definitely here; I don't need it for the crude oil line, but performance is really going to matter on this one. ** Extending the logistics(roboport) network out to where I'm going to build the Grand Ore Processing Station needs to happen yesterday. The solid fuel is the simplest and easiest issue to deal with. I think the one plant I have set up for it can build them faster than they'll get used, and if not it wouldn't be difficult to expand production further. Adding the Roboports is easy also. This was interrupted by a base too close to our east end that had gotten large enough to be a problem even to multiple turrets -- so I went and quickly 'sanitized' the area.  This update lasted four hours instead of two, because I was working on the bus stuff and there would have been almost nothing to report. For those scoring at home, we're at 42 hours and approaching the endgame. The average usage is now up to 41.7 MW, a significant increase. There was one overnight period when a very small amount of steam power(less than a half-megawatt) was used. That's not nearly enough to prompt me to go nuclear, but it's definitely an increase from the low 30s. I'm at 140 U-235, more than enough to start that up whenever I need to. Also, not all of the furnaces shown here have efficiency modules yet, though a lot of them do. I'm steadily throwing those out, but as of late I've been building stuff faster.  Iron's up some, although not that much; you can see though that the last 10 minutes, after I made the ore-supply band-aid change, we boosted back upwards. Item Count: 49(new high again!) Total Production: 640k(+20% from 535k) Record production by over 100k, and that's with an iron-shortage problem. We'll be pushing toward a million once I get the ore problem sorted. I've reached a point where I want to overproduce the crap out of the raw material to make sure we don't have any more shortfalls. If I'm going to do this, might as well do it right. Resources ** Iron: 1.07M primary, 248k steel. I need to make sure I include an ore supply for steel in this new project. It's not going to last long. ** Copper: 59k old, 322k new. Still have more copper options within convenient belting range. I want to make sure the train infrastructure can handle copper, but for now I just want to mine and hook up some of the nearer patches. ** Stone: 230k. Plowing through it a bit faster now, but still fine. ** Coal: 169k steam power, 161k factory, 1M train. I added some more drills on the main factory field, and it won't be long before I hook up the one that used to feed steel to that process. Not yet though. ** Crude Oil: 155/sec(-19). Yeah we're definitely churning through the black gold now. ** Uranium: 229k. About 11 hours worth at the current rate, but we've got plenty processed; just continuing to build up the reserve at this point.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2017 23:21
|
|
|
Productivity gives you 'free' product. I.e., a mining productivity of 10% means every 10 units of ore you mine, you get an 11th one free.ousire posted:you probably want to eventually upgrade your trains to solid fuel so ratios are more important. You still need a buttload of petro though so I usually do a mix between regular and advanced cracking. Maybe half and half, or two regular to one advanced, depending on my oil needs. Another far-seeing statement; this will come up soon. EpononymousMrYar posted:Mostly because I didn't have enough space at my original petro-focused plant and the only space I had that was convenient for a lubricant line to go was on the opposite side of my factory Quite easy to do. I started out with what I thought was a ton of extra space, and I'm glad I have a decent-length crude oil pipeline down to the train station at this point because I may need to extend refineries down that way and do some piping gymnastics. The oil production chain really does take up a LOT of room. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Dec 29, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2017 04:45
|
|
|
Didn't take long to get the line set up for solid fuel. I also added track to the current group of logistics requests. Another thing that hasn't been made for hours, but I'll sure be needing a crapton of it now: I also added concrete shortly after this, a long-overdue step. The # of things that just don't occur to you because you've got a dozen other priorities is rather mindboggling. In my next run, I need to do what I've done in other complicated games in the past: obsessively make lists. Not long aftewards, the basic form of the station was up.  I call it 'Central Ore'. Solid fuel to fill the locomotive on the left, stack-filter inserters to unload as fast as possible, with a second row of chests for buffer. Eventually I'll have express belts taking these west and a bit south to the smelting array. Probably at least twice as much but this is set up for a pair of cargo wagons as a starting point. Here, I redid the next part multiple times after some thinking. Using a single track with loops isn't going to work; at most I could get two trains running(one at a station, one waiting for it to leave). The structure needs to be more complex, accomodating trains headed in both directions, etc. Made regular use of the tutorial(near the top of page 4) by EponymousMrYar(thanks again for that!). ** Mining Productivity 8(800 RGAP) -- The start of another series of four of these, with gradually escalatings costs. One can always use getting more from less. While that was finishing up, I found myself overwhelmed for a while with all the stuff the logistic bots were bringing me. Soon all the yellow assembling machines I needed were in place, and almost all of the efficiency modules. That was all well and good, but I wanted to be busy with fixing my stupid roundabout blueprint that I'm not getting quite straight so I could get this railway going. That doesn't make for the most compelling LP reading, but it was necessary. Anyway, I screwed things up good and proper multiple times. The amount of chopping down trees to place track, only to discover that I didn't really want the blasted track in quite that location to begin with, lather-rinse-repeat ... this happened a LOT. I think my personal favorite is the brilliant way in which I put all the train signals on the wrong freaking side of the roundabouts at first -- so that the trains would be going the opposite way on them that they need to go in order to use the Central Ore unloading station. And then continued to put them on the wrong side afterwards, after partially fixing it. When it comes to wrong-side rail signals, I must be the world champion of Factorio. But eventually, after a sufficient amount of repetitive failcannon extraordinaire, I got a starting setup done. I REALLY HATE TRYING TO GET RAIL SECTIONS TO FREAKING MERGE. Often I can get it to go every freaking which way, except the way I want it to, and I could never get the stupid roundabouts to be even/symmetrical which meant fiddling with every single stinking one after they were built. Factorio makes a lot of things really easy. I'm here to say this still isn't one of them, at least for me. Abcdef. I'd like to say that I slaved over it and, in the interests of an informative LP, came up with a multi-step process that is easy to use and make it work. Uh-uh. Actually, after the 'slaving over it' part, I often found myself ragequitting Factorio to go do something else before mud-wrestling with the track-laying interface. I feel that's a sufficient amount of rant on that. Or at least close. ** Mining Productivity 9(900 RGAP) -- *Yawn* After spending almost the whole blasted session on this project, I had nine minutes left and was finally ready for a test drive. I'll not spoil it with screenshots; here's a video of the first shot at the new ore-supply line. Warning: this is not for the faint of heart(or the faint of butt, or other body parts, for that matter). Viewer discretion is highly encouraged; those with OCD like myself will be annoyed at some aspects of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcEi0qyNgHg No path. No path? What the heck do you mean, no path??(yes, I know it means the train can't find a path to the next station, but there is clearly one in this case. I've walked it multiple times). Sigh. I could have driven manually to see what the problem was, but we've already seen me drive trains manually. I'm not a sadist. So I went and took a look. What I found was shocking. Absolutely shocking.  What's that? A train signal on the wrong freaking side, leading to a red light preventing me from leaving the station. You don't say. After replacing every.single.signal in the entire roundabout that is just to the east here, I discovered that I couldn't even put the signal here on the correct side ... because it's curved too much. Sweet! Let's just rip up more track and re-merge! I love re-merging rail tracks. Wait. Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you. While I'm at it, a further demonstration of why it's so awesome.  Two rail tracks, pointed almost directly at each other. Note that I can easily lay more track alongside(the green part). So just angle it a little more to the north, right? That results in this:  Which doesn't work. It's simply crossing tracks, they don't link up. Can't move it just that slight bit I need to. The manipulations I go through to get it the way it needs to be(deleting more track and doing the merge on a straighter, not-angled section usually) are just stupid. Anyway. I go back to the locomotive, and guess what it says? That's right, 'No path'. It can take it's 'no path' and shove it. I check the track and I can't figure out why it won't work. Screw it, manual driving to test it out. And, despite the blue section indicated it would work, I have a bad merge and the train just stops instead of following the track around a turn. ARGEBARGLEZORZ!!!!  It won't move forward. It hates me. After removing one miniscule, barely-detectable-to-the-human-eye segment, that had the locomotive thinking it was supposed to keep going straight, I try again. Similar problem at one of the roundabouts; a tiny section is missing this time. Fix that, one other issue I spot. Attempt number umpteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kW1OYl6TOA It's working! It's working!! Uh, sort of. It like, goes around the circuit I intended it to. I need stack inserters to load the ore, the fast ones are just way too slow. And of course, I rather humorously forgot to put any at the Central Ore station to unload the chests onto the belts, which is to say nothing of the fact that I haven't completed sending them to the west to where the smelters are. But this will work. Eventually. And who knows, I may even get vaguely competent at setting up the rails, though perhaps that's expecting too much. The patch I had set up there in the east to produce the ore is, for this point, in the game, a mid-sized one; a little over a half-million. Maybe a dozen miners; it's dense but not particularly big. I'll need to rework the instructions at each stop; this one just said wait here for a minute. Once I get the train line extended to several more patches, some of them bigger, get another couple trains put on the network, I'll get more regular deliveries and then I'll have a sense of what further adjustments need to be made. But I will succeed. I will not be defeated by stupid track-laying and pathing mechanics, or my own ineptitude at properly using them. Both are conspiring against me, but I will endeavor to persevere. Or something.  Haven't looked at it yet, but I suspect the iron ore flow is diminishing again. I also have almost all the modules I want out, so that's helped with the savings. 37.8 MW is the load for the last hour.  Hrm. Looks like ore supply is holding just fine for the moment. Item Count: an even 50 Total Production: 689k(+8% from 640k) We're still far from being fully-supplied, even though things are going much better than expected for how long I've been out dealing with the train setup. I still want to get ridiculously oversupplied on ore and at least max out our current smelters with blue lines all the way down the bus(only partway done still on that) -- then I can see what other issues have come up. Resources ** Iron: 898k primary, 152k steel. Definitely churning through it, esp. when it comes to the steel. I need to send a belt down that way from Central Ore as soon as the network is up and running properly. The new patch is not included here, since I haven't got it hooked up yet to the smelters. ** Copper: 36k old, 241k new. At 60k an hour, this is getting really low also. Going to see a lot of things grind to a halt soon. ** Stone: 204k. Really starting to cut through this more now, at about 13k per hour. ** Coal: 169k steam power, 147k factory, 1M train. About 7k an hour, still manageable for now. ** Crude Oil: 143/sec(-12). Still a lot of waiting around for the liquid wagon to be drained. ** Uranium: 193k. A couple of drills have gone quiet, and more will join them soon.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2017 01:51
|
|
|
I'll have to see how that whole situation goes, but for this run I don't think I'll reach a point where I get all that many problems with traffic jams.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2017 18:56
|
|
|
After getting inserters properly set up both at Central Ore and the new iron patch, I did some mining maintenance, clearing out some used-up drills, and then hooked up our new-found ore supply to the smelting columns. It's a spaghettified, quick-n-dirty for-now solution.  Also corrected a problem; I was using a yellow instead of red splitter in one spot, artifically limiting the flow. This will get much cleaner once our older patches are used up and all I have to do is divide up the incoming from Central Ore, instead of merging it with the existing supply. Good enough for now though; the buffer is already starting to back up at Central Ore, and I'm going to make sure it does even more by laying more track. The next patch on the route is 1M strong. That ought to do for a while. After getting the two dozen or so mines that field required set up, it was necessary to do some biter-clearing in the tank to keep the pollution from bringing too many of them on raids. With iron ok for the time being, I moved on to copper. Within our borders to the west, there are four patches of varying size, none much bigger than 400k but a pretty good supply combined.  A couple patches in the east are also worth snagging up. Combine all of them together, and six fields that probably don't exceed 1M. It'll clean up the surrounding area quite a bit though, and after that we've got some much bigger ones to hook up the train to. ** Mining Productivity 10(RGAP) -- Now up to a full 20% extra. There were some interruptions, and not a whole lot worth reporting here; a few attacks in unexpected numbers or unexpected locations, and also an oil supply issue. I haven't found the sweet spot yet; I had too much heavy oil and that was causing a backlog, slowing down plastic to a crawl. I really need to get a 'smart switch' going if I can rig something up using the circuit network, so that it will react to changes in the needs of the different products over there. I need to ponder that, which will help keep things running smoothly. Anyway, I haven't gotten the copper quite connected yet:  A couple of overview shots to finish things off and at least add something useful to this update. This is the current train network. Andrew Hobbs station there is the 1M patch. I've got the train set to remain at each one for a full minute, which seems to be a reasonable amount(I would later drop it to 30 seconds, and I may optimize that more, but that is at least sufficient). Right now I still have the one train cycling between the two. Andrew Hobbs is set up to load a third cargo wagon, but I don't have that attached, and I also don't have the unloading set up. I really should do that as soon as copper is finished, and send that third line south to the steel-smelting area. Got a feeling the resource numbers there are probably pretty ugly by now. This also shows the roundabout situation a little better. When a train reaches the northern one, it can go west to Central Ore, east to the French-sounding station, or south to Andrew Hobbs, as needed.  Here's how the copper situation stands. I've just completed getting drills set up on the biggest patch here, which was another one in the middle of a forest so that had to be dealt with. Soon I'll at least have this western group connected up to the smelting.  Another dip to less than 37 MW used, probably due to the petrol-related slowdown.  The difference between iron ore and iron plate production here is mostly due to the buffering in chests; there's some unevenness in getting everything where I want to go in a smooth and balanced fashion. I also had the ore train stuck for a while due to bad instructions(stay until empty, while one of the lines was backed up so it just never unloaded and sat there). There'll be a fair amount of this for a while as I work out the kinks and try to improve the system; only so many problems that can be fixed at once. Item Count: 47 Total Production: 571k(-17% from 689k) Yep, definitely need to get logistics running smoother than they are. Eventually. Resources ** Iron: 769k(65k) primary, 104k(24k) steel, 1.54M Central(about 30k). Surprised the steel fields still have that much, to be honest. Probably lost some drills making it slow down. Central here is simply the amount in the patches connected by train to Central Ore. Eventually we'll just have one number. ** Copper: 21k(8k) old, 177k(32k) new. Saw a slowdown here, though I don't know if it's because of something else. Either way, it's just a few hours worth and falling fast. ** Stone: 183k(10k). Eventually I'll set up drills on the other large nearby field, just north of the current one. A very minimally-painful transition for that. ** Coal: 169k steam power, 138k(4.5k) factory, 1M train. ** Crude Oil: 134/sec(-9). Not as much of a drop, due to the heavy oil backlog. ** Uranium: 159k(17k). The nearby one-drill field is gone, and nearly half the original drills are now off-line. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Dec 31, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2017 19:00
|
|
|
ousire posted:Oh my god, the belt spaghetti. It's glorious. What I like best about that nonsense is that it's using all three speeds, all for specific purposes. That were clear in my mind at one point. And no longer are. EponymousMrYar posted:It's more efficient to set up your train schedules depending on their cargo rather than trying to guess time. I'm gradually learning to do the orders better, and I mostly agree with this. You'll be seeing things slowly, forcibly drag themselves into a more reasonable arrangement in the future here. Veloxyll posted:Those mixed outputs though *twitch* One cargo per train car only please good sir! Like the order set with the max time for waiting. I think I'll eventually adopt that. As far as this goes ... I realized eventually that it wasn't the best. And didn't do anything about it, because I think it's sufficient for the purposes of this game. The idea was to be flexible -- but that's not the spot to be flexible. Adjusting train orders and destinations for flexibility would have been better. So, something to remember for next time. Veloxyll posted:I quite like the track laying mode, besides not slapping down signals. Drives me up the wall and down the other side. Veloxyll posted:if you're doing it in blueprint mode, you can shift click to lay track right over trees etc. And your robopals will clear and build the line. I mean, eventually you run out of stored power because that's how personal roboports go pre-high tech. But still. I knew there was a way to do this, but didn't remember how. I don't use blueprints a 50th as much as I should probably.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2018 03:41
|
|
|
A couple screenshots are missing from this: apparently my brain was on vacation even more than it usually is. My apologies. Anyway ... Finishing the western copper setup was pretty quick from this point, and I moved on to the two small eastern patches, just for redundancy's sake. ** Mining Productivity 11(1100 RGAP) -- 22% now, and that's where we'll stay for a while. Further progress required Hi-Tech research. But there is yet one further task to be done before making that move. After finishing with the copper, I got the third wagon on the train and hooked up a line down to the steel.  How's this for spaghetti belting? It's a mess if you don't know what you're doing(or even if you do). As a general outline for this latest one, the new ore supply line to steel runs south from Central Ore, zig-zagging around the left of that copper field right in the middle here, and joining the existing steel-supply belt at the bottom, where the white asterisk is. This also shows the spread of concrete to date. On the left side there's quite a bit of empty space where the start of the factory was at the beginning. At this point I was momentarily satisfied with ore supply. Manually switching things up in the oil area is working for now(though I need a better solution there eventually). Next on the agenda was getting Hi-Tech research vials rolling. You may remember that, probably close to 10 hours back now, I had starting running a line of batteries over that way but stopped in the middle of that first step. Time to get back on it. Getting the batteries over there was pretty quick. Now we've got two of the four needed Hi-Tech ingredients bussed, and the components for the other two, to be assembled on site, also available. That should be sufficient. I had most of it up when the last 'pre-Hi Tech' project finished. ** Nuclear fuel reprocessing(1500 RGAP) -- The most expensive project so far by a good margin. This allows us to 'recycle' used uranium fuel cells, getting some U-238(the 'bad' isotope) back. Research Progress And now we have officially arrived completely at the final tier. Projects Completed: 76 Available: 30 Locked: 6 Costs range from 75 to 1500 vials of each type per project, though there's one not-yet-unlocked which is substantially more.  Here's the Black vial-assembly area to demonstrate an issue I need to resolve. The general pattern I've followed is to produce the ingredients for a vial, then for the vial assembly itself send those down the middle, with two columns outputting the vials to either side, and from there they are taken to the labs. This isn't going to work for the Hi-Tech vials though. Three of the ingredients(Speed Modules, Processing Units, and Batteries) will do just fine with that. The fourth(30 Copper Cable each pair) will not. Even the one lane I could give it on an express belt would only be able to handle enough to support a few assemblers if filled. The copper cable needs to be produced 'on-site', which won't leave room for the same kind of setup.  Once again I'm interrupted by another achievement(10k red circuits per hour isn't bad though).  Here's the initial setup I'm going with. Convoluted, but it works. Each pair of vial assembling machines on each side has a belt taking the completed vials to the outside of the copper that comes in to feed the cable assemblers. The cable machines themselves produce more than we'll need; each can supply almost, but not quite, twice as much as is needed. I don't mind a little redundancy in that fashion. I shudder at the amount of copper this is going to burn through, but that is a problem for another time. Once I get everything connected, I have an initial setup to fund our final tier of research. There is nothing in the current research list that I can't eventually discover with this. Finally I am nearing the end. While we go through the faster items, I'll be spending my time mostly checking up on various production issues and ensuring everything is running reasonably smoothly, fixing problems where they crop up. ** Effect Transmission(75 RGAY) -- Unlocks the beacon, which 'transmits the effects of upgrade modules to friendly entities'. In other words, instead of throwing efficiency modules in every mining drill, I can use the beacon to spread those instructions over an area of coverage, with all machines in it gaining the benefit. Very nice. Note: I would then proceed to ignore the entire idea for far too long. Because that's what I do. Ignore helpful things, to pursue whatever my brain is locked on. ** Military 4(150 RGABY) -- Unlocks Piercing Shotgun Shells, improved versions of our standard shotgun shells -- which I'm not using. Rather unimpressive advance. ** Logistic System(150 RGAPY) -- The other two types of logistics chests, Active Provider and Requester, are now available. Once research slows down I'll get into a bit of how to use them, but suffice to say this is the point at which you only have to use belts as much as you want to. Everything is in place now to have robots do the transportation work, if desired. ** Cluster Grenade(200 RGABY) -- A grenade upgrade that pretty much does what it's name says, but I'm still not planning on using them. A couple of laser turret upgrades followed, as a copper shortage directed my attention back to upgrading the bus lines to express belts. More progress on that helped some, but the appetite of the green circuits is sucking up over half of a saturated line right now, to say nothing about what happens further down. The red circuit line convinced me of the need to make the next major change. I've already done some small upgrades here: faster inserters for the copper cable and a couple more assemblers there, fast/red belts to supply all of the products(cable/green circuits/plastic), etc. Even so, the green circuits can't keep up, and it's a fully saturated standard/yellow belt on the bus up to this point. We're going to have to upgrade to a fast/red one, doubling production of those -- and the current amount is sucking down over half of the current copper supply. Going back to the source then, it's time for a second copper smelting column, and a second copper line on the ever-growing bus. It can join pretty much anywhere before this, which is about halfway through the bus, to minimize the required reworking and logistics. Even so, the demands of the ravenous beast that the factory is becoming continue to grow. It's not all bad news. The iron ore imports are going well despite some kinks in the system still to be worked out. The steel line is operating at full capacity until I get to expanding that, and is producing enough -- barely -- to keep up. Research has nearly stalled though, and the problem is on the Hi-Tech end. Not enough Processing Units, because of the green circuit issue; only half a belt left when it gets there, which becomes a quarter-belt after the splitting. That's enough for only a very slow trickle. So there's just really no option now except going insane on the copper supply. There is some good news; our borders have been mostly silent, and the turrets have taken care of any attacks recently without issue. Of course, that's partly because there is less pressure on the iron mining and research area with the copper shortage slowing things down. The new column is mostly finished at this point.  42.2 MW now, which is a new high. A hair of steam usage again, which I think happens mostly when a lot of turrets have to fire during the overnight period. Less than 600 KW though, nothing to be concerned with. Not quite time to get the nuclear operation going yet.  Copper cable speaks for itself. That's ... a lot. And yet, not enough. 46k green circuits, 10k red, 600+ blue. Item Count: 44 Total Production: 900k(+58% from 571k) We'd never hit 700k before so we basically smashed the previous high. Not a huge surprise that the copper couldn't keep up given the circumstances. Resources ** Iron: 649k(55k) primary, 36k(34k) steel, 1.49M Central(about 30k). Lots of patches drying up -- we'll continue to rely on the imports more and more. ** Copper: 1.11M. Most of this is new. Still, it's only a stopgap at about 10 hours worth of supply. Once the new smelting is up and running, we're definitely going to need to add more. ** Stone: 164k(9.5k). ** Coal: 168k(less than 1k steam power, 121k(8.5k) factory, 1M train. ** Crude Oil: 119/sec(-15). Down to just over half of what it was at peak. Which is still enough, but I'm not certain how long that will remain the case. ** Uranium: 130k(14k). Continuing to gradually slow down. Total U-235 supply is now at 226, enough to last quite a while. At the moment, I don't think we'll need to seek out any new sources.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2018 03:51
|
|
|
EponymousMrYar posted:Most of the annoyances I've had with it are actually because of how the game handles train tracks themselves (with the sprite layers making it seem like things are connected when they're actually not or with how the game allows tracks to merge vs. them crossing etc.) The actual general laying of track doesn't bother me. This is what annoys me, but I am getting better at it. Not good, but better. Like anything, experience with it, learning the tricks, getting better at eyeballing stuff, etc helps. PsychoticWeasel posted:s for spaghetti, my factories are such a disorganized mess I spend as much time figuring out how to hook a new resource in as I do building the necessary infrastructure: I think that looks highly organized by comparison. PsychoticWeasel posted:Does anyone really stick to a plan when they start playing this game? You have to be really disciplined in order to do it, for sure. I'm going to have to for the second game(I've started planning that recently), but Factorio definitely lends itself easily to the sort of 'oh, what was I doing again?' moments.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2018 23:14
|
|
|
Note: I may end up accelerating the pace of updates here; I binged Factorio over the weekend and have a lot more in the hopper(at the expense of getting behind on everything else I'm supposed to be doing, pretty-much, including sleep) and for some of them there just isn't a whole lot there. ** Portable Fusion Reactor(200 RGABY) -- This comes in while finishing up the second copper column. And it's kind of a big deal. Takes up 4x4 space in the armor, producing 750kw. 16 portable solar panels, occupying the same space, will produce 160kw. That makes the fusion reactor a 368% improvement. Price is 250 blue circuits, or about 20 minutes worth at the moment. Still, I need this thing to fully power my suit. I stop the flow of blue circuits to the research area for a while, so that I can gather enough to build one. The bi-hourly tour of our mining facilities is taking longer and longer each time; this one took almost half an hour, but most of that was spent ripping up a sizable section of transport belt from the west that is no longer needed as all the iron mines are exhausted there. It has it's benefits as well; the re-use of the materials involved, clearing out areas of belt spaghetti, removing several underground belt passages that are no longer needed, etc. I took part of the journeying by train, and eventually I'll be able to do almost if not all of that way to speed things up. It's also beneficial for catching and correcting things I forgot to do, in this case adding modules to about a dozen mining drills. For the next bus adjustment, the 'center highway' of the bus will consist of two iron and two copper belts, all of the high-speed blue/express variety. Gear wheels will slide up to the top 'highway. This will not be nearly as involved of a project as when we added the second belt of iron, but it will still take a while.  This did however afford me an opportunity to use the logistic bots to do some more busy work for me, and demonstrate one of the new chests. This is the requester chest, whose purpose essentially is to feed assembling machines with the products they need. That is, instead of pulling items off a belt, bots can fill this chest with whatever you ask for, and the assembler can grab from there. In this case, I'm taking down a bunch of belt that has stone bricks in them. I need somewhere convenient to put it. Here at the concrete assembler is a good spot. On the left, 'Logistic Request' allows me to specify what to bring there. Since I've just set it up there's nothing in it. But now when I set my personal logistics up to auto-trash almost all of the stone bricks I acquire, the logistics bots will take them here, where they can actually be used for something.  A million green circuits. And how many more to come? ** Personal Roboport 2(250 RGAY) -- Still working on the bus, but I'm approaching the research area so we've got enough done to resume some level of operations there. Also had one expansion party break through in the southeast to deal with, first one of those in hours. Anyway, an improved roboport for my armor will be worth getting eventually.  Skipped the power readout this time because, just like this one, it dropped while I was working on the bus. I'm now a full 50 hours in -- longer than it took to finish 0.14. I figured I'd be done by now, but Factorio had it's own opinion about that. Item Count: 44 Total Production: 515k(-43% from 900k) Seemed a good time to take a look at some history-of-the-factory numbers: ** 4M iron ore, and almost as many plates ** 3M copper cable ** 1.7M copper ** 800k green circuits(the achievement disagrees, not sure why) ** 453k coal ** 308k stone, about the same uranium ** 142k red circuits ** 8.4k blue circuits ** 18M Steam ** 26M water ** 5.4M crude oil ** 19k net sections of transport belt(32k built, 13k deconstructed) ** 4800 trees cut down ** 2.4k net fast belt sections ** 4.8k net express belt sections That's a fair amount of crap. Resources ** Iron: 541k(54k) primary, 37k(--) steel, 1.39M Central(about 50k). ** Copper: 988k(65k). I think everything is still safe here until the bus is fully functional again; then we'll see how crazy things get. ** Stone: 151k(6.5k). ** Coal: 168k(--), 111k(5k) factory, 1M train(--) ** Crude Oil: 111/sec(-8). ** Uranium: 102k(14k). Another 15 U-235, now at 241.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2018 23:20
|
|
|
EponymousMrYar posted:en with minimal biter presence and using RSO so my resource patches last really long I still started going 'I need more iron plates, ok I fixed that now I need more green circuits, ok that's that wait why's my copper so low DANGIT ok, there's that AUGH WHY ARE RED CIRCUITS SO SLOOOOOOW' Yeah I agree -- I marvel at some of the YouTube creations where most of the factory isn't even on most of the time and all production is balanced, but mostly that's achieved by absurdly overproducing and then just turning stuff of when it isn't needed via the circuit network. Either way, that's a state I imagine -- not one I expect to achieve.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2018 00:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 12:12 |
|
|
 I do believe this is the first time we've been recognized for blue circuits. 18 Achievements completed, 7 can no longer be accomplished, 13 still possible. ** Speed Module 3(300 RGAY) -- 50% speed gain for 70% extra energy. The ratios get better at the top tier, but still generally not worth it. ** Efficiency Module 3(300 RGAY) -- 50% reduction in energy use. However, we can get nothing from this, unless there's something out there that takes only one module slot, that we can't get from the second-tier module ... which is cheaper. At this point it's time for another whole mess of military upgrades. After finishing up the bus, including double express/blue lines of both iron and copper now in it's centre, I was confident throughput would be less of an issue. Still an issue, but less of one. I'll still need to add another green circuit production area to boost up to a red line of those, but I want to make sure ore is oversupplied. That means getting copper going to Central Ore now. Garr! Missing screenshot here. What it was supposed to show is the largest ore patch yet of either kind, 1.3 million, a short distance east of Central Ore. Unfortunately, it's literally right in the middle of the main train highway(I bent one lane north around it and the other south, not bothering to consider the consequences of this decision -- you can see that in the train vid I made a while back). So the question was, to belt or to make a train stop here? Clogging up the railway didn't seem worth it, esp. given that I'd only be transporting it a short distance. So for now, I'll just get some high-speed belts going. Once that was hooked up, the copper smelting was even more secure, and iron ore was backed up at the station as well. Now for more green circuits:  Like the original one, only more efficient. At the bottom of the screen, the green circuit belt disengages from the bus completely, comes in from the west, merges with the output here on a fast/red belt, then heads back to rejoin the bus.  That bus now has 13 belts on it, 11 products, four express belts, one fast, eight standard. And, roboports straddle it all the way down for making quick changes. A good amount of upgrades in the last couple hours or so. Now what? Well, it's pretty obvious where the problem is, and also pretty predictable. The blue circuits are now the shortage. Only enough to make enough Hi-Tech vials to keep a few labs running.  Most of the assemblers there are running though -- I just need more of them. Nearly doubling it and upgrading to fast inserters helped a bit ... but not enough, as the supply of green circuits couldn't keep up. If a fast belt of them isn't enough, I guess I'll have to go blue. However, this is major progress nonetheless; 16 labs are running now, and still increasing. That's not bad by any stretch -- I may have to put more down soon.  Despite expanding numbers of roboports, furnaces, assemblers, etc. we are not yet up to peak power usage. The latest average is 39.7 MW, about 3 MW below that peak. That's a scary amount of copper cable, leaving everything in the dust. And I'm going higher. The only reason iron isn't more than it is, is that we don't actually need more than this right now. Definitely the biggest numbers I've seen for the circuits(58k green, 8.5k red, 1.7k blue). Item Count: 43 Total Production: 812k(+58% from 515k) Not quite to the record so for of 900k, but a nice rebound nonetheless. Resources ** Iron: 446k(47.5k) primary, 33k(2k) steel, 1.31M Central(about 40k). At least for now, we are really oversupplied on steel. Which is just fine. ** Copper: 2.07M. Over half is the new field. ** Stone: 146k(2.5k). ** Coal: 167k(less than 1k) steam power, 99k(6k) factory, 1M train(--) ** Crude Oil: 101/sec(-10). ** Uranium: 81k(10.5k). We seem to have 'enough for now' again.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2018 00:42
|
|