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Ratzap
Jun 9, 2012

Let no pie go wasted
Soiled Meat
Bob's does modules differently (of course) by having module labs which you feed module parts (boards, cases etc) and it's selected from the research window. I hadn't touched modules in my game yet and the thought of trying to squeeze them into my central area somehow wasn't pleasant. So I hopped in a tank and drove round till I found an area with all the ores it needs nearby plus some oil. Then I set up a completely independent module research area - I just have to go back (I ran a train line out there) to move mining gear around.



Actually building some useful modules is a completely different kettle of fish. They have up to 12 ingredients making me think they're designed to be hand crafted, otherwise just getting the bits into an assembler will be pretty challenging.

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Captain_duck
Dec 3, 2005

I swear nice bushes!
Started a new game today because i couldnt help myself. This is what i have so far

Jabor
Jul 16, 2010

#1 Loser at SpaceChem

Ratzap posted:

Actually building some useful modules is a completely different kettle of fish. They have up to 12 ingredients making me think they're designed to be hand crafted, otherwise just getting the bits into an assembler will be pretty challenging.

I'm going to spoil the real solution a little bit - they're mostly designed so you stick a requester chest next to the assembler and have bots haul everything over for you. I'm not a big fan of this part of Bob's mods.

GotLag
Jul 17, 2005

食べちゃダメだよ
I haven't played Bob's Mods, because to me it looks like the Factorio equivalent of Gregtech.

Fart Cannon
Oct 12, 2008

College Slice

Jabor posted:

I'm going to spoil the real solution a little bit - they're mostly designed so you stick a requester chest next to the assembler and have bots haul everything over for you. I'm not a big fan of this part of Bob's mods.

This is the truth for pretty much all of bobs past the blue science pack stage anyways. Who wants to try to navigate all those intermediates on belts?

Dunno-Lars
Apr 7, 2011
:norway:

:iiam:



GotLag posted:

I haven't played Bob's Mods, because to me it looks like the Factorio equivalent of Gregtech.

Bob's modules is pretty fun. The tier 5 God modules gives you -150% energy consumption, +200% speed, +50% productivity and -100% pollution. And you can fit a few of them into something.

Add them in on every production step, and you get a lot more from what you put in. It's how I got over 110k logistic robots mk3 in my previous all-in game, and some 50k construction robot mk3.

Loren1350
Mar 30, 2007

Dunno-Lars posted:

Bob's modules is pretty fun. The tier 5 God modules gives you -150% energy consumption, +200% speed, +50% productivity and -100% pollution. And you can fit a few of them into something.

Add them in on every production step, and you get a lot more from what you put in. It's how I got over 110k logistic robots mk3 in my previous all-in game, and some 50k construction robot mk3.

Thanks for confirming I don't need to check it to see if it got better.

GotLag
Jul 17, 2005

食べちゃダメだよ
Mod updates!

I have renamed Rotatable Pipes to Flow Control as I have added the non-return or check valve (formerly a separate mod), an overflow valve (only permits flow when input pressure is over 80%), and an express pump with five times the speed of the small pump.

I've also made an entirely new mod, the Flare Stack. If you've got a hydrocarbon you can't find any other use for (maybe you need lube more than you need gas, I dunno) or maybe you just feel like making the world a brighter, dirtier place, you can now burn the oil or gas of your choice!

RiotGearEpsilon
Jun 26, 2005
SHAVE ME FROM MY SHELF
I'm just waiting for a mod that replaces the player character sprite with classic Doctor Robotnik from sonic 1, and then we will truly have video games'd.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
With mods that have upgraded versions of construction bots, is an easy way to pull the old bots out of your network and upgrade them? That was one of the big things that held me back from some of these huge mods, is even if you built these huge robo networks with the new robots, you'd still have the old clunkers flying around slowing everything down.

Xerol
Jan 13, 2007


I don't have any experience with them but a smart inserter pulling out of each roboport into an active provider might work?

e: Of course if you have 100 roboports that might take too long to set up, but maybe you could get away with just doing it around the places your robots are most likely to cluster - a central storage area or any other high-traffic roboport.

Xerol fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Mar 15, 2016

Bhodi
Dec 9, 2007

Oh, it's just a cat.
Pillbug
Bots can be pulled out of roboports , so smart inserters bound to the old bot type attached to them seems the obvious way.

Ratzap
Jun 9, 2012

Let no pie go wasted
Soiled Meat

Jabor posted:

I'm going to spoil the real solution a little bit - they're mostly designed so you stick a requester chest next to the assembler and have bots haul everything over for you. I'm not a big fan of this part of Bob's mods.

That occurred to me as I was going to sleep (it was 6am when I posted, drat you factorio) but it doesn't make me happy. I like the whole 'feed things on belts' method, using a box with robots for the main work just feels dirty.

Roflex posted:

I don't have any experience with them but a smart inserter pulling out of each roboport into an active provider might work?

e: Of course if you have 100 roboports that might take too long to set up, but maybe you could get away with just doing it around the places your robots are most likely to cluster - a central storage area or any other high-traffic roboport.

This works but with Bobs you need less roboports because the higher tech ones cover a silly amount of area. Mk3 units I'm using now have a logistic range of 150x150 - 3 times the standard.

I spent most of yesterday starting fresh trying to build things in a tidy manner but the sheer amount of components makes the idea of a bus difficult to implement. I'll keep playing the save to finish the research off and work on the rebuild but late game Bobs is not as fun as it was earlier. Plus constantly moving mining gear around is getting bloody tedious.
Then I found No hand crafting (which was undoubtedly not lost) and gave that a wee shot. It certainly makes the early game a hell of a lot more interesting to get through.

Ratzap
Jun 9, 2012

Let no pie go wasted
Soiled Meat
While rummaging through the mods section of the forums I came across some nuggets you might be interested in:

Fuild void - removes fluids from play, no more steam engine required ;)

Subsurface - Tunnels for travel/trains etc, it's a WIP but it looks pretty interesting

awesmoe
Nov 30, 2005

Pillbug

GotLag posted:

I've also made an entirely new mod, the Flare Stack. If you've got a hydrocarbon you can't find any other use for (maybe you need lube more than you need gas, I dunno) or maybe you just feel like making the world a brighter, dirtier place, you can now burn the oil or gas of your choice!

Thought about oil fueled power plants instead of just flare stacks? Water + oil = power + pollution, or something.

Solumin
Jan 11, 2013
You can just use a steam engine for that. They'll run on any liquid, not just water. You still need to heat it up to get any performance of course.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
Is there a way to make the flare stacks burn oil to heat up water? They'd essentially become glorified boilers.

awesmoe
Nov 30, 2005

Pillbug

Solumin posted:

You can just use a steam engine for that. They'll run on any liquid, not just water. You still need to heat it up to get any performance of course.
Well yeah but the advantage of this would be that it takes less space than the whole coal/inserter/boiler/steam engine shenanigans, at the cost of a more expensive resource. So you've got solar/accumulators which are space-expensive, resource-free, pollution free, steam engines which are space-medium, pollution-heavy, resource-medium, and then oil power plants which are space-cheap, pollution-heavy, resource-heavy.
OR SOMEHTING ITS JUST AN IDEA! It's just slightly more useful than flares.

e: yeah or that ^^^

LLSix
Jan 20, 2010

The real power behind countless overlords

Dirk the Average posted:

Is there a way to make the flare stacks burn oil to heat up water? They'd essentially become glorified boilers.

You can crack light oil to solid fuel to run burners in the base game already.

Kenlon
Jun 27, 2003

Digitus Impudicus

Jabor posted:

I'm going to spoil the real solution a little bit - they're mostly designed so you stick a requester chest next to the assembler and have bots haul everything over for you. I'm not a big fan of this part of Bob's mods.

The answer is long-handed inserters and an interwoven mesh assembler setup. Plus,. that makes it very easy to expand, as long as you have enough input going in. An assembler with a double row of long-handed inserters on each side has access to eight belts (though, of course, you do need output somewhere, so it won't be a double row on all four sides. Eight belts is up to 16 inputs, and there's nothing - even in Bob's Mods - that wants that many.
Using speed modules in the assemblers will make it hard to keep them fed, even with fast belts and injection, so I recommend going hog-wild on productivity. (I don't use god modules because they are boring, and my personal fork of the mods has them cut out entirely.)

GotLag posted:

I haven't played Bob's Mods, because to me it looks like the Factorio equivalent of Gregtech.

It's very much aimed at "I've played a million hours of Factorio and I want more", which it does very well. I tried playing vanilla again recently and it was just too simple after getting used to the complexity of Bob's. I would never recommend that someone start out using Bob's Mods, though.

Kenlon fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Mar 15, 2016

Agent355
Jul 26, 2011


I want some way to measure total throughput of a particular place and total input capacity of another so I can be more optimal.

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos

Agent355 posted:

I want some way to measure total throughput of a particular place and total input capacity of another so I can be more optimal.
Its called a notebook and a stopwatch. But that's getting closer to Factory than Factorio.

Kenlon
Jun 27, 2003

Digitus Impudicus

Agent355 posted:

I want some way to measure total throughput of a particular place and total input capacity of another so I can be more optimal.

It's pretty straightforward to work out how long it takes for things to get made in assemblers, and you just work ratios from there - or are you talking about belt capacity?

Xerophyte
Mar 17, 2008

This space intentionally left blank

Agent355 posted:

I want some way to measure total throughput of a particular place and total input capacity of another so I can be more optimal.

What's "a particular place"? Individual assemblers list what they require, what they generate and how much time they take so you can arithmetic your way to know what they need. For arbitrary regions of factory? Not so much.

Frankly, my general advise on good ratios is gently caress ratios and gently caress efficiency. The only thing it costs you to screw up your ratios is that you will have some assemblers, furnaces and mines along the chain that lie idle while either their output is saturated or their input is empty. This is perfectly okay. It costs you a small amount of idling power and some space. Getting perfect efficiency costs a bunch of time and effort in setting up your factory, which are much more precious as resources go.

It's worth adhering to some trivial equivalencies like 3 wire assemblers feed 2 circuit assemblers, but beyond that just build everything in easily expandable assembler lines with inputs on belts on one side and outputs on belts on the other side. If you need more output, expand the line. If you need more input, expand the line that feeds the input belt. Repeat until you get enough stuff out at the business end.

Solumin
Jan 11, 2013
IMO the only input ratio I care about is, "Are my copper plate and iron plate belts completely filled?" That's more of an aesthetic thing, I guess. I like to see that 4-lane bus completely saturated with plates.

I wouldn't say to completely ignore ratios, but don't worry about being 10000% optimal.

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos
Everyone has different triggers for oh god what a mess, but its hard to argue with slamming stuff down the belts faster than you can consume it, but that shouldn't discourage a few critical looks especially if you are sticking to crazy spagehtti. There's some tricks to debottlenecking stuff that I didn't figure out until way too late, like needing 2 long inserters to keep up with 0.5s crafting speeds.

By the time you have blueprints and a backpack of bots you can have the basic building blocks for building stuff automated and if you so desire you can use the old dirty slambus factory to build a new pristine factory where the lines are load balanced with the splitters and the trains run to perfect precision. And then blueprint stamp it into the horizon.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
Does anybody know the expected way to play through the New Hope campaign, where you restore the base and get rails working again? I must have started this campaign four or five times and every time I feel like I'm doing it wrong somehow. Always takes way too long to make all the things I have to put in my car, even with rails going and multiple furnace arrays.

ikanreed
Sep 25, 2009

I honestly I have no idea who cannibal[SIC] is and I do not know why I should know.

syq dude, just syq!

Suspicious Dish posted:

Does anybody know the expected way to play through the New Hope campaign, where you restore the base and get rails working again? I must have started this campaign four or five times and every time I feel like I'm doing it wrong somehow. Always takes way too long to make all the things I have to put in my car, even with rails going and multiple furnace arrays.

Factorio is a slow game. Do build the rails back to the iron and copper mines for extra resources, but that's about it.

GotLag
Jul 17, 2005

食べちゃダメだよ
Honk!

(Adds a short horn sound when a train stops at a station)

Applewhite
Aug 16, 2014

by vyelkin
Nap Ghost

Captain_duck posted:

Just finished my first game of factorio, took me 32 hours.



Ended up being a big heap of spaghetti (drat those blue circuits), but man that was a lot of fun.

That's a really nice base, especially for a first playthrough. I'm still on my first playhtrough and my base is a shambles.

Truga
May 4, 2014
Lipstick Apathy

GotLag posted:

Honk!

(Adds a short horn sound when a train stops at a station)

Oh here's an idea. Would it be possible to make a train horn mod that fires when the train is 5 seconds away from the player at current speed, and the player is standing near a rail? That would make them a lot less dangerous, especially at high speed sections.

GotLag
Jul 17, 2005

食べちゃダメだよ
It might be possible but it would take a lot of scripting and polling every moving train at frequent intervals. The little mod I just wrote simply adds an extra sound event to the train's stop trigger.

You can make a ghetto visual warning by putting gates on track segments in areas where you often cross.

Royal W
Jun 20, 2008

Truga posted:

Oh here's an idea. Would it be possible to make a train horn mod that fires when the train is 5 seconds away from the player at current speed, and the player is standing near a rail? That would make them a lot less dangerous, especially at high speed sections.

Level crossings with crossbars would be neat. You should be able to integrate it into the rail signal circuit somehow.

widespread
Aug 5, 2013

I believe I am now no longer in the presence of nice people.


Welp, got my first 50 artifacts with the Combat Shotgun, basic modular armor, and 4 shields.

What do I sink these artifacts into.

Solumin
Jan 11, 2013
Whichever purple science you like best, with an eye for getting the better modular armor, a personal fusion reactor, and possibly multiple personal roboports. (You need a goodly number of artifacts to research all the end-game science.) (Though you don't have to actually research all of it.)

Captain_duck
Dec 3, 2005

I swear nice bushes!
Game 2, Day 2:



Started using logistics bots a tad more to not clutter up the base.

Whats not pictured is big field of accumulators for battery storage.

widespread
Aug 5, 2013

I believe I am now no longer in the presence of nice people.


Solumin posted:

Whichever purple science you like best, with an eye for getting the better modular armor, a personal fusion reactor, and possibly multiple personal roboports. (You need a goodly number of artifacts to research all the end-game science.) (Though you don't have to actually research all of it.)

I'm working on Piercing Shotgun Ammo right now, since I think the biters/spitters are starting to get bigger. Soon after, gonna bulk up to Power Armor 1 and general "make killing bases easier" stuff until I can get to Rocket Silos... which might take a bit because god drat I am out of copper wire.

GotLag
Jul 17, 2005

食べちゃダメだよ
Honk! 0.2.0
Now with more honking action! Two short taps when a train moves, one longer blast when braking for a signal or station.

Indecisive
May 6, 2007


Okay, do I have ANY chance of taking out a big worm midgame (just finished getting blue science online)? The biters established an expansion right outside my base that's been driving me crazy and it has a big worm and medium worm that just wreck me if I go near it. Piercing ammo in my SMG seems to do approximately nothing, throwing a fuckton of grenades seemed to make a dent, maybe I'll just have to make like 50 of those and do a few hit and runs?

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Xerol
Jan 13, 2007


Indecisive posted:

Okay, do I have ANY chance of taking out a big worm midgame (just finished getting blue science online)? The biters established an expansion right outside my base that's been driving me crazy and it has a big worm and medium worm that just wreck me if I go near it. Piercing ammo in my SMG seems to do approximately nothing, throwing a fuckton of grenades seemed to make a dent, maybe I'll just have to make like 50 of those and do a few hit and runs?

Blue Science lets you get Military 3, which lets you get poison capsules, which have a range (due to splash) just longer than a worm's. So you have to carefully edge up to one (probably with a couple turrets nearby for cover) and drop 3-5 poison capsules so they hit the worm, wait a bit for it to die, then creep forward some more if there's more than one.

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