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The visionary approach is to turn heavy into lube and light into solid fuel into a buffer chest for eventual use as rocket fuel. But by the time you know you want loads of that junk later, you presumably also know how to cut a blue science factory from whole cloth before you end up with a tank of either.
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Apr 1, 2016 01:05
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Ratzap posted:Read this guy's post, it's the ratios you're looking for. I'm following this ratio. 4 refineries with advanced oil processing, 1 heavy + 6 light crackers, and it isn't keeping up with petroleum production. My two sulfur plants and two chemical plants are struggling to get petroleum - they're maybe doing it at an 80% rate. Is there a way to diagnose the problem? The petroleum slowly creeps in to their plants, the pipes that carry them all are at 0.0 or 0.1 petroleum, and storage tanks for petroleum are pretty much empty. Does this ratio assume I have modules or something? Do I need to add a fifth refinery, with the risk of capping out of heavy or light oil? Do I need to be more graceful with the way pipes are laid out, or do all pipes and storage containers not care about how things are laid out, as long as they are connected to the same resource? 
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Apr 1, 2016 02:35
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Node posted:I'm following this ratio. 4 refineries with advanced oil processing, 1 heavy + 6 light crackers, and it isn't keeping up with petroleum production. My two sulfur plants and two chemical plants are struggling to get petroleum - they're maybe doing it at an 80% rate. Is there a way to diagnose the problem? The petroleum slowly creeps in to their plants, the pipes that carry them all are at 0.0 or 0.1 petroleum, and storage tanks for petroleum are pretty much empty. e. If you aren't already, use underground pipes everywhere except when changing direction. It saves headaches from crossed lines. There's reduced flow from many pipes which it also helps with since it counts as a couple pipes for the whole distance, but locally that shouldn't be the issue as that's more a long oil pipeline thing. zedprime fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 02:59
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Node posted:I'm following this ratio. 4 refineries with advanced oil processing, 1 heavy + 6 light crackers, and it isn't keeping up with petroleum production. My two sulfur plants and two chemical plants are struggling to get petroleum - they're maybe doing it at an 80% rate. Is there a way to diagnose the problem? The petroleum slowly creeps in to their plants, the pipes that carry them all are at 0.0 or 0.1 petroleum, and storage tanks for petroleum are pretty much empty. Are your refineries all burning to show they're running? If they're not, then you have a bottleneck somewhere and need to fix it (full lubricant tanks for example), and if they are - you need more crude. If your pumps have run dry then fill them with Speed Modules and surround them with Speed Module'd beacons. 400% of 0.1/s is still 0.4/s Just remember that if you have nowhere for excess products to go then the refineries shut off. Their programming evidently considers it bad form to flush diesel down a discreet drain somewhere.
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Apr 1, 2016 03:08
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mossyfisk posted:Are your refineries all burning to show they're running? If they're not, then you have a bottleneck somewhere and need to fix it (full lubricant tanks for example), and if they are - you need more crude. If your pumps have run dry then fill them with Speed Modules and surround them with Speed Module'd beacons. 400% of 0.1/s is still 0.4/s My refineries are chewing through crude 100% of the time. I use underground pipe as much as I can, and nothing is cross connected. I dunno. Maybe a fifth refinery will do it.
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Apr 1, 2016 03:25
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Node posted:I'm following this ratio. 4 refineries with advanced oil processing, 1 heavy + 6 light crackers, and it isn't keeping up with petroleum production. My two sulfur plants and two chemical plants are struggling to get petroleum - they're maybe doing it at an 80% rate. Is there a way to diagnose the problem? The petroleum slowly creeps in to their plants, the pipes that carry them all are at 0.0 or 0.1 petroleum, and storage tanks for petroleum are pretty much empty. I don't agree with his ratios. I did my own math and came out 5 advanced oil processing refineries + 6 light-oil cracking plants producing 8.5 petro gas / second, while each plastic bar plant and sulfur plant consumes 3.75 petro gas per second. (I laid this out a couple posts ago.) My advice would be to cut one of the plants, to be honest. Or add another set of 5 refineries + 6 light cracking plants.
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Apr 1, 2016 03:53
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mossyfisk posted:Just remember that if you have nowhere for excess products to go then the refineries shut off. Their programming evidently considers it bad form to flush diesel down a discreet drain somewhere. 3 essential mods if you try to play Bobs - void chest, fluid void and gas vent pump. Standard Factorio only has problems with oil backing up (and you can use the steam engine method to get rid of 6/s per engine) but Bobs is impossible to balance completely. Having a method to dump solid, fluid and gas is so useful.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:00
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zedprime posted:The visionary approach is to turn heavy into lube and light into solid fuel into a buffer chest for eventual use as rocket fuel. But by the time you know you want loads of that junk later, you presumably also know how to cut a blue science factory from whole cloth before you end up with a tank of either. That's pretty much exactly what I'm doing at the moment. The enemy hives are getting much stronger, it's not safe to go near them now that they've got middle-sized worms. drat. Looks like it's tank or nothing at this point. That or power armor, assuming I can get my economy going enough to get power armor. Flamethrowers: worth it?
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Apr 1, 2016 04:02
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How many electric furnaces are necessary to fill a blue belt? I don't like it when there is one furnace in the line that never empties out.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:08
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Does anyone have Fat Controller working on the current alpha version? I get a UI error, and I don't know enough about Lua to even bother trying to fix it.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:09
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Ratzap posted:3 essential mods if you try to play Bobs - void chest, fluid void and gas vent pump. Standard Factorio only has problems with oil backing up (and you can use the steam engine method to get rid of 6/s per engine) but Bobs is impossible to balance completely. Having a method to dump solid, fluid and gas is so useful. Bob's has gas venting built in, but you still tend to get massive excesses of things like sodium hydroxide which are a little trickier to get rid of.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:11
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CanOfMDAmp posted:Does anyone have Fat Controller working on the current alpha version? I get a UI error, and I don't know enough about Lua to even bother trying to fix it. I got that error message too, but it appears to still work fine. It just appears the first time you load the game expanding the Trains menu causes the error, but from then on it's fine.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:19
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azsedcf posted:How many electric furnaces are necessary to fill a blue belt? I don't like it when there is one furnace in the line that never empties out. I'm reasonably sure it's 24-26 per side.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:50
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Speedball posted:That's pretty much exactly what I'm doing at the moment. Not until 0.13, they're really wonky right now. Power armor and drones are where it's at. Just smacking down offensive laser turrets is probably even better (and can be done a lot earlier), but entails a lot of cleaning up of power poles, turrets, and performing repairs.
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Apr 1, 2016 05:22
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azsedcf posted:How many electric furnaces are necessary to fill a blue belt? I don't like it when there is one furnace in the line that never empties out. Iron and copper smelt at 4/7 per second in an electric furnace, and blue belts can carry 40 per second, so you're looking at 70 furnaces per belt. Filling them with speed modules brings it down to 50 (module I), 44 (module II), or 35 (module III).
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Apr 1, 2016 05:33
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I hope the Factorio developers work on presentation, instead of taking the toady one approach. I have absolutely no idea how to use the construction or logistic network without resorting to the wiki. Same with balancing advanced oil processing, circuits, and more. Have they mentioned working on that?
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Apr 1, 2016 05:37
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Moddington posted:Iron and copper smelt at 4/7 per second in an electric furnace, and blue belts can carry 40 per second, so you're looking at 70 furnaces per belt. Filling them with speed modules brings it down to 50 (module I), 44 (module II), or 35 (module III). Ah, but inserters never saturate a belt completely. They always do that infuriating space-wasting offset. Cuts the 'furnaces needed' in half.
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Apr 1, 2016 05:41
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Yeah, you'll want multiple parallel output belts that you then funnel down through splitters in order to get saturation. The "input on the inside, output on the outside" furnace structure is handy for this - with only a small tweak, you can put the output of the first half of the furnaces onto the inside of the belt, where it doesn't compete with the second half, and then at the end of the stack you have two uncompressed belts that you can merge down into a single fully saturated belt. Oh, and if you think about this a little, you'll also realize that having 4 blue belts of a material on your bus is completely pointless unless you have literally hundreds of furnaces making that stuff.
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Apr 1, 2016 05:49
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As much as I love huge elegant designs, sometimes I love the absolute garbage you have to come up with to solve a problem you can't get around any other way. This is my starting coal field, with belts wrapping around themselves to feed furnace complexes both above and below the field. 
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Apr 1, 2016 06:01
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Evilreaver posted:Ah, but inserters never saturate a belt completely. They always do that infuriating space-wasting offset. Cuts the 'furnaces needed' in half. Well then you haven't filled the belt, now have you?  'cause yeah, like Jabor says, you need to merge at least two non-saturated belts with a splitter to get a truly saturated belt. Apparently there's also a glitch with underground belts that let them fully saturate a belt, but it's finicky and not guaranteed to stick around.
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Apr 1, 2016 06:05
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There's a trick mentioned in the wiki where you have an inserter placing stuff on a belt, but the single tile it's placing on is faster than the rest of the belt. So you'd have one red belt tile in the middle of a yellow belt, and have the inserter place things on that tile. It'll make the belt as dense as possible. The obvious drawback is it doesn't work with endlessly l entirely blue belts... In fact, it may only work for the limited scenario of a fast inserter placing onto a red belt embedded in a yellow belt, pulling from a chest or something where it can pull at max speed.Node posted:I hope the Factorio developers work on presentation, instead of taking the toady one approach. I have absolutely no idea how to use the construction or logistic network without resorting to the wiki. Same with balancing advanced oil processing, circuits, and more. Have they mentioned working on that? Yeah, they don't do a great job explaining the various networks. Circuit networks are probably the worst. There's definitely a lot of other information that isn't given to you explicitly - for example, I had no idea you could use solid fuel as a substitute for coal, I thought it was only used in the rocket! It wasn't until my third or fourth game that i realized it was, well, fuel. But maybe all the missing info is covered in the game manual? Calculating optimal ratios for most things is just algebra, and they give you all the information you need for that in the game. (Crafting speed, input rates and output rates, mostly.)
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Apr 1, 2016 07:48
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I don't think anyone has mentioned Foreman at all yet? If you're looking to do some extreme optimization and getting precise numbers (except oil with cracking, you can get it to work, but it's wonky) it works great, even with modded in items https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=134&t=5576
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Apr 1, 2016 08:16
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One weird thing with Foreman is that it always seems to tell me I need roughly twice as many mining drills as I actually do. Also as you say with oil it doesn't take cracking into account or even have a recipe for it as far as I can tell. On the subject of oil, 5 Refineries feeding 1 Heavy to Light and 7 Light to Petroleum Chemical Plants is the optimal ratio for Petroleum production:
Is there any way to see how much Crude you're producing without checking each pumpjack and adding up their production? It sucks that oil stuff isn't on the P hotkey production stats window. Jack the Lad fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 10:37
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This may be really stupid, but I have no idea how foreman works. I put it in my Factorio mod folder, but I don't know how to actually use it.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:02
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Solumin posted:Yeah, they don't do a great job explaining the various networks. Circuit networks are probably the worst. There's definitely a lot of other information that isn't given to you explicitly - for example, I had no idea you could use solid fuel as a substitute for coal, I thought it was only used in the rocket! It wasn't until my third or fourth game that i realized it was, well, fuel. But maybe all the missing info is covered in the game manual? I just hit robots, and I really can't figure out the difference between the four chests, even after reading the wiki. Can anyone dumb that down for me? This game is great at exposing how retarded I am.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:07
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Loopoo posted:This may be really stupid, but I have no idea how foreman works. I put it in my Factorio mod folder, but I don't know how to actually use it. It's a standalone program rather than a mod. When you open it it will ask you to point it at your game folders. Once you've done so it will pull data from them (so it can take mods into account) and then let you build production flowcharts. The easiest way to do that is to drag an item into the workspace as an output node and set a rate per minute or second on it, then hit the button to automatically complete the flowchart. You can enable/disable things like speed modules and assembler 3s to suit your game situation.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:11
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Node posted:I just hit robots, and I really can't figure out the difference between the four chests, even after reading the wiki. I had the same problem, but once you wrap your head around it, it's super easy: Passive Provider Chests - Just ignore the name! Think of them as "The red chests". These basically take items normally and will fill up exactly like a normal chest, but it will allow logistic robots to access items in the chest and take them to where they're needed. If the item in the chest isn't needed, it will fill up as normal (or to whatever limit you set it with the red X). Active Provider Chests - The blue one. These guys constantly make logistic robots retrieve any items in the chest and take it to storage chests. So if you've got 5 factories making concrete and they get stuffed into a active provider chest, logistic robots will keep taking concrete the minute it gets put in the chest, and fly it over to a storage chest for longterm storage. I don't really use active provider chests, I don't see the point in them. Maybe if you wanted to build a logistics railway it'd be good for offloading trains and stuff. Storage Chest - Basically store stuff for logistics / construction bots to use. Very longterm storage, which basically means poo poo gets dumped here when it's in logistics limbo and has nowhere else to go (like when you deconstruct trees / buildings, it'll go into a storage chest). Active provider chests also send all their stuff here. Requester Chest - easiest to understand. Basically calls for items to be delivered to it so it stays stocked at a certain level. Will take from active chests first, and then passive chests, and then storage (I think that's the right order). Or maybe storage and passive is the other way around.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:11
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Loopoo posted:I had the same problem, but once you wrap your head around it, it's super easy: Worth noting on chests that if you use a disassembly blueprint to remove stuff the bots will only put it into a storage chest. If you don't have any they'll hover in place holding the item and not doing anything else. That's the only reason I have storage chests, though, and I don't see the point of active provider chests either; worth noting with them is that emptying active providers is always the highest priority task for your bots, so everything else will grind to a halt until they're empty. 99% of my logistics chests are passive providers or requesters.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:12
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Loopoo posted:Active Provider Chests - The blue one. These guys constantly make logistic robots retrieve any items in the chest and take it to storage chests. So if you've got 5 factories making concrete and they get stuffed into a active provider chest, logistic robots will keep taking concrete the minute it gets put in the chest, and fly it over to a storage chest for longterm storage. I don't really use active provider chests, I don't see the point in them. It's for things you have a surplus of, basically. The passive provider will, if there is not enough demand for what is in it, eventually fill up and production of that thing will stop. With an active provider, the chest will never fill up, and thus the thing will keep being produced regardless of how much is needed. I just use them for solid fuel because my entire factory runs on it and I always want a huge amount in storage so that when I notice I'm no longer producing more than I'm using I have plenty of time before I actually run out and lose power to everything and get eaten by giant bugs. They're good for train stations as well. Most of the time you want a passive chest instead, though.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:39
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Jack the Lad posted:Is there any way to see how much Crude you're producing without checking each pumpjack and adding up their production? It sucks that oil stuff isn't on the P hotkey production stats window. As far as actionable info goes, if your crude storage is going up, you're good, and if its going down time to find new pumpjacks.
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Apr 1, 2016 13:48
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zedprime posted:Oil production = consumption at refineries + accumulation (in the crude storage tanks at the throat of the refineries, can be negative) Sure, but that's low quality information. Storage going down (or more likely sitting empty) in front of 5 refineries could mean you're producing 0.1 crude per second or 9.9 crude per second. I wonder if there's a mod that does what I'm after.
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Apr 1, 2016 14:00
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The only other thing I would note is that you have to leave the storage chests up to the robots. You don't really have control over what things go to which storage chest, and that is OK. Let the robots handle it. Don't run around trying to organize them, it won't last. You place the storage chests and just walk away. The logistics network is cool and useful because it removes you from having to worry about where things are. Oh and the game doesn't really explain roboports, so here's the basics: the inner orange field is the range of the port's logistics network. The outer green field is the size of its construction robots' range. If two ports' orange fields are touching, their logistics networks will merge, and this is represented by a thick dashed yellow line between the two ports that is visible when placing the port. Construction robots will repair anything in range, if they have repair kits available in the network or in the port itself. Their other major function is actually constructing or deconstructing things, of course. Logistics robots are really good at rapidly moving things within a relatively short range. Don't use them to transport tons of goods from one side of the map to the other, use a belt or train for that. The recommended range I've heard is 50 to 500 tiles. People generally recommend 50 to 100 robots per roboport. More ports means more places for robots to recharge, which is good. Too many robots in the network means they're all trying to charge, and your network gets slower and slower as more robots queue up to charge.
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Apr 1, 2016 14:11
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Jack the Lad posted:Sure, but that's low quality information. Storage going down (or more likely sitting empty) in front of 5 refineries could mean you're producing 0.1 crude per second or 9.9 crude per second. My first point was if you have some sitting in the tank and its going down (or up) you can calculate the number. More explicitly than my first reply, the formula would be n*2+(dV/t) where n is the number of refineries, dV is the change in inventory over a benchmark time, and t is the benchmark time you used.
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Apr 1, 2016 14:14
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FISHMANPET posted:As much as I love huge elegant designs, sometimes I love the absolute garbage you have to come up with to solve a problem you can't get around any other way. Honestly it is this "be clever to deal with obstructions" aspect of the game that I love, and I've considered making a mod that makes rocks invulnerable and more common for exactly this experience. For the most part those changes should be easy. The hard part would be tuning it so it hits the sweet spot of "interesting" that lies between "uncommon enough as to be only an irritation" and "impossible / annoying as all hell."
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Apr 1, 2016 14:42
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Speedball posted:That's pretty much exactly what I'm doing at the moment. A tank is not going to make it that much easier. Take turrets and AP if you don't want to string out poles for lasers. Take poison capsules if you're scared of worms but the turrets will kill them. The worms even warn you before they start spitting, when they rise up you have 2 or 3 paces before they fire. Plop down something for them to shoot at then move in and set up the firing squad. Loopoo posted:Active Provider Chests - The blue one. These guys constantly make logistic robots retrieve any items in the chest and take it to storage chests. So if you've got 5 factories making concrete and they get stuffed into a active provider chest, logistic robots will keep taking concrete the minute it gets put in the chest, and fly it over to a storage chest for longterm storage. I don't really use active provider chests, I don't see the point in them. Maybe if you wanted to build a logistics railway it'd be good for offloading trains and stuff. Once again, repair kits. You want to put repair kits into active chests so the bots spread them around the roboports and storage. Then if you are attacked, they don't have to all traipse back to the same passive box to get a kit. Solumin posted:Logistics robots are really good at rapidly moving things within a relatively short range. Don't use them to transport tons of goods from one side of the map to the other, use a belt or train for that. The recommended range I've heard is 50 to 500 tiles. People generally recommend 50 to 100 robots per roboport. More ports means more places for robots to recharge, which is good. Too many robots in the network means they're all trying to charge, and your network gets slower and slower as more robots queue up to charge. Rapidly? I've seen a 20 year old asthmatic dog move faster than those things. Kidding aside though, they're comfort things not for bulk transfers. 50 to 100 bots per port? That sounds pretty insane, if you're using hundreds or thousands of logistic bots you've either got a huge factory or you're trying to replace belts. Most people build way too many bots and never use them, hover over a roboport and it shows you how many are available. If you have 100+ idle bots, you don't need another 600 to sit next to them.
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Apr 1, 2016 14:48
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To clarify, that's 50 to 100 bots as an upper limit on how many your network can comfortably support without having too many robots queueing up to recharge. You almost never need that many actual robots, though I anticipate some goon will show us their factory that uses 6000 logistics robots as the only method for moving materials.
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Apr 1, 2016 15:01
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Ratzap posted:Once again, repair kits. You want to put repair kits into active chests so the bots spread them around the roboports and storage. Then if you are attacked, they don't have to all traipse back to the same passive box to get a kit. I tried this once and quickly ended up with about 200 storage chests completely full of the things.
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Apr 1, 2016 15:06
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You can always hook up a smart inserter going from the repair kit factory to the active provider chest that only produces when the number in the system drops below X number
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Apr 1, 2016 15:11
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Roflex posted:I tried this once and quickly ended up with about 200 storage chests completely full of the things. Smart inserter, limit how many are put into the logistics network. Set a limit of, say, 500 to 1000 and you're good.
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Apr 1, 2016 15:20
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Ratzap posted:Once again, repair kits. You want to put repair kits into active chests so the bots spread them around the roboports and storage. Then if you are attacked, they don't have to all traipse back to the same passive box to get a kit. Wait, do active provider chests distribute the contents across all storage chests to ensure an even distribution? I thought they just shuttled the contents to whatever storage chest was closest. Evilreaver posted:Smart inserter, limit how many are put into the logistics network. Set a limit of, say, 500 to 1000 and you're good. 500 or 1000 is way too excessive man. I had my limit set to 300 and even that was way too excessive. I'd say 150 repairpacks is a good limit. One assembler can churn out 50 repair packs in next to no time.
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Apr 1, 2016 15:37
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