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Yeah when you have a steel furnace layout and blueprint (and bots!) its not disadvantageous to keep using it. Until you need modules or you have so many smelters that coal delivery becomes a problem, but by that point you should be well into the train phase.
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Apr 4, 2018 16:06
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I've done an 8-car 16-lane belt-based steel smeltery outpost before and the coal trains were only cycling through a couple times an hour. Fuel-based smelting is viable and scaleable until you start hitting UPS issues.
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Apr 4, 2018 17:44
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Yes ferrying coal is 100% viable, I just prefer to run a power line to a deposit over fussing over getting coal into it.
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Apr 4, 2018 17:52
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Delivering coal to your furnaces generally isn't all that bad. I play rail worlds, so I have fairly distant outposts that mine and smelt things on site. I already need a train stop to load up the smelted metal, so it's no big deal to add a second station for a dropoff of coal to supply the smelters.
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Apr 4, 2018 18:08
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I tried the demo of this on my laptop a long long time ago and it ran like such crap I wrote it off. I tried it again the other night and was surprised to be getting 60+ fps. So kudos to the devs for that kind of optimization. Is there anything important I should know before starting out?
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Apr 5, 2018 01:04
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Away all Goats posted:I tried the demo of this on my laptop a long long time ago and it ran like such crap I wrote it off. I tried it again the other night and was surprised to be getting 60+ fps. So kudos to the devs for that kind of optimization. You are probably going to build things and then later realize you did it badly. If it works resist the urge to tear it down and rebuild (or worse start a new map) and instead just build your improved version too. Space and resources are effectively infinite and if you tear something out to improve it you don't get any use out of it while you are rebuilding. If its something important like iron smelting you might really regret tearing it down when you run out of iron before you get your new smelting setup working. When you get to oil give yourself a lot of room. No more than that. Oil takes up a lot of space since pipes are a lot more finicky than belts. Its easy to end up with it as a major bottleneck in your factory and that sucks if you didn't give yourself any room to expand it. After you play a bit check out the keybindings in options. There are a lot of handy things that aren't really explained. Other than that I suggest not looking at guides or stuff too much to start. Mechanics tutorials like how to make trains work are a fine idea but just looking up optimal builds or downloading someone else's blueprints is missing a lot of the fun. And yeah the devs are crazy about optimization and fixing bugs. If you want the nitty gritty they talk about what and why in their dev blog a lot.
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Apr 5, 2018 01:49
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Away all Goats posted:I tried the demo of this on my laptop a long long time ago and it ran like such crap I wrote it off. I tried it again the other night and was surprised to be getting 60+ fps. So kudos to the devs for that kind of optimization. The advice above is good, but don't spoil things for yourself. Let your first factory be an adventure. Do some of the tutorials so you know a few fundamental mechanics, like how to fire your pistol. Anyone have good map settings to recommend for a new player?
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Apr 5, 2018 02:20
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First launch done! I "cheated" and used the rich resources game presets, so didn't need to expand that much. Tried expanding into solar power and realized it suuuucks at night and you need like 10000 accumulators to survive the nights. Especially when I moved to pure lasers for defending my base, to avoid ammo management. And then I thought I was done when building the rocket silo, but nope, have to build the rocket too! And then I was forced to break my (not so) beautiful base by dismantling any research related processes to focus on the rocket parts. 26 hours. Think it will take a while before I get the 8 hour achievement. (Also I didn't use any logic circuits, nuclear or drones at all, so that will be the next thing I try) ymgve fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 02:46
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Beacons feel really overpowered, now that power is so easy/cheap with Nuclear. Is there ever a reason not to use Production Modules in the Assemblers themselves, and then Beacon the poo poo out of them with Speed 3 Modules? (i.e. is there ever a time when Speed Modules are preferable in the Assembler?)
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Apr 5, 2018 03:10
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When you're really space-constrained to fit a build in. Or occasionally to help make the ratios work in a compact blueprintable subunit. If you're not space-constrained, just building more assemblers is more resource-efficient than using speed modules.
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Apr 5, 2018 03:22
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LtSmash posted:You are probably going to build things and then later realize you did it badly. If it works resist the urge to tear it down and rebuild (or worse start a new map) and instead just build your improved version too. Space and resources are effectively infinite and if you tear something out to improve it you don't get any use out of it while you are rebuilding. If its something important like iron smelting you might really regret tearing it down when you run out of iron before you get your new smelting setup working. Thanks that sounds like the kind of advice I was looking for.
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Apr 5, 2018 03:24
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XkyRauh posted:Beacons feel really overpowered, now that power is so easy/cheap with Nuclear. Is there ever a reason not to use Production Modules in the Assemblers themselves, and then Beacon the poo poo out of them with Speed 3 Modules? (i.e. is there ever a time when Speed Modules are preferable in the Assembler?) Don't forget that prod3 modules are expensive. Given a long enough run they will eventually be optimal for anything you can put them in but you had better be planning on sticking with that save for a looooonng time if you are putting them in copper wire machines. For expensive things like rocket parts or blue chips they will pay themselves off pretty quick and you are going to pretty much always go for them. I recall seeing someone spreadsheet out the time it would take for all the different items to pay off modules on reddit or the official forums.
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Apr 5, 2018 03:34
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LtSmash posted:Don't forget that prod3 modules are expensive. Given a long enough run they will eventually be optimal for anything you can put them in but you had better be planning on sticking with that save for a looooonng time if you are putting them in copper wire machines. For expensive things like rocket parts or blue chips they will pay themselves off pretty quick and you are going to pretty much always go for them. I recall seeing someone spreadsheet out the time it would take for all the different items to pay off modules on reddit or the official forums. I use this cheat sheet pretty much constantly when I play, it has a good section on payoff times for productivity modules. I tend to go overboard with them on things like red circuit production because I like to build big long stacks of assemblers fed by just a few belts of input materials.
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Apr 5, 2018 06:55
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Jamsque posted:I use this cheat sheet pretty much constantly when I play, it has a good section on payoff times for productivity modules. I tend to go overboard with them on things like red circuit production because I like to build big long stacks of assemblers fed by just a few belts of input materials. ugh this is great quote:A Storage tank holding 25k units of Steam at 500°C contains 2.425 GJ of energy, equal to 485 fully charged Accumulators!
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Apr 5, 2018 08:04
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Today I unlocked oil, and trains, and a bunch of other things....and I'm kind of staring because I went from finally straightening out my copper plate production, and getting some steel smelters going, to.... I have to make five billion things, and make sure all this stuff can reach that stuff, and I'm. I'm overwhelmed. So I focused and made a jeep, and I'm going to work later on getting bigger steel productions so I can automate engine-building, first of all. Small steps, keep the focus small....
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Apr 5, 2018 14:00
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StrixNebulosa posted:Today I unlocked oil, and trains, and a bunch of other things....and I'm kind of staring because I went from finally straightening out my copper plate production, and getting some steel smelters going, to.... :factoriosay:
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Apr 5, 2018 14:37
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Is there a way to reliably fill up both sides of a conveyor belt? My current setup keeps hitting bottlenecks where the belts fill up with too much of one part at the expense of another.
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Apr 5, 2018 16:57
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Bad Seafood posted:Is there a way to reliably fill up both sides of a conveyor belt? My current setup keeps hitting bottlenecks where the belts fill up with too much of one part at the expense of another. Can you show a picture of what you mean? Chances are it doesn't actually matter - inserters can take from both sides of the belt, so if one lane is still full of a particular item then it's not actually causing a bottleneck.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:02
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It becomes an issue when you split off single lanes in order to have two different item types on a belt. If you have a belt of iron and split the left lane off to make belts and the right lane to make circuits, you might run into a situation that you're making a lot of belts but no circuits, run the left lane dry, but have iron production only going at 50% capacity since there's no room for the smelters that output to the right side of the belt. Ideally you could draw each single lane evenly from both input lanes: maybe the new splitter behavior would help with this? Maybe the answer is to never split off single lanes or mix belts, but that doesn't seem as fun!
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Apr 5, 2018 17:15
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Yeah, it's fine to pull unevenly from a belt because once they deplete the side they prioritize, they'll start grabbing from the other side. If you have one side of the belt full and the other mostly empty, it's just because you're not drawing enough resources to actually use the entire belt yet. Though, the same is not true for filling a belt. You want your producers to be half putting on one side of the belt and half on the other. Paper Tiger posted:It becomes an issue when you split off single lanes in order to have two different item types on a belt. If you have a belt of iron and split the left lane off to make belts and the right lane to make circuits, you might run into a situation that you're making a lot of belts but no circuits, run the left lane dry, but have iron production only going at 50% capacity since there's no room for the smelters that output to the right side of the belt. Ideally you could draw each single lane evenly from both input lanes: maybe the new splitter behavior would help with this? The issue here is that you pulled half a belt when half a belt was not enough iron to satisfy your consumption. It's not splitting the belt that's the issue. You'd run into the same problem if your build needed two belts worth of iron and you only fed it one.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:20
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The half belt is limited to carry 13 items/second for red belt or whatever it comes out to, so if your belt production wants to pull more than that it doesn't matter if you can produce 100 iron/second. The issue is you don't have enough lanes of iron going to belts, not that there are smelters sitting idle.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:26
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Jabor posted:Can you show a picture of what you mean?  No blockages currently, but about 20 minutes back the conveyor belt loop with circuits and plates (and cogs) was so full of plates no more circuits (or cogs) could be inserted - despite the fact that the plates only ever took up the inner track. Since then I've picked up a bunch of plates so now circuits can be placed again, but I ran into another logistical problem with my gears so I've been inserting them manually while drawing up plans for fixing it. By comparison, see the loop above, with wires and plates. See how the plates are on the inside but the wires are on the outside. I somehow managed to do that by accident. I'm trying to figure out how to do it on purpose. I bought this game at the beginning of this week, so I'm still learning the ropes. Might be missing something basic, but this feels like something I should be able to do.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:36
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Bad Seafood posted:Is there a way to reliably fill up both sides of a conveyor belt? My current setup keeps hitting bottlenecks where the belts fill up with too much of one part at the expense of another.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:37
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Bad Seafood posted:Sure. I love this. And please understand it's not an insult, and you are absolutely not doing anything wrong. It's just that you can only get the magic of playing this game for the first time once and your design solutions perfectly represent that. One of the reasons this game is so good is because there's no wrong way to do something and I love seeing everyone's creative solutions to the same problems.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:44
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Bad Seafood posted:LOOPS .... loops why didn't I think of that
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Apr 5, 2018 17:46
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Bad Seafood posted:By comparison, see the loop above, with wires and plates. See how the plates are on the inside but the wires are on the outside. I somehow managed to do that by accident. I'm trying to figure out how to do it on purpose. okay so now to answer your question for real: Inserters will ALWAYS place on the far side of the belt. Your plates are being inserted on the left side of the belt moving right, so they're being placed on the right side of the belt. That's how they're on the inside. The wires on the outside are pretty self explanatory. You're directly placing them there by combining two belts. If you want to insert to the outside of the loop, you're going to have to get creative with the paths your belts take, or put the factories on the inside of the loop. Generally speaking, it's not the best idea to mix the contents on a single side of a belt. You can think of a belt as two "lanes", but we're dirty racists and want to keep each lane segregated. You have the right idea on the top loop with copper wire and iron plates. So your bottom right loop, I'd change it to have only plates on one side, and green circuits on the other. This way you don't stop producing circuits because you have too much iron. Renegret fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 17:50
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Renegret posted:I love this. But I still need to send him through reform school. Renegret posted:One of the reasons this game is so good is because there's no wrong way to do something and I love seeing everyone's creative solutions to the same problems.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:57
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Bad Seafood posted:Yeah, I'd heard about this game last year, but between the intimidating trailer and a superficial resemblance to Minecraft (which I bounced off hard), I never bothered to look into it. Then I picked up Opus Magnum by Zachtronics, sunk 40 hours into it, and realized maybe I'm into this sorta thing, so I gave the demo a try and here we are. Probably gonna sink another 40 hours, maybe more. Probably more. The reason I love Factorio so much is that it's not about making pretty houses. I'm not an artistic person, I hate Minecraft because there's too much design freedom and I'm no good at making anything that's not a box. Factorio's a game about logistics and problem solving. It doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work. If you don't do something optimally, that's okay. You can brute force the issue by building more. Any problem can be brute forced with "more". More of everything. More iron, more green circuits. Something to keep in mind, factories become incredibly iron hungry. Soon you're going to be facing problems producing enough iron. The solution is to build more iron smelters. Then build some more. Then keep building. Build more than you need to, then build a few more just to be safe. You're going to need more iron smelters at some point anyway, but you're just buying time until you have to build more again.
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Apr 5, 2018 18:05
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Bad Seafood posted:Ah, this might be just what I need. Just invented splitters too, so it all works out. Many thanks. I spam this everywhere I want to load both sides of a belt, it's sufficient for about 99% of cases.  There's ways to do it without splitters too, but they're ugly and fussy and gently caress it just use splitters.
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Apr 5, 2018 18:15
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xzzy posted:I spam this everywhere I want to load both sides of a belt, it's sufficient for about 99% of cases. This doesn't do a whole lot. You're loading both sides of the belt, but at half capacity, so it's not too much different from using one side of the belt fully.
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Apr 5, 2018 18:25
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All it does is give you a bigger buffer. I guess that's not the worst thing in the world? Personally I just double the factories and insert onto both sides of the belt.
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Apr 5, 2018 18:28
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Renegret posted:The reason I love Factorio so much is that it's not about making pretty houses. I'm not an artistic person, I hate Minecraft because there's too much design freedom and I'm no good at making anything that's not a box. Factorio's a game about logistics and problem solving. It doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work. If you don't do something optimally, that's okay. You can brute force the issue by building more.  They're completely different games. If I wanted to build beautiful factories, I'd play something else. Factorio so far is scratching that "I need this, so I need to do this" itch - simple problems, infinite solutions, and I like puzzle solving, especially since it isn't limited at all. I just have to be smart enough to make myself happy.
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Apr 5, 2018 18:36
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Renegret posted:Generally speaking, it's not the best idea to mix the contents on a single side of a belt. You can think of a belt as two "lanes", but we're dirty racists and want to keep each lane segregated. You have the right idea on the top loop with copper wire and iron plates. So your bottom right loop, I'd change it to have only plates on one side, and green circuits on the other. This way you don't stop producing circuits because you have too much iron. I did just invent longer-reaching inserters, so maybe I can do something with that. Renegret posted:The reason I love Factorio so much is that it's not about making pretty houses. I'm not an artistic person, I hate Minecraft because there's too much design freedom and I'm no good at making anything that's not a box. Factorio's a game about logistics and problem solving. It doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work. If you don't do something optimally, that's okay. You can brute force the issue by building more. 1.0  2.0  I expect I'll have a third iteration to share over the weekend. I know you're not supposed to rebuild everything every time, and I don't plan on doing so into the mid-game where I'm sure it just becomes impractical, but so long as I feel I've still got a relatively compact base of operations, I actually enjoy trying to rearrange everything to work more efficiently. It's me, the guy who always lost multiplayer matches of Age of Empires II when I was a kid because I wanted my villages to look nice and prioritized that over making them defensible.
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Apr 5, 2018 18:36
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I'm not in front of a place where I can load up the game right now but there's a neat trick you can do in early-midgame for splitting from two lanes to one.code:
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Apr 5, 2018 18:44
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Dr. Stab posted:This doesn't do a whole lot. You're loading both sides of the belt, but at half capacity, so it's not too much different from using one side of the belt fully. If I'm balancing a belt it's because it's clogged up further ahead, so yes, I should probably fix that bottleneck, but on the other, it's free to fill up the belt as much as possible so why not. (real reason I do it: full belts look cooler)
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Apr 5, 2018 19:03
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xzzy posted:(real reason I do it: full belts look cooler) factorio.txt
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Apr 5, 2018 19:05
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Dr. Stab posted:This doesn't do a whole lot. You're loading both sides of the belt, but at half capacity, so it's not too much different from using one side of the belt fully. I'll do this coming off miners before they hit a balancer so the inputs are even.
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Apr 5, 2018 19:06
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xzzy posted:(real reason I do it: full belts look cooler)
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Apr 5, 2018 19:10
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Renegret posted:okay so now to answer your question for real: This is one of those things that isn't explained, and doesn't really need to be to create a rocket (See factorio rule #1: Just Make More), but if you really pay attention to the detail of the inserter at all, you see why it does and it totally makes sense. The fact that the devs spent so much time on the animations that show you this ever so subtly is why I love it.
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Apr 5, 2018 22:28
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DelphiAegis posted:This is one of those things that isn't explained, and doesn't really need to be to create a rocket (See factorio rule #1: Just Make More), but if you really pay attention to the detail of the inserter at all, you see why it does and it totally makes sense. The fact that the devs spent so much time on the animations that show you this ever so subtly is why I love it. Yeah the attention to detail is really one of the things that makes this a beautiful, wonderful game. Literally everything you need to know you can learn by just futzing around and clicking on stuff. Meanwhile the stuff you need to know is actually a relatively short list; the game never actually forces you into any given solution. You can build a gigantic bus that hauls everything you could possibly need 5,000 tiles. Or you could haul everything on trains. Or just use bots. Doesn't matter, take your pick, they all do the job but gently caress I'm out of iron again well let's see that patch looks nice but that biter nest is big and I don't have artillery yet...well guess I'm researching that next. *8 hours later* ...where the gently caress did the day go?
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