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Sweeper posted:I’m on my first run still and I didn’t expect this. Went in totally blind so my spaghetti is wild, I can’t belt enough copper wire on a single line to make enough circuits (both red and green) for my liking. It’s like 2700 wire/minute (looks like a lot but isn’t lol) and I have to find a new copper ore area just to get more loving wire for these loving circuits For new people it can be fun to figure out things on your own so I'll spoiler out the alternative: 1 copper = 2 wires so wire takes up twice as much space. You're generally better off to belt in plates and build wire in assemblers that feed directly to your circuit assemblers. It makes your circuit areas take a little more space but is also way more flexible.
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Sep 3, 2020 16:54
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Sweeper posted:I’m on my first run still and I didn’t expect this. Went in totally blind so my spaghetti is wild, I can’t belt enough copper wire on a single line to make enough circuits (both red and green) for my liking. It’s like 2700 wire/minute (looks like a lot but isn’t lol) and I have to find a new copper ore area just to get more loving wire for these loving circuits Don’t belt copper wire. That’s a trap for new players. Wire takes more belt space than the copper plates that it is formed from. I’m not endorsing this exact design, but the basic idea of direct insertion from three wire assemblers to two circuit assemblers is a good one. 
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Sep 3, 2020 16:55
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That said it can be fine to belt copper wire locally, and whatever you end up doing for red circuits will almost certainly involve putting wire on a belt at some point. Just don't send wire anywhere distant, and avoid designs where the throughput of your wire belt is critical. For an example, in that green circuit set up it wouldn't limit anything if there was a belt between the wire assemblers and the circuit assemblers that the wire was temporarily on. It wouldn't be useful in any way, but the only thing it would cost in that case is vertical space.
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Sep 3, 2020 17:07
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While you certainly don't need to ratio out your entire factory, looking at basic ratios in terms of throughput can help you out a lot. If I want X/second of Y, what do I need to make that happen? Once you've figured that out, it becomes a lot easier to scale up, or to understand exactly how far a given setup can scale up before you need to either produce more in parallel, start splitting in more material, etc. Sometimes you'll do this for end products (like science) and other times you'll do it for things you know you'll need to keep scaling up on, and greens are the best example of this since they're the thing you need the most of that requires multiple inputs.
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Sep 3, 2020 17:28
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K8.0 posted:While you certainly don't need to ratio out your entire factory, looking at basic ratios in terms of throughput can help you out a lot. If I want X/second of Y, what do I need to make that happen? Once you've figured that out, it becomes a lot easier to scale up, or to understand exactly how far a given setup can scale up before you need to either produce more in parallel, start splitting in more material, etc. Sometimes you'll do this for end products (like science) and other times you'll do it for things you know you'll need to keep scaling up on, and greens are the best example of this since they're the thing you need the most of that requires multiple inputs. Where do you find the ratios? I feel like I’m missing obvious input/output speeds of items in the game
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Sep 3, 2020 17:34
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You have to deduce it from the craft time of the recipe, the crafting speed of the building performing the task, and the fact that some recipes produce multiples of an output. After a while it becomes second nature.
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Sep 3, 2020 17:43
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Fuzzy Mammal posted:You have to deduce it from the craft time of the recipe, the crafting speed of the building performing the task, and the fact that some recipes produce multiples of an output. After a while it becomes second nature. And then get speed modules and bust out the spreadsheet
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Sep 3, 2020 17:50
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If there is ever a moment of doubt the correct ratio is: MORE
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Sep 3, 2020 17:59
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Sweeper posted:Where do you find the ratios? I feel like I’m missing obvious input/output speeds of items in the game You can work it out from the in‐game numbers in the infoboxes and recipe information, or you can use a cheat sheet, planner, or calculator someone else has made.
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Sep 3, 2020 18:10
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Sweeper posted:Where do you find the ratios? I feel like I’m missing obvious input/output speeds of items in the game There's a calculator that will do everything for you but I think that ruins a lot of the fun. Most of it is simple stuff you can easily see in-game. A yellow belt can transport 15 items/second. Iron plates take 3.2 seconds to smelt. Stone furnaces have a crafting speed of 1. 15*3.2=48, so it takes 48 stone furnaces to turn a solid yellow belt of iron ore into plates. Steel furnaces and red belts are both twice as fast, so that number remains the same when you upgrade. Iron ore has a mining speed of 1 and electric drills have a speed of 0.5, so it will take 30 drills to saturate a yellow belt and 60 to saturate a red belt. Green circuits take 0.5 seconds to build and take 3 copper wire and 1 iron plate. It takes 0.5 seconds to make 2 copper wire. Both are modified the same way by assembler speed, so for assembler ratio purposes that's irrelevant. That means you need 1.5 assemblers of copper wire per green circuit assembler, leading to the 3:2 ratio, and given the 3x3 size of assemblers a relatively obvious way to position assemblers for direct feeding. Getting 2 copper wire from 1 plate and needing 3 copper wire to make 1 circuit also makes it obvious that it takes 1.5 belts of copper to make 1 belt of green circuits, while the 1:1 ratio on iron plates means you only need a single belt of iron. Make of that as you will, there are further design cues to be had there. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 18:12
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You absolutely don't need to get ratios exact, though. In fact with beacons and modules its often impossible to do so. What's useful is getting a sense for roughly how many assemblers of one thing you need to feed into the next thing, and roughly how many assemblers you can support on a belt of a given type. The cost of getting a ratio wrong is that some of your assemblers will idle, either because they lack input or because their output is saturated. Having idle assemblers costs you: space, a small amount of idle power and the materials that went into the assemblers. This is generally not much of a price to pay, except for when you're first getting started with serious beacon + module setups and then the ratios are pretty fuzzy anyhow. For an example: the green circuit array posted uses 3 wire assemblers to feed 2 green circuit assemblers, which is a design with 0 idling and building those can give you the warm fuzzies. Speedruns often use designs with 1 wire assembler feeding directly to 1 green circuit assembler, because they're much less fiddly to build and ease-of-build is more important in that scenario than the minor extra power draw of a 33% idle time on your green circuit assemblers. Spending a bunch of effort on exact ratios for things is a trap if your goal is building a factory. [E:] In general, the key metric for building an array of assemblers/furnaces/chemplants/whatever to make anything in Factorio is "am I getting enough stuff out of the business end". If yes, good enough. If no, expand the array. If you're not getting enough stuff at the input, expand the problematic input production and transport. Minimizing idle time when working at full speed can be a fun puzzle to solve if you like that sort of thing, but try not to trick yourself into thinking it's a necessary one. Xerophyte fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 18:20
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I'm just playing along and learning as I go. Only thing I looked up was how logistic robots work because I could not get them to do what I wanted. My main stumbling point right now is getting trains to work properly. I have had a simple setup with 2 trains and 2 or 3 signals, but now I went and added a bunch more with multiple trains running the same line, and I completely hosed everything so all trains are just "No path"-ing me and nothing runs. The wiki isn't really helpful as it has some point about "All signals must be placed to the right" which makes 0 sense
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Sep 3, 2020 18:29
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refleks posted:The wiki isn't really helpful as it has some point about "All signals must be placed to the right" which makes 0 sense Trains driving down a track obey the signals to their right, not the signals to their left. Most people build single-directional tracks, with signals only on the right side from the perspective of the train.
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Sep 3, 2020 18:31
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I think the miners : smelters ratios are the ones that are impossible to calculate from the in-game item cards, unless they've added more information. Thankfully, it's about 1 electric miner : 2 stone furnaces, and steel and electric furnaces are twice as efficient as stone furnaces. ...I think?
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Sep 3, 2020 18:36
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Xerophyte posted:Trains driving down a track obey the signals to their right, not the signals to their left. Most people build single-directional tracks, with signals only on the right side from the perspective of the train. Yeah, I figured that out after a while. Now I'm just trying to understand chain signals
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Sep 3, 2020 18:38
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Phobeste posted:Play space exploration mod and you can even out that stat while not getting any closer to actually ending a game, it’s great I kind of fell off after launching my first rocket so I figured, okay, I'll try this. The first thing I notice (after re-researching a bunch of stuff because research recipes changed), is that green circuits are made of copper wire and... wood?? The gently caress??? How does one get that much wood 
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Sep 3, 2020 18:46
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Solumin posted:I think the miners : smelters ratios are the ones that are impossible to calculate from the in-game item cards, unless they've added more information. Miners are “whatever fits on the ore patch”, smelters are “as many columns as my factory can use”, and if the ore isn’t backing up, it’s time to set up another outpost.
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Sep 3, 2020 18:49
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MonkeyforaHead posted:I kind of fell off after launching my first rocket so I figured, okay, I'll try this. I'm not familiar with this specific mod, but check your production buildings or research tab for a "greenhouse" building or something. Every mod I've played that used wood for anything important also added some building that could automate making it somewhere.
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Sep 3, 2020 18:50
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refleks posted:Yeah, I figured that out after a while. Now I'm just trying to understand chain signals chain signals basically act as a multiplexer for any chain/rail signals behind them, which ends when they hit rail signals. using regular signals (where G is regular signal showing green, and S is regular signal showing red) coming from the left G------S, a train will go all the way to the S and stop there now if we replace G with a chain signal (C) C-----S, a train will instead stop at C because it can't exit the block bounded by chain signal and regular signal. Basically you put chain signals to start where you want trains to not loiter, and use regular signals to indicate the end of the no loitering block
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Sep 3, 2020 18:52
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The worst thing about seablock is there's no reason to ever use trains
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Sep 3, 2020 19:03
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TKBs6TD7WU This video I watched helped me a lot with trains. Or it did theoretically, because I haven't set them up yet. Related - if I name my outposts the same thing "Iron Pickup" or whatever and set the condition to leave when full, would my trains just go to whatever ones are available and bypass any others when they're full?
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Sep 3, 2020 19:03
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Solumin posted:I think the miners : smelters ratios are the ones that are impossible to calculate from the in-game item cards, unless they've added more information. They fixed how mining speed is reported so it's much easier to do the math, and more intuitive. Ore speed * miner speed (and then productivity if you have that researched).
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Sep 3, 2020 19:05
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Vasudus posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TKBs6TD7WU You're gonna start learning how to use colored wire! If you make a bunch of, say, red wire, and connect all the chests at a train station together, and then red wire that cluster to a power pole, you can hover your mouse over the power pole and see the total of all the resources in those chests. Using that, you can connect the same cluster of red wired chests to the train station, and then tell the train station to only enable when the resources are equal to or greater than a full train load. This way, even if all your iron pickups are the same name, the only ones that'll enable are the ones with a full load.  Edit: the rabbit hole for colored wire goes deep, and once you hit the vanilla limit, there are a few train mods that will help you go even further beyond. XkyRauh fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 19:17
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I have hundreds of hours in this game and I'm still an idiot when it comes to anything involving the circuit network. What's the best way to tell my inserter to put a uranium fuel cell into the reactor when a) I'm low on steam in the network, AND b) there's no fuel cell already in use? a) is easy, but when the inserter activates it shoves 5 cells into the reactor, and some usually go to waste. How do I get it so that there's only ever one cell in the reactor at a time? The game won't let me connect a wire to the reactor itself.
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Sep 3, 2020 19:43
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:I have hundreds of hours in this game and I'm still an idiot when it comes to anything involving the circuit network. What's the best way to tell my inserter to put a uranium fuel cell into the reactor when a) I'm low on steam in the network, AND b) there's no fuel cell already in use? a) is easy, but when the inserter activates it shoves 5 cells into the reactor, and some usually go to waste. How do I get it so that there's only ever one cell in the reactor at a time? The game won't let me connect a wire to the reactor itself. Click on the inserter, there's an option to limit stack size so you can set it to only pick up 1 at a time.
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Sep 3, 2020 19:54
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:I have hundreds of hours in this game and I'm still an idiot when it comes to anything involving the circuit network. What's the best way to tell my inserter to put a uranium fuel cell into the reactor when a) I'm low on steam in the network, AND b) there's no fuel cell already in use? a) is easy, but when the inserter activates it shoves 5 cells into the reactor, and some usually go to waste. How do I get it so that there's only ever one cell in the reactor at a time? The game won't let me connect a wire to the reactor itself. Yeah, you're not allowed to read the state of object that uses up or makes factory items. Which sucks. The best I can recommend for you is a rate limiter that uses an arithmetic combinator fed to itself as a timer(by adding one every frame). Making a resetable timer requires you to feed an arithmetic combinator to a decider that either outputs zero or the sum based on a trigger, then that back to itself. Okay so now all you do is calculate how many frames you expect it to take before another input will be needed, and make your arm condition require both that and the steam. Use the same condition to reset the timer. If I'm right in my head that's 3 combinators
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Sep 3, 2020 19:58
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For something like that you need to do two things: 1) Limit the stack size on the inserter (just click on it, this is available for all inserters once stack inserter is researched). 2) Lock out the signal going to the inserter for enough time for your trigger condition (steam or accumulator amount) to turn off. This is complicated and I've only done it once or twice. As a much simpler alternative to #2, you can make a clock that goes off once per reactor cycle (200 seconds or 12000 ticks). This is just a constant combinator wired to a decider combinator: Constant - Output C 1, wired to input of decider Decider - C < 12000, output C input count, output wired to its own input Using steam as a decision factor, you can then take another decider: Inputs - Clock output, steam Output - To inserter Condition - C < 5, output steam input count (you may want to play with this value depending on your inserter type, you want to trigger the inserter long enough to complete one insertion cycle but no more) Inserter condition - Steam < trigger value Now, every 200 seconds the second decider will output the steam value to the inserter, for 5 ticks. The inserter checks if the steam is low enough to warrant inserting a new fuel cell, and then waits around for the next cycle. This cycle does not necessarily line up with the reactor's use of fuel cells or your base's power needs, so make sure your steam (or accumulator) buffers are big enough to survive skipping one cycle.
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Sep 3, 2020 20:13
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:I have hundreds of hours in this game and I'm still an idiot when it comes to anything involving the circuit network. What's the best way to tell my inserter to put a uranium fuel cell into the reactor when a) I'm low on steam in the network, AND b) there's no fuel cell already in use? a) is easy, but when the inserter activates it shoves 5 cells into the reactor, and some usually go to waste. How do I get it so that there's only ever one cell in the reactor at a time? The game won't let me connect a wire to the reactor itself. The simple way to do this is enable your extraction inserter when steam is low, and then the insertion one reads that inserter to see if a used cell is in its hand (with pulse mode) and insert a new fuel cell only then. Also set stack size to 1 on both. You will have to prime the reactor with it's first fuel cell to kick it off.
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Sep 3, 2020 20:29
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iirc how I've done it in the past is set it up to be based on when the spent fuel cell is removed from the reactor. Input wired to only go off while the output inserter is holding something. Output wired to only remove spent fuel cells when steam falls below X. That way your input can't toss 5 fuel cells in rapidly when your steam reserve dips, it can only put them in as fast as you consume them. e: what the guy above me said.
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Sep 3, 2020 20:31
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Space Exploration might be a tad too much for me, dropping it into an unmodded save changes way too many of the recipes around and I'm going to end up having to rebuild half my factory; and if I start a new game I'm presumably still going to have meteors dropping on my base every 10 minutes, but no repair bots or defense systems available to keep them from jacking my poo poo completely up. 
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Sep 3, 2020 21:12
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MonkeyforaHead posted:Space Exploration might be a tad too much for me, dropping it into an unmodded save changes way too many of the recipes around and I'm going to end up having to rebuild half my factory; and if I start a new game I'm presumably still going to have meteors dropping on my base every 10 minutes, but no repair bots or defense systems available to keep them from jacking my poo poo completely up. They drop randomly around the area you're playing in... yes, you're likely to have 2 or 3 unfortunate direct hits before you get some defenses put up, but really it's not that big a deal. You can also mine the asteroids that fall for free iron/copper/stone! Space Exploration is crazy.
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Sep 3, 2020 21:18
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:I have hundreds of hours in this game and I'm still an idiot when it comes to anything involving the circuit network. What's the best way to tell my inserter to put a uranium fuel cell into the reactor when a) I'm low on steam in the network, AND b) there's no fuel cell already in use? a) is easy, but when the inserter activates it shoves 5 cells into the reactor, and some usually go to waste. How do I get it so that there's only ever one cell in the reactor at a time? The game won't let me connect a wire to the reactor itself. My system is that I realized that I can't possibly ever run out of nuclear fuel once I'm up and running with Kovarex (or really even before then) so I ignore the waste, never store any steam, and just keep my reactors all running full bore all the time. 
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Sep 3, 2020 21:22
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XkyRauh posted:They drop randomly around the area you're playing in... yes, you're likely to have 2 or 3 unfortunate direct hits before you get some defenses put up, but really it's not that big a deal. You can also mine the asteroids that fall for free iron/copper/stone! Maybe I'll take a crack at it some other time, I was hoping for something I could slap onto a late-game save and start tooling around in, rather than something I'd need to spend another 100+ hours working my way back up to. Very few of my assembly lines work anymore and the nice straightforward layouts I had for things like inserters and conveyors are completely inoperable. Even if I tore this entire branch off my main bus and rebuilt it, these recipes feel like they're deliberately screwing with me. Burner inserters and long inserters take iron sticks but regular inserters don't. Only stack inserters take gears now. I also need to get motors and electric motors in here which means somehow adding copper plates/wiring to the mix along with red and green circuits AND using the previous tiers of inserters to build the next one and that's too many drat materials for one assembly line, come on man, I just wanted to putz around in space  e: another meteor just blew up a chunk of my iron production line while I was trying to work out how to get green research flowing again MonkeyforaHead fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 21:39
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The Locator posted:My system is that I realized that I can't possibly ever run out of nuclear fuel once I'm up and running with Kovarex (or really even before then) so I ignore the waste, never store any steam, and just keep my reactors all running full bore all the time. Same, but currently I have the issue of pulling 15GW and not having the sheer mass of fuel needed.. even with Kovarex 
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Sep 3, 2020 22:00
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necrotic posted:The simple way to do this is enable your extraction inserter when steam is low, and then the insertion one reads that inserter to see if a used cell is in its hand (with pulse mode) and insert a new fuel cell only then. Also set stack size to 1 on both. gently caress, how am I so stupid that I never thought of this. It seems so obvious in retrospect.
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Sep 3, 2020 22:28
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is there a good text writeup on the basics of LTN? I don't need it to do anything fancy just "when station a needs x of y material send train z to station b that has x of y material from a supply depot"
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Sep 3, 2020 23:44
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Manyorcas posted:I'm not familiar with this specific mod, but check your production buildings or research tab for a "greenhouse" building or something. Every mod I've played that used wood for anything important also added some building that could automate making it somewhere. I think Space Exploration specifically has a recipe to make circuit boards out of stone, instead. It makes growing trees late-game tech, last time I looked.
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Sep 3, 2020 23:44
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Saraiguma posted:is there a good text writeup on the basics of LTN? I don't need it to do anything fancy just "when station a needs x of y material send train z to station b that has x of y material from a supply depot" The mod forum has a post with a high level tutorial.
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Sep 3, 2020 23:50
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Saraiguma posted:is there a good text writeup on the basics of LTN? I don't need it to do anything fancy just "when station a needs x of y material send train z to station b that has x of y material from a supply depot" Take a look at TSM too - they both have strengths but TSM made more sense to me and was a more natural extension from vanilla train setups, so it's what I use.
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Sep 4, 2020 00:00
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:The game won't let me connect a wire to the reactor itself. If you're not averse to using mods, this can be done: Reactor Interface refleks posted:Yeah, I figured that out after a while. Now I'm just trying to understand chain signals Should a train be allowed to wait at this signal? If the answer is no, the preceding signal should be a chain signal. GotLag fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Sep 4, 2020 |
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Sep 4, 2020 00:57
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