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I'm curious, because I think I know how it works but I haven't been able to confirm - the game generates chunks a certain minimum depth into the fog of war, so even if you've eliminated all visible biter bases with artillery, there's biter bases still hanging around in the unexplored perimeter already generated and sending expansion parties. When artillery shells land in or near the fog of war, those chunks are considered "explored" for the purposes of pushing the generated map boundaries, correct? In other words, am I correct in believing that every time you fire into the fog of war you reveal tiles, you expand the generated map area and thus spawn new biter bases further away in the fog of war?
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Dec 31, 2017 18:22
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Gwyneth Palpate posted:Yeah. Tracks and locomotives don't actually produce any pollution, so biters almost never target them. Biters prefer to attack radars, turrets, players, and bots over pollution sources, too. Turrets and players makes sense; the AI has to go after things that are in range to kill it or it'll be ineffective. Killing radars prevents players from managing biter attacks by simply air-dropping in laser turrets (although this behavior predates 0.15 where Radars gave you map-mode visibility, it's still a good end result worth keeping). Pollution sources trigger biters to make attack squads and give them a destination - the fact that biters don't ignore threats they come across keeps biters interesting for longer before they become irrelevant. But going after tracks? From a practical standpoint, biters breaking train tracks they come across doesn't meaningfully increase vanilla biter threat, it just increases the tedium necessary to defend increasingly long supply lines. In vanilla, at least, it's relatively trivial to set up defenses that will withstand moderate biter attacks, and with the advent of artillery, it's simple enough to ensure that no larger biter attacks ever become possible except against heavily fortified bunkers.
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Jan 4, 2018 21:01
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:So, in my farthest-running game ever, I've got a tank and a nuclear reactor. I'm producing cement pretty fast (could be faster) but I think I am being held back by a lack of really wide production, assisted with robots. I am totally intimidated by purple science and setting up an actual Factory that's scalable and isnt just a line of plates with random chests and so on. Any advice on what to do? Am I going to eventually get overwhelmed by biters, if I keep having to trundle out every hour or so and blow up the closest nest or two? Is there a way to automatically just drop cement behind my tank anywhere it goes? If your problem is biters coming in, you don't really want to concrete over the world, as it will have a pretty noticeable effect on how far out your pollution spreads. If you have access to plenty of power and are manufacturing walls at a decent rate, you can "solve" your biter problem by walling outside the edges of your pollution. What you do, is you pick a point outside your pollution cloud, run power out to it, clear it out (either with a tank or via turret creep), and then set up a bunker - turrets, walls, power. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be able to survive biter attacks unattended for a while, because it'll be your main power backbone to the outer wall.Then you start extending a wall around your entire base outside of the pollution cloud, clearing biter bases as you go. You don't need a ton of turrets for this; I usually drop big power poles at max distance and use a pair of turrets on each. Once you have a defended wall outside your pollution area, biters cease to be a threat since the only thing they'll send into your turrets are relatively small expansion parties that won't overwhelm your light defenses, and their expansion into the pollution cloud will be entirely cut off. With no pollution reaching biter bases, they will not be able to generate large attack groups at all, and by preventing them from establishing new bases inside your perimeter, you don't need to clear out biter bases as often and thus the biters will evolve slower because you aren't killing their bases anymore. Plus, once you have a gigantic area of claimed space, you'll have plenty of area to figure out how to spaghetti things for purple science.
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Jan 6, 2018 19:45
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sharkbomb posted:I like the idea of using batteries to fuel bots! Make the batteries function just like typical fuel sources, except they are specific for bots. When they run out of battery power they just limp back to a roboport, and if they can't refuel they just stay docked. It would definitely make belt-heavy factories easier to set up and resupply, as well as more efficient in the long-term. Depending on implementation, this would either have basically no impact to actually being a stealth buff to bots. I suspect that there is no possible way for belts to ever compete with bots in the long run, because fundamentally belts always require a discrete path from point A to B and the tiled nature of the game limits the maximum amount of ways to overlap and organize this, something that's avoided by bots. It is possible to nerf bots and make them more expensive, but this only ever really serves to kick the can down the road in terms of the point where you have the resource income to switch from belts to bots. Bots are just easier. No need to figure out how to tap a line of resources and pull in materials or organize an efficient way to spaghetti belts through/past a group of inserters.
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Jan 13, 2018 17:44
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FISHMANPET posted:A fun way to do the exact opposite of that is the "AutoDesignate" mod. Every radar cycle if there's biter base or spitter in radar range, it will put a manual artillery target on it. It seems to jump all over the place, so instead of designating a biter nest for destruction, it just keeps taking pot shots at giant nests and sending gigantic armies towards the gun. I'm sure eventually it will settle down, but for now my frontier outposts are getting absolutely hammered. Thank God for Nuclear Power! Isn't this effectively a really roundabout buff to the passive artillery range? The mod isn't super clear on exactly how it works; does it designate a known target every time it scans a chunk, or only when it actually scans a chunk containing a spawner?
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Jan 23, 2018 20:36
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ninjewtsu posted:is there a way to pave over cliffs You can build cliff explosives, that will clear away the cliffs. Then you can pave the remaining area as you like.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:34
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DarkHorse posted:Electric furnaces are the next step up from steel furnaces. They're 3x3 instead of 2x2 though and have a really high power consumption, and unless you have lots of solar or nuclear power then you'll be burning lots of coal to power them. Steel furnaces consume 180kW to power them, the same as an Electric furnace. Steel furnaces generate 3.6 pollution, while Electric furnaces generate 0.9. Boilers only operate at 50% efficiency. If you're powering your electric grid through boilers, you could potentially be better off sticking with steel furnaces because you burn twice as much coal to do the same smelting. People cite the pollution numbers (because you need to run more boilers vs running steel furnaces), but that's not as cut and dry as people might think... Furnaces take 180kW of power to run. A pair of steam engines generates 1.8 MW of power, so one boiler feeding two steam engines can run ten electric furnaces. These are good, round numbers. 10 steel furnaces generate 36 pollution. 10 electric furnaces generate 9 pollution, plus the cost of running a boiler (27.6923 pollution), which is just very slightly higher than the steel furnaces. 10 electric furnaces also have a continual drain of 60kW on your electric system, so it takes 1/30th of another boiler in power (and pollution) to have the furnaces turned on at all. Not exactly breaking the bank on pollution, here, and for the efficiency-minded, you can place efficiency modules into electric furnaces - since the pollution of electric furnaces is only slightly higher, even a single efficiency 1 module in each furnace will cut your total pollution down below the equivalent in steel furnaces. Really, the main hiccup you can run into switching to electric furnaces is that suddenly you're powering all of these furnaces off your electric grid instead of directly from coal, meaning that if you just replace all your smelting without expanding power, you're probably going to run into power issues. Hell, this is probably part of the reason electric furnaces are 3x3 - so you can't just upgrade over steel furnaces without thinking about it.
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Feb 5, 2018 18:54
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Evilreaver posted:-Miners, jamming 3 Effect1's into them makes them not pollute at all so you don't have to bother with defense This isn't actually true; modules can only reduce to a minimum of 20% of the machines' base energy usage. A pair of Efficiency 2s is enough for any machine not otherwise affected by modules to hit that 20% cap. This also means that there's no way to completely elimination mining and production pollution, although because of the way pollution dispersal works an 80% reduction will certainly eliminate most if not all of the spread if you don't have other pollution sources nearby.
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Apr 17, 2018 20:51
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(also they can be powered on site with a dozen solars)
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ShadowHawk posted:You're both right. I'm the sort of person who has a spreadsheet of how to module my base as I play. If you're trying to minimize pollution: Yeah, this is also why adding speed modules to things with productivity paradoxically generates significantly less pollution. Fundamentally, though, in a vanilla game this is something that isn't really all that meaningful unless you're operating under some self-imposed restrictions, such as "no artillery" or "must minimize all pollution". Artillery provides an effective and efficient solution to creating a no-biter zone that is simple to expand out as your pollution expands - compared to the 0.15 solution of creating a giant wall outside your pollution cloud and stocking it with turrets, making little artillery outposts to clear large areas of biters is way more efficient in terms of both time and effort spent. Also, I've never really sat down and tried to figure out the combination of modules necessary to run "efficient" beaconed setups - the beacons themselves don't generate any pollution (aside from, potentially, what's generated to power them if you're not running off solar). Just doing some back of the napkin math here, four productivity modules increase energy consumption by +320% (and reduces speed by 60%). For a row of assemblers, you can get a maximum of 8 beacons in range of each assembler. To get the maximum "efficiency" boost, you'd need all your beacons to have a pair of Efficiency 3 modules in them (for a grand total of 400% reduced energy consumption) and you'd have no room for Speed modules. If you swap to 3 productivity modules and 1 speed module instead, you vastly increase your output (90% speed vs 40%) at a modest cost of 130% productivity vs the maximum 140%, and dramatically reduce the pollution generated per item (because items are crafted 2.25x as fast). However, this is ludicrously expensive in modules, only increases your assembler output by about 1/6th (vs non-moduled assemblers), and doesn't allow you to use the maximum amount of productivity. Considering the power requirements of beacons and the manufacturing requirements of all of these modules, what sort of time scale would you have to be operating on for this to be worth it vs just using 3xEfficiency3 and 1xSpeed3 in all your assemblers?
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Apr 18, 2018 10:24
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Evilreaver posted:Three 1s hit the cap a whole lot cheaper than two 2s For pollution reduction, which type of module you use depends on how many module slots you have available. 2 slots - 2x Efficiency 2 3 slots - 3x Efficiency 1 4 slots - 3x Efficiency 3 + 1x Speed 3 (or 3x Efficiency 1s) 3 slot machines are the cheapest because the way the numbers work out, you might as well just throw the 3x E1 modules in because it's cheaper than using 2x E2s or E3s and you can't otherwise benefit from that third slot without raising your consumption above 20%. You can do the same with 4 slot buildings, but in the long run using E3 modules and a Speed 3 generates less pollution, even though it's significantly more expensive to start. LLSix posted:Beaconing Efficiency modules is counterproductive with less than 4 or 5 targets. Beacons have a huge energy drain of 480 and that's not reduced by Efficiency modules. Even in dense layouts you're not saving a lot of energy and each module3 is a significant investment of both resources and energy to make. Beacons don't generate pollution by themselves, this was a discussion about minimizing pollution, not power usage, and I did specify a row of assemblers. Running beacons off solar power doesn't generate any pollution besides the fixed cost associated with manufacturing them in the first place. I don't have a spreadsheet or anything to sit down and figure out exactly where the breakpoint is in terms of the number of products you'd need per assembler to break even on pollution generated, but over the long run this does appear to be the most efficient option for minimizing pollution per craft available while also taking advantage of as much productivity as possible. Beyond this, you'd need to dig into circuit networks to turn off the assemblers and beacons when not needed to further reduce the pollution, or simply do without productivity modules - productivity modules inherently can never provide pollution savings, while speed modules can (provided their power generation is offset with more efficiency modules).
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Apr 18, 2018 18:10
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ShadowHawk posted:I did make that spreadsheet, and one of the lessons from it is that productivity modules are absolutely necessary for minimizing pollution. You use fewer inputs, meaning you don't need to craft those inputs. In some cases productivity modules reduce net pollution even without any other modules attached. Hmm, let me think about this for a second. Productivity modules don't just have increased power usage, they also have a pollution multiplier. At Prod 3, you get 10% more productivity but you also get a 10% pollution multiplier per craft. Let's say you've got 20% productivity going, and you've otherwise reduced your energy usage to 20% and your speed is 100% (making it equivalent in power per craft to a non-productivity assembler with only efficiency modules). With the productivity, in 5 crafts you'll have generated six end products, spent the same power as a default assembler, and generated 120% of the pollution (compared to a single craft). Without productivity, in 6 crafts you'll have generated six end products, spent more power than a default assembler, and generated 120% of the pollution (compared to a single craft). Yep, those numbers sure work out - requiring (100 / (100 + productivity bonus))% of the initial inputs for the end result is straight up an efficiency gain by virtue of requiring fewer precursors. So, even if you're trying to minimize pollution, maximum productivity at all times is still the best way to go. You just can't do it with the standard column of beacons / column of machines / column of beacons / etc. setup. Good to know.
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Apr 18, 2018 23:02
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LLSix posted:You can get by with just yellow bullets for a long time, so I'd suggest not worrying about upgrading to red bullets until you've cleared out the biter nests under your pollution cloud. Roughly triple the resources: 1 firearm magazine = 4 iron plates 1 piercing rounds magazine= 4 iron plates + 1 steel (5 iron plates) + 5 copper. Bullet damage is 5 damage vs 8. However - and this is a big however - you should be upgraded to piercing rounds by the time medium biters start showing up in any real quantity, because medium biters and up have physical resist. Mediums have 4/10% resist - they take 4 damage off the top and 10% of the remainder, so piercing rounds end up being around 4x as effective to start with. Nests also have a little bit of physical resist (2/15%) - not a ton, but it makes piercing rounds still twice as good as regular yellow bullets when clearing out nests, which is very helpful since the faster you kill the nest, the fewer rounds you end up having to spend on the associated biters.
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Oct 11, 2018 20:01
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You have the power of roboports and blueprints. Grab the sections of Solar City that would interfere in a blueprint. Place them down out of the way. Mark the sections that are in the way for deconstruction. Landfill and go straight through the now clear gap.
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Dec 10, 2018 19:37
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Toast Museum posted:I'm pretty sure any conversation about Factorio is automatically sperging Right angle inserters are a little more complex from a UX standpoint, and there's a perfectly serviceable mod to add them in. I don't think vanilla needs them, but I also wouldn't lose any sleep over them being added into the base game since the number of designs that are only possible with the use of right angle inserters is relatively small. Long-handled (red) inserters not being able to grab adjacent, on the other hand, is an odd complaint to me. I've never felt limited in what red inserters can do, because they bypass a specific restriction (grabbing and delivering adjacent) and you have to design differently to be able to use them. There's some complaints about the lack of filter/speed/stack functionality on red inserters, but like with right-angle inserters, there's a mod for that if you want it. I think the UX for it is less good than the UX for right-angle inserters, but it's still serviceable. On the other hand, long-handled inserters have a different set of restrictions on using them, and if you could grab and deliver adjacent, what makes red inserters not simply an upgrade over your standard yellows? Honestly, the inserters arbitrarily being restricted in terms of direction and red inserters having the dead zone is fine. A lot of what makes Factorio and similar games interesting is that they're optimization problems with arbitrary restrictions - as you start removing those restrictions, I feel like you'd lose a lot of the fun of the whole process of working around the limitations the game gives you.
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Dec 29, 2018 00:46
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corgski posted:Bots have way more throughput than belts in a given amount of space and a lot of that comes down to the limitations of vanilla inserters. Right angle inserters would allow increased density that would make belts competitive with bots (which really wouldn’t benefit from right angle inserters) Bots also use inserters, so any adjustments on that end isn't likely to close the gap. There's been a lot of words written about the gap between belts and bots and the blogs on the topic are good summaries, but if you want an even shorter summary about the problem of closing the gap between bots and belts, here it is: Belts have a maximum amount of throughput based on available physical space and the efficiency of your design - you can't realistically infinitely tile belt-based construction. Bots have a maximum amount of throughput based on the number of bots you construct. You can infinitely tile bot-based construction. In a game about automating production, one of these is self-reinforcing and the other is not.
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Dec 30, 2018 18:36
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Laser Turrets: - Range 24, Base 20 (laser) damage, 3 shots/sec. - 60 DPS Gun turrets: - Range 18, Base 5 (Physical) damage, 10 shots/sec (standard rounds) - 50 DPS - Range 18, Base 8 (Physical) damage, 10 shots/sec (piercing rounds) - 80 DPS - Range 18, Base 24 (Physical) damage, 10 shots/sec (uranium rounds) - 240 DPS On paper, this looks great. The problem with gun turrets is that Biters (but not Spitters) get Physical resistance - Medium and Big biters resist 8/10% physical, while Behemoths resist 12/10%. If you've got high evolution such that you're seeing lots of upgraded Biters, it's entirely possible that gun turrets alone don't do the job until you've put enough upgrades into them . Since you can get your upgrades to level to 4 with just red, green, and military science and turrets get an extra damage boost from research, this should only really be a problem if you've let pollution and evolution get completely out of hand while just not doing your defensive research, but depending on how much you're kept on the defensive and how slow you're teching up, you might need to switch to laser turrets for defense almost entirely until gun turrets are viable again (via more upgrades, or uranium ammo).
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Mar 19, 2019 22:39
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Evilreaver posted:I also did the math earlier in the thread (though not as comprehensively), even including armor values gun turrets always win dps/time-to-kill races tech-for-tech unless you're using yellow ammo The spreadsheet is a little off for 0.17 - medium biters are up to 8/10% - but it does a good job illustrating that gun turrets are king for DPS. Laser turrets remain the weapon of spot convenience - you don't need to supply them with ammo, only power, so they're easier to throw in outposts or other far flung areas. Personally, I wish flamethrower turrets had more of a niche... they do a lot of damage, but their limits mean they can't realistically operate on their own and they're typically overkill in vanilla.
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Mar 20, 2019 06:21
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Ixjuvin posted:Returning but newbie player here (the last time I really played Factorio the rocket defense was just a square placeholder graphic), i just got to crude oil and am kind of paralyzed by how obnoxious it is to route pipes. I spent my first few packets of blue science to unlock advanced processing, but I'm not really sure what i should be building - should i even bother thinking about how much i can support on the back of my 4 oil wells, or just build one of each product to get the assembly lines going? Also with red chips online I can build roboports and whatnot, what is a good early task to set my new robits to? Routing pipes gets a little more tolerable if you primarily use undergrounds whenever possible. Most of what you will initially care about from oil (i.e., plastic and to a somewhat lesser degree sulfur) comes from petroleum gas. However, basic oil processing gives you a return of 30 heavy, 30 light, and 40 petroleum gas, and if you are only really consuming petroleum gas, your refineries will get backed up with excess heavy and/or light oil, and stop processing crude, meaning no more petroleum gas, meaning no more plastic. Until you get access to Advanced Oil Processing (and, later, Coal Liquefaction), your options for consuming heavy and light oil (to free up space to obtain more petroleum gas) are basically limited to: 1: Build more holding tanks for Heavy and Light oil (no practical value beyond temporarily extending the length of time you are producing petroleum before it fills up) 2: Convert Heavy/Light oil into solid fuel (DO THIS) Blue science requires solid fuel anyways, so it's a really good idea to start producing lots of solid fuel (to make sure you don't get backed up on heavy/light oil). You'll eventually get backed up on solid fuel if you don't consume it, so you can phase out coal as a fuel and just start using solid fuel for everything - the main goal here is to make sure that petroleum keeps flowing for those delicious delicious plastics and sulfur. "Early" robots, meaning what you have access to with only red and green science, allow you to start taking advantage of construction robots, meaning you can set things up such that you no longer need to be physically present to construct things, and can use blueprints to lay down large constructions quickly and let your robots handle the task of actually retrieving the materials and placing them - useful for easily-tiled constructions and/or extending existing already-built sections of your base further. To be of use, construction robots need a few things: - Contiguous roboport coverage of all applicable areas, but more specifically: - Roboport access to any entity "ghosts" to construct them (such as the "ghosts" created by placing down a blueprint) - Roboport access to a logistic chest within the same logistic network that contains the objects to be constructed. - Available construction robots within the network Additionally, construction robots will automatically attempt to replace destroyed items within their coverage area (if replacements can be found within the network) and will automatically attempt to repair damaged items within their coverage area (if there are roboports with repair packs within the same logistics network). In short, if you place down a "ghost" yellow inserter within roboport coverage, a construction robot will be tasked to go retrieve a a yellow inserter from the closest logistics chest, fly it over to the "ghost" inserter, and put it in place. This may seem slow and crude at first, but each roboport can hold hundreds of robots, freeing you up from having to manually place repetitive constructions (such as a row of smelters) and allowing you to design and reuse blueprints for any commonly used constructions without the need to actually carry hundreds of materials around on you at all times.
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Apr 10, 2019 23:46
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I'm having trouble understanding some of this. Tenebrais posted:On the other hand, increasing amounts of biters is the only thing pushing the player to expand rather than go AFK for an hour or so while their one assembler each of science slowly churns out the next tech. Tenebrais posted:I think central to the problem with biters is the focus on making the attacks organic. Your pollution hits nests which spawn biters to attack. So until your pollution cloud is big enough to reach a nest you have no idea what kind of threat you'll face or from where. And later you have a visible radius to destroy every nest in to be completely secure from biters. Tenebrais posted:If I were designing I'd have the biters as a whole attack you in a gradual curve triggered by the pollution you generated anywhere, spawned from the nearest nest(s), regardless of whether they're in your cloud or not. Measure it out to gradually test your defences (the first wave or two could be fended off with your initial pistol and ammo before they do real damage, gradually require bigger defences). Having it triggered by total pollution generated rather than absorbed means that newer players taking it slow will be less pressured than experienced ones going all-out from the start, but the pressure will still ramp up over time proportionately. If the goal was to have a single fixed location and to make the strength of attack waves more or less predictable and consistent across games (based on similar production levels and growth), this would make more sense to me. This works as long as you can assume the base is roughly in the same central spot. However, there's a number of ways Factorio demands that the player expand, focused around acquiring additional resources. What with the need to continually acquire resource patches further and further away, it becomes harder to make a consistent (and efficient!) determination of which biter bases are "closest". This is one of the ways the "organic" pollution cloud system excels - when the pollution cloud is spread over biter nests, those nests start absorbing pollution to fund attacks. This is also subject to abuse, however - if attacks always originate from the closest bases, then the optimal strategy to trivialize biter attacks is to "claim" the closest biter nests, leaving them intact but ringing them with static defenses, leaving you free to expand, "claiming" additional bases as necessary. A strategy similar to this already exists - if you surround a spawner with a sufficiently thick barrier of pipes/walls, you can block it from actually spawning anything while it still absorbs pollution. Under your proposed changes, destroying biter bases becomes less appealing in general because if you destroy one of the "close" bases that's sending attacks, you aren't reducing the amount of biters coming in - instead, you've simply redirected the incoming attack waves to start coming from a new direction where you may or may not have any static defenses built. This creates an incentive to not destroy any biter bases unless absolutely necessary - if you go out and clear biter bases, suddenly you don't really know where the next attack waves will come from until they appear, which seems to be the opposite of what you intended.
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Jul 31, 2019 19:59
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Taffer posted:What's the secret to trains in this game? I have a total blast in this game, but by the time I get to the point where I need more than a handful of mining outposts my drive just fizzles out because the logistics of trains are such a pain in the rear end. There seem to be so many ways to do trains and they all seem to be really frustrating. How do you all do it? Taffer posted:Yeah, this is basically what I'm doing now. The problem is it doesn't seems scaleable - I have separate stations for each material type and they're going painfully slow and backing up like crazy. I guess I can try and figure out how to make usable stackers behind each station so that they don't just back up for miles - I've never built one of those but it's probably the next step. So I'm going to discuss the paradigm I typically use, which can be simplified as "producers and consumers". There are any number of ways to approach the problem of delivering resources to the place they're used, but this one works with the general way I end up designing my base. I use a pretty standard main bus design for my base, where usable resources (iron, copper, steel, plastic, circuits, etc) are transported along a linear path and then I have manufacturing sections branch off the main bus, splitting resources off the main bus lines as needed. This simplifies the general basic design for resource delivery - all usable resources end up on the main bus. As far as my assemblers are concerned, the main bus is the "producer" of resources and they are the consumer. However, as far as my train network is concerned, the outposts are the "producers" of resources and the main bus is the "consumer". ---- Here I'll describe the path of adding a new iron patch and connecting it to the network. Let's take an iron mining outpost as an example A new iron patch is located. The rail network needs to be extended to reach the new iron patch. I use a two-lane system. - An intersection is constructed off the existing rail network and signaled, to accommodate incoming and outgoing trains. - The rail network is extended out near the new iron patch to connect to the station. An outpost needs to be constructed at the destination to handle loading of iron ore. Once I've decided where I want the outpost to be, I'll construct the train portion of the outpost, which consists of a few parts: - The off-ramp, where incoming empty trains leave the main rail line to head to the station - A holding area or "parking lot", where multiple incoming empty trains can sit waiting for the station to be free without obstructing rail traffic elsewhere. - From the parking lot, the rail lines follow a one-way route that leads "out", as in the path returns to the on-ramp that rejoins the rail network. This includes branches to one (or more) loading stations where trains will actually be loaded from the outpost, before merging back on to the on-ramp and heading back out to the rail network for delivery. - The loading station is constructed, based on whatever size train you are using. Typically, I load from both sides, with incoming belts of material delivering to stack inserters which load into chests to buffer for a train's arrival, and then stack inserters load the train directly from chests. Since I use 4 cargo wagons, this means there are 8 total belts going to the station. I'll start putting down the belts, working backwards from the station, until I can line up all 8 belts together neatly, and place down an 8-lane belt balancer. - - Any incoming material will feed into this 8-lane balancer and spread it evenly across all 4 loading wagons. I want to avoid a scenario where my mining outputs are unbalanced. - Now circuits get involved. I connect all of the loading chests together so that I can get a combined count of how much ore is actually in the chests as a buffer. - - Since each cargo wagon holds 2000 ore, and I use trains with 4 wagons, I want to know when all of the chests combined reach at least 8000 ore. - Now I connect the train stop to the network, using the circuit network to set conditions. I only want the station to be enabled so long as there is at least 8000 ore between all of the chests - - If there isn't enough ore to fill at least one train, then I want the station to be disabled. This stops trains from coming to the station and waiting. - Once the train stop is configured, I go ahead and give it the appropriate name. Since this is an iron mining outpost, we'll call it "Ore Loading - Iron". - - Note that if I have any other iron mining outposts, their train stops will also have the same name. Any trains that are scheduled to make stops at "Ore Loading - Iron" will choose the nearest available station with that name. Since the stations are only enabled when they have enough resources to load a full train, I don't have to worry about setting up dedicated trains for each outpost. - - - Instead, I have one type of train with a route that looks something like this: Go to "Ore Loading - Iron" and wait until full. Go to "Ore Delivery - Iron" and wait until empty. Go to "Main Parking Lot", and wait 15 seconds. More on this in a moment - Now that the rail line is set up and the station is build and configured, I'll go ahead and actually build the mining portion of the outpost itself - putting down the miners and belts. I don't have to worry too much about this part; all of the miners output into the giant 8-way belt balancer I've already put down, which will more or less evenly distribute the output of the miners between the chests used to load into the train. - At this point, the outpost is ready and working - existing trains will start routing to the outpost whenever it's sufficiently full. I may or may not add additional trains to the network, depending on whether or not I'm expanding my iron ore production or compensating for an older outpost that's been used up. ---- The mining outpost "produces" iron ore for the train network, which delivers it to destinations that "consume" it. This is only one piece of the puzzle, but you should be able to extrapolate from here more or less what the rest of my design probably looks like. - Mining outposts are set up so they turn on when they have enough buffered material to load a train. - Trains that want to collect iron ore will select the nearest enabled outpost. - Since outposts turn off when they don't have enough material to load a train, this means that as outposts deliver material, they'll turn themselves off and trains will route to other, "ready" outposts instead, ensuring that trains minimize the time they spend waiting to be filled. As far as "consumers" go, there's really one major "consumer" for iron ore - smelting it into iron plates. All iron ore gets delivered to an iron plate outpost, which is similar to the mining outpost - incoming full trains are directed to a station where they are rapidly unloaded onto belts which are balanced and loaded into buffer chests, which are then unloaded and balanced out to feed ore to smelters. The smelters offload plates into a giant belt balancer, which evenly feeds plates into an iron plate loading station, which works just like the iron ore station - plates are loaded into chests, which are connected to the signal network, which turns on the train stop when the buffer chests are filled with at least enough iron plates to completely fill a train. Our smelting outpost is really two outposts in one, with two separate stations that feed into each other - an iron ore "consumer" that feeds an iron plate "producer". The iron plate "producer" station uses its own trains that operate on a separate "iron plates" schedule, that collect "produced" iron plates and feed it to equivalent iron plate "consumer" stations. If you need to expand iron plate "production", you can expand the size of your existing outpost, or construct additional, independent outposts as needed. From a design standpoint, managing resource demand under this paradigm is pretty simplified. Are your "producer" outposts constantly full while your "consumer" outposts don't have enough materials? Build more trains. Are your "producer" outposts not meeting the demand of your "consumers"? Build more "producers". With all mining and smelting outsourced to outputs, your main section of your base can, for example be cleaned up and dedicated to loading materials onto your main bus for manufacture, or set up distributed outpost manufacturing or whatever. The sky's the limit.
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Sep 7, 2019 23:16
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Taffer posted:So in your setup, an iron train is always an iron train? When demands shift do you manually add/remove trains from certain item types to something else? As far as re-purposing trains goes.... the general assumption I work with is that resource consumption will always go up over time, so I'll always need to add trains, and so there will never be a reason to reduce throughput. If the existing count of, say, iron ore trains are sitting around inactive, it's one of two things. If the trains are sitting around empty, it's because I'm not producing enough iron ore - maybe I expanded manufacturing and now have more resource demands, maybe an outpost dried up, whatever. In this case, I need more mining outposts, not fewer trains. If the trains are sitting around full, it's because I'm not consuming iron ore and producing iron plates fast enough - either my smelters are producing more iron then I need at the moment, or I need more smelters. Getting rid of trains wouldn't solve either of these problems. Your number of trains is your throughput, ultimately. Once you've got a decent train system going, adding trains improves throughput, removing trains reduces it. Something to be mindful of, however - hypothetically, let's say that you have 10 trains empty and waiting for one of your outposts to be ready. One of your outposts fills up to a train's worth of ore and your circuit switch there enables the train stop. What will happen is that ALL TEN of your trains will start heading over to that outpost. When the first one reaches the outpost, the rest of the trains will still be en route. If there's another open outpost by that time, the remaining 9 trains (plus any new trains that unloaded and returned to the parking lot) will all want to start heading over there. Your rail infrastructure needs to be able to handle this by ensuring no matter where a train decides to change its mind, there's always a way for them to get there without going through a station that might shut itself down. Make sure there's always a way for queued up trains to leave outposts without passing through any train stops, and make sure trains can always turn around without necessarily having to go through an outpost.
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Sep 8, 2019 12:35
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ShadowHawk posted:What speed/productivity for drills do blue belts become insufficient? Does outputting directly onto a splitter double that? Let's answer the first question in the nerdiest way possible. So some back of the napkin math here - an electric drill will output 0.5 ore/second. Blue belt throughput is 45 items/second, so to fill both sides of a blue belt "normally" you'd need 90 miners, 45 on each side - the 45 number is what we're looking at here, and to keep the math looking neat, I'm going to refer to the base drill speed as 1 (even though it's actually 0.5) and the target output rate as 45 (even though it's actually 22.5 items/second). At this is really just some basic algebra Where S is equal to the bonus speed (with 100% being equal to 1) and P is equal to bonus productivity, 45 (our target rate) = 1 (base rate) * (1 + S) * (1 + P). The maximum possible speed you can get on a single miner in vanilla is 12 beacons (600%) + 3 speed modules (150%), for 750% bonus speed (or 850% total speed). At maximum speed, this means your miner would be spitting out 8.5x the base rate - still short of the target rate of 45. So to get the total amount of productivity, we just divide 45 by the current speed (8.5). 45 / 8.5 = ~5.2941, or ~529.41% total productivity and 429.41 bonus productivity. At 10% per productivity research, this means you'd need 43 levels of mining productivity research to beat out the maximum throughput of one side of a belt Let's say you're not using beacons and only adding in the three speed modules - in this case, your total speed is 250%, so you'd need a grand total of 1800% productivity, or 170 levels of mining productivity research to oversaturate a belt with a single miner. In practice, well before this becomes remotely an issue you're not going to care. By the time you have the resources and productivity to do things like create an entire ore mining outpost with speed modules and have the productivity to worry about a single lane of miners filling up a blue belt, it's simple enough to output directly to provider chests and let bots do the work.
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Sep 21, 2019 00:49
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M_Gargantua posted:First: I feel like 0.17 is much better about this, because if you really, really just can't figure out how to deal with excess heavy/light oil, you can always just turn some of your refineries back to basic oil processing or only make a small advanced oil setup exclusively for your heavy/light oil products and otherwise solely use the basic oil recipe which only produces petroleum gas.
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Nov 12, 2019 04:05
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Evilreaver posted:No. Gun turrets are essentially flat upgrades as long as you can supply them with ammo. You're likely to be using yellow and AP rounds for most of the time this is actually relevant, but it should come as no real surprise to learn that uranium rounds are king and the primary benefit of lasers is the lack of a supply chain necessary to sustain them, meaning they are very convenient defenses. Behemoth biters got upgraded defenses since that post was written (up to 12 flat) but that still doesn't put laser turrets ahead of AP unless you have been neglecting your physical projectile damage research - if you have blue science for lasers, you can research Physical 5, and if you're seeing behemoth biters without having the underlying tech to defend against them and need lasers to get through their damage, something has gone terribly wrong and you're probably in a failure cascade.
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Dec 4, 2019 12:39
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Travic posted:Is nuclear power really that bad for UPS? I'm using nuclear and solar at the moment and trying to phase out nuclear, but I'm running out of space. Space is infinite, but infinity is full of biters. My CPU is about 6 years so hopefully it can handle 1k SPM. Off the top of my head, it's something about the heat pipes. Solar is king because it has no "moving parts", so to speak - you plop down a solar panel, it just generates power, no inserters, belts, or fluid physics required. As far as trains go, assuming you're not using any train mods, there's a number of different ways people have approached the problem... Any train station in your main logistics network can pretty trivially have requester chests and stack inserters. If all of your train routes involve at least one regular stop somewhere inside your logistics network, problem solved. On the other hand, if you have trains that operate outpost-to-outpost (like, say, picking up ore from one outpost and delivering it to a smelting outpost), you might have trains that never stop inside your logistics network. One solution to that, amusingly, is more trains. Set up each of your outposts to have a local logistics network (disconnected from your main one) and create a new stop at each outpost that exists to offload supplies - in this case, fuel. Drop a (stack) filter inserter and a provider chest on the output, maybe do a little bit of basic wiring to limit the outpost to only stock one or two trains' worth of fuel max, and just give every train stop a requester chest tied to the local logistics network so your trains top off fuel at every opportunity. This is basically the "supply train" paradigm - you can expand the fuel delivery train from carrying just fuel into more generic base-building supplies. Set the train to stock itself with robots, buildings, belts, everything you'd need to get an outpost going, set the train stop to turn itself off when it's stocked, and you can have one (or more) supply trains quietly keeping your outposts stocked on food, ammo, and robots in the background. Then, whenever you want to set up a new outpost, you only need to bring tracks and a starter kit to build a stop to summon the supply train, and then the supply train will show up, offload a bunch of materials and robots into your new outpost's local network, and then you can let the robots handle the work of actually constructing the outpost without needing to personally lug around a ton of materials.
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Apr 15, 2020 21:36
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I've recently unlocked nuclear weapons, and not a moment too soon because i have biters nonstop crawling through holes or gaps in my walls and into my base. while i'm trying to nuke their bases closest to my production centers (since that's way faster than the tank) i just realized that they've killed all 800+ of my construction bots. is there a better way to get the biters to back off, i'm under attack from virtually all angles now. i still have lots of logistics bots at least (they're the ones dropping off my atom bomb parts). i'd like to get things to stabilize but i'm worried i'm on the verge of collapse since they are really starting to inflict damage faster than i can repair it Bad news - you're on the verge of collapse. Short of eliminating all "non-critical production" (which you might not be able to do, depending on how your base is set up), to reduce the size of your pollution cloud, the only way to get out of the hole is to eliminate all the biter bases in your pollution cloud. Bolster your defenses as much as possible so that you can take trips out without losing chunks of your base, saddle up, and get to clearing bases. Nukes can help with manually clearing bases quickly, so if you already have a big stockpile you can drive around and nuke down a bunch of bases. If you can bolster your defenses long enough to go out and kill the biter bases that are being touched by pollution, you can dig your way out of the hole. If you can reduce your pollution generation by turning off science, you can buy yourself some time by reducing the severity of incoming attacks. Ultimately until you push all the biter bases outside your pollution cloud this problem will only get worse.
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Aug 6, 2020 21:21
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Qubee posted:Too late to help out now but I usually turn biter expansion off. I find biters fun in the early to midgame, but lategame they just become an absolute chore to keep tidy. It ends up taking away from the fun of the game when I have to keep going out on excursions to wipe them out. Mithaldu posted:the task of the game is to automate it This really is the long-term solution - once you have access to artillery, you can very efficiently set up and leapfrog zones of artillery coverage out to the edge of your pollution cloud, and then encircle your pollution cloud with artillery bases (which will have the secondary benefit of passively clearing out a wider swath of biter bases and keeping bases from spawning within their zone of coverage. Prior to artillery, you can more or less accomplish the same thing by building a giant defended wall around your base and expanding it until it completely encompasses your pollution cloud, preventing biters from being able to expand into polluted areas, but it's much more labor intensive (although setting up dedicated combat robot manufacturing can make the process easier if you feel like manually clearing biter bases instead of relying on laser turret creep. If you're feeling particularly spicy, you can set up train gun outposts, where you have a train of artillery wagons patrol between various outposts around the edge of your base, eliminating the need to actually directly connect your outposts to your base (your military train can double as a supply/repair train to resupply outposts automatically with turrets/ammo/bots/etc.
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Aug 7, 2020 13:21
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Duzzy Funlop posted:I've got the "cannot connect systems with different fluids"-bug for the second time in my 1.0 playthrough now, and the second time is infinitely more frustrating. Unfortunately (for you) usually when this crops up it's not a bug, it's a leaky mess of piping being cross-contaminated by accident - in other words, you screwed something up at some point. You can't mix fluids between pipes, and the moment you connect an "empty" section to a section that has existing fluid, that fluid will spread more or less instantly and render the new "empty" pipes as containing fluid - if your pipes are being contaminated with the "wrong" fluid it's because they're connected to a pipe system that has the wrong fluid in it. This will happen even if all inputs and outputs are disconnected, because existing fluid will spread itself more or less evenly through the pipe network without any external help. In other words, if you have pipes with fluid already in them, you can cut those pipes off from all inputs and outputs and as soon as you attach new "empty" pipes, fluid will flow into the new section basically instantly. Cross-contaminated piping is a pain in the rear end and the simple and sanity-preserving solution is to rip out your piping at scale and redo it, because to try to remove fluid from existing pipes is a monumental pain in the rear end. When you try and piecemeal it what often happens is that "empty" pipes that aren't actually empty get left in place and re-contaminate the system.
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Aug 31, 2020 13:22
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The Locator posted:I installed Big Brother into my existing game and researched up all the radar ranges then ran out and plopped down the radars to expand my view area. Ignorance is indeed bliss. Factorio only generates new chunks* as needed and maintains a generated border about 3 chunks thick outside of the visible explored area to ensure that player exploration is never hampered by the need to generate new map chunks on the fly**. Because of this, it is impossible to stop all attacks by preemptively eliminating all biters and nests from the generated area - the 3-chunk wide border area** will naturally contain biters and their nests, and the biters will expand normally, both around the border and into the visible area. Even if the player eliminates all visible nests and proceeds to investigate where the biters keep coming from, exploring the border area to eliminate the hidden biters that exist there simply pushes back the border and causes more of the map to be generated, invisible to the player until they explore those chunks which causes the border to expand around those areas, and so forth. In the vanilla game, without console commands, there is no way to eliminate the biters hiding in the "invisible" border without exploring the chunks - artillery turrets/wagons can, with sufficient range, fire into the unexplored "border" chunks but will explore them as a consequence of firing into them, causing more map tiles to be generated further away. * A chunk is a section of map 32x32 tiles large **The game will, under some conditions, pre-generate additional chunks beyond the 3-tile border as needed - for example, if pollution would spill out into a chunk that hasn't been generated yet, the game will generate that chunk to properly account for the effects of the pollution.
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Feb 23, 2021 08:32
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LonsomeSon posted:Seems like a situation which is just crying out for a nuclear-artillery-shell rapid-delivery service. You can theoretically infinitely push out the borders passively by upgrading artillery range - each range upgrade makes your artillery turrets/wagons passively fire an additional two chunks further. If you do this long enough, the game will lag hilariously the moment your research completes as all your artillery suddenly detects thousands or tens of thousands of new targets and have to decide who to shoot at. Last time I did it, the biter AI just broke as retaliation parties would simply give up and stop moving halfway to their destination, leaving periodic ambushes I'd stumble into hours later setting up a new train route to a resource. Edit: also, for fun, eventually you can use manual targeting to generate ludicrously large chunks of the map, at the cost of massively increasing your ram burden every time you do this.
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Feb 23, 2021 21:31
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Larry Parrish posted:You can get like 15 defenders at once if you're at the point where youre pumping out nades, and they're pretty good if you have the first couple damage and attack speed upgrades. Grenades are probably better and faster still, but defenders have more range and save brain-cycles for juking acid spit Defenders are seriously underrated as an early-mid game tool. I feel like this is in part because getting meaningful use out of defenders (and the later upgraded combat robots) can't be accomplished at the scale manual crafting permits, and setting up dedicated automation to churn out defender bots (not to mention spending the research required to acquire and upgrade them) more or less has to be done proactively, or at least when you're in a situation where you have enough breathing room to accomplish this - and it's possible to be in a situation where you're scrambling just to keep the base from being overrun. Also, they're consumables, and some people hate relying on consumables. But they bridge a combat gap before you get access to other tools, allowing you to take out bases with worms in a straight up fight, and remain useful even once you get access to tanks and power armor, since you can deploy capsules while using vehicles. A handful of Defenders does a great job mowing down the hordes of biters chasing you around while you focus on the more dangerous threats, which also is a key part of their utility - you don't have to really focus on what the Defenders are doing, you just deploy them and they'll shoot everything nearby, allowing you to focus your attention on dodging or driving or whatever.
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May 13, 2021 08:38
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KillHour posted:I'm pretty sure killing biters doesn't actually increase evolution, but killing nests does. So is a trade-off between evolution from pollution and revolution from nest eradication. Correct. Evolution is only affected by three things: - Time - Killing Nests - Pollution Generation Of the third, what happens to the pollution after its generation doesn't matter - whether it's absorbed by trees, eaten by land/water tiles, or eaten by biters nests, it's all the same as far as evolution factor is concerned. IOW, biter nests guzzling down smog doesn't directly matter as far as evolution is concerned. The primary practical reason to push your walls/defenses outside of your cloud is that letting new bases be spawned inside your cloud means dealing with those attacks constantly (and/or clearing out the bases at an additional evolution cost) instead of dealing with the much smaller expansion parties.
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Dec 1, 2021 20:27
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K8.0 posted:If you produce approximately 2,223 pollution defending against a biter nest, you've caused more evolution than if you destroyed the nest. Practically speaking, that could definitely happen, but it's not like a nest being in your cloud for 2 minute is going to cause more evolution than killing it. There's an easier* way to do that, which is surround nests with sufficient walls such that the biters can't actually spawn out of their nests. (*May not actually be easy). The nests will continue to eat pollution but won't actually spawn anything. The bonus is that the one-time material cost is substantially cheaper and there's no risk of a particularly bad wave breaking out. In terms of evolution, naturally, it's more or less irrelevant as evolution triggers off of any pollution generated and isn't affected by how or when that pollution is absorbed, but from what I understand a few captive biter bases will hoover up a surprising amount of pollution.
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Dec 2, 2021 01:12
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xzzy posted:This must be a rampant ai thing because I've never had expansions set up so close to my defenses but hey, if you wanna fling yourself against my flamethrowers you go right ahead dudes. I got lots of oil. KillHour posted:I don't think it's rampant I've had it happen before in vanilla. Biter bases will try and expand into a spot between 3-7 chunks away from existing bases, so over time expansion parties will eventually colonize spots that are very close to (but still out of range of) your defenses.
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Jan 24, 2022 22:28
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The Locator posted:Yeah... I don't like constantly tearing down and rebuilding mining outposts. I don't remember what the settings are for this game but definitely tuned up. Technically a sufficient quantity of landmines will prevent damage to the walls, but then your robots need to replace those. Defenses are inherently ablative, but once you're at the point where you have artillery you don't really need to wall off an area anymore. It takes some effort to get a base defense supply train setup going, including designing your military outpost blueprint, but once you've got that it's an extremely efficient way to deny whole chunks of the map to biters. Want to expand a bit more to the south? Run a rail that direction (covered by your existing artillery defenses), plant the outpost blueprint, and then the military supply train will show up and get the party started. From there, you now have another big chunk of map covered - any biters that expand into the area get cleared by your expanded artillery coverage, and it's very efficient in terms of defensive resources because the biters are being provoked to attack your fortified outpost, rather than covering every square tile of perimeter as you continue to expand. As you get more artillery coverage, you need fewer outposts / can cover a larger area with the same resources. Clearing out chunks of the map manually /leapfrogging artillery a few chunks at a time is a sucker's game - plop down a defensive outpost with artillery (and possibly with a station for an artillery wagon) wherever you want to expand and get back to designing your factory while your trains and robots do all of the grunt work for you.
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Jan 25, 2023 23:21
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goodness posted:Made some progress and I'm at 90% researched Rocket Silo, but we have a bit of a monster problem. I've largely been able to avoid combat besides exterminating minor colonies with the tank. However, I've slowly been surrounded by the enemy and not sure on best course of action. Biters and pollution exist to basically put pressure on you and prevent you the player from simply winning the game by very slowly researching and assembling a handful of things at a time. In order to outpace the biters, eventually you need to remote / automate defenses (turrets), construction/repair of your base and defenses (bots), and even permit remote attacking of biter bases (spidertrons). Incrementally, there are a bunch of tools that you can use to throw back the biter menace and clear bases out of the pollution cloud - combat robots are a mid-game consumable option that will permit you to manually clear out bases with the tank far more effectively, if you aren't ready to set up the wall + artillery, but ultimately the wall of defenses + artillery is the final defensive option, because artillery will prevent biters from expanding into its passive range, and you can (manually) use the artillery remote to clear bases out of a much larger area, to push the line of your defenses forward more quickly and safely than driving out with a tank. In short, you build up your defenses on a side, place (and supply) your artillery, and then use the remote to delete bases and clear an area. Then you can expand into the cleared area, build more defenses, place more artillery, and keep moving forward until you've cleared and expanded past your pollution cloud, at which point you can rely on your passive defenses outside the cloud to prevent biters from expanding into the cloud and getting aggressive. So, if you're close to the point where it would be feasible to get artillery manufacture and supply going, I'd prioritize that - even if you get the rocket research finished, you still have to construct the silo, construct all the components for a rocket + satellite, and then launch, which is a whole lot of assembly that you probably don't have done yet, and if you're unsure about your ability to hold out against the biters, you should probably consider rapidly reinforcing your defensive situation first, because artillery pays off in spades in terms of letting you handle things without having to spend time driving out manually clearing bases. edit: The General posted:My strategy for bug hunting is plop down a turret, and load it with ammo. Then put down another one closer, delete the first one and put it closer, until it's close enough to aggro. Run a little closer, fire some explosive rockets at the spawners, retreat into the safety of the turret coverage for the next wave of bugs, and repeat. Then run in with a flamethrower to clear up the spitting worms since they appear to be rocket resistant. Combat robots are kind of the final missing link. You can deploy them from vehicles, and even when you've gotten to the point where you can field a squad of multiple spidertrons, they're still tremendously useful if you want to manually go out and clear biter bases because the additional damage they put out for you makes advancing into and clearing biter bases much more rapid, and the faster you actually can move into and clear the bases, the less biters that spawn and the less incoming damage you have to worry about. The problem with combat robots is that, as consumables you're going to use in quantity, you really need to devote some assemblers to produce them in quantity and spend them, and it feels like some people find them wasteful because eventually they (and tanks) get obsoleted by artillery (and spidertrons). On the other hand, combat robots are fun and having a swarm of 100 destroyers annihilating everything in your path while your extremely resilient speedy robot delivers the death robot swarm is a satisfying and engaging way to manually clear biter bases. Olesh fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 02:23
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KillHour posted:If you're still moving or crafting anything by hand by the time you have yellow/purple science, you need to stop doing that and automate it. I feel like combat robots sit in this weird spot where it's early enough that people craft them by hand to try them out, are kind of disappointed with them, and never bother to invest further, especially seeing that the next "upgrade" in the chain doesn't even move and the defenders you start with are one robot at a time. Which is a shame, because destroyer robots are quite fun to use! But if you can research destroyer robots, you can almost certainly also research artillery and start working on a more permanent automated solution.
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Feb 26, 2023 04:40
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A Bakers Cousin posted:What mod is Dosh using to place those clean up blueprints to pick up the extra fuel cells? I'm pretty sure it's Recursive Blueprints, as I think he mentioned setting up a circuit to redeploy blueprints for the thrower inserters earlier in the video in order to change the throw distance.
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Mar 22, 2023 01:10
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GetDunked posted:How does one go about refueling in vanilla anyway? The condition to start/stop for certain numbers of items seems to only use the cargo and not the contents of the locomotive proper, so I can't just do something like add a coal stop to the schedule and top it up if it's under 50 coal or what have you. I guess I could set it up so that it just stops there for 10 seconds unconditionally and it gets whatever fuel it gets. People have covered this more or less, but I get the impression that you're routing your trains to stop at a designated fuel depot as part of their route - while this will probably work fine (especially with stack inserters, it's not hard to keep locomotives topped off on fuel this way), mostly people just set up (some of) their train stops to include fuel and automatically refuel any locomotives that show up. This isn't too much of a hassle to, say, split off part of a belt of coal and run it past all your unloading stations - it's not much additional complexity to wrangle with even very spaghetti belt style loading stations already in place. But if you're thinking about switching to solid fuel, do it. Solid fuel is a nice QOL upgrade -because while even with coal it's unlikely that any fully loaded trains will ever run out of fuel before they get back to a station that will refuel them, switching to solid fuel triples the running time of your trains before going empty. And because it's derived from oil, which never entirely runs out, it means your basic fuel infrastructure can be separated from the need to periodically set up new coal outposts - you have to set up new oil outposts instead, sure, but you'd have been doing that anyways for plastics. edit: And of course, while rocket fuel is technically less efficient, you need to produce it in quantity anyways. Also nuclear fuel is fantastic and every vehicle should be upgraded with it as soon as practical.
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May 15, 2023 22:01
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K8.0 posted:The fact that they don't stack actually diminishes a lot of that. As soon as you put quality modules anywhere, you HAVE to filter everything and implement recycling for every stream if it overflows, or it's guaranteed to logjam eventually. And that will also apply to anything where any quality > 0 component becomes an input, it also will require filtering and recycling for every tier of output. I tend to view that decision as a rare mistake by Wube, though it does have some technical and design advantages, I think the downsides are worse. Is it? At least in the basic miner -> belt -> assembler -> other belt/chest -> assembler etc paradigm, assuming you can mix quality in the assembler this ought not to matter at all. There doesn't seem to really be a downside to mixing quality on the belt, aside from not actually meaningfully benefitting from the existence of quality, and the extremely low ratios of the quality progression mean that benefitting from quality is a deliberate decision where you are intentionally setting up resource lines to filter for and stockpile higher quality ingredients at low rates of return instead of expanding.
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Sep 9, 2023 19:31
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