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Jamsque
May 31, 2009
I've only been messing around with this game for a couple of days, the pictures of bases in this thread are really intimidating.

Should I be aiming for that kind of bus-centric setup from the very beginning? On my best run so far I had red and green science production going as fast as eight labs could consume it, and I started to think about replacing all of my burner mines with electronic ones and I couldn't face it. My setup of one long belt of coal going through iron and copper fields (drills feeding straight in to furnaces) and terminating at my generators didn't seem upgrade-able. I can see how having smelting separated from mining would help with that upgrade path but I can't figure out how efficiently feed smelters with coal AND ore while still having space to take out the plates.

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Jamsque
May 31, 2009

zedprime posted:

The burner stage is a trap

This was the tip I needed, thank you.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
The magic of buses took me far enough to get loving MURDERED by huge swarms of aliens, my steel suit kept me alive for a long time but I ran out of bullets pretty quickly. Getting an earlier start on mining stone and manufacturing walls is my plan for next time. I also learned that there is no such thing as over-doing your iron production. This game is pretty good.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
How far up the military tree to I need to get before mounting a sortie against a bug base is a good idea?

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
The only mods I would recommend for new starters are Long Reach and Autofill, which are both very simple tweaks that change nothing about the game's balance but make your life easier.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
This game eats days.

Really liking the new science packs. I am close to rocket on my first real .15 factory but there are so many things I want to do differently in a restart. For one, I need to put coal on my main bus, and maybe bricks too, and definitely gears. I don't know why I wasted so much time with localized gear production. Green and Red circuits are still the most persistent bottle-necks late in the game, next go around I am going to produce them before my bus in expandable stacks so I can scale up to the absurd numbers of Reds needed to supply 3rd tier module and high-tech science production.

Also nuclear seems like a bit of a boondoggle unless you are willing to search far and wide for ore patches, or stockpile for a long time until you make it to enrichment tech. I mined out one large (25k+) patch of uranium and got maybe a few dozen usable fuel loads out of it.

Jamsque fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Apr 27, 2017

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

The Saddest Robot posted:

I struggle to run 4 blue chip factories in 0.15. My green chip section is consuming an entire iron belt and it's still not enough green chips for them.

I built up to the final tier of science before space and then re-started specifically to build a factory with more room for circuit production. In my new factory I am feeding two thirds of my copper and a quarter of my iron throughput into making circuits and I'm not even close to producing enough reds to steadily make electric furnaces and blue chips for science as well as tier 3 modules.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

Tenebrais posted:

The new flamethrower in the tank straight up deletes a swath of trees in front of you, without starting forest fires.

I just discovered this myself, first time I've ever bothered with flamethrower ammo and I'm glad I did. I am currently building a very wide perimeter wall around my factory by first charging my tank through with the flamer going to kill a path of trees and then laying walls on the way back, it's very satisfying. I still think the point where you get the grenade damage upgrade to one-shot trees is more satisfying though.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

OddObserver posted:

Anyone have ideas on how to automate withdrawal of extra stuff from the Uranium enrichment process? It's easy to make it produce new U-235 in a closed loop, but I want the extras going to reactor fuel, not sitting in a centrifuge input buffer, and the closest I can come up with for solution has a long delay belt with circuit network in every cell.



I am a simple boy who doesn't use circuits, here is my expandable enrichment setup. U-235 and U-238 from my ore-processing centrifuges enters on the belt at the top left and is filtered, with the bad stuff going in to a chain of chests for storage and the good stuff going on to the top loop. The buffer chest with a fast inserter input and slow inserter output makes sure the belt is stocked but always has gaps on it so centrifuge output is never blocked. The loop feeds ore to the enrichment centrifuges first, and they are set up so they output to the belt earlier than they take from it, so they will re-consume their own output before allowing it to pass on, and good uranium will only make it to the end and the fuel cell assembler if all of the centrifuges are already working and have full inputs. I use logistics requester chests to keep the iron plates for the assembler and U-238 for the bottom loop stocked.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
After 160+ hours I finally beat the game





I thought I would make a nice short video tour of my factory for this thread and it turned in to an hour-long thing that I don't really expect anyone to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFiL8hU6bQ0

If you just want to tell me I'm wrong about something then skip to the 37 minute mark to hear me whine about robots.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

Loopoo posted:

Really nice base but it's sad to see you've cranked resource patches up to the point where you never needed to rely on trains. Trains are fun as hell.

Eh, I don't begrudge people their railworld maps, but resource mine-out is not a part of this game that I find fun, or at least not nearly as much fun as building a factory and protecting it from biters. I've played a lot of Transport Tycoon in my time, I don't need to get my train fix from Factorio.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
Also don't tear down your stone mines just yet, you will need that stuff later to pave the earth

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

Nalesh posted:

Someone should make a mod that allows you to use biter parts to make biofuel :v:

Up until two or three major versions ago the biter bases dropped purple orbs that were an ingredient in the last science pack in the tech tree.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

LLSix posted:

Is it just me, or are .16 bots way slower. Even speed+3 logi bots can't keep up with me on concrete. I don't even have exoskeletons yet.

It's just you, the bots have always been painfully slow. You will need to get up to speed 6 or 7 before they will keep up with you on concrete, and if you use exoskeletons they will basically never catch up.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
More important is a change to how splitters treat lanes, which will break black magic splitter sorters if you have any in your factory

https://gfycat.com/ApprehensiveJampackedIsabellineshrike

New behavior on the left, old on the right (gif stolen shamelessly from reddit). I know the throughput is the same but I always hated how the old way unbalanced my lanes so badly.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

RiotGearEpsilon posted:

Splitters can now filter and prioritize both inputs and outputs and holy poo poo this is gonna be amazing

Yeah this week's Friday Facts is a must-read and also something that will probably make you want to stop playing until the changes it discusses are in the game. Besides the splitter changes, which will make a bunch of new and different setups possible, it also seems like a fairly serious nerf to logistics bots is not far in the future.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
I don't know if the numbers changed at some point but I recall back when nuclear power was added to the game someone worked out that two well-supplied centrifuges running enrichment produced enough to keep even the most extravagant megabase nuclear plant fueled forever. If you go too overboard on Kovarex you will eventually run out of material for the top tier of ammunition and cannon shells.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

Foehammer posted:

I'm making nukes, get that depleted poo poo outta here

Edit: Note that 20 centrifuges kitted with speed module 3's can make enough U-235 for just over 1 nuke per minute

Ah, I forgot about nukes. They are on the list of 'things I have never intentionally built in 250 hours of Factorio' along with lamps and anything to do with the circuit network.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

M_Gargantua posted:

I'm worried. Do we need to stage a thread intervention? No lamps? What madness is this?

Who needs lamps? They don't aid production at all. I just lean waaaay close to my screen during in-game night until I get night vision goggles.

If you want to get really mad at me, I didn't start using trains until like a month ago

Jamsque fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 15, 2018

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
Can never have too many. We got a quick vanilla multiplayer game up and running.

[edit] Also to be fair there is no mention of discord in the OP or on the first page of the thread

Jamsque fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Jan 19, 2018

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
16.17 just hit, this is the big splitter change (filtering and priority settings), still nothing on belt compression though

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
Firing your boilers (and even smelters) with solid fuel can be a great mid-game strategy if you have oil going but run out of coal, you're not gonna be using that light/heavy oil for anything else anyway.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

Michaellaneous posted:

I'm still looking for a goon for some chill vanilla MP sessions? Drop me a PM or something.

https://discord.gg/rDPVGb people have been running/playing vanilla MP on this discord

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
Concreting large areas with bots is a good way to brown out your power network.

My dream is for some kind of automated concrete sprawl like the Zerg creep in Starcraft. Like, once you are producing concrete and you have construction bots and roboports they will slowly start to place concrete around the areas that are the most dense with buildings.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

RobotDogPolice posted:

New to the game. Should I play through the story first? Or is it better to just jump in and mess around in the other modes?

Starting the story is the best way to learn the basics but you can jump out of it and in to the 'real' game whenever you feel comfortable

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
If you have been holding off on buying Factorio then now is the time to pull the trigger, the price is going to go up in a couple of weeks and the devs claim that it will never be on sale.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

LtSmash posted:

Don't forget that prod3 modules are expensive. Given a long enough run they will eventually be optimal for anything you can put them in but you had better be planning on sticking with that save for a looooonng time if you are putting them in copper wire machines. For expensive things like rocket parts or blue chips they will pay themselves off pretty quick and you are going to pretty much always go for them. I recall seeing someone spreadsheet out the time it would take for all the different items to pay off modules on reddit or the official forums.

I use this cheat sheet pretty much constantly when I play, it has a good section on payoff times for productivity modules. I tend to go overboard with them on things like red circuit production because I like to build big long stacks of assemblers fed by just a few belts of input materials.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
I use Grid Rails because I spent more than 300 hours in this game without ever using trains so I am only building simple networks for now. Might be easier for newer players than the full-on four lane madness.



Jamsque
May 31, 2009
I saw a handful of posts complaining about pipe spaghetti headaches so put together a super basic video of fluid handling tips, hopefully it is useful to someone?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk_UdBr5G8Y

(yes I know my blueprint wasn't actually properly tile-able because I missed one pipe-to-ground)

Jamsque
May 31, 2009


I like this setup that produces its own green circuits.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

jokes posted:

It's also upsetting that electric furnaces are Tier 3. They should definitely be Tier 2, because it makes your life a whole, whole lot easier.

Electric Furnaces in the early/mid game are a trap! They smelt at the same speed as steel furnaces while taking up more space, costing more materials to manufacture, and most importantly using FAR more coal to operate (assuming coal power is your main method of generating electricity, which it almost certainly is in the early/mid game). The only advantages to electric furnaces are that they have slots for modules and are marginally simpler to set up because they don't require coal.

tl;dr don't bother with electric furnaces until you have good nuclear power going

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

xzzy posted:

Electric furnaces let you smelt without long inserters or convoluted subterranean belt rigs.

I take your other point but this is crazy, you can easily use exactly one length of underground belt and zero long inserters:

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

captain innocuous posted:

The most important thing about oil processing is to do the 3 different pipe lengths for outputs from the refinery.

Crude gets 1 pipe segment out the back and then joins up left/right.
Light oil gets 2 straight pipes out then left/right.
Heavy gets 3 pipes out then left/right.

Once you get that, you can have a row of many refineries, and they all pump out into easy to manage pipes, so you can tile them together.

When you first start out doing oil, just set down a crap ton of storage tanks down the line, and thanks to the pipe separating above, it's easy to get going.

If you run out of room for your oil, just make more tanks. Or just deconstruct the tanks and dump it out.

I made a quick video tutorial about this a while back, sounds like it might be useful to a few people again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk_UdBr5G8Y

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
Paving over resources does not hide them unfortunately.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

necrotic posted:

Belts for life. I only use bots in random areas like my mall and nuclear power. For the meat and potatoes it's belts all the way down.

I also play this way, the only exception I allow myself is loading trains, it's just way simpler to evenly balance X belts of output to Y train cars with maximum throughput that way.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
Peaceful is a totally legitimate way to play if you are starting out or if you just don't like the biter mechanics. I do enjoy the pressure they provide, I tend to play with biter aggression and evolution turned on but biter spread turned off so I only have to clear out nests once.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009

euphronius posted:

Seems somewhat genocidal !!

Welcome to Factorio

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
Crack light oil to petroleum if you don't have enough petroleum to satisfy your plastic/sulfur production. Otherwise, turn it in to solid fuel, which is excellent as a power source in the mid game (it's often easier to build solid fuel power than to scale up whatever coal setup you started with) and which you will need plenty of to make rocket fuel later on.

Jamsque
May 31, 2009
^^^^^^^
The last big patch fixed side-loading so that it provides compression again, there is no reason not to use it now.

Ciaphas posted:

What do I want to do to fix the lane-imbalanced smeltery output circled here? Some kind of balancer but I can't work out what or where. (I know it's because of imbalanced iron plate draw offscreen, just working out what to do about it or if it matters.)



Put one of these at the end of your smelt stack's output belt:



Won't slow down throughput and will keep one side from backing up too much more than the other. It's only in very rare circumstances that having one side of a belt backed up actually hurts your throughput but I know it is very visually unsatisfying.

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Jamsque
May 31, 2009
Blue Belts are fine and there is no need to be mad about them. Factorio is not a game about building The Most Optimal Factory, it is a game about building the factory you want to build, and for a lot of people that means using belts instead of bots even when that is less efficient because that is how they want to make their factory.

Yes, blue belts are expensive in resources relative to yellow and red belts, but not so expensive that it is actually challenging to make a lot of them, if you are making enough plastic to crank out a decent volume of red circuits then you should easily have the lubricant you need. Apart from that they just take iron and honestly who doesn't have too much iron in the mid-game.

The only things in the vanilla game that are actually expensive and difficult to produce in volume pre-megabase are level 3 modules.

Jamsque fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Dec 11, 2018

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