Factorio: Captain Planet doesn't stand a chance.

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Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Chain signals for rails is a big thing, and they've done several optimization passes. There doesn't seem to be a hard list anywhere, so you have to keep up with the devblogs I guess.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 11:02

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 02:02

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

The transport belt changes also mean that corners no longer have lower throughput than straight sections. :woop:

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 21:28

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxOrhH23mBY

:flashfap:

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 21:51

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Hopefully they will fix (or already have) outside corners, but with this the items on the belt will never decompress, so throughput is constant and identical for both sides. Just means there might be a bit of lag time on one lane when a belt's throughput changes.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 22:17

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Construction robots and the deconstruct tool don't even cost blue science, you can get a healthy amount at the same time as you reach trains. It's normal to need to replace your rickety old base around that time, don't restart just unleash a swarm of worker bees on it.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 19:14

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Yeah, but once you have a red+green research factory going it's just a matter of time. Even with RSO your starting patches will have more than enough material.
Logistics bots are pretty well balanced. They serve the role of fully automated but short-range and medium-load transport, while belts will always have better throughput and trains will always be the best bang for your buck over long distances. And construction bots are so laughably better at construction (as opposed to design) than doing it by hand, but it's very much needed and well-deserved by the time you get them.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 19:52

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Filters on rail cars are great for transporting oil barrels, since they need to carry the empties back with them.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 17:33

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

In 0.11 and before, every single item on a belt is individually simulated. Logistic bots got nothin' on fields of fully saturated belts.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 20:54

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Productivity modules will actually hurt oil production, not help, since they have a 15% speed reduction and the level 3 only reaches +10% productivity. Put speed modules in your pumpjacks (beacons too if you really need it) and productivity in your refineries and chemical plants.

e: Productivity might be a good way to get extra mileage out of oil deposits that haven't hit 10% yield yet, but it'd probably need to be tested.

Telarra fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Aug 15, 2015

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 08:56

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

You mean like this?

http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=92&t=14243

# ¿ Sep 7, 2015 22:29

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Sandbox mode is a scenario type under "custom scenario". You'll probably also want to familiarize yourself with some console commands to handle stuff like cheating in items.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 17:44

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Just did a test in 0.12, and 14x fast inserters vs. 28x long-handed inserters comes up as completely equal: in 5 seconds they move 840 items, just over half a train car.

Honestly I want to know how you got 3s load/unload times even in 0.11, that just doesn't seem possible to me.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 19:47

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

With vanilla you do have the option of launching untold amounts of rockets, which covers everything but stone. For stone you could pave the world in concrete, or just make a lot of silos (10k stone each). But yeah, some kind of mod that just adds a huge endgame resource drain would be a welcome addition to any modpack.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2015 19:19

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

I haven't tried it out, but I noticed this mod while combing through the forums the other day. Shouldn't be hard to edit the files to apply infinite levels to other upgrade types if you feel like it.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2016 23:58

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Elendil004 posted:

Is there a quickstart mod that gives you a chest with a few hundred iron/copper plate, or some basic electric poo poo?

Probably easiest to just console command it:

code:


/c game.player.insert { name='iron-plate', count=1000 }
/c game.player.insert { name='copper-plate', count=1000 }
/c game.player.insert { name='stone', count=200 }

# ¿ Jan 10, 2016 06:05

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

SinineSiil posted:

Also also, do biters attack lone power lines and pipelines? I haven't seen that happen yet, but I want to be sure.

When idling around the hives, they'll attack things nearby. When they decide to attack, they will follow the pollution until they find a 'peak'. While travelling they will ignore most buildings, but will attack buildings from the military tab (including radar and rocket silos!) on sight. Only once they reach what they think is the center of the pollution (lower pollution in all directions) will they go into an attacking frenzy.

So in general you can protect mines, rail/power/pipe lines, or entire factories by casting an overwhelming cloud of pollution over them, and just protect the center of that cloud (huge steam plants work real well for this). And with vanilla settings, biters won't create new hives within aggro range of your stuff, so you'll rarely need to prune them back.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2016 17:38

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Applewhite posted:

What does Radar do anyway? Did I forget to check a box for Fog of War because my entire minimap is revealed at all times.

There is no such checkbox, so maybe this is just a misunderstanding? The fog of war is slightly darker map tiles that don't show biters or trains. The minimap is about as big as your character's sight range, so you might need to hit 'm' to open the full map to notice it.

Radars will reveal an area as big as your character's sight range, and will gradually scan an area twice as big. So they're good for some passive exploration, but like to chug a lot of power.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2016 17:51

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Balanced belts carry more throughput than unbalanced ones, and in larger factories, transportation quickly becomes the bottleneck instead of fabber speed. Eventually (post-rocket silo 'eventually') you'll even surpass the limits of what a naive bus can reasonably handle, and you'll instead want to explicitly ratio out the products of each factory to their destination factories.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2016 20:18

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Ak Gara posted:

A problem I'm finding with single lane buses is that each time you split off to somewhere it's needed, you're cutting the amount on the bus after that point by half each time.

100 green circuit per minute bus gets reduced down to 12 per minute after just 3 off-branches. I was thinking of either making triple lane buses or dedicated lanes. 1 green circuit bus for EVERY section that requires green circuits, etc?

[edit] This is like minecraft crossed with OpenTTD. Only with less bribing towns so I can bulldoze their homes in order to run a 12 lane railroad in a straight line from one side of the map to the other.

This is what I meant when I brought up the limits of a naive bus. Splitting it by half each time works so long as you produce much more than you use, because the belts will always be backed up, and you can continue to expand a bus by making it wider. But eventually you have more bus than you have factory, with giant splitter monstrocities splitting off single belts of iron plates from the 6+ lanes spewing out of your smelting array.

Up to that point, busses are definitely worth the time saved in designing the factory alone. But past it, you'll want to start figuring how many belts each factory section (eg. your green circuit array, your smelting arrays, your science facility, etc.) consumes and produces, and just hook them up to each other directly (though you'll still want to put a balancer on the output side of each factory).

# ¿ Mar 2, 2016 00:58

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Ciaphas posted:

I have elected to start a new map because oh my god sudden bodies of water offscreen are assholes my base is ruined

If big open spaces are your thing, I heartily recommend choosing 'low' terrain segmentation for your next map. Just don't pick 'very low' unless you like seeing only one terrrain type, ever.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2016 18:19

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Bedurndurn posted:

I thought I was being smart and decided to have all my things that required melting run into the same area of furnaces. Why is this silly furnace jammed?

So the arm on the right side is trying to put iron ore into it, but it's currently got a steel plate into it. The arm on the left isn't emptying the thing because it's decided it being lazy is fun?

These are those electric furnace things that some person from this thread made. Is this a bug or something I don't understand?

The iron plate is in an input slot, not an output slot, which is why the arm on the left isn't doing anything about it. Doing a big adaptive system like this doesn't work in general with any recipes that require more than one ingredient, so the steel recipe (5 iron plate -> 1 steel plate) you'll have to run separately.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2016 18:39

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

chairface posted:

So I actually really appreciated the about science output ratios. Got any other useful cheater rules like that for poo poo like steel production, circuit fab, etc? If someone's already done the math I'd rather just have a chart that reinvent the wheel.

I usually pen+paper it myself, but there's tools out there for calculating entire production chains. The major one I'm aware of is Foreman, but you may or may not have to look around a bit for an up-to-date version.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2016 19:22

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Ciaphas posted:

Now that I'm at work and thinking about factorio, new question. Say I have a four belt iron plate bus; on one side a splitter takes half the plates off for iron gears, leaving that belt half empty (assuming there's no input backlog). (Or, more likely, dedicate that belt on the bus entirely to gears, because god drat do I need a lot of gears.) How do I then re-balance the bus after that point?

Best I can figure is to leave the bus unbalanced until I have another factory that needs plates, take those from the belt on the opposite side, then put two splitters inline on the bus to "rob" the middle two lanes.

What you're working with here is what I'd term a "naive bus". A bus system that's designed without any specific knowledge of what it's going to feed. Which makes them incredibly flexible, and a great system to center your entire base around, all the way up to launching a rocket.

With a naive bus, there's a couple ways you can use to keep the belts balanced. The first is to take products from the belts in a balanced way, using a splitter setup like one of the following:

This inherently keeps the belts balanced, and if you make sure to take from both lanes equally, the lanes will also stay balanced. The other way is to use a much smaller splitter setup (eg. a single splitter on the leftmost belt) to take a belt of products, and every so often throw onto the bus a balancer like the following:

The one on the left is very compact, but has a bias to it (items coming in on the left or right half of the bus will more likely than not leave on the same half), while the one on the right is count-perfect, but bulky.

What I've done lately is use the first setup, leaving lots of space between the different products on the bus for splitter shenanigans, and a single count-perfect balancer at the very start of the bus.

But a third method is to make the bus a little less naive, which is something I think I'll do for my gear and circuit builds next time I start a new base. What I mean is you'd take a number of belts from the bus, and redirect them fully into the gear or circuit factory. So your 4 belts of iron plates would be cut down to 2, but with the gear factory operating you would've just had 2 belts worth spread over 4 belts, so you're kind of better off anyways. This method becomes even more desirable when you start working with ratios, because you can measure input and output in terms of how many fully loaded belts and completely eliminate bottlenecks with little effort.

Telarra fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Mar 3, 2016

# ¿ Mar 2, 2016 22:05

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Ciaphas posted:

Bookmarking the hell out of this post, too. Thanks!

Ack, I just noticed I completely butchered the designs in the first pic, and the center belts are completely unused. I'll fix it once I get home and have access to my savefiles.

e: Turns out I botched it because I'm not even using any 4-wide bus lines on my current save. Updated the post with a 4-wide and a 2-wide.

Telarra fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Mar 3, 2016

# ¿ Mar 2, 2016 23:58

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

LordSaturn posted:

I remember when that feature was added. Check this out:
code:
CC>v
CC-v
1 burner miner + 1 burner arm + 3 belts = THE COAL MINES ITSELF

This trick gets even niftier when you realize that you can replace the burner inserter and the belts with another burner miner instead.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 17:48

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Walh Hara posted:

Which mod would you guys recommend for making lategame enemies a bit more challenging? I just build the rocket silo and yet enemies are still mostly small biters (only very recently did I start seeing spitter's at all). It's also a bit too easy in my opinion to just clear out all enemy bases in your pollution cloud, something that would make them resettle (much faster) would be good.

You can use the console to greatly reduce the global cooldown on biter settling (default values shown):

code:

/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.min_expansion_cooldown = 5 * 3600
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.max_expansion_cooldown = 60 * 3600

The values are given in ticks (60 ticks per second, 3600 ticks per minute), and the default settings are 5 to 60 minutes. Bringing it down to under a minute can have some impressively dramatic effects. Though note that this won't take effect until the next time the biters settle.

Or, if the biter bases aren't dense enough for you, or you want them to settle even closer to you, there's also these settings:

code:

/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.min_base_spacing = 3
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.min_player_base_distance = 3

Both values are given in chunks (32x32 areas the size of the 'pixels' of pollution/fog of war on the map).

You only have to type these commands once per save file, as the game will remember your changes. And typing them becomes easier when you use the up/down arrows to use the command history.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2016 20:04

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Barrels have three advantages: they can be handled by a logistics network, they prevent some of the liquid loss when deconstructing pipes or fluid factories, and probably most importantly they provide far denser storage (tanker car/storage tank: 2500 oil, boxcar with barrels: 7500 oil, steel chest with barrels: 12000 oil). These come at the cost of additional complexity, and steel for the barrels.

And just like Rail Tanker is an essential mod for fluid handling (it's even getting added to the base game in the next release), Fluid Barrels is an essential mod for barrel handling.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 10:02

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

WhiteHowler posted:

- Is there a way to auto-feed coal into boilers? I have a coal belt with injectors pointed at the boilers, but nothing ever happens. This setup works for raw materials in furnaces and assemblers, but this is the first time I've tried it for fuel and it's not working.

Inserters can definitely be used to insert fuel into boilers (as well as furnaces or even burner mining drills), so something in your layout must be amiss. Post a screenshot if you can't figure out what's wrong.

WhiteHowler posted:

- I have a pretty big mining operation now, but I haven't seen any biters at all. I don't remember turning them off, but I'm several hours into the game and there haven't been any. If there aren't any creatures on the map, am I locked out of certain technologies?

The nearest biter colony can be fairly far away sometimes, it happens. Just take it as a good thing and use the extra time to prepare some turrets and a lot of bullets. But yes, without any biters at all you cannot get alien artifacts, completely locking you out from the endgame technology, including the rocket silo which is the current win condition.

WhiteHowler posted:

- I started playing around 9pm last night, then looked at the clock and it was 2am. What happened?

*flashes a light in your eyes* Weather balloon, nothing to worry about.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 18:13

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

WhiteHowler posted:

My wife is a pretty active tabletop boardgamer, and she does play some PC games, but it's rare to find a good co-op experience that we're both really excited by. I think the last thing we played through together was Borderlands 2/Pre-Sequel.

Someone mentioned to me that Factorio is a bit like Minecraft. I guess I can see that (giant construction sandbox with multiplayer), but where Minecraft falls flat for me is the lack of upgrades or a feeling of progression.

Minecraft is basically "I mine some poo poo and then build some poo poo with it". No offense to anyone who enjoys that game, but I was bored after about 30 minutes.

In Factorio, I'm still free to do whatever I want, but the next goal is always in sight, and every step of the way I'm getting fun new tools to play with. It's definitely one of those "just one more ~~turn~~ thing" games, like Civ or Xcom.

The Minecraft comparisons are probably coming from people who played Minecraft with some combination of the various industrial-themed mods. Automatic quarries, pneumatic tubes, resource processing, production lines, power generation and more. Factorio scratches that same itch for me, and even better than the Minecraft mods did, because they didn't manage (due to having to build off of an existing game) even a fraction of the level of automation Factorio takes for granted.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2016 18:05

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

At any rate, by splitting the row like that you're doubling the amount of waterfront your power plant requires. Just add more rows, that final bit of water only matters if you're drawing a full load from your steam engines, and if you are something's wrong anyways.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 21:47

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Well, that clinches it. Gonna abandon my current map and spend my factorio time until 0.13 theorycrafting and preparing blueprints.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 19:16

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

CanOfMDAmp posted:

For those of you with a bus going on, how do you pull from 3+ belts of one material while keeping it balanced?

This is actually the simpler of the splitter problems: one splitter for each belt, send one from each to continue along the bus, and one from each to the output. Use splitters or side-loading to combine them back down to as few as you want.

It gets real ugly when you have more than 4 belts, so if you do, bundle them into 4's and do each one separately.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 03:26

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Solumin posted:

Indeed, my understanding is that it is biased towards one of the output belts. I think the bottom one? I'm not sure, but it works well enough.

If the input belts are loaded (left to right) 100%, 100%, 0%, 0%, the output belts will be 75%, 75%, 25%, 25%

Telarra fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Mar 26, 2016

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 21:35

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

WhiteHowler posted:

My wife and I just built the Rocket Silo in our first co-op base.

We're kind of at a loss what to do now, because it requires a bunch of stuff we've never had to build before, and I doubt our base is in any way set up to actually do it.

Do we build one Satellite, and then have the Rocket Silo build enough rocket parts to get to 100%? Or is there more?

Yes, then you build another. And another. And then you quadruple your rocket output. But it still isn't enough. This game is only over when you can no longer make rockets faster because more machinery would slow your FPS more than it would improve efficiency.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 04:54

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

I have the bad habit of upgrading from a handful of hand-fueled, self-contained miner+two furnace setups, right into a giant 256+ stone furnace array that sticks around until I outgrow 4 belts of each ore.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2016 02:28

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

LLSix posted:

I forgot that FARL can lay out parallel tracks going the other way too. Wow, Choumiko really thought of everything.

Yeah, there's nothing quite like laying down an 8-lane mainline complete with signals and power lines at 150km/h.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2016 01:03

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Speedball posted:

That's pretty much exactly what I'm doing at the moment.

The enemy hives are getting much stronger, it's not safe to go near them now that they've got middle-sized worms. drat. Looks like it's tank or nothing at this point. That or power armor, assuming I can get my economy going enough to get power armor.

Flamethrowers: worth it?

Not until 0.13, they're really wonky right now. Power armor and drones are where it's at. Just smacking down offensive laser turrets is probably even better (and can be done a lot earlier), but entails a lot of cleaning up of power poles, turrets, and performing repairs.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2016 05:22

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

azsedcf posted:

How many electric furnaces are necessary to fill a blue belt? I don't like it when there is one furnace in the line that never empties out.

Iron and copper smelt at 4/7 per second in an electric furnace, and blue belts can carry 40 per second, so you're looking at 70 furnaces per belt. Filling them with speed modules brings it down to 50 (module I), 44 (module II), or 35 (module III).

# ¿ Apr 1, 2016 05:33

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

Evilreaver posted:

Ah, but inserters never saturate a belt completely. They always do that infuriating space-wasting offset. Cuts the 'furnaces needed' in half.

Well then you haven't filled the belt, now have you? :colbert:

'cause yeah, like Jabor says, you need to merge at least two non-saturated belts with a splitter to get a truly saturated belt. Apparently there's also a glitch with underground belts that let them fully saturate a belt, but it's finicky and not guaranteed to stick around.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2016 06:05

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 02:02

Telarra: Oct 9, 2012

zedprime posted:

I am uncharacteristically wasteful in that I usually just point the assembler output into a robot port and let it make logistics robots forever.

Actually, you are doing things correctly, but chain a chest in there for extra buffer in case the port fills up.

e: do this for construction robots too

# ¿ Apr 2, 2016 04:27

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