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I put off making a new start a couple of weeks before 0.17 and i'm so glad i did with the new belt and train UI. Now i've got a (fairly) waste-free nuclear setup and i can finally REALLY expand a laser+wall perimeter around my fart gas clouds plus some breathing room. I feel like the newly less useful tank will make actual expansion before artillery tough though. Funnily enough my uranium mine is the one getting the most heat, since it's furthest out and is the most active right now. I really wish it was more obvious what best practices are in regards to fluid flow and pipelines however. It feels kind of wasteful experimenting with different setups, but i guess i spent a good while scratching my head over nuclear fuel inserter circuits and now i've got a stockpile of 500 fuel and gently caress it, i can afford to waste some steam. Not being able to read from the reactor's inventory is such a pain in the rear end, and i'm probably overthinking it, but it feels like i need to go and look up real-rear end electrical engineering stuff so i can put together a circuit that'll only add one fuel canister off of a laggy steam signal. Something i found useful in my space-limited starting position is to fill a couple of steel chests with early and midgame science so that i can just flatten old production and feed the labs off of the chests when i'm getting into midgame stuff - in terms of actually getting progression-relevant research you don't seem to actually need more than a couple of steel chests full. It's been really helpful not having to expand my base (and fart cloud, and fart cloud protection) and not having to worry about evenly feeding masses of red-to-blue production while i'm trying to put together a nuclear plant and ten billion walls and laser turrets.
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Mar 4, 2019 13:11
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Yeah, they provide a really good time-pressure early on, but i've had a few times late game when i really didn't feel like rolling out a tank and clearing bases for 10 minutes just to clear out enough room for a new base section or mining spot.
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Mar 4, 2019 16:38
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Now you just need to make enough smelters to feed them all
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May 14, 2019 04:35
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I always found it a pain in the rear end because that early on, making and plumbing 5+ chem plants to crack down to gas instead of 2 or 3 just for products is fairly resource and time intensive, when you're way more interested in getting blue science going so you can make tanks and drones and poo poo. I've played a couple of vanilla games to completion, so by now i'm familiar with just using circuits to make a simple 'if there's more heavier products, get crackin' circuit, but considering how mysterious and byzantine the circuit system seems to new players, making your oil balanced or finding your plastic production starved for gas after you've left it running for half an hour is a big subject to learn that doesn't feel like it gives much progress until a good while later Wallrod fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jul 20, 2019 |
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Jul 20, 2019 17:18
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counter-counter point: i'm not smart (or patient) enough to do things elegantly
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Jul 20, 2019 22:01
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I haven't started a game from scratch for a while, but i recently did a (normal enemies setting) 15 hour run, and didn't find the biters too bad, but i set up automated production of ammo and turrets about as early as i could leave red and green science unattended. I got a bit lucky since water was covering about 2/3 of the angles to my base, but i just set up belted ammo to them once it was a bother to restock the turrets manually. Definitely lost a few buildings to biters before i could really ramp up defense production though. I would probably turn off biters if i were trying to learn the game or wanted to make a megabase game, since at some point it's really just 1 hour every 10 or so of clearing out nests with a tank or going ham with artillery (edit: and ~5-50% of your production into ammo/turrets/walls/repairs etc). I have a 130 hour save with ~400 rocket launches done where i'm still not quite sure whether it would be more efficient to lay a bunch more track down to send an artillery train to every border of my cleared area to wait at until it's got no more targets, or set up placed artillery and run an ammo train to each one periodically. Either way making artillery ammo en masse is got dang expensive and i still can't put out two full blue belts of red circuits without massively expanding production of every basic item Scouting with artillery shells is baller as gently caress though, and they look so pretty mid flight on the radar 
Wallrod fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 23:50
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It took me a little too long to realise you can name multiple train stations one thing, for example 'copper pickup' and 'copper dropoff', so you don't need a 10 station long todo list for each train. Trains can be really messy if you've not planned well enough, i've got a 150 hour save that's had a major train highway splitting the oil and power area from the main production zone for about 100 of those, and i think it's a miracle that i've only been flattened once or twice when crossing it. I've started a new game on rail world just so i can get a fresh start without fighting bugs for 20 hours, and really get a grip on good practices for stations and unloading and stuff. I need to do some experimentation with how i unload to smelters, and how/if i can balance large amounts (16+ blue belts) of copper/iron plates since belting from stations to smelting can leave certain factory parts running dry when there's only distant mining stations active. I also haven't tried smelting at the mine yet but i'm starting to think a lot about it just to make the main copper and iron stations a sane size. Either way i friggin' love how modular and extensible a good train network is, going out and slapping down a new station and getting trains queueing up before you've even left feels great. edit: i guess i should smelt in big batches off-site and train the basic products into my base now huh. gently caress that's gonna take a while to arrange. Wallrod fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Sep 8, 2019 |
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Sep 8, 2019 02:16
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Usually i'll have an area in my factory that's just a square of crates filled with odd bits and pieces. Don't worry too much about using the entire buffalo, there's usually plenty of resources for what you need to progress. You can always just put whatever you don't want to deal with any more into a wooden box and shoot it (point your mouse at it and hold C) which destroys it, but i don't think i've ever really needed to do that for stuff that isn't wooden power poles and obsolete armour/guns.
Wallrod fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 17:41
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It feels so, so wrong i'm still gonna use it
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Oct 10, 2019 21:34
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Croccers posted:
 this is easily my most orderly factory ever and it's still a fuckin' jumbled mess on a small scale. That red circuit area to the right is loving huge because i haven't even bothered with beaconing it yet. gently caress IT.  the magic of trains is that your jumbled mess is modular and extensible Wallrod fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 16:56
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BUILD MORE
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Teledahn posted:What is the thread consensus on automatic train refueling? I’m hoping for something more sophisticated than a box/belt and an inserter at every station. Is it possible to program it to divert to a coaling station when at 1/3 capacity or something? I don't believe there's any way in the vanilla game to apply if->then logic to the schedule entries themselves, and you can't read the train's fuel reserves through the circuit network, so as far as i know there's not many clean solutions to refueling that are particularly smart and compact. I get the feeling that a lot of people use mods like FARL and LTN to make rail a bit more convenient, which i haven't done yet because i don't know where my personal line is for modding the challenge out of the game.
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Oct 24, 2019 07:47
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If it was going to a normal stop (say, an ore dropoff) the normal inserters would put fuel onto non-fuel belts, unless you put filter inserters everywhere, which is a fair bit more expensive.
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Oct 24, 2019 08:16
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26 hours and a base something like the biggest i've ever built: "so i began to build the real starter base" 
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Dec 9, 2019 10:50
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Bhodi posted:LTN Quick how-to. It's a pet hate of mine in software (particularly some open source projects) where you can't even tell what the project IS or DOES because the documentation assumes you already know about what you're getting. I honest to god thought at first that the 'rail layer' in Fully Autmated Rail Layer meant 'a stratum of automated logic relating to rails' rather than 'this places rails automatically' because everything i could find about it only tells you how to get started. Anyway rant over, i've swerved into trying some transport tycoon style games because factorio rails gave me a real infrastructure-building itch and it's kind of amazing how many recent games there are that try to pick up where transport tycoon left off. Transport Fever 2's supposed to be released today (there's an SA thread about 1) so that could be a pretty good time for me to jump in
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Dec 11, 2019 16:16
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I had that problem and just made a regular ol' gigantic 90 degree turn in my factory. You can make it into a cosy little nook for your science area! 
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Mar 31, 2020 03:31
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Pretty much, yeah, and depending on your map seed you might need to do it a good few times before your first rocket, too. Clearing bases feels really good when you've first got Trouser Lasers or when you sally out with a pocket full of action for the first time, but there's usually a long period (in vanilla at least) where clearing out chokepoint-friendly sections of land just takes friggin' ages because you haven't got whatever technology in abundance yet to make it a breeze. Even when it is a breeze, it ends up being a job that takes human time and attention, which, given the general automation theme of the game, makes you notice all the time and attention spent even more so. Hell, just revealing the terrain can take a good while, and that feels like you're not doing anything. Basically fully agreed with the idea that it feels like a chore, most of the time anyway. I still appreciate the pressure of having to defend from biters and plan ahead production and land use with them in mind, but i've definitely had long factorio sessions cut short (or drag on longer than they should) because it's time to defend the fart cloud again instead of expanding production. I'm doing a run to collect vanilla achievements now that .18 is out of beta, so i'm especially aware of the fact i can't just switch off biters or install a couple of mods. I like the idea of biter AI having a complex response to your defense structures or attacks, but i suspect it could tip the focus of the game and make bugs less of a general external pressure and more of an embodied single threat, like a bizarro-world starcraft tower defense, if it's not done just so. I actually had a pretty good time using artillery trains on a patrol in my last few games, though the first few salvos naturally spaced themselves out due to the amount of ammo needed. Only having one or two gun carriages helps with pacing out the counter-attacks, even though seeing 6+ rounds in the air at once looks way cooler on the radar. Wagons also let you scout more quickly by manual fire, which is really handy for seeing across large lakes etc. For what it's worth i've always built laser turrets on my outer perimeter and overbuilt my power storage/production because all you need is a pocket full of pylons, and they're very quick to get up and running on said territory expansion trips, no worries about setting up an ammo or oil supply. Wallrod fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Apr 19, 2020 |
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Apr 19, 2020 22:57
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I made a tidy little self sufficient radar outpost that fits around a single pylon My brain posted:0eNqVlE1vhCAQhv/KZs64kXWtW4+99dpr0zSok4aEDwPY1Bj+e9E2tsmikQsEAg/vOzPMBI0YsDdcOagn4K1WFurXCSz/UEzMe27sEWrgDiUQUEzOK6sFM1nPFArwBLjq8Atq6t8IoHLccfzBLIvxXQ2yQRMORAEEem3DHa3m9wInuxIYw1R4T+4Yl5XB2naQg2BOmwiDnstfyrmMcYpjWuiOlOsxxJ6bMtUNjbt5SIpsHkNUiVLyuJLbMcxqaAPzuGIkdnyQGQpsneFt1muB97x82xjNU/IUR6RVbjTV9K9yDetYNLQ7t4u0uG7UCU2q2biSMk3J8v9CY1g6SP2v4RAQrAmP1/Ac+kePYVDu9DLH5vTE7JzkTzR2IVZVQfNbWdAL9f4bKiKLPQ== I was already sleep deprived when i started making it, so figuring out the numbers for the minimum parts required to provide near 100% power was enough for me. There's also some toggling fuckery you can do with circuits to only use one panel and accumulator, but that's wizardry so i left it alone. I like the idea of having minimal parts variety too. This dips power slightly in the early morning but it's not long enough to lose vision, it just slows down the long distance scanning.
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May 5, 2020 09:40
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Yeah, i mainly did it because it felt wasteful to use a substation, you could definitely make a quicker long-range scanning solution just with the space granted by a second pylon or substation, which would be a good idea for me at the edge of my territory. And obviously none of it really matters cost-wise once you're past a certain point of development, i just fancied the design challenge.
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May 5, 2020 12:07
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I feel ill
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May 13, 2020 21:33
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Well, 1.0's out and uhh
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Aug 14, 2020 10:14
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Solumin posted:How do y'all choose what to build first? I always get really overwhelmed in the beginning, major analysis paralysis once I get basic belts + red science automation going. As long as biters are kept at bay (which is a pretty huge focus at the early game on default settings, to be fair) it's just a matter of seeing what you're being starved of and expanding the part that produces it while climbing the science trees, with speedbumps around oil and probably nuclear. I don't sweat too much about implementing new tech if it's expensive either, fast inserters and steel power poles are essential past an early point IMO but you can get away with yellow and red belts all the way to the rocket, and blue assemblers to 90% of the way there. You can fall into a trap of putting in loads of effort to produce and use something you won't get major benefits from until you've expanded every other part of your production. I usually regret not laying out some stone processing and military science early on since they have unusual ingredients, and i end up stockpiling hand grenades fairly early on just to deal with trees blocking any building plans.
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Aug 24, 2020 20:52
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The bugs will send scouting parties out that slowly expand their bases a small distance from old ones, but only become aggressive and send attacking groups if they get a whiff of your pollution (one of the buttons under the map will make your cloud visible), so as long as the bug bases are clear of your fart gas you shouldn't get dangerous incursions. I usually set up a decent perimeter at some point just because i get lazy and/or focused on other things for 12 hours and ignore bugs
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Aug 30, 2020 22:26
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ymgve posted:are we still talking about coding in Lua
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Aug 30, 2020 23:02
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https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-361 1.1 is going to have stations gain a circuitry-compatible 'train limit' setting, where each train heading there or using the station takes up a slot. At long last. The circuit interaction thing could lead to some really complex or interesting setups, but mostly beyond me to be honest. Also some improvements to the tips UI but WATEVA.
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Oct 9, 2020 08:22
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I recently had a very bad situation with a rocket launcher. Gotta be sure you're holding ctrl before pressing c with that in your hands.
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Oct 11, 2020 23:23
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Scaling up red circuits to make a smooth supply of blue for tier 3 modules and everything else as well is still pretty daunting as someone that's played hundreds of hours. You can launch a rocket off a reasonably sized base, but it's pretty fun to see your early factory that took you to yellow science end up getting dwarfed by just one ingredient's production later on
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Oct 22, 2020 21:41
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Canuckistan posted:spectacular flower of misc components
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Nov 21, 2020 13:29
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Steam's got cloud saves, so if you've got a net connection you should be able to just let it do its thang. Regardless, the game's save folder is in \Users\[username]\Appdata\Roaming\Factorio\Saves. I haven't done it but i'd bet the devs made copy-pasted save files work in a no-nonsense way.
Wallrod fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Nov 21, 2020 |
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Nov 21, 2020 16:58
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Paper Tiger posted:I'll put a simple way to do that in spoilers in case you wanted to figure that part out yourself: run a circuit from an accumulator on the grid to the pump feeding water to your steam engines; have the pump only turn on if the accumulator is under a certain threshold. I find myself sometimes wishing the game would prioritise nuclear over all other power sources, so that i'm getting my money's worth for all that uranium, but as mentioned before it doesn't really matter once centrifuges aren't a significant cost to you. It's really satisfying to do the maths on your stockpile of fuel cells and realise you have hundreds of gigawatt-hours on tap.
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Nov 24, 2020 00:04
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 I actually went and checked last night because i thought you couldn't do that, and somehow failed. I definitely should have been asleep by then.In other news, new stuff yay! Map pings!   Recipe icons and bot locations! I found hundreds of bots failing to cross a gap in a place i never visit!   Rail signal states!  edit: SPIDERTRON ROUTING WITH SHIFT-CLICK! NEATO!!!! 
Wallrod fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Nov 24, 2020 |
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Nov 24, 2020 10:10
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Yeah, i remember some surprises with changes to biter AI that made some defenses suddenly way too weak, but they generally do stick to the version numbers having real meaning and betas only being for bugs and balance. I definitely played a bunch of 0.15 and 0.16 on beta without issue.
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Dec 1, 2020 23:01
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Arcturas posted:I have not touched modules at all. I finally set up a few assemblers in my mall to work on them, but is there a primer on when/why to use them? Or should I just assume that they’re good where there are bottlenecks and I shouldn’t worry about power because more nuclear generators? Power usage ramps up significantly with them, especially with beacons involved, so just make sure you don't accidentally cause blackouts by laying down a new factory section with them and stalling your fuel feeds. As per the mathspost upthread, modules are generally most effective on high tier end-products, but you'll start to see when they're worth the investment elsewhere once you can afford to throw them around more. You can of course launch rockets without even bothering with them, or beacons, but it can save a few trainloads of materials over an hour of playing.
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Dec 2, 2020 22:12
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NP! and yeah, spidertrons use electro-gams.
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Dec 3, 2020 02:39
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Selklubber posted:Somebody should make a mod where instead of wiring up logic with separate buildings, you program PLCs on the circuit network instead. Could have a CPU in one location with RIO modules for input/output on the machines you’re controlling. I’ll join the mod team as the ideas guy, just need a programmer and we’re good to go! https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fcpu
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Dec 4, 2020 02:38
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You should be able to summon captain planet and process his body for materials.
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Dec 14, 2020 02:52
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I'm slowly working towards a fully rail-grid based botbase from a slightly bodged endgame bus base, and significantly overbuilt my copper and iron production.... it's really satisfying to have a stacker of full plate trains ready to dump anywhere. I'm dreading figuring out whether to transport or produce certain science ingredients on-site, though. And naturally i should have picked a better grid size to prevent bot areas from connecting. It wouldn't be a large project without stupid technical debt OH WELL It's also a strange feeling having 3+ gigawatts of power going directly to beacons.
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Dec 16, 2020 20:40
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A quick, low effort way to have your coal power only kick in as an emergency is to wire the water pumps to an accumulator and have them turn on when it drains below whatever figure. I left coal power there for a long time just because it'd be more effort to remove it, but yeah, once you've got a steady system up it's pretty superfluous.
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Jan 4, 2021 20:33
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Arcturas posted:(Or is being low-power significantly better than being no-power?) It's worth also keeping in mind that what looks like a stable system now might not be, as soon as you add a few more trains that need to use an already busy junction, or start using a bunch more sulfuric acid or iron plates elsewhere, resulting in a nightmare spiral  edit: and yeah, centrifuges feel expensive as hell at first but once you've got a few spare it's easy to build up a few chests full of spare nuclear fuel, giving you IRL days of power Wallrod fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jan 4, 2021 |
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Jan 4, 2021 20:56
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Does feeding into the side of an underneathie still only take from one side? I think you save a splitter by just having one splitter feed the red/green combo straight into the bottom edge of that underboyo. edit: like this, you know what they say about pictures and words and all that:  this is all code golf type poo poo though, either works Wallrod fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 01:09
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 14:20 |
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It's worth at least dipping into construction bots (which is mostly after you've got a good handle on oil production anyway) and blueprints, they save you placing large factory areas by hand, and it makes expanding your factory really easy. Though you can absolutely finish the game without them - same as nuclear power, rail and a few other things, the game really opens wide after blue science, and you can follow all kinds of trails for hours if you fancy it. I'd suggest getting a really basic purple and/or yellow production line going so you're still getting progress while you're looking at other stuff anyway. I don't think i've heard of a crafting-from-hotbar mod, most people at some point just set up a small area to make common buildings etc in assemblers instead and just scoop up a handful of stuff when running low. You can make most of what you need using iron, gears, green circuits and a bit of copper. Your choice of reach mods is really down to your personal taste - i think there's still one (called QOL research maybe?) that lets you research longer reach, wider zoom and other QoL things if you want to 'earn' it. I think folks here are generally of the 'make it as difficult as you want' attitude regarding that stuff, mainly extending from the fact the vanilla game lets you change the difficulty a lot to your own taste anyway. I personally think vanilla is pretty good in terms of QoL now, but it's just a matter of taste - if something really feels like it's missing or annoying to you, there's probably something out there that'll fill the space. I think ultrawide works fine, i haven't got one myself but i see UW screenshots in here and not many complaints... though you might not get as huge a benefit without a reach mod ;P Oh, a little tip - you can set markers on the map with text tags, it's a handy way of making an ingame todo list. I think you still doubleclick on the map in the non-beta version. But the beta is really stable and adds some pretty nice quality of life features, especially regarding trains, so it's worth having a look at that in the steam game properties. edit: holy crap, remember when stuff looked like this? 
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Jan 28, 2021 10:08
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