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 What Is Factorio? Factorio is a WIP, early-access title from Wube Software nearing the end of that stage after over four years in development. The wiki describes it as a 'game in which you build and maintain factories'. I'd say it fits in the puzzle-solving/engineering/logistics genre. 'Minecraft Automated' is another phrase that is bandied about, and that concept played no small part in inspiring the developers. Why This, Here, Now? Short answer is 'because it's time'. Currently the 0.15.x version is essentially complete, and development is focused on 0.16, the final version before 1.0 release and the end of early access. There was one 'legacy' LP by Evil Reaver several versions ago, but a great deal has changed since then. There's still a quite active discussion in the Games section as well, and some of those involved in it are clearly more advanced players than I. Most of the planned changes between now and development being 'finished' are minor or cosmetic: it's time for Factorio to get the full treatment. Since nobody else has stepped up to the plate, it was an easy choice for this to be my next project. I've thought about it many times before, but wanted to wait until 0.15 was finished and stable. That's been the case for a number of weeks now, so I'm excited to get this show on the road. Spoilers There's nothing I'm worried about spoiling in this game; fire away without concerns. LP Details Mostly a SSLP here, with some video sprinkled in as brief demonstrations of gameplay aspects mostly. I intend at least two play-throughs. The first will be in vanilla, and be heavy on exposition at first as I explain the game and go through things in a methodical style that I think is appropriate to learning. I'll endeavor not to be too long-winded in that, but I like trying to make things accessible to anyone who might read this and not be particularly familiar with the game. Some will be new to me as well, as I've only beaten Factorio once and that was months ago on 0.14, so there are new features/aspects. Showing how to think your way through Factorio, so to speak, will be the goal there. The second I plan on doing will have greatly increased difficulty/complexity by the use of both settings and mods, most likely some version of AngelBobs for those familiar with the community. Versioning I'm tracking with the GOG version, which is currently 0.15.34. That came out three weeks ago. When a new major version is released, updates come fast and furious: 0.15.0 hit on April 24 of this year, and the first 'stable candidate' was 0.15.31, three months later almost to the day. .34 is the only one that's come out in almost six weeks and even that didn't include anything of major concern for our purposes here. Wube does a great job in support: they've had weekly updates known as 'Friday Facts' every week for over 200 of them, and I'm highly confident that there will be no significant problems. Cool Factorio Links ** Gameplay Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVvXv1Z6EY8 This is outdated, but still gives a good sense of things. ** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kry8lbrHjeY&t=30s Get rick-rolled, and like it. ** GreyGoo MK I: Self-Expanding Factory(or if you like, von Neumann machine) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM ** Speedrun by AntiElitz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6ybxDx8kOY&t= This is 0.14, the previous version, and it takes longer now. Still fascinating though for people interested in such things. Much of what's in those links is WAY beyond my capabilities. Might as well be Greek or Japanese or whatever. Useful though IMO to whet the appetite -- one of the great things about Factorio is the amazing variety of things it is flexible enough to potentially do. For those who choose to stick around at this point; you have elected to ingest the blue bill. Let's see how deep the rabbit-hole goes ...
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Sep 17, 2017 05:53
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 And so it begins. The protagonist, our nameless avatar, is alone on a strange planet. He's crash-landed here in his ship, and we frankly don't know a whole lot else. There's a significant random element to map generation: for this game I restarted a few dozen times until I found something convenient for our purposes here. Settings are the defaults; you can change available resources, danger level of the planet, cost of research, environmental factors, etc. but again no messing around with that stuff for the initial run. You can see the 'win condition' here, such as it is. Launch a rocket with a satellite. The basic idea here, although it's not developed in any detail, is that you crash-landed on this planet and were able to scavenge a very few useful supplies from the wreckage. The satellite would presumably be used to communicate with others of your civilization and request a rescue, inform about your situation, etc. You don't have to stop there if you don't want to. We will be for this game; the second one probably will involve other projects afterwards.  After getting rid of the intro message, the main interface opens up. Most of it is your basic top-down view where you can run around and interact with the world, as here.  This is the quickbar, persistently shown at the bottom centre. Juggling inventory is a constant thing, and this helps keep it sane. Generally it's used for items you need frequently, and you can lock them to a position, hot-key them, etc. Items here will re-fill automatically from your main inventory, if available. The two shown here are a burner mining drill and stone furnace. We'll get back to those.  This is in the lower right corner, and is for essential equipment. The only thing we have here, in the second column, is a pistol and 10 ammo magazines for self-defense. Better than nothing. Each slot can only hold a specific type of item in the equipment bar.  Here is the minmap, in our upper-right corner. The buttons above the map are fairly recent additions and we'll get to most of them later. The 'graduation cap', third from the right, is for Tutorials. The far-right wreath or whatever is for Achievements. Some acheivements we'll see here and I'll show when they come up; I've reset mine for this so they can be seen. Others are naturally for more advanced challenges.  This is the 'character' display. Note the sizable inventory on the left. This is rather massive and can actually be expanded later through research. You'll need it. Oh you'll need it. One more slot is filled here(iron plates), and that completes all the starting resources we possess: ** 8 Iron Plates ** 1 Pistol ** 10 Firearm Magazins ** 1 Stone Furnace ** 1 Burner Mining Drill As far as this display itself is concerned, items here can be moved to the quickbar, and vice-versa. That's all 'click-and-drag' functionality. On the right side is the Crafting interface. By Crafting we simply mean 'building stuff yourself'. In keeping with the spirit of Factorio, the goal will be to only craft what we must. There's an achievement for taking this to extremes(Lazy Bastard, crafting 111 items or less, with 101 or so the minimum so there's not much room for error). I won't be going to nearly that much of an extreme, but you're generally better off automating as much as possible. It's basically the point of the game. Even at the start, there are 31 different items that can be made(and so very many more will be added later); almost all of them can be hand-crafted. Most of them we need not concern ourselves with now. Notice I've moused-over the 'copper plate' to show the tool-tip details. The clock icon is how many seconds it takes to make, below that are the ingredients required(1 copper ore). The red background means it can't be crafted by hand -- most things can be, but the tool-tip tells us it's made in a building(furnaces, in this case). Raw ore cannot be turned into usable plates without them. Resources: A Strange, Bountiful Planet  Here is the zoomable, movable full minimap display. There are overlays that can be used for other purposes, but we'll get back to those another time. The black area around the edge are areas we know nothing about. The available exploring area is infinite up to the processing ability of your PC. We won't be testing those limits in this game. The lightest square in the middle is the area where we can detect any movement; the darker but still revealed area are places where we have knowledge of the terrain, but not of any hostile threats that might lurk there. The vanilla-colored circle is our avatar, the engineer protagonist. Notice the 'iron ore 144k' and the highlight of that resource field. That's a new and positive change in 0.15.x, telling us what resource and how much. Iron is the primary resource for building things initially and will always be needed in large amounts. I have also, and quite badly, drawn numbers on some areas for identification: 1. Amber-colored stuff is copper. Needed only in small amounts early on, it is primarily used for things that require electronics. More advance things need a lot of this. 2. Water. Good old H20. An inexhaustible supply of it in fact. It won't be long before this is a critical part of our factory. Also importantly, the 'natives' aren't amphibious, so it's an impenetrable barrier to them. 3. These splotches are the forests. Some players will say trees just get in the way. I've intentionally chosen a world with a good amount of them nearby though. They can be used for wood, which will be necessary in moderate quantities, but also absorb pollution. 4. The black is coal, the best initial fuel source and also useful for a few others things later. 5. I guess I'd call this off-white? These areas yield stone, a necessary building material. Also, note just below it the small bright green ore that is too small to be numbered. That's uranium, a 0.15 addition. We can't do anything with it yet. In fact, I've personally never used it, something that will change in the course of this game. 6. Plain old open terrain. There are no resources here, but stretches of open land are very much a valuable commodity in and of themselves. We need space to build without being too constricted. 7. The purple dots here are crude oil sources. We don't have the technical ability to do anything with petrol yet, can't even acquire it. Like uranium, that will change. We Are Not Alone There's one other aspect of the planet that we need to consider; the native population. An insectoid species, colloquially known simply as the 'Biters', will complicate our efforts. They do not appear to be capable of communication to the point of negotiating, and they are definitely hostile. Though there are none in the immediate vicinity(biters show up as bright red on the map), rest assured they are there lurking in the blackness of our surroundings somewhere. For now it is sufficient to understand three things about Biters: ** Biters are not static. They will actively enlarge their 'nests' or 'hives', and build new ones in nearby areas. We are not the only pro-active force on this world; merely the most advanced. ** Biters HATE pollution. Desecrate the airspace around their nests, and they will absorb a good part of it -- and send an attack wave against the general source of that pollution. The only such source is us, and our factory. ** Biters evolve. Pollution is the primary driver of this; the more pollution, the more 'biter evolution'. This takes the general form of larger, hardier, and more dangerous variants. Time also drives the evolution, but it is a much smaller factor. These facts produce some basic conclusions. First, time is against us. Standing around with our proverbial thumb up your arse plays into their hands. We must constantly be doing something to forward our goal and progress; if not, we are simply ensuring things will become more difficult later on. Secondly, don't over-pollute early on. The time will come when we are able to take the best they can dish out, and return it with interest. Right now, with a pistol and a few spare mags, is not that time. Some pollution is unavoidable, but be sensible about it. Third, don't ignore combat preparedness. There are lots of them, and only one of you -- screw up badly enough, and your end will come. That should just about do it in terms of understanding what's out there; now how do we pratically interact with and aquire these goodies? Mining Mining, in game terms, involves any act of removing something from the planet and taking it yourself. That includes things you might not normally think of as 'mining' per se, such as removing something you've built and previously placed, chopping down trees, etc.  As you can see here, coal has a hardness of 0.9(0.1 through 1.0 is the scale) and a mining time of 2. It also has a fuel value of 8 MJ(megajoules). Trees have the same mining time, but a hardness of 0.5 which means less effort(and time) is required to get them. They also yield four units of raw wood at a time, whereas coal gives only one unit at a time. The fuel value of wood is half that of coal, 4 MJ. The other point that matters here is that trees, as mentioned before, absorb pollution. Every tree you cut down means pollution will spread further before it dissipates. Goals Factorio is a sandbox-y beast, but for this game at least I'm going to approach it in a fairly logical manner. 1. The ultimate goal is building the rocket to 'win' the game. 2. That requires many things, including a large, expansive factory(at least by our very basic current reckoning of things, you'll find 'big' to be a relative term in the Factorio community), but aside from a lot of materials and buildings there will also be a need for a lot of research to advance our capabilities. 3. Research labs require power, with steam being our only power source option at the moment. 4. Minimally, steam requires stone(minable by hand), and more copper and iron plates. We can't craft these plates; they must be smelted from the raw, minable ore at some kind of furnace. 5. Making any kind of real progress in the game then will require, at some level, a smelting operation for both copper and iron. A reliable source of fuel will be needed for this. 6. Iron and stone, but not copper, are required for the equipment to get this up and running. 7. Wood is the quickest fuel source to acquire, and we'll need it for other things as well. 25-30 to start, or 6-8 trees, is usually more than sufficient. The first thing to do, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS, is craft an iron axe. Costs half of our initial iron plates, but it's more than worth it as it greatly speeds up mining. Here's an example of how long it takes to chop down a tree without, and then with, the axe:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCdSxDO6PC8 As you can see it's much faster with than without.  The damage relates to the fact that you can use the axe for combat. If it ever comes to that though, you're in big trouble. Mining Power relates to how easily the axe can 'cut through' tougher substances to mine them. 2.5 is much better than the player's starting natural ability. Also note the durability here. Axes wear out through use. 50 of the 4k starting value was already used up by chopping a single tree. It's a good idea to have a spare on hand, and once I get a few things going I pretty much always do that. Iron's the basic building block, we need it to expand operations beyond our initial drill and furnace -- everything points in the direction of getting that going first. Let's take a look at how all that works:  Furnace on top, burner mining drill on the bottom, placed on the edge of an iron ore resource patch. Both are flashing the red 'gas pump' icon, which indicates they need fuel. Also note the 'up' arrow on the drill, which shows where product will exit. This can be rotated to any of the four primary directions(up, down, left, right), before or after placing a building.  There are hotkeys for adding fuel to a building without opening up it's interface every time, but this is what the furnace looks like when you do open it. The three square boxes at the top all hold something. The top two separated by the progress bar are the Resource and Result spots: put something in the Resource spot that a furnance can use, and you will get the finished product in Result. The 'gas station' icon is rather obviously where you put the Fuel in. Below is my inventory again; 16 wood, 4 iron plates. Adding some of the wood by dragging it up there(or Ctrl-right-click to send half automatically) makes the flashing 'I need fuel' icon cease and desist.  The drill is even more simple: give it fuel to burn and I'll use it up producing, in this case, iron ore. Whatever it's placed on is what you get; you can't even place a drill on empty ground with no resources. It can use up what's within range for it to mine, but we aren't going to be using this one long enough for that to matter.  Now we need to deal with getting the ore from the drill into the furnace. Left alone, it will simply drop one onto the ground by the output chute as shown here, and then stop. That's not super helpful, as every few seconds you'd need to pick it up(using the F key) to get the drill to start again. A full-time job basically.  This is what I did my first few starts. By putting a wooden chest, easy to build for a bit of our lumber, at the exit point, the drill can run for quite a time. Every so often, get the ore from the chest and put it in the furnace. This is progress, allowing time to go do other things in between transfers. But there's a better way.  The drill can actually dump the ore directly into the furnace itself. That wasn't at all obvious to me initially, and it wasn't until seeing a couple youtube vids that I discovered it. There are many things like that in Factorio. Here's how it looks in operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fKuRhnGAvg As long as the fuel lasts and the furnace isn't completely full of plates, this will work indefinitely. It can hold one full stack, or 100 of them. With this setup, a small but important step has been taken away from mining and towards being a factory engineer. No manual labor is required to either mine or transport the iron ore itself; we need to supply fuel and pick up the finished product when it's done. Note the smoke coming out of both buildings: this is also our first pollution. Nothing comes totally free of cost. The drill pollutes much worse of the two(10 compared to 1.8). Now what? As mentioned, coal is a superior fuel source and I want to get that up and running. Getting that coal up and running. For that we need another drill(9 Iron Plates, 5 Stone). While the furnace produces the iron, I mine the stone.  The coal drill will simply dump it's product into a chest, available to be raided for supplies whenever I need it. The way the math works out, one unit of coal is enough to power this for long enough to produce about 7.5 units more. So some will be used here, but most of the production will be available to supply other machines such as our iron operation.  Here's how chests work(on the right). There are 16 stacks in a wooden one, 32 in the iron version. Another thing that's easy to miss as a new player is the purpose of the red 'X', shown here; you can limit how much of the chest is filled. In this case I want it to pump out as much as it can, but that functionality is very helpful later on. At this point the next task is to get everything running on the more efficient coal. I'll need the remaining wood for other things later, so there's no reason to waste it. Right away I put the first units produced back into the drill here. After there's a few in there to keep it running and a few extras, I start making runs to the drill and then the furnace at the iron operation.  Here's something worth noting. If you mouse over a drill, the right-side panel will display what's in it(just the coal for fuel in this case) but also the yield(expected resources). In this case, the drill can produce 2.5k before exhausting the coal within it's radius. It'll be a long time before that happens. The coal supplied here is significantly more than is needed to run the two drills and the furnace I've got going so far. After several more runs, there's at least a few units in all three machines, enough to give me time to work on expanding operations without having to concern myself with any sort of pause in operations. Exactly how much you'd want to build up to depends on how far apart they are of course, and this is very close together, on of the advantages of this start. The only real point here is 'enough so you won't run out'. Stone and copper remain in terms of resources. This is quite minimalist, but I actually don't think it's useful to set up a stone drill at this point in most cases. About the only exception to that is if there is a long distance to an available stone patch, and that's not the case. It simply doesn't take that long and you don't need very much of it, so manual mining is temporarily the way to go. Copper is a must though. Same idea as the iron, a drill with a furnace immediately next to it, to the west just past the big stone patches. Grab iron from the furnace, mine a bit of stone if needed, and then after the setup redistributing coal until there's a decent amount everywhere once again. The workload in keeping everything going involves refilling five machines in three different locations from the coal chest. Most of the work is being done for me, but I'm still doing grunt labor. By the time there's a few units everywhere, I'll be able to step away for long enough, and will have more than enough iron and copper plates, to get basic steam power going. Mostly I'll just be showing videos of key moments, but here's how that looks from the moment of startup to the point of being set up with iron, copper, and coal operations all underway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICCeVRyu9-w You probably noticed that for part of the video there the world got darker -- there is a day/night cycle to contend with has both gameplay and cosmetic impacts. Aside from the standard head-lamp there isn't anything to be done to brighten things up at night yet. We'll get to ways of doing that before too long though. In terms of time played in-game(tracked on each save), the count here is a little under four and a half minutes. You are probably already quite sick of watching me mostly run all over the place distributing coal, and without ore fields so tightly packed together, it would be a fair bit longer. Certainly this would make for a boring and tedious game if that was all there was here. The power of electricity(pun intended) will start to change things though. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 05:56
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DoubleNegative posted:How open are you to suggestions about what you've built so far with regards to efficiency and ease of use? Go for it. Dialogue about that kind of thing is very much encouraged; there's so many ways to play and I expect to learn from others quite a bit during this. Poil posted:his current coal mining setup is appalling. That's insulting! You have no idea what appalling is until you see the setups that are yet to come as things get more complex!! 
Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 14:48
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Power! The minimal setup for steam power is a offshore pump(to get the water), a boiler(to heat the water), and a steam engine(to turn the steam into electricity). The combined raw/materials cost for this is 5 stone, 3 copper plates, and 40 iron plates. Iron continues to be the key. I've got 46 right now so it's no problem.  Take a look at an updated minimap. If you look closely, you can see small bluish bits on the coal, iron, and copper fields. That's where our buildings are. That lake to the south is our closest source of water. It's good to do a small bit of planning at this point. We need a supply of coal for the boilers, and proximity to water. For reasons I'll explain a bit later, I want a separate coal source for the power plant and a second one for everything else. Looks to me like the best approach here is to use that coal field in the northwest and transport it down south to the lake, and the one in the east that we are currently mining can figure as the second source.  Here we are. The offshore pump has to be placed on the edge of a body of water. The boiler can be rotated in any direction, but as it's set up the water comes in from the south and goes out the north if needed; steam goes east into the steam engine itself. The pipes are just there to get the operation moved a decent distance away from the lake. The flashing yellow electric icon on the steam engine itself confused the snot out of me when I first started playing. I thought it meant there was something preventing the power from working. It's actually rather the opposite: it means there is nowhere for the power to go. That is, it's not hooked up to anything. Of course, that's not the only issue to be addressed. We've added yet another machine(the boiler withe the fuel warning) that needs to be regularly refilled with coal. And we don't have anything that can run on electricity either. Burner mining drills, furnaces, boilers -- none of them can use that kind of power source even if they have it. There's nothing to be done about the boiler and furnaces right now, but we can make electric mining drills. For comparison, here are the key facts. ** Burner Mining Drills having a mining power of 2.5, mining speed of 0.35, mining area of 2x2 tiles, and consume 300 kw of energy per unit produced. The require 9 iron plates and 5 stone to construct. ** Electric Mining Drills have a mining power of 3, mining speed of 0.5, mining area of 5x5 tiles, and consume 90 kw of energy. The materials required are 23 Iron Plates and 4.5 Copper plates. It's a little more complicated than that since some of those materials must be first fashioned into electronic circuits and gear wheels, but that's the raw requirements for the process and the 'intermediate products' are automatically made when you queue up something. The electric drills cost more to make initially, but aside from that they are an investment we want to make immediately. Considerably more production at less than one-third the cost in terms of energy? Yes please. Now it's actually not as good as that on the energy front, because boilers are only 50% efficient; half the energy is lost in the process. But the electric drill is still 67% more efficient after factoring that in. To actually get the power to where they need to operate, we'll also need small electric poles, requiring a small amount of wood and copper each. The copper is starting become a little more important here. Not much, but a little.  Iron is closest and gets the treatment first. Note the electric poles: one is needed every few tiles in order to be properly connected. The faster electric drills will quickly surpass the ability of our furnaces to keep up. I could just leave things as is, but we're going to need the production especially in the case of iron. The current method of dumping directly into the furnace won't cut it though, since there's no way to dump it into two of them. As a temporary 'fix', I'll use the setup shown. As the drill spits out the ore on the ground, one of these two yellow contraptions called inserters will pick it up and put it into one of the furnaces as needed. They are basically robotic arms. On the high-lighted one note the straight line on the left and the arrow on the right. The direction of the arrow is where product will be moved to, and taken from the opposite side. They will only load in raw materials and take out finished product; for that reason I can't simply feed directly from the mining drill into one of them and then have an inserter move the excess ore from one furnace to another. This is almost a perfect production balance, as the electric drill produces almost, but not quite, enough to satisfy both furnaces. This means more coal redistribution but not that much of it given how fast we are producing it now. It can be loaded in en masse. Another short 'how it works' video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14uPpY2WuXw Before long, all three drills have been replaced. I've had to take a bit of time to cut down more trees in order to build the electric poles to get the power everywhere. Only the furnaces(three now) and the boiler now need to be supplied with coal, coal will get produced faster, and the boiler demand will be less than the drills would have previously required. It's almost time to delve into research, but in order to be forward-thinking there's a couple things to do first. We don't need any more copper right now, so I'll leave that be at a single furnace. The extra iron will definitely start coming in handy right away. Having gone as far as we can in terms of improving production at the ore fields, it's now time to work on automating delivery of our coal fuel. First up, another drill is placed on that coal field to the northwest, and this time we'll use transport belts to bring it down to the boiler.  This is an overhead view of the entire 'factory' at this point. It hardly deserves that name yet, but it's slowly taking shape. On the west side you can see the new coal drill in the north and the route of the transport belts taking the fuel down to the boiler. This took a bit to accomplish; each transport belt requires three iron plates to make. For automated material transport over any significant distance at this point though, it's the only choice. Had to wait a couple minutes on the iron in the furnaces. In terms of other materials though we're doing great. Well over 100 copper plates, almost at the century mark in coal surplus(not counting what's on that belt), so fuel runs are now only an occasional concern.  Here's a closer look at the south end of the coal delivery line. Notice the highlighted inserter next to the boiler: it's black, not yellow like the other one. This is a burner inserter, running on coal not electricity. It's inferior is almost every respect, requiring 188 kW of energy to operate; the standard inserter takes only 13 kW, less than 14% as much after you factor in the boiler inefficiency! For most purposes, once you get steam power up and running you wouldn't ever want to consider using 'burner tech'. The reason this can make sense is that in the case we ever run low on power, everything will slow down that is connected to the grid -- including inserters. If you feed the boilers with standard inserters, this will cause the coal supply to slow, which will further reduce available power -- a snowball effect. It's worth some extra energy usage to have these inserters 'off the grid'. That's also why I've got a dedicated field producing the coal for only the power plant; it keeps any coal production shortage elsewhere from slowing things down. Someone might ask, why not go one step further and use burner miners for the supply here as well? That could be done, but I don't think it's necessary. There'll be a considerable buffer in the coal backlog sitting on the belt itself here, and I can increase that buffer in the future if I want to. I'll definitely want to make sure that coal production to the power plant remains well above requirements though. That's going to be a priority for periodic checks as operations expand. Now that we've got some electricity consumers hooked up, let's take a look at one of the well-done reports in Factorio that help us monitor the situation.  At the top we've got three bars; we can ignore 'Accumulator charge' for now as Accumulators won't be invented for some time yet. If the 'Satisfaction' bar is not completely full, you have a big problem; that means you don't have enough power for everything that needs it. The factory won't prioritize in that case -- everything, no matter how critical, that draws power will slow down. This is a Bad Thing(tm), and should be avoided. 'Production' gives an indicator of how much power is being produced compared to the maximum capacity. Each steam engine, assuming a sufficient supply of steam from the boilers, can produce 900 kw(kilowatts). Our usage right now is just above a third of that. Below that we have time controls, I've set it to 10 minutes as that seems to be the best for viewing how we've ramped up our power usage. Then we've got the divided Consumption and Production display; this shows specifically where we are using power and where we are getting it from. Here we can see that almost all(98.5%) of our consumption is from the drills, with a very small amount going to the two standard inserters. And obviously it's all coming from the steam engine.  Here on the minimap is another useful display. This is one of six available filters that can be turned on or off: the electric network. The solid blue line shows the flow of power throughout the factory. Another filter that it's time to start keeping an eye on is this one:  The reddish tint can be hard to see at times, but it shows the spread of our 'pollution cloud'. Note that it's already beyond the area of our immediate vision. The effect of the forest to the west is also pretty clear: it isn't spreading nearly as far where the trees are thick in that direction. We know only the terrain in the 'middle', or 'Fog of War' zone; biters can expand into that area, get ticked off at the pollution, and launch an attack. The 'safe zone' around the starting area is big enough under our current standard settings that this isn't a problem yet, but it can lead to nasty surprises. For that reason, I start expanding our knowledge of the terrain at this point.  This here doohickey is a Radar station, available for the somewhat pricey(at this stage, it's all relative) cost of 25 Iron Plates, 7.5 Copper. They serve two purposes. Any movement nearby is spotted -- same distance that we can see on our own, as it happens. They also expand our knowledge of the terrain by scanning outwards at a much larger, but not infinite range, one 'sector' at a time. This is invaluable in locating resources and biter strongholds. It is also, particularly at this point, a power sponge. Each radar station(this one is named Elcajon, a name pulled from a list of early Factorio contributors) requires 300kw to operate, as much as all four electric drills combined. If they didn't suck up so much energy I'd build more to scan faster. As it is, this ups our power consumption to as much as 665kw, or almost three-quarters of capacity, at peak. That's a little too high for comfort. An easy fix of course; add another steam engine and our max increases to 1.8 MW. Now we're ready to get another power-sucking item going, the fundamental pre-requisite for point #2 in the initial list of goals. It's time to do some research. There are a couple of thing we need to discover before it's all that practical to start setting up much larger-scale operations and start morphing into a factory proper. To do research, you need a Lab(36 Iron Plates, 15 Copper Plates).  Here we go. An off-white dome. These are named also, Grubberdeck in this case if you care. The power usage is 60kw here, so it won't add much to what we are using already. Upon placing your first Lab, the Research screen will come up automatically.  Sorry about the distortion here, I shrunk this down for size purposes. The musky yellow backgrounds indicate what we can research, and the red ones what we cannot. The left panel scrolls down quite a bit: there are a LOT of things you can discover. 112 it appears, and it's actually quite a bit more than that because some of them unlock more advanced versions of the same basic technology once they are acquired. For the moment we are only interested in two of them, one of which is shown here: Automation. Note the cost: 10 'red vials' which take 10 seconds each to process. The other one we want, which is basically twice the cost, is Logistics. I'll get into the specifics of what these unlock a bit later, but they are the essentials to allow a proper, basic production line. For now, to get these going, I'll need to craft those red beakers, known as science packs, myself. 2 Iron plates, 1 Copper plate each, and we'll need 30 of them altogether.  Here's the 'inside' of the lab. Note that there are 7 different kinds of science packs. Barely scratching the surface right now, if that. I queue up the whole 30 packs needed as soon as I have the resources. I can make them in five seconds each, which is about twice as fast as the lab needs to use them. I could build another lab -- but the cost for that's a bit heavy right now. Something else needs to be done first anyhow. We're going to need a lot more iron to set up a bigger operation, so I do a simple expansion of that part while waiting on research.  Here's what it looks like at a little over 25 minutes in, with Automation and Logistics are done and we've got what we need to start expanding operations. Iron production has been tripled to a half-dozen furnaces now. This is a fairly good balance between the need to have more, and not doing a ridiculous amount of coal runs; I don't want to set up a coal supply line over to here because this is just temporary. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Sep 18, 2017 |
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Sep 18, 2017 18:45
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Jabor posted:The biggest Factorio pro-tip is to press alt. It's definitely crucial. I remember the light dawning in my brain when I first discovered what it does.
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Sep 18, 2017 18:51
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 Underground pipes aren't needed yet, the iron is important for other things. As far as the burner inserters, we'll find out. Science!
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Sep 19, 2017 17:02
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DoubleWeasel posted:the miners on the power supply coal are still burner, right? If so, try putting two with their outputs facing each other. They'll power each other indefinitely until the internal buffers fill up. An excellent approach that most people use. I just don't produce that much coal in the beginning. I've already got an electric drill for both coal ones. Glazius posted:That's an impressive-looking tech tree. All fully implemented? Yep! Veloxyll posted:What's a Factorio playthrough without some poorly remembered ratios, anyhow? Indeed. Or even, ratios that you never really properly understood in the first place :P
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Sep 20, 2017 14:33
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 Pollution is spreading a bit further but not much. The radar is slowly expanding our knowledge of the surrounding territory; the ore fields in the north including a more substantive supply of uranium were previously unknown, for example. The 'Main Bus' Concept As one gains experience with Factorio, it is inevitable that they will migrate to some version of a main bus even if they don't really know what it is. The main bus is your 'resource highway'. In it's purest form nothing actually gets built directly from the bus itself, but it takes the most-used resources through the factory. They are diverted wherever they are needed to 'side streets' of varying size and length as required. Without this, any factory with early-game technology will very quickly degrade into an untenable spahetti mess. Now it's time for building the starting point of my main bus; iron and copper smelting, heavy on the iron. We'll run it south of the coal field for now, which seems to provide the most reasonable location. A lot more furnaces will be needed so I set up a quick temporary mining drill for more stone, using the 'dump-it-in-a-chest' approach for the moment. That'll give plenty of raw resources.  This shows the beginning of the setup to illustrate something; I'll explain the design of this later when it's done. Notice that I'm placing furnaces while at the same time in the lower left I've got a whole bunch of crafting going on. In this case, standard inserters to be used shortly. When tackling a significant construction project early in the game, if you have enough raw materials being produced, it's quite useful to place things while crafting other things(how your avatar manages to handle this miracle of multi-tasking is best not considered for too long). You'll get things done a lot faster. This is one of the cardinal rules of Factorio, which I always imagine, with all due apologies to the source material, as part of a lecture by this guy:  Remember your ABCs. If you don't need something right away, craft something you use a lot of. Transport belts are probably the biggest need at this point. Mining drills, furnaces, inserters, electric poles, a few chests maybe depending on your style. Spare boilers, pipes, or steam engines. You get the point.  It takes about 10-15 minutes for me to get everything operational. Here's the bird's-eye view of the whole thing. You can't see much detail from this high up though.  Copper ore mining is here, no furnace now though as the transport belts will take it to main smelting area. Why I have four drills going here will be explained in a bit. Important to note here are the two sides of the belt; that's why it's symmetrical, with two drills on each side. It keeps the line balanced. As an example of what happens when you aren't balanced:  This is back to the west, the coal line that supplies our power plant. Having a backup buffer filling the line is good. Having it on only one side isn't. This happens because there is only one mining drill, and no matter where you put them they will always be predictable. That is, they will always deposit the ore on the same side of the line every time. Line Balancing Balancing transport belts is a complicated topic all of it's own, and can get quite involved in bigger operations. Here, with only one belt to be concerned with, it's not that complicated.  The key is one of our newly researched toys, the Splitter -- see the right-side panel. Dividing our output into two belts(A and B) and then re-merging onto C, will end up with an equal distribution to both sides of the belt. This will only work properly if the final belt is perpendicular to the two merging belts, as shown. A comes in from the top and will put everything on the closest side of C, B comes in from the bottom. Line balancing in general is absolutely vital to maintaining maximum throughput; the amount of stuff that can be transported on a given belt. It will become more and more important as the factory grows.  Here's more splitting and merging over by the smelting area. Coal comes in from the north, and is split into two lines. One loops around to merge with iron coming from the north, the other to join the copper coming from the south. This results in the two lines heading east. Each is half coal and half ore; one with iron, one with copper. This provides the raw materials for our smelting.  Ultimately it all ends up here. 6 Copper and 10 Iron furnaces for the time being. As I mentioned before, each electric mining drill produces enough ore to roughly supply two furnaces. Roughly, but just a hair short. I have one extra drill of each type to make there's enough supply; 6 Iron and the 4 Copper. Also note that I have furnaces emptying finished plates from both sides onto a central belt for both metals. Another step forward, as prior to this I had to go by and grab the plates out of the furnaces by hand every so often. This central built is in place because inserters always put things on the opposite side of the belt; if you only have the furnaces on one side you'll have a backup on one side of the belt and the other side empty, just as we saw with the coal a bit ago. The chests at the very south end will be moved soon, but the inserters there serve the purpose of pulling the plates off the line and giving me an easy spot to go grab some when I need it.  Here's another toy from our research that is necessary to do this sensibly: the underground belt. It has quite a limited distance, but it's the only practical way to deal with situations like this where we need iron and coal to cross without merging or intermingling. The arrows are quite helpful in avoiding confusion about which way stuff is going.  After any major expansion, it's always a good idea to check the power supply. 1.3-1.4 MW used here, almost 75% of capacity. That's a little too close for comfort as we expand, with the increased drilling the primary culprit. Time to expand our steam plant. As it happens, we'll need another boiler to do that; each can support exactly two steam engines at full capacity. So we'll just double up on everything:  In general I'll just keep adding another row like this whenever it's needed.  In the middle of all the heavy mining we can see pollution is definitely getting worse, with a more pronounced reddening. Thankfully we have magical protective gear of some sort which protects us from any harmful health effects.  Pro-Tip: If you think you've built big enough, you only have a fraction of what you need. That might well be the cardinal rule of Factorio. Here, I've run the copper & iron plate lines much further south to allow for more smelting in the future when I need it. Not if, WHEN.
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Sep 20, 2017 21:21
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jabor posted:more important is the fact that production is being capped at half a belt worth of iron, since there's only half a belt of iron ore going in. If you split the inputs first, and only then put them onto the same belt as the coal, you have a full belt worth of input ore (and hence can produce a full belt of output). But there's half a belt of ore on each side. That's more than enough to supply the furnaces to saturate a single output belt, it's not capped at anything other than the speed of the belts(once enough furnaces are in). To put it another way, the furnaces will run out of room to put plates on the central belt before they run out of ore supply. I also don't really agree on single-lane line balancers. Balancing still improves throughput compared to having one side that doesn't have much on it. Poli posted:Isn't it better to combine the coal and ore to one belt after you've split them down for a line of smelters? I'm not sure exactly what you mean, therefore not sure if I answered the question or not. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Sep 21, 2017 |
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Sep 21, 2017 00:32
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Jabor posted:Immediately before the splitter, you have half a belt of ore. It doesn't matter how much available throughput there is after that, the bottleneck is what limits the overall throughput of the system. Totally agree as far as it goes, except for the very last part. What limits the throughput of the system isn't the ore/coal belt at all; it's the amount of smelted iron plates that can fit on the one belt being filled from both sides. Jabor posted:lane-balancing a single belt doesn't help with throughput. It's still limited to the throughput of the belt at the moment just before the lane balancer. I think maybe I'm using the wrong words here. Possibly throughput isn't the right one. Let me explain differently what I mean(and then feel free to tell me I'm still wrong :P).  This coal mining drill is idle, because it can't put any more coal on the belt. Whole top side is empty, but it's not going to do anything because it's trying to put more coal on the bottom side, which is full and backed up.  Same situation here, but with a balancer. Now the coal is divided onto both sides of the line. It's not backed up as quickly 'upstream', so more coal can get 'downstream' before another jam occurs. This happens quite a bit when you've got more product being taken off a line from one side as opposed to another as well; one side might be 'backed up' for quite a ways while the other side is maybe a third full. I don't know if throughput is the right word for what I'm talking about, but more overall product is going to move in the desired direction of the belt with a balancer than without it.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:12
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Jabor posted:One ore turns into one plate. If you have less than a full belt of ore, you're not going to get a full belt of plate out of it. I'm very aware of that. Went back and read some things though, and I think I understand where the screwup was. Changed the setup to this:  Messy, but I've got the ore and coal split before combining them now, and got rid of the downstream splitters. I think this should accomplish the intended goal now(half-belt of ore on each side of the furnace array). Jabor posted:If you have a large buffer, though, what happens is that your buffer silently starts shrinking, and after you go off and do something else you come back and wonder why nothing in your factory is getting done. You must have seen some of my later-game factories! I'm very skilled at the above, though I think it might happen anyway regardless of the buffer size. It offends my moderate OCD tendencies, but I'll get rid of the 'single-lane buffering' as well. *stifles internal groaning*
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Sep 22, 2017 02:22
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Veloxyll posted:If your raw material buffer chests aren't close to full, you need more trains. I expect this thread will need a full-time mental health professional on standby by the time we get to these. Let's just say, though I've seen it done, my win in 0.14 was done without a single raw material buffer chest at train stops. I had like three of them, and used them only for transporting crude. The other stuff I had on obscenely long belts. Basically, by the time I realized it wasn't the best idea, I didn't feel like ripping it all up.
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Sep 23, 2017 01:38
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For our next segment, another individual best expresses what we're going for here. It's probably the central theme of Factorio, so he might be considered it's ambassador, perhaps? Well put, Mr. Weaving ... err, Smith. We've been smelting ore into usable metal for some while now, but metal plates on their own aren't particularly useful. When we want to do something with them, it's been done by hand. It's time for another crucial, recently-invented toy to take center stage: the Assembling Machine.  Here's the start of what I call the 'basics line'. On the right, the main bus consistently for now of copper and iron plates(more items will be added later), is split off. Everything to the west here because the east is forest. Also note the underground belt on the copper line as it goes south -- this allows the flow of copper to keep going and will be a much-used technique to allow some to divert in one direction while the rest moseys on down. It's already been mentioned how important 'Alt' is. Pressing it toggles the icons you see on the assemblers and chests here. Shows what's in the chests, and what the assembling machines are producing, at a glance. We've got four things being built here. ** Iron Gear Wheels at the bottom. Key intermediate product. Requires 2 Iron Plates. Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but in Factorio terms 'intermediate product' means somethign that is used in making something else, but not necessarily useful on it's own. Lead and wood in a pencil, for example, to take an everyday item. ** Transport Belts beside them. They need iron plates and iron gear wheels, so they can just take what the gear wheel assembler builds; that's why they are placed side-by-side. Right now we need a LOT of transport belts as we expand. Soon I won't be needing to craft any on my own. ** At the top above the copper lane, Copper Cable. Another intermediate product, and a cheap one at two per copper plate. For that reason, it's generally considered to be a BAD IDEA to put copper cable on the bus. Reason is, you are basically wasting space -- you can get twice the copper plating throughput as you can cable, so build the cable where it's needed, at least for the most part. Note the red inserter below it: these aren't needed all that often but they are useful. They are 'long-handed inserters', meaning they reach two spaces away instead of one. That allows it to cross the copper belt and place cables into the assembler below it. Which is: ** Electronic Circuits. An intermediate product requiring another intermediate product(here we go with the production layers), three copper cables, as well as iron plates. I've got one iron chest for each of these, limited for how many i want -- that part is important or they'll chew up all of your product early on. You can always just produce more of course, but why use up your metal with stuff you don't need? These chests are a buffer. I won't go through iron and copper as quickly now with gear wheels, cables, and circuits in my inventory. I'll show how I handle those once I get a supply built up. I can run here and pick up whatever I need from the chests when I run low, and also the transport belts to lay more of it. Not perhaps immediately obvious also is the fact that it will make my crafting much faster. When I need an inserter for example, I don't need to craft the circuits first. I'll just grab the ingredients from my inventory and put one together in a fraction of the time.  Here's the inside of an assembling machine. Across the top we've got iron plates(2 currently) and iron gear wheels as the required ingredients. That's determined by the next button, that circular line with the arrow. Click that, and the crafting screen comes up again to select what you want to build. We can see at the right that we are making transport belts here and 1 is currently in the machine. The internal buffers for these, unlike furnaces and the burner drills, is quite low -- it will stop building once it has two full production runs. I.e., two items for many things, some recipes like transports belts produce 2 at a time, so it'll stop at 4 there, etc. Makes it important to unload them so they will keep working; hence the use of chests. Also, even though we've got the iron available here, the assembling machine can't use it to craft the gear wheels, then use those in making the transport belts, etc. It can't do multi-stage crafting like the player can. This necessitates the use of a proper production chain. This one -- iron plates to gear wheels to transport belts -- is pretty simple. Others will not be so simple.  Right-side panel here again; details on one of the assembling machines. We can see the energy usage here ... and then notice the 'drain' part. Most electrical machines are 'vampires' to an extent. The drain is the power used when it is sitting there inactive. This is one reason why you don't just want to have assemblers for everything. Iron axes, for example, I need a new one of every once in a while, and it's a super-quick crafting job. Not worth it to set up a machine for that, because it's just going to sit here draining power ... which means using coal and causing more pollution ... forever. One machine doesn't drain a lot, but inserters also have a smaller drain(400W). So ... if you don't need it to build something you'll use often, don't make an assembler for it. Crafting speed of 0.5 means this level of technology isn't as good as I am in another way: it will only craft half as fast. I like the attention to detail in the next line, which I think was added fairly recently. Tracks how many products each and every assemble you place has made. That's pretty cool IMO.  A bit later, I've added an assembler for magazines in case I need more ammo, and I've got a chain for small electric poles at the top. I've got to supply the raw wood(chest at the top left), but I simply throw that in there, one assembler makes the regular wood(panels) out of it, another combines that will cable to make the poles, and those are ready for me. I had to cut down more trees to supply this, and I'll need to keep doing that every so often, but now I can snag a hundred or two of the poles at my leisure so long as I keep up my end. To the north, I've also got one set up by the stone mining to build furnaces. No chest for those as I don't need that many, but I shouldn't need to make those by hand anymore. This is pretty much everything I want to have assemblers for right now; I added underground belts as well but showed the rest. There's nine different assemblers all happily crafting away until they meet the quota I've set for them. This can now properly be called a factory. It's only building things for me to expand it with(other than the ammunition), but it's a start and still going to make my life easier.  I've still got lots of room here. From left to right, top to bottom, there's transport belts, small electric poles, a random unit of coal that I'll throw in a furnace somewhere, iron plates, copper plates, copper cable, iron gear wheels, and electronic circuits. The basics are covered. "But what about inserters and assemblers?", someone asks. I'll use enough of those for sure, but they can't be built in these entry-level machines: more than two ingredients required. I extend the bus a little bit, but I'll wait on the next step because we're almost at the 1-hour point. I'd like to do a quick review every hour at least for a while here to show the evolution of the factory and check on the numbers. Here's the power situation.  1 hour settings on the graph. Most interesting thing here is that the drills aren't using nearly as much power as they were 10-15 minutes ago. That's largely because of copper: we simply aren't using as much as we are producing, so there's a constant backlog. We can see that the max. there didn't last very long. Overall, 1.6 MW is our peak usage right now, just under half of capacity. Power plant is doing just fine.  We've made a bunch of crap, basically. Graph is a jumbled mess and we can't even display everything we've made at once. 34 different items, with a combined quantity of 23,749. Most of it is always going to be the basics; top ones here are iron ore/plates, with copper and coal stuff also well over 2k.  Here's an update of what we know about the world. Radar still plugging along; this will be a perfect square when it is done. The tan or vanilla lines are the transport belts, visible as long as you don't zoom out too far along with the blue electric network. Still no sign of hostiles. Also worth noting that resources are getting more sparse as it expands outwards. Sometimes they are spaced fairly evenly, sometimes they cluster. Pollution hasn't gotten much worse, and the forest continues to keep it's spread in check. So far. Resources It's good to keep an eye on how much we have left of our key non-renewables. The ore fields we are mining right now have the following amounts remaining: ** Iron: 493k. We mined out nearly 6k in the first hour; at that rate we have a supply that will last 82 more hours. We're going to increase usage of course; I doubt it lasts more than ten, but we're not in imminent danger of running out. ** Copper: 152k. Another 50 hours roughly at our current pace. I'm even less worried here because we have two pretty close fields at more than 600k each that we can tap; by comparison the only other iron field in the area is less than 150k in size. ** Coal: 375k for the factory field, 306k for the one feeding the power plant. Again no concerns here, could last literally 150 hours or so at the current pace. ** Stone: 428k, and another one very close by it of almost 200k. We're using it only rarely at the moment -- this will change. So we're in great shape right now, hilariously oversupplied.  I also forgot to make this early on, which I should have. On more dangerous settings, I might have even paid for it. This is the initial light armor which is initially available. Costs a bit at 40 Iron Plates. Every time it takes damage, Durability is reduced, so it won't last forever. Should last far beyond the time I need to use it though, so I only need one suit. Below are the four types of damage. "Physical: 3/20%" indicates that the first three points from any physical attack are absorbed, and the rest reduced 20%. This provides significantly more protection than wearing no armor, which I was foolishly doing. You only live once, remember. Safety first.  This shot had to be taken somewhat after completion, due to it being the middle of the night when I actually got this up and running. Quite a bit south the bus has been extended, in keeping with allowing room for expansion. Here, we'll extend the automation process to our research. Red vials are manufactured and then fed into the Labs -- all I've got to do is pick what to research next. We are limited to those which require only red vials ... we have the capability of making green vials as well, but not fully automating the production chain for them. This brings up another point Factorio Stages In terms of general advancement through the game, Factorio can be thought of in terms of what kinds of vials your factory is capable of producing. 1. Burner Tech/Pre-Research. Early mining and smelting, assembling our first steam power plant, etc. 2. Red Research. Where we are now. Various activities will follow, largely driven by the discoveries from technologies requiring red vials only. 3. Green Research. Probably not a surprise to anyone that this is next. By the time we have exhausted the red-only options, we'll have the ability to automate green vial production. 4. Etc., repeating the general pattern of #2 and #3. There's nothing saying you have to research everything in red, then everything in green, etc. Speed-runners win the game while leaving the great majority of techs unresearched, getting only what they need. Often you will want to target a specific group of important advances, coming back to other less important ones later. For the methodical approach I'm doing though, we will exhaust one level before going on to the next. There is benefit to this; you increase your capabilities as much as you can before doing a big re-design. Although there were only four of them before and it's different now, each different color/type of research vial brings with it increased complexity in some way, and it's a lot easier to just grab the next 'little thing' before 'going big'. Ok, so how'd I come up with the red research area? A little math. First, we've got the iron gear wheel assembling machine, which a simple calculation will quickly convince you that we need only one of. Assuming sufficient supply, they can produce a gear wheel every second; each red vial assembler needs only one every 10 seconds. A 10:1 ratio; 10 red vial assemblers fully supplied by a single iron gear wheel assembler. We won't need that much. After that it's a case of how fast you want to be able to do the research. Early in the game -- I'll probably increase this somewhat later, depending -- I like to have the # of labs fairly equal to the square root of the typical research job requirement. Right now the range 10-50 red vial required for each available one; four labs would be the square root of 16. It's really whatever you want here; this is what works for me. I'll probably eventually double that to 8 before we are 'through' with red. The typical time required to process each vial is 10 seconds in the lab. So, to satisfy four labs, we need a vial every 2.5 seconds. Assemblers produce one every 10 seconds, so it's an easy 1:1 ratio. Four red vial assemblers, four labs. and we can scale this up easily.
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Sep 23, 2017 01:56
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That won't be happening here. Grey Goo uses a couple of mods that extend capabilities of the vanilla game, and I don't think it can be done without them. Aside from that, it's a big fundamental leap. Building increasingly complex production lines will continue, new products and capabilities will be discovered, etc. Telling the factory to think on it's own; to expand, decide what resources to ship and what ones to store in place, when to expand, etc. is a rather large order of magnitude more difficult. And that's saying nothing about dealing with the hostiles, which I believe were disabled for Grey Goo. It's not particularly hard to build a factory which is essentially immune to their attacks once you've reached a certain point. However, left to it's own, you'd eventually run out of resources and get swarmed when that happens. A factory which expands on it's own to new resource areas, eliminating biter resistance on the way? I don't think the mods even exist to allow for that. There's no RTS concept allowing you to take a battalion of mechs or whatever and have them go into search-and-destroy mode(though some in the community want the game to head that way).
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Sep 24, 2017 18:10
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What To Research Again you can go for something specific; here I'm just going to knock off the quickest ones first. That means Turrets are next. While we are going through the quick ones, there isn't much lag time in between so I don't research the next one until I'm ready to go on the tools we just researched. It takes less than minute, literally, to get Turrets. 3 down, well over 100 to go . Grab that Snickers bar. Gun turrets use the same kind of magazine ammo that my trusty pistol does. They have a higher range(18 to 15), shoot more than twice as fast(10 rounds/sec. compared to 4/sec.), and most importantly, they are our first automated defense which means I'm not exposed to danger if something attacks. They require no power, working on some sort of mechanical magic, automatically sensing and attacking any enemy that comes in range(frankly I think this is rather absurdly OP for this point in the game, but it is what it is). All we need to do is fill them with magazines, and at this point there's not even a need to have them delivered automatically -- they won't get used up that fast unless there's a big sustaind attack which we aren't going to see yet. Usually I can get to the 2-3 hour point before any hostilities emerge, and we're only halfway there. But as Cicero said, if you want peace, prepare for war. Let's be ready. The bad news is the price: 8 seconds each to craft, 10 gear wheels, 10 copper plates, 20 iron plates. It's important to note that when biters do attack, they tend to attack things that pollute ... and radars. They HATE radars. Generally at this point I want about 10 turrets placed at various strategic locations. They'll be more than enough to deal with any over-enthusiastic interlopers.  The green circle here shows the range of the turret; anything within that is going to be appointed hostile intent, in the form of high-velocity trans-cortical lead therapy. I've got 8 of them up, with two more to place; each of the active turrets has about 10-15 magazines with a few dozen still left for myself. This is a solid initial step towards a functional factory defense. There will come a time when it will be hideously inadequate, but it just needs to be good enough for now and it's all of that. So, what's next? Stone Walls. I'm on way back up to get those started, restocking my basics on the way, when I notice that iron production is starting to lag behind demand. Probably temporary at this point, but even so it's time to give it a boost. I place 8 more furnaces, up to 18 of them now so almost double. That means four more mining drills also. It's up in just a few minutes thanks to the materials I've got stockpiled in my inventory. Now back up to the stone field to make some walls. They function much as you might expect: a protective barrier against attackers. However, they can hit what is in the space directly behind the walls, which is good to remember. Anything you put near them should be two spaces back. Biters cannot climb over them or dig under them though. They have to destroy the walls, which can take a decent amount of punishment, in order to get past.  Here's our new production line. Same deal as the smelter before, except each furnace uses 2 stone per 1 coal to bake the stone bricks. Here the volume of stone needed would eventually overwhelm the ability of the belts if we made this much longer, but we won't need to(famous last words; if so, I'll redesign it with a full line of stone on each side. Using more stone means more drills; we now have eight electric mining drills there as well. Coal is keeping up fine still, haven't really had to expand that -- mostly because iron has now caught up with demand. Will have to watch it though. Anyway, the assembler on the right turns 5 stone bricks into a wall section. The chest there is set to allow filling more than halfway, up to a thousand wall sections. I'm going to be use a LOT of this, it's going to be my first megaproject. A new type of inserter as well, the last one currently available. Let's take a look at our little blue friend:  They are well-named, moving multiple times more product in the same time as standard variants. The energy requirement is also 3.5x as high, so it's a case of using the right tool for the job. Regular inserters can't keep up here, with the assembler needing 5 bricks a second. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79jdqNGbcYg A brief bit showing the blue hero in action. We'd need almost twice as many furnaces to fully supply the assembling machine here, but it'll be enough for our purposes. By the by, you can use stone bricks to pave pathways and whatnot. This has the benefit of adding 30% to travel speed in those areas. However, there's a slightly improved option coming up soon, which is why I haven't done it yet. We've just added a crapton of pollution, and are about to add more. Power usage is nearly double what is was not that long ago, breaking 3 MW on occasion. Definitely time for another pair of steam engines.  It's getting worse in our neck of the woods, and spreading further. And we've got our first biter sightings in the northeast corner there. Long-term defense can be handled multiple ways. I like the approach of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure -- and I want a lot of prevention. Hanging out here with turrets would be leaving it all up to cure, and when the biters get to where the pollution is, they'll start coming at us. Instead, I invest early on in building walls roughly around the area where there is pollution. These walls will protect radar stations and guard turrets behind them. The radar stations are largely the point of the exercise, providing constant real-time coverage of everywhere that we have pollution, meaning we'll need a grid of them. Knowledge is power, and this method will keep the biter threat under control and well away from the factory. It will also take a considerable amount of time, and require even more steam power to run the radars: ergo yet more pollution. We'll eventually need the space we are claiming here though. It's front-end effort, an investment in the future. That's where I'm going, and the reason for the walls. It'll be a bit before we have enough of them to make it worth setting up a section though, a few hundred at least. So let's do more research! Optics takes a bit longer, but not long.  Now we have 5kw lamps that can be placed anywhere on the ground within our electric network, shedding light on the subject. As this high-altitude view shows, we can still see where we're going at all tims of the day. This will make it easier to get things accomplished during the dark, and of course makes the images a lot better also. Military is up next, our last really cheap one. This allows a submachine gun, which is basically like carrying a turret(same range and firing rate). A shotgun is also available, which has even longer range of 20(18 for the other two), fires only once a second, but does a lot more damage despite it(60 damage/sec., 50 for the SMG or turret). This needs it's own ammunition, interestingly enough known as shotgun shells. So I make myself a SMG and a shotgun, and set up a new assembling machine for the shotgun ammo. Electronics brings us Filter Inserters(purple), which can be programmed to grab only certain items from a belt. They are excellent for sorting, and we have no need of that at the moment. It's more a stepping-stone to other things. Now we're up to a bunch of things that require 50 red vials each. I think it's time to double our labs and assemblers down there to eight apiece for this increased requirement. Then Steel comes in. This is a big one. Steel can make better axes, the best and fastest ones available. Steel chests hold twice as much as iron ones. There will be other applications later. They are iron sponges though, requiring 5 Iron Plates and 5 times the smelting time of iron as well: 17.5 seconds. Pro Tip: Do NOT simply divert iron off your bus to make steel. It can work if you simply just make more, more lanes of it, whatever -- but it's a much less of a headache to simply have a dedicated operation for your steel eventually. Separate iron mining, separate coal mining, separate everything, then sent your steel from there to wherever it needs to go in your factory. That is not really feasible for us yet. And we don't want a lot of it. I do want some though. As I'm pondering this ...  Oh YAY! Our first Factorio achievement!! 37 to go *cough cough cough*. There's only a few of them, and it takes like one magazine for a turret to put them down. They don't get close. But it's a nice little reminder, a bit earlier than usual, that we haven't got all day here. As far as steel goes, I'm tempted to just say it's not worth the effort right now and move on. Moving on though, I find that I really want to be able to build the next thing we're going to get -- which requires steel. Heh. So seriously then, what's a sensible way to do this given the situation?  I've probably seen more elegance in the comments on the walls of public restrooms, but here it is. Split a line back west from our primary coal field, north of the iron one for the fuel. We've got a half-dozen mining drills on the west end of that field feeding this; the others on the east end are feeding everything else. Gonna eat it fast that way, but what else is there to be done? Anyway, there's a chest a ways to the north to store it and keep this from ever getting backed up. A little different pattern here, because the coal needs to keep going past the iron furnaces to the steel ones. Long-handed inserters to reach further, and a couple gaps between the furnaces to facilitate having enough space for the electric poles. In the time to set this up, Heavy Armor research was finished, which was the main point; it's much better than what we have, but also takes a bit of material to craft. 100 Copper, 50 Steel. I've got a decent amount of wall sections ready, but I'm not going adventuring until I get it. We also have some bullet upgrades, increasing damage and firing rate for our standard magazines. I've gone through a couple of those, and more are coming. ** Note: I realized much later that I had done something simple but stupid here. Should be one iron furnace here for each steel one. I forgot that the steel takes 5x as long to smelt; and therefore I have way too much iron here. I then went back, got rid of most of the mining drills, reduced the iron setup to four and added a couple of steel furnaces so that I would have what I need. I then imagined slapping myself upside the head for being a moron. Had a literal headache at the time, so I stopped short of actually doing it.  I use the time to check the power. Good thing I did. This is not good. The problem is coal supply; I just didn't put enough drills down. Everything was oversupplied not long ago. Oops. Doesn't take long to fix it, but I still need to check it more often. Or learn the ratio of mining drills to boilers. That might help too(I would later discover that this is about one electric drill per pair of boilers or 4 steam engines, and save myself future troubles. That's about ... I didn't get precise with it. Might take just a hair more). Once everything is up and running again, I'm waiting on steel and research so I run around and restock, clear some boulders, cut some trees for wood, just a bunch of side-work tasks. Just before I get the steel needed for the armor, the last research job for the Red phase is finished(80 vials, most expensive yet, but they go quick). Automation 2, allowing for a more advanced assembling machine. Creatively, it's known as assembling machine 2. But before I deal with that, it's time to go take down some biters for the first time and start establishing a perimeter. There are two basic ways to deal with early combat. First up, I'll demonstrate the easy, IMO cheesy way. Ladies and gentlemen: Turret Creep(this one is a few minutes, and is the furthest thing from a display of expertise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUZcRD6Q2Gs ** Note: I realized afterwards that sound did not record on these. I'm not sure why, but I apologize for that and will try to get that working properly. I screwed up there at the end, and I certainly could be faster getting the ammo into the turrets. It's a 'leapfrog' method though, which has very limited exposure to the player and only the long-range 'worms' there are any real threat to the turrets. Safe, and you don't lose much. Just need several turrets and plenty of ammunition for them. There's plenty of cheese in Factorio to begin with(hauling around enough supplies on your person to build a decent-sized city comes to mind), but I just think this is several orders of magnitude OP at this point. I like to let turrets be turrets(defensive static structures), not constantly repositioning gun emplacements that do everything for you. Kind of takes the point out of your own personal weapons. So, here's how I would handle this normally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbm7_CPSNpU Controls here are Tab to switch weapons, Space to fire, and then you can use the mouse to aim at what you'd like to shoot at. A few things to note about this combat sequence: ** First phase is always the Rush. Biter bases have a number of enemies around them, roughly proportional to the number of spawners. Gotta take them out first. Used the shotgun at first here because it has slightly better total damage if it hits ... a crowd at fairly close range is a good target for them. Once they are mostly surrounding you though, the SMG will be better as you aren't going to hit a lot of them with a blast. ** Then the spawners. These have some protection and periodically send more enemies at you, so you want to switch back and forth. Theoretically the shotgun at close range would kill the spawners faster -- but then I'd be in range of the worms. No thank you. Note the red and green targeting indicators; green is within range, red is not. ** The worms suck basically, doing quite a bit of damage from range. The approach angle I took allowed hitting the second one some with the shotgun. Could have done almost as well with the SMG really, not quite as much damage but more accuracy. Either way, I would have died if not for the heavy armor. It's up to 30% resistances across the board, and absorbs 6 physical, 3 acid, and 20 from explosions. These entry-level biters and spitters didn't do much damage. The worms on the other hand are more of a pain. It's generally heavily-advisable to get the heavy armor before going base-clearing.  Here's where the fight took place; I'm the vanilla-colored circle again here. This is where the mentioned attack came from, just within our pollution's reach. We won't have any more problems from this location for a while. This base was NOT on our minimap beforehand; reason being that it wasn't here when the radar scanned it. They're expanding, and we've got a put an end to that. \ For the wall, I like to build them about at the edge of the pollution cloud. That way radars placed just behind the wall will be able to see some distance further -- it gives you a margin of error. This is as good a place as any to start. Came out here with almost 800 sections, and used nearly 300, but found we've got to go through a bit of forest now to push this to the west. Going around it to the northeast means dealing with biters we don't need to mess with yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMkBwSi7s4o This is just a brief one showing the process here. By standing exactly in the path you want to build and holding down that direction, most of the trees that are in the way will get cut. In particularly thick areas you might want to make another pass one step in each direction. Here, I was a little off on the initial line, usually there isn't much additional cutting that needs to be done. Then put down the wall sections, and you've got everything set. Definitely don't want to miss a section and give them a way through.  A couple more cutting sessions later, all of the wall sections were in place -- and I'm carrying around 500 raw wood. Won't be needing to cut any more of that for supply purposes anytime soon! There's a couple hundred more ready, not nearly enough to finish this. We need to get some radars with turrets to guard them out here anyway. That part is easy; connecting the power poles all the way back to the factory takes a little more time. While I'm here, unloading the wood and restocking is a sensible thing. I also add another pair of steam engines, because these radars are going to suck down quite a bit of power. I'll show the new reach of our stations when completed, but for now it's time for another hourly review.  That ugly dip is our brief power outage. Those SUCK. Also, we haven't needed the drills as much over the last 20 minutes or so, due to a backlog of supply pretty much everywhere. Factory isn't doing much right now. The stone bricks and walls are running non-stop, but the basics stuff is at capacity and there's no research going on. Which reminds me: I also take down the whole research area while I'm in the general vicinity. It's a bit of a hike, but why pay to have everything draining -- and polluting -- when we aren't going to use it. Served it's purpose until we start getting the green stuff up and going. We were up to nearly 4 MW at our peak usage this hour, but it's down in the mid-2s as you can see. Can produce 7+ MW with the recent addition, so we should be good here.  Time to show off the filters here I think. You can set the graph to display only certain items. The others are greyed out. Blue is iron ore here, orangish is raw stone. You can see the stone ramping up as we got the bricks and walls going, the fluctuations esp. in iron which include the unfortunate power situation, and then iron dipping recently. This ability to show whatever specific items you want to see is really excellent and can be quite useful. Here's how the numbers look overall for this hour: # of different items: 40(up 18% from 34) Total Production: 64.9k(up 174% from 23.7k) Almost three times as much total items being made, but mostly the same stuff. Resources ** Iron: 479k. More than doubled our extraction to 14k, leaving 34 hours' worth. Not a problem yet. ** Copper: 149k. Just three thousand used here, only slightly more than before. It's not started ramping up yet, but it will. Oh, it will. ** Coal: 372k(3k used), 304k(2k used). Still all kinds of time. ** Stone(: 418k, with 10k being pulled. Once the wall is finished this will go down to almost no usage. More will be required in the future, but for current projects we are totally set. Iron continues to be the top concern but only as a really long-term thing.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:32
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Of course you can -- just has to be done differently. Obviously the first question is, why only one iron deposit? Why haven't you completely eradicated all resistance from an area the size of a mid-sized nation for your personal use? Obviously if you haven't got enough raw materials of all kinds stored to last your factory if left running from now until the heat death of the physical universe ten thousand times over, you are thinking way too small. /sarcasm. Oh, and in actual news here, I have more done but it may or may not get put up before my brother's wedding on Saturday. Distractions.
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Sep 29, 2017 06:01
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 Another little thing I do here. This chest has random stuff in it I don't need at the moment and don't have a better place for. Burner mining drills, the pistol and light armor I'll never use again -- generally archaic stuff. I also threw the nearly 300 red science vials that didn't get used from the research area in there -- I'll grab them up again when needed. While more wall is made I took the first dive into expanding the factory proper thanks to new assemblers. Assembling machine 2s use two-thirds more energy than the first variant, craft 50% faster(now 75% as fast as the player), and most importantly they can make things requiring up to four ingredients instead of just two. A lot of things fall into that category. The majority of items, in fact. First item on the agenda is to get an area set up to build the key intermediate items, circuits and gear wheels. Electronic Circuits require 2.5 total metal plates to build, 2.0 for Iron Gear Wheels. That means by building them en masse and putting them on the bus, there will be a 60% and 50% space bonus respectively compared to moving all that iron and copper downstream. We also won't need a new production line for them every place we want them to be used for something. Back down south where the research area was, I've decided to turn the bus towards itself towards the west and get this going.  These are quite simple, divert some iron and send it back on in a different form.  This is probably one of the more well-known Factorio ratios: 3 copper cable to 2 electronic circuits. The fast and long-handed inserters are finding more and more use. The main goal with these is to make them expandable; there's room the south, and to the west if we want to bring another copper belt over there to complete the other 'half' for the circuits. Then it was time to finish the wall project. I actually come up short by four freaking poles while I was out there, but there's plenty of trees and I had the copper on me, forestalling a fit of profanity.  Ended up being even bigger than I intended, mostly to go around forests in the west and south. A total of 11 radar stations for those of you scoring at home. Just that one little blind spot in the west. To the northwest, by the lake, there are just three small bases that I will probably want to take out and move the wall up to the water before they grow too large. No imminent threats though.  Note that zoomed out as far as we can see so far -- knowledge expanding rapidly with all those radars -- you can't even see all of the wall. Parts of it just disappear due to the zoom level. That coal field in the southwest just below the lake is our big winner so far for largest resource field, coming in at 1.5 million units. There's another million coal in the east. Some of the larger biter bases, like the one in the northeast, would be rather suicidal to take on at this point. Our first major oil cluster appears to be coming into focus just north of due east. For the moment though the most important thing is the establishment of a clear border. If they get too close, I'll know about it -- even if it's not near a turret, an attack on the wall will result in a warning and give me a bit of time to react. That'll allow me to focus all my efforts on getting more stuff done in the factory again. A quick power check shows us peaking at a little over 5 MW, nearing three-quarters of capacity with a number of inactive drills. A bit too close for comfort, so I'll expand that again from four boilers to six. Ok, back to expanding the stuff we are building. You may want to consult a physician before the next shot.  Oh my. This is me splitting materials off the larger bus now. Badly. I know it can be done better than this ... I know I've done it better than this myself! Main thing that matters though is undergrounds to keep the material moving, don't mix stuff together, etc. That was accomplished. Aesthetics weren't. I thought about redoing it, but then figured what the heck: it works, this isn't a sanitary everything-perfect run-through by any stretch.  That leads to this, heading back up north along the west side of one of the copper field towards our basics line. That's because this is just more basics really. All three of the inserters I expect to need a lot of -- I could add filter inserters in here if I want, but I rarely use them, and the long-handed ones are just below this shot. Assembling machines 1 and 2 ... here's the 'robots building robots' moment -- and electric mining drills. And at the top, splitters with the very bad-practice idea of just running down transport belts from the north. Ladies and gentlemen, spaghetti is served. I'll try to keep things like this under control. I do now have seven more important items being built here(one stack of 50 each limited right now). Then I check on the coal for our power plant, resupply -- all that's fine, but also I forgot to limit the steel chest. Currently at 693 plates. That just might be enough I think to keep me in steel axes and armor. Won't need any more of that for a while. That's up to pretty much everything I use regularly. But look at the iron line. Err, I mean, that empty transport belt with a bit of iron trickling down it occasionally. Yeah that'll need a bit of attention. Drills and both types of assembling machines suck up 9-10 plates each unit, and a healthy portion of gear wheels which dry up more. More product-intensive stuff, so this isn't a surprise. But before I go fix that, we've hit the three-hour mark here.  Holding pretty steady at about 7 MW now, two-thirds of capacity. As you can see by the breakdown below, it was quite a bit lower; the ramp-up in radar drain has been the biggest factor.  That's ... a lot of stone. Item Count: 32(25% down from 40) Total Production: 60.8k(-6% from 64.9k) That's definitely not the previous or normal trend; spent a lot of time on the wall which limited expansion. I daresay we won't be having this repeated though. Resources ** Iron: 471k ** Copper: 147k ** Stone: 401k ** Coal: 300k power, 370k factory Still looking fine on all of these.
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Oct 2, 2017 02:10
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Poli posted:I don't suppose you're planning to run a too long conveyor belt loop of ammo around the inside of the wall for turrets to grab from? No but ... I actually did that the first time I played. But yeah, completely unnecessary given that they won't need nearly enough ammunition for that to be required. Pool Is Closed posted:What is a man? A valid argument.
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Oct 3, 2017 01:17
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Last couple updates have been pretty short, so I'll throw in another one today: Ok so on to the iron issue. 18 furnaces currently rolling ... let's try doubling that, see where it gets us. That of course meant a lot more drills. And then of course the coal started running low naturally, so a couple more over there -- we've been running with only two of them. A couple more boilers would definitely be needed to ensure we could handle all of this. Ah, the joys of expansion ... boosting one thing means boosting a whole bunch of others or the house of cards collapses. Factorio imprints itself on your brain sometimes. I wanted to go set up green research now just a bit to the west, but it was time for sleep at this point. And then the next day at work I was pondering things and realized that I really needed to make more room in there for new products we'd acquire. Then I noticed that we're soon going to get another vial type(new to 0.15) unlocked which is going to require steel, and I need to find a better place to smelt that anyway, and boy would it have been really stupid to put up the green research line only to just have to tear it down and add the new one soon, and boy this sentence has been really long and my brain just wanted to shut down at this point. The 'creative, hypnotic terror' of Factorio strikes again. Here's a bunch of badly drawn crap on a minimap showing what the factory looks like now, where everything is, and what I want to do with it.  A -- Current Iron Ore Field B -- Copper Ore Field C -- Factory Coal Field D -- Stone Field E -- Power Plant Coal Field Basics -- Two lines, one vertical and one horizontal, where the commonly used stuff is built. The other labels should be self-explanatory I think. New Steel is where I want to move steel production to. Idea here is to use the iron in that smaller field to the east for it. That'll leave the big field for our main flow of iron, and there's another 400k iron field to the west of this image once we need more. I really don't know if this smaller, sub-200k one will give us enough supply once we start ramping up. Answer is probably plenty at first, eventually not enough, like it is freaking everything. The coal would get drawn from that field in the forest to the west. Thing is, at this point I basically need to clear-cut most of that area anyway. I was tempted to make a video of me doing that. Just that. However long it took(a while would be the answer). But that wouldn't be particularly exciting. We've got the most space out west, and need to use it. Establishing mastery over the territory inside the walls, both in terms of cutting the forests and frankly just plain mining out all the resource fields so we can build stuff there to, is going to be more and more a theme I think. I'm also at the point where I don't really care as much about overbuilding now that we have a semi-secure perimeter. Anyway, setting up a steel column in this new area is good use of the space there I think, and it will allow adding that to the bus because we're going to need it. First a couple of research things to wrap up. I actually forgot to do one in the red-only category: Fluid Handling. I forget that one a lot because it makes me scratch my head. 100 red vials, and it gives you liquid storage tanks which you have absolutely no purpose for. The only thing I could put in them right now are water and steam. If I wanted a steam buffer for the power plant, and why I would given that the dynamics of that don't really justify it, I have no idea. But I could do that. First time you really want to use them is when you get to acquiring oil. That's coming up -- but it's in the 'green' zone. So you basically get to storing it before you have the ability to actually acquire any. Backwards. I've got 280-some red vial stored from the earlier research, so it's a small matter to slap down a few labs anywhere connected to the grid and throw those in there. The more pressing concern, alluded to above, is Military 2. This allows for grenades, which I rarely use -- most people seem to like them for blowing up trees. Others use their shotgun on them. A few are OCD enough like me to actually cut the darn things down and use the wood. Or if we can't use it, store it. It also brings us the Black(military) science vial. Getting this is quite inexpensive, just 20 red and 20 green vials. So all I really need to do here to avoid setting up any kind of chain is craft the green ones. Piece of cake, and it avoids setting up green research, then tearing it down and/or adjusting stuff so we can have black as well. Tearing down the current steel area took a bit of doing. Then I set up the drills on the smaller iron field to south, which brings up a point of philosophy  This is the way I see things done in most factorio videos. Drills side-by-side, as many packed in as possible for maximum production. Room only for belts to carry it away, everything else covered by a drill. The field here has 27 mining drills using this method.  This is what I do. It's not necessarily better, just fits my style more. While the production will be lower(17 drills only, 10 less), it will last a lot longer because they don't 'overlap'. I'm still mining the whole field.  This will mine anything within the greenish square. 5x5 area, and the drill is only 3x3. The first method has multiple drills extracting from a lot of the same territory. They'll have to be removed and placed again somewhere else a lot more often as they'll run out of product. Second way -- more of a slow-and-steady tortoise kind of deal. More sustainable, less initial surge of production. IMO, at least so far, this falls into a personal 'not wrong just different' kind of choice. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with what we are going to get at least initially. It's actually way more than what I plan on doing at first: 8 steel, 8 iron, nearly 1 steel plate every two seconds. I may well be wrong but I think this is more than enough for the time being. Then I went and murdered dozens, probably hundreds of innocent trees minding their own business. As I was carrying a bunch of extra crap as it is from taking down the old steel line, I soon ran out of inventory space. Time for the time-honored Factorio tradition of throwing a chest on the ground and dumping half my stash in it. That's perfectly fine if you know where it is and come back and get the stuff later. The pain of having done that and then having no clue where you put thousands of useful items is not a joyful experience though. Shortly after getting a clear path to the coal field and the field itself taken down, we got another notice:  One of a number of achievements relating to success in mass production. This one is not all that impressive, but well over 5 plates/second. Research had also finished recently. Steel was soon up and operational, and -- making sure to get my chest picked up and the stuff in it put away -- it was time to move on. While I'm not a big fan of the grenades, I'd be a fool not to get set up with the new-and-improved Piercing Rounds we now have as a result of Military 2. They do 60% more damage than the standard ones, while also requiring significantly more material including a bit of steel.  Before moving on, I just wanted to show this real quick. On the quickbar here, notice the blue background on the boxes on the left. These are 'filters', but probably better described as a 'lock' or something. What that basically does is keep that item in place; nothing else will get put there even if you mis-click on it with something different. It's a good way to keep the stuff you want where you want it, as mis-clicking is so very easy to do. I should use this more than I do. You can still accidentally remove stuff from the slot, but you'll get an error message if you try to put something else in.  Another kewl little badge for us, making a lot of electronics.  Further to the west, the bus makes it's turn northwards and will run along the west coast of the lake. There's a gap as you can see between steel and the rest. To see why, look at where the steel line splits and goes to the left. It has to go under the other products, and the underground belts can only go under a distance of 4. Having this gap in between allows that to happen, otherwhise you'd have to use a lot more undergrounds on the other lines and just have the steel run straight across on the surface. A 4th hour is in the books. The last 10+ minutes have been spent cutting a swath through the forest to move the bus northwards, on it's way to where I intend to put our new research section.  As you can see on the right, our usage has dipped somewhat. We've been well within comfortable limits the whole time though. It becomes more difficult to gauge this as the factory expands, because you can multiply what you are using several times over once you set up a new resource-intensive area. All of sudden multiple supply lines that were idle now start operating again and ... brownouts are easy to come by if you aren't careful. It's probably time to do a little math. ** 16 Steam Engines @ 900 KW each produce 14.4 MW at maximum capacity. ** 12 Radar Stations @ 300 KW each = 3.6 MW. ** 58 Electric Mining Drills @ 90 KW each = 5.22 MW. ** 15 Assembling Machines 2 @ 150 KW each = 2.25 MW. ** 191 Inserters @ 13 KW each = 2.483 MW. ** 11 Assembling Machines 1 @ 90 KW each = 990 KW. ** 34 Long-handed Inserters @ 19 KW each = 646 KW. ** 17 Lamps @ 5 KW each = 85 KW. ** 7 Fast Inserters @ 46 KW each = 322 KW. Total Maximum Usage = 15.596 MW. 108.3% of capacity. Oops. Now, we haven't gotten above 10, but it's not at all out of the question that we might have everything or almost everything on at some point. And of course we are still going to build more stuff. No question we need more. Another 8 steam engines gets us to 24, and 21.6 MW. That's more like it. It also seems to me that we are needing a coal drill to keep 3-4 steam engines going at max. capacity, I've been eyeballing that the last couple hours here. We have 4 for 16 engines, and I want to keep that ratio at a minimum; going up to 6 drills keeps us there and should maintain supply.  Three discernible spikes in iron this hour; first is when we put up the second basics line and a bunch got sucked down for the assembling machines, drills, etc. Second one is when we put down the steel production area, and the third when I raided that second basics line for more supplies. Made almost as much iron as we made everything combined in the previous hour. Item Count: 35(+3 from 32) Total Production: 108k(+78% from 60.8k) A little of this will go away as our wall-section storage capacity is now at the desired capacity of two thousand sections. I could basically rebuild our entire wall right now if I chose to, so there's no need for more. That should be dwarfed by what we are going to add on though. Resources ** Iron: 448k(used 23k) for the factory field. The steel one is much smaller at 141k. We're now down to only another 20 hours on the big one though, and we'll need more supply up and running a while before it's completely gone. All of a sudden that doesn't look so safe anymore. ** Copper: 142k(5k used). A little more now but still over 28 hours worth. ** Stone: 388k(13k used). This should dry up to almost nothing for the time being. ** Coal: 293k power(7k used), 367k factory(3k used), 602k Steel. The factory field doesn't need to power the stone brick furnaces anymore, or the temporary steel line that isn't there anymore, so it's not seeing much activity relatively speaking. Almost 42 hours worth on the power end, while the bigger steel-supporting operation has only eight furnaces to support -- that's probably not much over a thousand an hour I would think. Definitely got our eyes mostly on the iron, esp. with plenty of close-by options for the other three. We'll want to move drilling out to that 400k-strong field to the west before this one starts to dry up.
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Oct 3, 2017 03:41
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EponymousMrYar posted:What a novel idea, bussing Green Circuits. That would probably save a lot of organization space in my current factory... Veloxyll posted:I usually have just built lines as I needed for them. Horribly inefficient, perhaps, but it means I just have to worry about whether I have enough Iron/Copper etc usually. (May have also had coal on the bus to make steel as needed at some stage too) There are many ways to play. Almost as many as there are players. I like efficiency and having a single location to go to if I need to expand production or whatever. Others will have different priorities.
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Oct 3, 2017 17:51
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MayOrMayNotBeACat posted:I think I'm learning more about how to play Factorio from this Let's Play than I have from the "introductory" videos I've been watching on YouTube. Excellent! I'd just echo what others have said about this medium being better to explain details of things, etc. quote:whenever I had to do this kind of math, I just reached for the nearest APL interpreter (dabbling in obscure programming languages is a hobby of mine) because it's very good at streamlining this kind of workload and doing it quickly. After playing Factorio for a while, I just lose the ability to not be lazy. I have some programming ability but I just enjoy numbers in general. Quantifying progress is just how I roll, esp. in games like this with lots of them. PsychoticWeasel posted:They didn't jam them all together but they didn't spread them far apart to make sure everything was perfectly covered, either. Each drill was placed one tile apart in each direction to form a perfect square grid with some overlap since each miner can reach one tile out in addition to whatever is directly underneath. That's how I did it at first.
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Oct 6, 2017 02:16
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 Ahh, look at all that red. And we're not done scanning yet at some locations. Everything we've built so far is this small little thing in the middle. In the south-southwest area, by the big coal field south of the lake, there's a growing base of the bastards who think this planet belongs to them or something, and a little too close to our walls for comfort. We need to deal with that eventually, but I'd rather have some better toys first.  Here's something to reduce the amount of triggering in certain quarters. Behold the magnificient Underground Pipe of yore and legend. Much like the underground belt, only for liquids, this magnificent creation transports fluids underground, so that I may walk in between here without interrupting the operation of the steam power plant. Ain't technology grand?!? I soon discovered that I really needed, or at least wanted, more room for the new research area than was available at the spot intended, so I had to go further. This was very transport-belt intensive, and I had to wait for more to be made. Definitely going to up the storage on those from 400 to about a thousand. Of course there is nearly always something else that can be usefully done. In this case, delivering some of our spanking new piercing rounds to the turrets guarding the walls. Took nearly a Factorio day, almost 10 minutes by our reckoning, to do the circuit. When the biters decide to test the boundaries I've imposed upon them though, I'll probably be glad to have this.  I came back to discover this. Definitely got a copper issue. It'll eventually catch back up as it's just going for filling the circuit line on the bus and making the ammunition right now, but we're going to need more soon anyway. Not a surprise here as I've still got the same six furnaces I started with. Decided to do a bit more than double it, going to 14. Almost half the hour was already burnt. I was finally ready to get going on our new research line ... after I did the math, of course. Completed Research Projects: 12 Available: 17 Locked: 83 For those of you scoring at home, we're about a ninth of the way(10.7%) through those that we know about. Just nicely getting started, but we'll sink our teeth into things a bit more with this coming endeavor. A lot of the currently available projects cost 100 vials each(100 of multiple kinds, often 100 red and 100 green). The most expensive one is at 250. I think we'll want enough space here to start at 10 Labs, and ramp up to 20-25 eventually. Typical processing time is a bit higher now as well, at 30 seconds. To start with then, we want to be able to produce a vial of each type every 3 seconds(30 seconds divided by 10 Labs) or faster. ** Red is still going to be pretty basic. We'll need three assemblers there; two would almost be enough. Everything required is already on the bus. ** Three assemblers for green as well; eight seconds each for an assembling machine 2 to produce one. 1 Transport Belt and 1 Inserter are required for those; a single assembler of each will hilariously over-supply them. ** Black is a bit different. Our sparkling new assembling machine 2s will take almost 7 seconds each on these, so we'll build three of them. They need piercing magazines(no problem), gun turrets(a crapload of raw material for those, but we've got it all incoming), and grenades. Which require coal. So now we need a coal source. There may come a time when we need to put that on the bus as well, but we're plenty close to the main factory field to just split off a line from that and send it up here. Grenades and turrets will take almost 11 seconds each to build, so we're going to need a larger amount there to get enough going. At least 5 assemblers each to start with. It's definitely best to figure all this out at the start; it gives you a ballpark of much room you need to plan for. The addition of the military vials, though many projects don't require them, is definitely going to mean a LOT more raw material drain when we start those up. That's a big change to deal with compared to 0.14. It could be done faster by someone with more skill, of course, but it took about half an hour to get it set up. There's a bit of spaghetti, but not much. Biggest concern is getting enough product for any military-intensive stuff.  Too far out to see much, the bird's-eye view here.  A close-up of part of it. A lot going on here but this is red, green, and part of the black production. The latter is where I expect problems; these were running full steam as I anticipated they would. ** Landfill -- Our first automated 'green' project, but not all that exciting for our purposes. It allows you to use a lot of stone to fill in water and turn it into usable land. 50 green, 50 red vials. ** Gun Turret Damage -- Same price, and a 10% upgrade in the effectiveness of our turrets. Sure, I'll take that.  The peak right now has been a little over 11 MW, well within our capabilites. You can see a nice spike here in the energy usage of the assembling machine 2s with the new research ramping up. ** 24 Steam Engines = 21.6 MW max capacity ** 12 Radar Stations = 3.6 MW ** 65 Electric Mining Drills = 5.85 MW ** 36 Assembling Machine 2s = 5.4 MW ** 10 Labs = 900 KW ** 273 Inserters = 3.55 MW ** 13 Assembling Machine 1s = 1.17 MW ** 65 Long handed Inserters = 1.24 MW ** 17 Lamps = 85 KW ** 7 Fast Inserters = 322 KW Total Maximum Usage = 22.12 MW, 102.4% of capacity. Back to a situation where we almost certainly have enough, but still going to expand here to stay ahead of things. Another eight steam engines.  Item Count: 34(staying pretty stable there) Total Production: 105k(-3% from 108k) Reached a bit of a new plateau here. I'd expect another jump in the next hour with a steady dose of research activity. Resources ** Iron: 428k primary(20k used), 132k steel(9k used). 21 and 15 hours remaining here. I'm a little surprised we're going through that much on the steel one, though perhaps I shouldn't be. ** Copper: 131k(11k used). 12 hours left here now. This relatively smallish field doesn't have all that long left. ** Stone: 388k(no change). As expected. The only thing it's used for now are furnaces. ** Coal: 363k(4k used) factory, 286k(7k used) power, 601k steel(1k used). Over 40 hours even on the power plant's source.
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Oct 6, 2017 02:23
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MayOrMayNotBeACat posted:gently caress large biter nests, and gently caress the fact that biters can expand them. Oh, you can plan on a slog pretty much for parts of it. Especially since some things have changed; one that I've already noticed is that you don't heal in combat, but only when the fighting has stopped for a while. That makes things harder all by itself. I'm sure there will be times when I do more fighting(and/or dying) than building. But yeah, all that is coming, slowly but surely. It's inevitable.
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Oct 7, 2017 00:29
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** Grenade Damage is our next research, and first one to use the black military vials. 50 each of all three here, 20% damage upgrade to all grenades.  We've got a developing situation here with the spread of pollution in the northwest -- and it's nearing the edge of our radar detection in the southwest also. It's time for a little more fighting. Research will continue in the meantime of course. ** Advanced Material Processing(75 red, 75 green). This one is more significant, allowing for steel furnances which craft twice as fast as our stone ones, with the same fuel requirement. Effectively we'll get double the bang for our buck coal-wise. The biters in the northwest were a piece of cake. Only one spawner each for three different bases, a worm with a couple of them but not even as difficult as the one we took out initially that had two of each. Extending our wall to the lake will now bring a nice 700k+ iron ore field within our grasp. ** Circuit Network(100 red, 100 green). Now it's time to really complicate the heck out of things with combinators and circuit networks. I'll get to more of this when I'm done with our current wall expansion. ** Gates(100 red, 100 green). Pretty much what they sound like, they make going in and out of our factory easier by lowering when we approach them. ** Engine(same cost). Pumps and Engine Units can now be built. We don't have any practical use for either ... yet. ** Toolbelt(same). This basically doubles the size of the quickbar, a welcome addition since there is more I'd like to put down there by this point.  It takes longer to take down walls then it does to put them up. By using the lake as a boundary again though, we are actually going to save wall sections here compared to what we had before. Three new radars go up, including one on this peninsula I'm currently on. That gives us real-time coverage of what's going on across the lake, which is a nice thing as there is definitely some activity here. While I was doing all of this, we had our first attack on the wall in the southwest. A minor one, but there are three bases I want to take out down that way and two of them are larger than what we've dealt with so far. After some restocking, most importantly on ammunition, it's time to face them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_NBZ0n6K_Q Ended up not being as difficult as I thought it might be. This is the second group, having already dealt with one during the night. Looked like an awful lot of biters for one spawner on the first part there -- I was actually close enough to the larger base that their initial rush had already been triggered. That can be a problem with dealing with multiple bases close together. Six spawners makes that the largest I've dealt with by far, but there was only one small worm. The more spawners there are, the more you are going to get periodically interrupted. These are still small enough though that all it really means is burning through more ammo in between destroying them. Eventually there's a tipping point though; enough of them and there's no time to kill the spawners; the biters just keep coming and coming as fast or faster than you can shoot them. That's when things get ... interesting. Extending our wall down the west coast of the lake further and throwing another radar up was enough to make us secure on this front again. Also worth noting is the state of my heavy armor; less than 10% worn out. It takes a lot of fighting before you need a new one. ** Lab Research Speed 1(same cost). This was already in by this point, allowing our Labs to work 10% faster. ** Oil Processing(same). This was already underway by the time I started heading back. It adds a number of possibilities relating to oil, and begins a whole new industry for us. There are a number of 100/100 cost military upgrades(bullet damage, shooting speed, another gun turret damage upgrade) that follow this. Five of them in all, so those can do their thing while I work on getting set up with oil.  Or, maybe I won't do that quite yet. Looking at our eastern border on the map here, pollution has gotten through the relatively thin borders out that way and is spreading. Quickly. I've got to deal with that first, especially since it's only going to get worse. Those purple dots are our initial oil supply, and it's a dirty operation.  Our fourth Achievement, specifically for getting oil processing. It is a rather important step, as many products will depend on it. It may say 'eco unfriendly', but there is no 'friendly' way to go -- without oil, you cannot win. ** Flammables(50 Red, 50 Green). A cheap gateway tech that doesn't actually do anything on it's own; it merely is a prereq for various explosives-related things. I haven't check on the research area in some time, but as things are whirling along fine with I'm otherwhise-occupied, it appears I didn't screw anything up too horrifically.  Our new border in the east, using a lake once again. There's lots of stuff to do now. ** Get a basic starting oil setup going. ** Replace stone furnances with the more efficient steel ones. ** Circuit networks and all their insanity. The most important of these seems to be the steel furnaces. Those require stone bricks, which we're already set up to produce, and steel, which we can easily divert to that area. It'll take a bit to get a significant amount of those built, so I head off to the oil patch in the meantime. Some trees have to go in order to get a clear look at it.  A bit dark so this isn't a great image, but you can see the details on the right. Mining hardness of 1 means it can't be mined by hand; the yield is quite important as well. Crude oil works a little differently than ores. The 98% number there will gradually diminish over time. At least before, it never would go below 10%, so you could always get something but eventually only in trickles. Higher the yield, the more you can get out of a single patch. There are two here(second one is not quite as good at 87%), which is not much but it's fine for right now as we just want to get a basic sense of how oil works. ** Pumpjacks at first, and they allow us to get the oil out of the ground. Fairly expensive(5 Steel Plates, 10 Gear Wheels, 5 Electronic Circuits, 10 Pipes). We'll eventually mass-produce these, but there is no need yet. One per oil patch, so we only need two. They pollute a lot, and take 90 KW of power to run. ** Pumpjacks won't do much without somewhere for the oil to go. For now, we'll run some piping and set up a storage tank. Finally we can use those.  This is a little smaller than I'd like, but you can see the two green pumpjacks on the left, piping out to the right, and of course the storage tank. It'll take a while for that thing to fill. Also notice the spaced underground pipes: at this point we want quite a bit of those. In fact, I'm going to want to add regular and underground pipes to our list of basics to get production of going and carry around. ** We've got a supply of crude going, meager though it might be. The next thing we need is the oil refinery, which we need to grab some stone bricks for(it also requires steel, gear wheels, pipe, and circuits. In general oil-related stuff is more expensive and time-consuming to make than what we've used so far). At five ingredients, I couldn't automate these even if I wanted to.  You want to be a little careful when you set this stuff up, because oil isn't as easy to move later as the solid materials we've worked with so far. You can't store the liquids in your inventory -- pick up something with liquid inside it, and the liquid disappears, lost forever. That means leaving plenty of space is a really good idea. This is only going to be a starter oil-related line and I'm sure I'll build a permanent one somewhere else later, but I still don't want to crowd it. I've run a small ways east of the storage tank for this. Anyway, a couple things about our first Refinery. The power usage jumps out right away; almost half a megawatt each. There is only one recipe(Basic Oil Processing) that these things can use. Every 5 seconds, they can turn 100 crude into 30 Heavy Oil, 30 Light Oil, and 40 Petroleum Gas. We'll need to get some basic storage up for each of those as well. This is still only a starter setup, but it's already getting a little complicated. Once I've got a storage tank for each of those three products, the refinery can run nonstop. Now I want to see if I've got enough refining capacity here. I need to restock anyway, so I note that there is 5.1k crude(still only a fraction of capacity) in the first tank. It's down just a hair when I get back, 5k on the button. Well, that almost never happens, but this is perfect. Producing almost enough to keep this one refinery busy. Now it's time to get to know the Chemical Plant. These aren't quite as expensive or power-hungry as the refineries, but they still draw their share of resources. These can do a couple of things right now: ** Any of the three oil products(light, heavy, petroleum gas) can be turned into solid fuel. Solid fuel is rated at 25 MJ, just over 3x the energy of an equal amount of coal, and provides a 20% acceleration boost for any vehicles that use it. ** We can also turn the Heavy Oil into Lubricant. We have no use for any of those at the moment, so I'm going to pass on getting them set up. We'll continue pumping the oil and refining it: I'll need to come back here regularly and ensure that we've got enough storage tank capacity to keep that going. For now though, we'll need more research to progress further. A full run of 50 steel furnaces is ready, plenty for my current purposes. Before we put them in place, it's a good time to do a little more math; our iron line is close to full capacity. Each belt can transport 13.33 items per second. At 3.5 seconds/plate, that means it can support 46.7 furnaces. 23 on each side. Right now we've got 36 iron smelting ones in place, so that's close. With the faster steel furnaces, the maximum we can use in a column is cut in half to 23.33, or less than 12 on a side. For now, we'll have 11 and basically be up to a full belt of iron.  Quite quickly the new iron line is set up, shown here. We've eliminated the overhead from 28 inserters that are no longer needed for the extra furnaces, and elsewhere stone, copper, and steel can be built at twice the rate they were before. I'll have to watch the ore supply because that'll eventually run low on those, but this will work a lot better.  Peak usage is now up a bit over 12 MW, continuing to creep upwards. Max. Capacity = 28.8 MW 19 Radar Stations = 5.7 MW 66 Electric Mining Drills = 5.94 MW 36 Assembling Machine 2s = 5.4 MW 10 Labs = 900 KW 1 Oil Refinery = 420 KW 247 Inserters = 3.21 MW 2 Pumpjacks = 180 KW 13 Assembling Machine 1s = 1.17 MW 65 Long handed Inserters = 1.24 MW 7 Fast Inserters = 322 KW 17 Lamps = 85 KW Maximum Usage = 24.57 MW The list of consumers continues to grow, but it looks like we've got enough capacity to stick with the way things are for now.  We haven't been nearly as busy the last 20-30 minutes here, and that's mostly due to some of the bullet and turret upgrades having longer processing times for the vials. I could just add more Labs to make it go faster, but I've still got other things to work on so there's no need. Item Count: 39(+5) Total Production: 144k(+37% from 105k) Onward and upwards. Resources ** Iron: 400k primary(28k used), 124k steel(8k used). 14 and 16 hours now. Tick tock. ** Copper: 121k(10k used). Still at 12 hours left. ** Stone: 380k(8k used). Mostly for the steel furnaces. ** Coal: 276k power(10k used), 356k factory(7k used), 600k steel(1k used). Looking more and more like the power-supply field in the west will be the first to go, but there are plenty of options. Factory usage was also up, partly because it's sending some north to the research area for the military vials. ** Crude Oil: 18/second. For this, it's the combined extraction rate of all our current oil patches. 97% translates to 9.7/second, for example. They've already depleted a bit in the brief time it's been running.
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Oct 7, 2017 01:29
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Dunno why I didn't figure out the dead simple conveyor way to have two products on one delivery line without messing things up. Should have seen my very first factory attempt. I had one conveyor, which was basically a rectangle. My idea was to just put everything I could build on one conveyor, that way each machine could grab what it needed when it needed it. So there was coal. And copper ore. And iron ore. And stone. And bricks. And iron plates. And copper plates. And raw wood. And ... all going basically in a circle, soon very clogged and discombobulated as you might imagine, with zero organization whatsoever. Wish I still had the save. Didn't take me long to figure out it really wasn't brilliant in it's simplicity -- it was just profoundly stupid and counterpreductive.
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Oct 8, 2017 01:52
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EponymousMrYar posted:I'd argue that if you're going to refine oil at all you might as well make use of it since it stores better as crude (it's a 1-1 crude to heavy/light/petro refinement but you need 3x the storage because it's 3x the product You are not wrong.
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Oct 8, 2017 16:00
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Next on the agenda is getting some more basics going; pipes, underground pipes, and storage tanks. The small area where the supply of piercing ammo magazines gets made in the southwest already has what is needed to get that done. That went quickly, and then another bunch of lamps got put in place, an overdue project to improve illumination at night. With the borders still under control, I decided that it was perhaps time to boost our research a bit. And then ... Circuit Networks, Combinators, and other Craziness Big caveat here. Before getting to this, I had never used a circuit network or a combinator for any purpose. I'd thought about it, seen a couple examples of it being done, etc. But that's about it. So I'm sure vets will be jump in and tell me what I'm wrong about helpfully. Here's the stuff that came with that tech advance, and what the game says about it. It's one of those things that is a powerful, beneficial feature, and yet completely optional to actually winning the game.  From left to right: ** Red Wire ** Green Wire -- the purposes of both red and green is to create a circuit network to pass information along and control various activities in the factory. There's two of them so that you can have two networks active in the same area. ** Arithmetic Combinator -- Performs arithmetic calculations on circuit network signals ** Decider Combinator -- Compares circuit network signals ** Constant Combinator -- Outputs constant circuit network signals ** Power Switch -- Used to control the connections of the electric network. Can also be controlled by the circuit network. ** Programmable Speaker The last one, the speaker, has to do with making your factory play various music. Not as in background music, but actually generated by the factory itself. Interesting, but not something I expect to be messing with. Ok, so starting at the beginning. The two different-colored wires essentially transmit what items you have stored. This can be later used to communicate with other machines and control what they do.  Basic example here. This is where I have the fast inserters made. I've got this chest limited to one stack, which is 50. I don't need 50 stored at all times: I've only used 7 so far. But the choices when I built this area were go with the 50, or just what the assembler will store itself(2), or even more clunky, throw down a belt long enough to fill up with whatever number I wanted.  Here I've connected the chest storing the fast inserters to the long-handed inserter that loads it. I can't connect the assembler itself to the circuit network.  Here's what the inserter gui displays now. Under 'Mode of Operation', stack size is not relevant yet. 'None' simply means the inserter will ignore the signal it gets from the circuit network. That signal will tell it what is in the chest, since that's what it's hooked up to(50 fast inserters in this case). I've set it to only put more in the chest if it is less than 10. Now I can take half of them out(down to 25) and it still does nothing. It will load only up to 10, and then stop. So I've achieved a finer level of control in terms of how much product I want to make and store.  This is the power switch. Shown here, it connects the research area in the north to the rest of the base. It's on here, but if we turn it off ...  Everything past it will not get power any longer. This should prove useful for saving power usage when a particular area of the factory is not needed. Times when I want to pause research to go clear out some biters, build a product line for a newly-discovered item, etc. Of course this could be achieved almost as easily by simply placing and removing a well-positioned electric pole. But these switches can be connected to the circuit network, allowing control over it from a distance and/or based on specific conditions. Combinators So what about these different combinators?  The arithmetic combinator manipulates the value of the incoming signal. In our 50 Fast Inserters example, I could add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. that value by whatever I feel like.  This one compares values with stuff like >, < , = , etc. It's a boolean true/false deal, and will send out a signal only if the expression evaluates as true. Could be used in conjunction with a power switch to set it to turn off when a certain amount of product is reached, for example.  Last but not least is the Constant combinator. This outputs a constant signal to the network. Not just one: it's got 18 slots for them. So what do I want to do with all this? Whatever it is, I'm going to need a supply of all six components. I think I can craft the combinators and power switches for now; they're quick and cheap and I don't think I want a ton of them, at least not yet. I think it's worth having a stash of the red and green wires though. ** Flamethrower(50 Red, 50 Green, 50 Black). The wire lines didn't take long to set up, but by the time they did this was the latest research item to come through. Flamethrowers do significant area-affect damage. They also continue burning for a couple seconds afterwards. That combination makes them a quality, if risky, weapon at this point. I say risky, because you can burn down things you don't want to if you aren't quite careful. The big thing here is the ammunition. It's made in a chemical plant, which gives us an excuse to make one of those. Heavy Oil, Light Oil, and Steel are required. A practical use for two of our three oil products. I don't really want to use these yet: I think our SMG with the various upgrades so far is going to be more effective in most cases. But it sure doesn't hurt to have it ready just in case. That's worth extending the steel line over to the oil area for. I don't really want to spend the time on it now though, so I'll just keep going with more upgrades research. Control Center That's not the name of any item or concept in the game; it's more what I want to do with this circuit network stuff. A central location for me to make changes and pick up things. The factory isn't very big but I still have to move around to do a lot of things that I can do in one place now. Again this is completely un-necessary, but should help with some efficiency and get me using the network. Technically very little beyond smelting in Factorio is NECESSARY ... I don't have to make assemblers at all. I could just craft everything by hand, but that would be stupid and take forever, for example.  First up, let's meet possibly the strangest 'health potion' you'll ever see. Since you only recover health when you've been out of combat for a while, these can actually be use it. There are actually fish in the bodies of water in the game, which you can 'mine' by the usual method quite quickly.  They are actually programmed as a weapon, with a 'shooting speed' of 2/second, and inflict -80 Physical damage. In Factorio terms, you 'fire' at yourselves with the raw fish by holding them and clicking anywhere roughly near your character/avatar. This is one of those items that most people don't discover for a while -- I don't know if I ever would have known about it if I hadn't stumbled upon it in a video. Not sure if it's possible to fish the waters dry, but you certainly shouldn't need enough to do that. You get 5 from each one you mine, so I take a moment and snatch up some. Ok, back to the Control Center. For now, a single constant combinator will serve as the 'nerve center' of the operation.  A single value here: R is set to 1. Up by the research area, I have a power switch with red wires following the power cables all the way up to connect them to the network.  I no longer can shut this power switch on and off manually now that it's hooked in to the network; that tells it to operate off the information it gets, not my control. I shouldn't want to though. As I have it set here, it will remain on as long as "R" equals 1. Any other value, and it will turn off. I try this out to make sure it works. Any time I want to stop doing research for a while, I simply change R at this constant combinator, the 'Control Center', to anything else and I'm no longer needing to power that area. Change it back to 1 to start researching again. Now let's add more to this. I run the network connections out to the oil area, and connect them to all of storage tanks.  This is just informational. At any power pole that's on the network, including the ones at the Control Center where I'd most commonly check it, I can see how much I have of the various products.  Initially I throw this up: another power switch that will shut off the refinery if crude reaches a minimal level, arbitrarily set at 500 here. Note that I can't connect the network to the refinery itself directly. This will work, but isn't optimal. When supply gets down to that level, it will be constantly shutting off and on. What would be better is to have it shut off at 500, then restart at say 5k. Then it would run for a while, turn off when supply is too low, then turn on when it's got enough to do another burst of activity. Actually making that happen is a bit more complicated. After spending far too much time and not being able to make it work, I decided to move on. I know it can be done, but my brain isn't connecting the dots on how to accomplish it. So I'll stick at simply an on/off at 500 crude here. Added another storage tank of each type while I was at it; petroleum gas is more than half full at 14k+, the others close to half at over 11k. Don't want to run out of space. Next project was a little more time-consuming, but not particularly difficult. Some spaghetti would be involved though. Transporting all of the 'basics' product to a central location, then setting up the network to control how many of each to store. While in the middle of this I finally got to the point in research where it became to pause the process because I'd acquired new, usable products. That'll get dealt with once I get this set up -- a few steps to the east and the research area was disconnected from the grid.  At the end of the next hour, I had it almost wired. Not completely, but mostly. Here's the end of it, near the control center, where I've got a couple of steel chests. The various iron ones scattered all over are now completely gone. I think the stone walls and steel furnaces are fine up by the stone line, but everything else directs here. Notice I've got the chests themselves hooked up to the network. This allows it to determine how much I have:  Eeek. Something's gone wrong for the crude to be up that high(24k). Must have set something incorrectly. In any case, here I've got the instructions for how much to build of everything set on the inserters that remove them from the various assemblers -- or in the case of the metal plates(steel, iron, copper), from the belt itself. I could have more signals coming out from the control center, but memorizing which signal goes to which item would drive me up the wall and down the other side. I don't have to change amounts often enough to make that worth it. Of course, when the inserters disable themselves, there will be still be some coming down the belt so this isn't super-precise, but given how infrequently I need to restock I don't foresee there being a logjam. I'll take a central location over precision,.  This is the first time I've used these. One chest isn't quite enough to store everything right now, so I've got a few of the more popular items being taken out by this thing. I can add more chests and inserters as needed. As you can see, the filter inserter can intelligently select up to five items, and only those items, to be moved. Their power load is 52kw, slightly above the fast inserter's 46kw, and they move about as quickly I think. Definitely a useful tool for the right situation.  Last 20 minutes or so of the 7th hour of operations, power needs dove with the shut-down of the research. Max. Capacity = 28.8 MW 65 Electric Mining Drills = 5.85 MW 19 Radar Stations = 5.7 MW 36 Assembling Machine 2s = 5.4 MW 260 Inserters = 3.38 MW 19 Assembling Machine 1s = 1.71 MW 76 Long handed Inserters = 1.44 MW 15 Labs = 1.35 MW 10 Fast Inserters = 460 KW 1 Oil Refinery = 420 KW 2 Pumpjacks = 180 KW 36 Lamps = 180 KW 1 Filter Inserter = 52 KW Maximum Usage = 26.02 MW Actually removed one drill that had exhausted the resources in it's area, and there's one more I noticed that needs to go. I also re-organized this list from biggest to smallest in terms of power usage; that way it can be seen quickly where the majority of the bill is going. We saw only a slight increase here, having spent the majority of the time on using the circuit networks to increase ease of control and efficiency of the factory. It doesn't look like we are going any higher than 12-13 MW at peak during this period.  Item Count: 41(+2) Total Production: 137k(-5% from 144k) Another brief, if expected, dip. Again the research stall is the cause here. However, this does not include the oil products:  1.4 million units of water for the power plant, 75.2k units of oil-related stuff. There is also a 'Buildings' category, which shows how much physical stuff was placed down/deconstructed during the time period.  575 built, 109 deconstructed. The latter number includes 11 fish ... apparently they are considered a building for this purpose. Interesting. This is useful for seeing how much the actual physical infrastructure of the factory is expanding, as compared to how much it is producing. Production is a lot more important, but still worth looking at here. Resources ** Iron: 375k primary(25k used), 110k steel(14k used). 15 and just under 8 hours remain. It's clear that we'll soon need to divert iron from our primary field to feed the steel beast. ** Copper: 111k(10k used). Holding steady, 11 hours left. ** Stone: 379k(1k used). Down to just a trickle now as expected. ** Coal: 264k power(12k used), 352k factory(4k used), 599k steel(1k used). All the time in the world for the last two, but the power field is down to about 22 hours. There's plenty within our borders to supplement this, when the time comes. ** Crude Oil: 14.3/second. That's already down 23% from the 18+ we had when the pumpjacks were placed. Oil patches do not last long.
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Oct 8, 2017 16:14
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MarquiseMindfang posted:Does Iron continue being a ridiculous bottleneck forever, because I'm getting to the point where one belt just isn't enough.... or I have way too many diverters on it and the constant halving means things downstream just don't get enough. Does this mean I should use power switches to turn off production lines I don't need right now so it can continue downstream? And do diverters work "in reverse"? Can I put two input streams in and extend only one output and it'll merge them, or is there something to do that later? Splitters don't work in reverse, but you can merge two lanes of product. The solution to this kind of thing you describe is almost always 'build more'. If you come to the conclusion that you just don't have enough iron and you are smelting a full belt of it ... then build another column of furnaces and add another lane to your bus. Iron will always be a major, major need, but it doesn't have to be a bottleneck. Veloxyll posted:Part of the fun of Factorio is learning to live with your terrible terrible engineering mistakes. The struggle is real.
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Oct 9, 2017 13:00
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Omobono posted:I have never played Factorio, but I think this should work: I will try this at some point. Jabor posted:The trick for adding hysteresis Thanks for this! MayOrMayNotBeACat posted:I spotted a typo. Even I wasn't sure what I meant by that at first. I'm fairly confident after thinking about it that 'be use it' was meant to say 'be useful'. But I'm not really sure how I expected anyone else to understand that if I barely do myself. MarquiseMindfang posted:I bought this game, drat you. Muwahahahahaha!!
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Oct 10, 2017 18:53
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Ok, first job is to check on the oil. The problem was absurdly simple ...  That underground pipe, supposed to be carrying heavy oil to storage, got rotated sideways somehow during all my messing around over here with the network, and I didn't notice it. The refinery clogged up with the stuff, and couldn't continue working, so the crude tank filled up. By the time I got over here it had stopped. It's remarkable how easy it is to screw up something like that. Only takes one small mistake to make your whole factory grind to a halt sometimes. Just oil in this case. Ok, now on to that research item I mentioned ** Electric Energy Distribution(120 Red, 120 Green). Everything else available takes 150 of a kind minimum, so we're starting to ramp up a bit in cost and get to the more expensive part of the Green/Black tier. This one brings in two more types of electric poles. Large ones are good for stringing cable across large distances(like out to the perimeter radars for instance). They have a small radius around them that they can connect that power to buildings though. That's where the mediums come in: they have the largest radius(7x7, 4x4 for large, 5x5 for small), and slightly longer reach for spacing between them compared to the small ones(9 to 7.5 -- the large's have a massive 30 here). Other than satisfying OCD tendencies stronger than mine, it doesn't serve a purpose to replace most of the existing power poles that are out there. Definitely want to add these two to our basics production though and have some for when they are needed. Both require steel and copper, more for the large ones naturally, which are already set up and available on my western-most line that makes pipes, storage tanks, and ammo. I'll just add to it, finishing up the rest of the inserter settings for the network's storage instructions on my way out there.  This is the last remaining loose end to tie up at this point. Once the new power pole production was going, I restarted research and ran the steel bus line out to the east near the oil. This is just a bit north of our storage tanks. Our first operational Chemical Plant, which are basically assembling machines for oil-related products. In this case, steel comes in from the right, light and heavy oil from below, and the belt to the left carries flamethrower ammunition back to central storage. ** Sulfur Processing(150 Red, 150 Green) was invented while this was being set up. There's no actual practical use for it yet ... but there will be soon. Sulfur itself requires equal parts water and petroleum gas(30 each, producing a pair of sulfur). This is then turned into Sulfuric Acid(5 Sulfur, 1 Iron plate, 100 Water to produce 50 units). It's basically time to start getting a little more serious about oil here. We're going to need H20 over here and the rest of the bus -- or at least the iron for now. Before I do that though, I think I'm going to want to have automated production of chemical plants eventually. So why not now? Noticed that a copper drill was no longer functioning, so I took it down and put up six more. That's more than we need, but it finishes off our current field. For the chemical plants, I'll need to do quite a bit of tree-cutting in the western forest. That could wait, but it's going to need to be done eventually. There's no good reason not to just bite the bullet ... err, steel axe ... and do the necessary. In the meantime, here's some research that got completed. ** Landmines(100 Red, 100 Green, 100 Black). These are made from Steel and Explosives, and as you'd expect they do area damage to enemies that come near. I've never really felt the need for them, though I suppose if there were repeated, concentrated attacks in an area they would be useful. For now at least I won't be making any. ** Rocketry(120 Red, 120 Green, 120 Black). This is a lot more useful, basically serving the same purpose as the shotgun for this tier, just as the flamethrower more or less replaces the SMG. Range of 22, damage of 200 explosion for the rockets themselves. The shotgun, even taking into account it's accuracy issues, does much less damage at slightly lower range of 20. We definitely want this. Rockets take Electronic Circuits, Explosives, and Iron Plates. So now we have a good reason to make those Explosives. A couple of upgrades for the shooting speed and damage of said rockets follow this.  Here's where the chemical plants are going to get built(to the west). I had been waiting to see if things caught up at all, and maybe they will eventually, but we've obviously got a steel shortage. More and more stuff requires it, and we have the room, so I headed back down to double our output there from 8 to 16 furnaces. We're already draining that iron field pretty fast -- now it's going to go even more quickly. This is also one area where the new power poles can help us: we can compress this a bit.  Here's the way it is with the smaller poles; a gap in between every other furnace to connect the power.  This is afterwards. No gaps, so we can fit 25% more furnaces in the same space. ** Battery(150 Red, 150 Green). Another product used to make other things. Batteries come from sulfuric acid, along with a little iron and copper. The chemical plant setup was done shortly after this, so I finally got around to extending the bus over to our oil area. I'm going to need to watch supplies carefully; I normally like to have the research area be the 'end', so that will run dry before anything I need immediately does. At least for a while here though, things will run past research and then on to oil. ** Electric Energy Accumulators(150 Red, 150 Green). These are very important -- but early. They're made from batteries and iron, and store power for use later. A LOT more military upgrades were available for 200 each of the three types: they got the nod next. Went back to central storage for supplies, including putting down a third chest and initially forgetting to hook it up to the network which caused a lot more stuff to turn on than really should have, but this kind of building sucks up a lot of transport belts. Then with the bus basically over to the oil section, I needed to put together some sort of sensible flow chart. That would have to wait though -- I noticed that I hadn't connected the second storage tank of each type(heavy, light, petroleum gas) to the network. Oops. Almost 90% full on the last one there, so I definitely want a couple more of those. That takes us to our next hourly review.  We're pretty much at our peak usage right now, and have stayed there for nearly a half-hour. Call it 16 MW, a significant jump. Max. Capacity = 28.8 MW 65 Electric Mining Drills = 6.39 MW 19 Radar Stations = 5.7 MW 37 Assembling Machine 2s = 5.55 MW 260 Inserters = 3.93 MW 22 Assembling Machine 1s = 1.98 MW 95 Long handed Inserters = 1.81 MW 15 Labs = 1.35 MW 11 Fast Inserters = 506 KW 1 Oil Refinery = 420 KW 1 Chemical Plant = 210 KW 41 Lamps = 205 KW 2 Pumpjacks = 180 KW 1 Filter Inserter = 52 KW Maximum Usage = 28.3 MW Basically right where we need to be, and we can get away with this for now but another expansion is on the horizon.  Item Count: 37(-4) Total Production: 161k(+18% from 137k) Reaching new heights with the iron ... and basically staying there. Looks like that operation will need expanding again soon. That fuels our rise to a new high in total activity. Liquid oil-based products increased significantly as well, as they were pretty much running solid the whole hour. Resources ** Iron: 350k primary(25k used), 93k steel(17k used). 14 and about 5.5 hours here. I'm now thinking about getting to a secure place where I'm able to go tap that western field. It's almost time, and I'd probably be doing it now if I didn't know that I'll soon be inventing something to make it more convenient. ** Copper: 97k(14k used). The draw here increased and it's just under 7 hours remaining. The only reason this is still a non-issue is how trivial it will be to move the mines a short distance away to a larger field. ** Stone: 378k(1k used). ** Coal: 252k power(12k used), 347k factory(5k used), 597k steel(2k used). Holding steady within expected parameters. ** Crude Oil: 14.5/sec. I had this at 14.3 an hour ago but I think I misread it: it was probably 16.3.
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Oct 10, 2017 19:03
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BonfireLit posted:They do work in reverse: Oops.
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Oct 11, 2017 22:46
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As an fyi, I don't find trains to be useful as quickly as you get them. Logistics and other power stuff, definitely and I know more about those anyway. I think I mentioned this before but in my 0.14 run, I used a single, minimalistic(two-car) train than ran around to a few locations picking up oil. And that's it. Anyway those things will be coming up soon.
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Oct 13, 2017 02:37
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 Been a while since we looked at this. Just look at the lovely, toxic, ecosystem-destroying(except for ours) pollution!  This is our one pressing problem at the moment. Looks like the pollution cloud in the southeast extends a bit beyond our radar ... and there is a sizable enemy presence not far beyond that. We've got work to do here, and I expect we will very shortly be thankful for all those military upgrades we've been doing.  This is a moderate distance east of our wall at the moment, and guarded by a sizable concentration of biters. It's also about twice as large as any other crude deposit within radar range. Not an immediate goal, but once our oil needs really start to ramp up we're going to need to invest the time and ammunition to clear out these nests, and those around it. The pumpjacks alone will cause significant pollution, but it'll be well worth the effort. Even the few other smaller sources aren't any easier to get to from what I can see. #1 priority has to be extending that wall in the southeast and getting a handle on how close we are to antagonizing that base. I'd like to get as many upgrades as possible done before I go after them though. The extensiion went without incident, though I did have a facepalm moment here:  That turret wouldn't do a whole lot of good now would it. Tons of ammunition, I just didn't load any in it before.  Here was a chance for the new electric poles to take center stage. Just 3-4 of them -- they actually stretch about twice this far -- to get the new radar's power connected. It shows we still have some margin ... but not a lot. Back to that oil flow concept: ** Crude -- Heavy, Light, and Petroleum Gas are produced at the Refinery. Oh yeah ... hadn't checked those levels in a long time. Turns out they are doing just fine, but ... oops. ** Petroleum Gas - Sulfur - Sulfuric Acid/Explosives. Other stuff like water, coal, metals are needed here but this is purely for the oil part to get my head around it. ** Sulfuric Acid - Batteries, which are not needed for anything immediately but will be later. ** Explosives - Rockets. And Land Mines that we don't need, and other things later I'm sure, but this one we want right away. It's our new top-dog in terms of out-ranging the enemy. First thing at the moment is that we want to produce as much sulfur as we can from the petroleum gas we are producing, and leave LOTS of room for expansion later. I do recall that oil products in particular need an obscene amount of room. So, we need water over here to do that.  This sizable lake to the northeast, forming part of our border in that direction, should do the job nicely. One Offshore Pump and a whole bunch of underground pipes later, and we've got our supply. I could just guess how many Chemical Plants we'll need to satisfy the refinery, but you know I'm not going to do that. Time for more math! ** Chemical Plants have a crafting speed of 1.25 and are rated at using up 30 Petroleum Gas/sec. for this sulfur recipe. That means each one actually will consume 37.5. ** The refinery produces 40 every 5 seconds, and crafts at 1.00 so no adjustments are needed. I would need almost five refineries working at full speed(and we don't produce enough crude to fully satisfy one) to make enough for a single chemical plant. One sulfur-producing plant should suffice for quite some time. Leaving a substantial amount of room, I slap one down and connect up the water and petroleum gas. This going to make up to 2.5 sulfur/second, so I'll need significant inserter power here. A bit of testing determines one fast and one standard unit can handle the workload.  As an aside, I've always rather liked the distinctive look of items like sulfur in Factorio. This setup will empty the sulfur plant slightly faster than it can produce the smelly yellow stuff. Next, this line needs to split into two parts. Explosives is the immediate concern: we need to add coal to the mix for that. After pondering the matter I decide to add coal to the bus, partly because I don't have a more convenient way of getting it over here. In needlessly convoluted fashion, I split off a line of that heading over this way and add a couple more miners to make sure at least some actually comes.  Of the cutting of trees there shall(seemingly) be no end. Here's the sulfur setup at the bottom from an overhead view, and to the north(and quite a bit beyond this image) is a decent-sized forest preventing getting the coal or anything else from the bus through. Quite frankly I'm going to need the whole area for oil-related stuff and then some eventually, so I might as well just clear-cut it. Exactly eight minutes later I had felled almost 300 trees and had nearly 1.5k wood in my inventory ... but I was clear of obstacles. Goes without saying that I'm never going to use all of this. I'm just going to store it because that's what I do with stuff I don't use. Spotted an issue on the way to store it; some of the iron furnaces aren't working. I made a miscalculation somewhere obviously; we need more iron mining drills. A quick count, and we've got 20 while we need about 24(just over one for each electric furnace, of which we have 22). Two of the drills are not operating either, so that makes the situation worse. Ok. Eight more, some of which are not going to last long, are placed to finish off the current field. That's not enough, particularly considering how close we are to burning through our supply for the steel. There's a small 40k patch to the north, just past where the research area is. It's the closest source though, and I throw four mining drills on there to supplement things a little. It'll hold for now ... but not for long. Back over to the east, I get production set up for the Rockets for the launcher, headed back west to central storage like everything else. The shotgun is now obsolete as far as I'm concerned, though I'll hang onto the SMG.  Latest equipment bar here. It's full now, I've got three weapons and after we get some produced and stored I'll have the Rockets too. Took a look next up at the research area ...  Appears we have enough production to boost this a bit. I throw down five more, increasing from 15 to 20. There's something I want to get before grabbing the iron field out west. ** Logistics 2(200 Red, 200 Green). There are only two military upgrades left that we can do, and they are of similar cost to this. Three new items allowing for greater throughput in our belt network arrive: Fast transport belts, Fast splitters, and Fast underground belts. They are more expensive to build of course, but move at twice the speed; 26.67 items per second. The end of another hour has been reached, but that'll definitely be top priority afterwards.  Actual peak usage is still holding at about 16 MW. Max. Capacity = 28.8 MW 83 Electric Mining Drills = 7.47 MW 20 Radar Stations = 6.0 MW 38 Assembling Machine 2s = 5.7 MW 315 Inserters = 4.10 MW 21 Assembling Machine 1s = 1.89 MW 97 Long handed Inserters = 1.84 MW 20 Labs = 1.2 MW 3 Chemical Plants = 630 KW 12 Fast Inserters = 552 KW 1 Oil Refinery = 420 KW 62 Lamps = 310 KW 2 Pumpjacks = 180 KW 1 Filter Inserter = 52 KW Maximum Usage = 30.3 MW Time for a few more steam engines to ensure that we stay ahead of things.  Item Count: 35(-2) Total Production: 197k(+22% from 161k) Iron now dwarfs everything else to a rather absurd degree, but we've got less significant amounts of a number of other things. Several hundred sulfur and explosives, four thousand steel plates, a bunch of coal and copper as usual, etc. Resources Iron: 313k primary(37k used), 71k steel(22k used), 37k supplmental(2k used). That last one is the small field to the north. Nine hours on the main supply, just over three on the steel one. Copper: 86k(11k used). Almost eight hours; we used a few thousand less than the previous period. Stone: 378k(unchanged). Coal: 239k power(13k used), 338k factory(9k used), 596k steel(1k used). 18+ hours on the power one, the most important to watch right now . Crude Oil: 12.9/sec. Down about 11% from 14.5. I'm not going to build any more storage for the time being; we are just over half right now on our products, with room for 50k each on the heavy and light oil, 100k on the petroleum gas. The refinery is only running part-time. I like where this is at for the moment.
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Oct 13, 2017 02:48
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Even steam. Everything you can describe as a gas/liquid does AFAIK.
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Oct 16, 2017 03:53
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Ok so first up is more steam engines, then getting production of the new Fast transport options automated, and after that tapping that iron field to the west and getting them hooked up to the factory. everything else can wait for that. ** Railway(75 Red, 75 Green). The gateway tech to rail travel, a whole other can of worms that can revolutionize how you think about your factory. This came in while I was setting up the power situation. At this point I basically put 'new stuff' research on hold, but there were still those last remaining military upgrades to go after so I switched to that. As far the new transport gear, everything that requires is made out west where I carved a hole in the forest to make chemical plants not that long ago. It'll take a bit of adjusting and some more tree-cutting, but it shouldn't be too difficult. After about 10 minutes, this is up and operational.  Had to make it a little small to fit it in, but this is where the chemical plants, fast/regular undergrounds, fast transport belts, fast/regular splitters will come from. Standard splitters and undergrounds were built at another location before; I have to build them here anyway since they are ingredients in the fast ones, so I'll just remove the originals. All of these are hooked into the circuit network with inserter instructions, so it's just a matter of time before I have enough to get going. This is going to suck up a lot of materials, esp. iron and gear wheels. I'll worry about that after we have mining set up on the new field though. After spending another 10 minutes reorganizing the storage chests, something that has to be done from time to time unless I want to make more chests and more filter inserters(probably should, but I've been too lazy to), I noticed that the definite bottleneck in getting more fast transport belts out was iron gear wheels. For the first time since it was built several hours ago, I headed back down there and doubled the number of assembling machines on that task from two to four. Then it was time to run out and get that iron field mined. 19 drills for this one. It soon became clear that I needed to wait for more belts to finish, but there's always something else to do ...  That small base on the coast is going to become a problem soon. It also wasn't a bad idea to try and clear out the big one south of it, but after a trial run I decided not to do that yet. I can handle it, but not that easily. The small one had just a single spawner and no worms, and was quickly dealt with. Ok so back to ... Trains Etc. Seemed the best use of my time to work on getting this going while waiting for more fast transport belts. Right now, as a result of our last research, we can build three things: ** Straight Rail(Stone, Iron, Steel) -- Tracks for a train to run on. ** Locomotive(20 Engine Units, 10 Electronic Circuits, 30 Steel Plate). Eeek. These power the trains down the track, and can be fueled by whatever(coal works fine for our purposes, solid fuel allows them to accelerate faster but I don't care about that right now. I might later). ** Cargo Wagon(10x Iron Gear Wheels, 20x Iron Plate, 20x Steel Plate). These carry stuff. Lots of stuff. Trains are the best option for long-range transportation. You don't have to use them; 'stupid-long' transport belts work just fine. Build enough of them though and Factorio itself will slow down. More to the point, trains are a more elegant solution. They are faster, more flexible, higher-capacity, etc -- but there is some infrastructure and planning required. At the entry level to the concept here, we need to get rail sections and engine units built. And that means, like so very many things do in Factorio, correcting and/or changing a not-entirely sound section of the factory.  Here's the stone section. Coal and raw stone come in from the west, get baked into bricks, and off to the east where the bricks are turned into wall sections or steel furnaces. But now I need raw stone for some things, and I run the risk of getting all spaghettified in trying to do so. I need iron to come in here for that, get the steel involved, and then there's that now-annoyingly-placed coal line headed north -- that's for the black research vials. I can't push this to the east, because the bus it just off-screen in that direction. Quite possibly I should just rip the whole thing up and rebuild it somewhere else with more room. Concrete(iron ore not plates, water, and raw stone) is coming up soonish and that'll complicate things even further). After pondering a bit though I decide that screw it, I'll put up with a bit of spaghetti and try to make the most of this. I don't really need more room than I have here, there's plenty of space to the west and some to the north.  I split off some stone, run it a ways to the west closer to our power area, and take some iron and steel from the bus to the north. This I can expand later if I need to. Make that when. After this shot, I connect an inserter for the rail sections to the network, which I'll put an "arbitrarily sizable" number. Right now, that's 500, which is what I'm using for the regular and fast transport belts as well. Needs change over time but that's a starter amount that can get moving to central storage. Took another 150+ fast belt sections out and placed them, but it's not enough to connect up yet. Probably need about that many more. Of course I could expand the production of those -- but that would require more iron which is why I'm setting this up in the first place, to increase and secure supply of that. These kind of dependencies are why it's a really good idea to stay way ahead of the game on resources where possible. Only one more thing to do so I figured it was time to turn research back on. Then engine units. All the required materials are present out where the fast transport stuff is being built. No gear wheels are getting that far down the line right now but they will eventually. A couple more things were finished in the meantime: ** Automated Rail Transportation(75 Red, 75 Green). Now I can build train stops, easy enough to craft by hand, that allow for scheduling and automating train routes. ** Rail Signals(100 Red, 100 Green). Further steps down the train development path, unlocking rail signals and rail chain signals. These allow multiple trains to operate safely on the same rail network. I've never used them -- in my 0.14 game I only had one train. I'm hoping to more fully develop things for this effort, so I'll have to figure these out. Also quite cheap and easy to make so no pre-production necessary. A few minute later(I stocked up, but did nothing much else in the interim): ** Automobilism(100/100) -- Another practical thing to use Engine Units on. It's time to build ourselves a car! Literally. A mobile storage space, transport, and weapons platform. Moving around faster than you can run is often it's main purpose, and in theory it can make it easier to take out biter bases. I say in theory, because I suck at using it. But that'll have to wait for engine units, which will have to wait for more gear wheels, which will have to wait for more iron plates, which .... you know the deal here. I went through a rare stretch of basically standing there waiting for research to finish and fast belt sections to build at this point. There's just not a ton else going on, borders are secure, and we're nearing the end of this tech tier anyway so nothing else was compelling. ** Fluid Wagon(200 Red, 200 Green) -- A new creation to 0.15. Like the cargo wagon, they are a freight car for trains that carry liquids. Previously all liquids had to be barrelled before transporting via rail. You can still put them in barrels, but this gives you the option of transporting them without doing that. I think. And that does it for the 10th hour of this run.  A dip there for the research stall I did, but other than that really things are the same. We're at the point of there not being enough raw materials to boost our energy usage. That'll change soon. Actual peak usage is still holding at about 16 MW. Max. Capacity = 36 MW(40 Steam Engines) 83 Electric Mining Drills = 7.47 MW 43 Assembling Machine 2s = 6.45 MW 20 Radar Stations = 6.0 MW 338 Inserters = 4.39 MW 27 Assembling Machine 1s = 2.43 MW 102 Long handed Inserters = 1.94 MW 20 Labs = 1.2 MW 14 Fast Inserters = 644 KW 3 Chemical Plants = 630 KW 1 Oil Refinery = 420 KW 65 Lamps = 325 KW 2 Pumpjacks = 180 KW 2 Filter Inserters = 104 KW Maximum Usage = 32.2 MW Still well within limits. The radars are an interesting case. When I first put them up they dwarfed all other consumers, and now they are slowly sliding down the list as other things fill out the list.  Item Count: 47(+12!) Total Production: 165k(-16% from 197k) Steel was down; that's the main takeaway here. As usual, that's a temporary situation. With the new transportation infrastructure ramping up, it was a more diverse selection of products however. Resources ** Iron: 274k primary(39k used), 62k steel(9k used), 35k supplmental(2k used). Steel didn't require as much here, but both there and the primary field are still at seven hours and fading fast. ** Copper: 76k(10k used). Very consistent. ** Stone: 377k(1k used). The initial run of rail sections is nearly done, and it didn't take that much. ** Coal: 225k power(14k used), 332k factory(6k used), 595k steel(1k used). Still set for some while. ** Crude Oil: 11.3/sec. A few more hours and we won't have much more than a trickle. Still room in the tanks, and the refinery is off about half the time now.
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Oct 16, 2017 13:11
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Have at it. I expect I'll learn quite a bit from it, and it'll make one game concept that I don't have to inflict my own suboptimal explanations of on the thread.
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Oct 17, 2017 02:49
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Good stuff, thanks!! To continue on with the game in progress ... Up to another 130 or so sections of fast transport belt, I headed out to lengthen the incoming iron line. That got it far enough to join one of our existing belts, which meant it was worth turning on the power to those drills out there. We can start getting things flowing.  This picture illustrates a point: I probably delayed this for no good reason, because I don't think I quite needed fast transport belts here. There are three columns of mining drills, and here I show them all merging onto one line. Probably one regular belt would have been enough. It would have been close if not. I've started getting more intelligent than I was in my first game about this, but still have quite a bit to learn; you don't need fast transport belts anywhere just cause you have them. Regular ones will work just fine, thank you, for many purposes. Only use them where they are helpful. ** Lab Research Speed 2(200 Red, 200 Green) -- Research now operates at 30% faster than normal. This came in while I was hooking up the power to our new iron field. This came in while hooking up the power. After thinking about this for a minute, I decided I wasn't going to leave this as it is. On my way back into the factory, I replaced this fast-transport line with normal belts. That way I don't have to wait for more to be produced.  Eventually I came to this. Here's where we need them. Stuff gets backed up here because of the limit of the normal transport belts. That's where you want the red(fast) ones to speed things along. In from the west comes the ore from our small field to the north and the bigger one we just got started on; it merges with the stuff from our primary, and still-operating, iron field. By the way, that's the original radar station there, still operating and keeping us updated on everything. Seems like forever ago that I built that. So starting right where they intersect and moving eastwards, the new belts are a very fine investment indeed. Pro-Tip: When upgrading belts, you really need to pay attention to detail and sweat the small stuff. A couple of examples here:  Here's a merge point with a problem. The north side is fast transport and full ... but the south side is neither full nor fast. The resulting belt going east is not nearly at capacity. A very small change leads to this ...  Just seconds after the change, ore is moving full speed ahead to the east. Now that south line isn't monopolizing half of the space, and the ore from there will only fill in where there is a gap. Then look at where the line turns south and it's starting to spread out. That's because of a single section of belt, the corner piece there, where you can just barely see the yellow of standard transport belt. I missed a section, and all it takes is one to slow the whole thing down to half-speed(because you can only cram in so much throughput, and the regular belt has half). These types of things aren't even an issue at the start, when you only have yellow, standard belts. This is the kind of aspect of Factorio's design that I really enjoy. It's the same exact concept; a transport/conveyor belt moving crap around. What could be simpler. And yet as you progress there's still more to deal with if you want to keep things running smoothly and optimally. Now you've got to pay more attention if you want to take advantage of the faster ones. Easy stuff to miss. Eventually I work the red belts all the way down to the smelters. A full one on each side(half ore, half coal still), and then the output line in the middle goes red/fast as well, continuing all the way down to here:  A lot more iron going into the gear wheel assembly area, and therefore a lot more wheels coming out. All four assembling machines are now getting used. Note that there's no point putting more fast belts on the part after the splitter where the plates feed down into the gear wheels ... half of a red belt is a yellow belt, so the best we are ever going to be able to do is to saturate that. Main reason that isn't happening yet here is that now it's back to the point where we need more furnaces. I've got enough lined up to saturate yellow, which means only half of what I could be producing. Instead of all this I could just have built another iron smelting column, more inputs on either side, more regular belts carrying the material, a second iron belt on the bus ... but the more you can do with one, the easier the logistics are going to be. I can now ramp up iron at my leisure until I get to about twice what I'm currently producing, and keep it on the one path for now. Already I'm getting a lot more product downstream, meaning more red belts heading to storage. ** Plastics(200 Red, 200 Green) -- A key tech comes in while I'm setting all that up and blathering on about it. Plastic Bars are made from petroleum gas and coal. Another 'by themselves they do nothing, but ... ' tech. While the next one percolates, I add 8 more furnaces for iron, going from 22 to an even 30. After checking a few mining areas and removing a couple exhausted drills ... ** Advanced Electronics(200 Red, 200 Green) -- Big one here. Advanced(red) circuits require standard(green) electronic circuits, along with plastic and copper cable. Also, another type of research vial(light blue). Those require advanced circuits, engine units, and electric mining drills. That'll be a fun, longer supply chain to build for our next stage. It also unlocks some more, somewhat cheaper research projects which I'll burn through next. There are other things I can work on. By this time, I've got more than enough engine units to build this:  Not exactly the Model T ... but we've got ourselves a vehicle. Note that there's no point in building more than one(unless an 'explosive accident' should befall this). I can't remote-control them and send them en masse at the biters. This isn't an RTS. These things require fuel, and burn in at 60% efficiency ... slightly better than what we get from the boilers, but not great.  More inventory space in the trunk than I can carry on my person, and more than any chest we've yet invented either. Spots for fuel and ammo ... and this 'vehicle machine gun' shoots the same stuff as our SMGs, standard ballistic magazines. At slightly longer range and 50% better Rate-of-Fire. So if I ever learn to control these things worth a darn, they will really help in combat. IF. So ... about that fuel. You may recall that under 'un-needed oil-related products', a heading that is growing, I mentioned solid fuel. With the 20% acceleration boost that it provides, I find it all of a sudden to be more interesting. Probably worth building some. All it needs is any of the refined oil products(light oil, heavy oil, or petroleum gas) at a chemical plant. This is not at all an urgent need, but it's very much a thing for when we want to start taking on biters more frequently. Always upgrade your military capabilities.  Light Oil is the one I have the least use for in terms of discovered products, so I go with that. It's an elementary matter to get a plant set up near our flamethrower ammo operation. We won't use much of it for the car; I set it up to maintain a stock of 100 units, which is absurd overkill at the moment.  Seemed to me that research was slowing down -- turns out I was right. A bit of production line problem-solving here. This is the 'problem' shot. The five labs on the left end of the line here aren't getting any green vials. Red and black ones are backed up, but no greens. Whenever something like this happens, just trace the issue back until you find the source. Next step: the green assemblers.  Plenty of ingredients here: both the inserters and the transport belts are available and backed up. That means there's a very simple solution; one more green vial assembling machine. Oftentimes you've got to trace things back a lot further to find the issue. This one was easy, but it gave me something to work on, and also speed up the process a bit. ** Mining Productivity 1(100 Red, 100 Green. This an 'infinite' research option; we can do these forever, with the cost continually increasing for each new step. Mining drills work 2% faster now. I ended up adding two more green vial assembling machines, which means I needed another red one as well to keep it reasonably balanced. ** Electric Engine(100/100) -- Electric Engine Units notably use Lubricant, along with standard electronic circuits and engine units. Can't do anything with them yet, but another step up the chain. ** Modules(same) -- Modules are devices that are built and integrated into buildings to enhance their performance. We don't actually get any available with this, is another gateway tech. ** Speed Modules(50/50) -- Speed increased 20%, at the cost of 50% more energy usage. I've never thought these were worth it. ** Productivity Modules(50/50) -- +40% energy usage, +4% productivity(extra product made from the same ingredients), -15% speed, +5% pollution. If you just don't care about anything but getting the most from your ingredients, particularly if something is in short supply, this could be worth it. Otherwhise ... no. ** Efficiency Modules(50/50) -- Decrease energy consumption by 30%, with no negative effects. Minimum energy usage is 20% of normal. These are basically magical handwavium, and I didn't use them before but frankly it's obviously a significant benefit. Advanced circuits and electronic circuits are required. We've got a good reason to make advanced circuits now, and we're going to have more of them. That means plastics first. I want to try and think ahead here. Might as well build the infrastructure for mass-producing this stuff, if we're going to need it for research. I may want to eventually bus the advanced circuits, but at the very least I'm going to want to be able to build a lot of them. ** Modular Armor(100/100). With this we start getting really serious with personal equipment. In terms of the basic capabilities, it offers increased protections over the current Heavy Armor: ** Acid -- 3/30% to 5/30% ** Explosions -- 20/30% to 30/35% ** Fire -- 0/30% to 0/40% ** Physical -- 6/30%, unchanged That's just the start though, it has other features: ** 10 extra slots for personal inventory ** A 5x5 grid where additional equipment can be added in to enhance capabilities. ** Double the durability from 5k to 10k ** NightVision Equipment(50/50). Time for a few quick tasks to get some of that gear for the armor. This takes up a 2x2 section of the grid, uses 10kw of power, and gives you better vision in the dark. ** Battery Equipment(50/50). Takes up 1x2 space, stores 20 MJ of energy for powering the armor. ** Portable Solar Panel(100/100). 1x1 space for these, which provide up to 10kw of power each. Our first adventure into renewable solar energy! The catch is that each requireds five standard solar panels to produce ... and we haven't invented those. Yet. That does it for armor equipment, for the moment.  The new advanced circuits area. I can extend this to the south as much as I want and will leave room for that. Plastics come in from the west, just south of our sulfur plant. These circuits take several seconds to produce each. ** Laser(150/150). Another gateway project that will reap benefits down the road. Nothing immediate. I get a single assembler set up doing efficiency modules. It'll take a long time for them to build, and a longer time for me get them spammed throughout the factory. I'm not in a particularly huge rush though. ** Robotics(150/150). Allow something called a 'flying robot frame' to be built. The first stage of something quite exciting, but not actually useful on it's own.  Then, for 30 red circuits and some steel, I make the new armor. Here's how it looks when you 'open' it. There's no point in building any equipment for it just yet, as I can't power it. ** Stack Inserters(150/150) -- These come in two varieties, standard and filter-capable. Both of them are capable of inserting multiple items at once, a great capability for high-volume operations. These prompt another 'crap I need to change a bunch of stuff' moment. I definitely want to have production of the regular stack inserters automated; as stuff starts to take more and more ingredients they'll become more valuable, even if they do basically take as much energy(132 k2) as the assemblers they'll feed. So I'll just add them to ... well, no I won't. See, they require Fast Inserters and Advanced Circuits, both of which I am building. In completely different places on opposite sides of the factory.  Great. Grand. WONDERFUL. '1' is where the red circuits are made, '2' for the existing inserter line. I can't just move the advanced circuits over to the west where the other inserters are ... because there's no oil over there. I'd have to transport the oil or the plastic or something. The more games of Factorio you play, the more you realize this stuff in advance. I was there for the first few stages but now I'm into stuff that's partly changed and which I've only done once before. A lot more 'how to learn Factorio' here, because you've got to constantly adjust to stuff like this. I've got a few different products that use red circuits, and I have a feeling there will be more. Screw it, I'm going to reinvent how things work on that side, bus the red circuits, then further east put a new production line for all of the different inserter types. I really think that's the best plan. It's just going to take some time -- but I'm still pounding away on research for some of it. ** Mining Productivity 2(200/200) -- Everything else is at least this expensive right now, so I might as well grab another one. Still ripping up the last of the very short-lived red circuits area, I came to the end of another hour. I'm probably not going to stop every single hour the whole game, but enough happened here to update our situation.  Still peaking at about 16 MW and we haven't seen that level for at least 45 minutes or so now. No real substantive change. Max. Capacity = 36 MW(40 Steam Engines) 101 Electric Mining Drills = 9.09 MW 43 Assembling Machine 2s = 6.45 MW 20 Radar Stations = 6.0 MW 356 Inserters = 4.63 MW 27 Assembling Machine 1s = 2.43 MW 99 Long handed Inserters = 1.88 MW 20 Labs = 1.2 MW 5 Chemical Plants = 1.05 MW 16 Fast Inserters = 736 KW 1 Oil Refinery = 420 KW 69 Lamps = 345 KW 2 Pumpjacks = 180 KW 2 Filter Inserters = 104 KW Maximum Usage = 34.5 MW Still ok here. Had about a 10-minute spike in drill requirements, then it went down as the iron line saturated.  Item Count: 30(-17!!) Total Production: 157k(-5% from 165k) Midway through the period here we got caught up on engine units and fast transport belts, and then iron took a significant dive, maybe about 30% less. A lot of less-common items were not needed at all, as you can see by the sharp drop there. Steel and copper requirements were also down some. There's a sense of being backed up with what we need everywhere at the moment. Usually what that means is it's time for a big expansion. Queue the red circuits. Resources ** Iron: 254k primary(20k used), 59k steel(3k used), 35k supplmental(no change), 379k western backup(22k used). Big-time drop in the steel draw here. ** Copper: 66k(10k used). This is actually split into two smaller fields now, since the 'middle' has been completely used up and a couple of drills removed. ** Stone: 377k(no change). The initial run of rail sections is nearly done, and it didn't take that much. ** Coal: 213k power(12k used), 330k factory(2k used), 595k steel(no change). A couple thousand less from the power supply field, which is at almost 18 hours now. ** Crude Oil: 10.0/sec(-1.3). Right now this is just filling the crude tank; the heavy oil is maxed out and the other types are close.
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Oct 17, 2017 14:28
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** Flight(200/200). Another pre-requisite tech. The next one is where things start getting interesting. ** Construction Robotics(100/100). Beginning an enormously important tool for larger factories. Construction Robots automatically repair and build things -- you place down an order for what you want, and they grab the supplies and build it for you. We'll need to get into blueprints which are a powerful way to tell them what to make. Roboports are locations where the robots charge and repair. Storage and Passive Provider chests are new chest types that the robots use. I've got a major reworking to do once I get to this.  Red circuits are in place. Four assembling machines for now; the plastic got belted up north closer to the bus, and just above this the circuits will join it. The inserter rebuild is still coming, but I'd just have to change it a bit again after dealing with the robotics stuff. So I'll switch to that now. Here's what we need for that: ** Roboports require steel, gear wheels, and red circuits. 45 of each. ** Both chest types need steel and both circuit types. ** Construction Robots themselves need a couple green circuits and a flying robot frame. Which needs steel, green circuits, batteries, and electric engine units. The last two there we aren't making right now, and we'll need batteries(iron, copper, sulfuric acid) for other stuff soon. And we aren't making sulfuric acid(sulfur, iron, water) yet either. So that's going to be a fun chain to set up. As for the electric engine units, those need regular engine units, currently getting built on the extreme west of the base, green circuits, and lubricant(needs only heavy oil) which we aren't making yet. This is the point in the game where I don't play that much in one sitting, because my brain starts to hurt just thinking about it. If you're wondering just now, 'are these robots really worth it?'. Oh, they are ... but this will not be a short process. You want to keep an eye on the whole picture, but tackle one thing at a time. Won't take much to get sulfuric acid and batteries going, so I'll just start there. ** Logistic Robots(150/150). Another robot type, these take red circuits to make and where construction bots build, these guys move things around. ** Character Logistic Slots 1(100/100). Allows me to request items from the logistic network. We'll get to that. ** Character Logistic trash slots 1(100/100). Similar, although these are for putting things that you want put back in the network, not on your person.  Here's our basic setup for sulfuric acid on the left, feeding a straight shot to the right with lots of room to a couple of battery-producing chemical plants. I've got two for the batteries right now, which take five seconds each. I'm sure I'll need more in time. A lot more. But it's a start. No output belt for the batteries yet ... because I honestly don't know where they're going. Next up is the electric engine units. It's a trivial matter to get another plant going to turn Heavy Oil into Lubricant. The rest is a little less trivial. ** Character Logistics Slots 2(150/150) -- Adds six more slots which again we will get into and explain when we can. ** Combat Robotics(150 Red, 150 Green, 150 Black) -- The general field of robotics has combat applications as well. Here's the first one: Defender Capsules follow the player and use your latest standard ammo magazines. They have a limited lifespan of 45 seconds once created from the capsule and will shoot at whatever enemies are nearby. The rest of the electric engine setup was a little more involved, but we've already made engine unitson the west end and it's not that complicated; add those to some green circuits and the lubricant. Another step finished. ** Combat Robot Damage 1(100 RGB) -- There are also energy-based weapons for combat robots, and this increases their damage by 10%. ** Energy Shield Equipment(150 RGB) -- Energy shields, when powered and recharged, can absorb damage in combat, prolonging your life. At this point I made another supply run -- and realized I had totally forgotten to set up the new inserter line. *Facepalm*. So much going on. I had the red circuits set up ... and then it was ooh, Modular Armor. Wow, Robotics!! And ... I totally forgot about it. I've still got plenty for now but can't push forward for long without the basics. I've also not set up the efficiency modules again, which I should for the power-saving potential. There won't be a major cost to these mistakes, but it's still not a great idea to forget fundamental needs. ** Inserter Capacity bonus 1(200 RG) -- This boosts how many items not just the stack inserters, but regular inserters to a lesser degree, can move at once. The first one just means the stack ones can move a single extra item. There are several projects in this series. ** Laser Turrets(200 RGB) -- A new look at base defense. These are more effective(better range and damage) than our standard Gun Turrets that are currently deployed. They also need no ammunition supply system, save being hooked up to the grid. And that last part is the rub; lose power, you lose the turrets. If an attack knocks out even part of your power plant, or you don't have a quite considerable surplus when the enemy comes calling -- you're going to have an issue. So if we use these, we're going to want to go overkill on the power grid and make darn sure it's protected at all times. In my 0.14 game I stuck with standard Gun variants and was just fine with those; this time I plan to upgrade. Eventually. Next up were a few quick laser turret upgrade techs(damage and rate-of-fire) as the seemingly never-ending research unlocks for this tier continue unabated. While those went through, I finished up this:  From bottom to top, that's long-handed, standard, fast, and stack inserters, with efficiency modules at the very top. I need to remember to regularly go back for the modules and throw them in a bunch of machines -- I've only put a few out there in assembling machines so far. This whole line is near the oil area, but north of the bus instead of south. Most convenient available space at the moment. ** Combat Robot Damage(200 RGB) -- Damage bonus increased to +15%.  The spaghetti is strong here, but I've finally got construction and logistics bots being built. I didn't really care what it looked like, knowing I'm just going to rip it all up anyway soon for reasons that will become clear fairly shortly. This is very slow -- the robot frames take a long time. I'd need more assembling machines to get them faster, but I've got time and just want a basic starter amount right now to get the system up and running. Roboports, expensive beasts that they are, are being built to the north of this nearer to the bus. I then notice a second freaking power shortage. Not a severe one -- I spotted it just in time. Heading over to the coal field I notice over half of the steam engines are not working. Power drain has increased and some mining drills had run out of resources without me noticing. After throwing several more down:  Using almost the whole thing now. It's time to get another source, but the solution this time will take a rather different form.  As you can see we are still recovering, but a look at usage shows that total demand has never been much higher than it is right now. 21-22 MW I think. Max. Capacity = 36 MW(40 Steam Engines) 102 Electric Mining Drills = 9.18 MW 56 Assembling Machine 2s = 8.4 MW 20 Radar Stations = 6.0 MW 391 Inserters = 5.08 MW 31 Assembling Machine 1s = 2.79 MW 118 Long handed Inserters = 2.24 MW 9 Chemical Plants = 1.89 MW 20 Labs = 1.2 MW 21 Fast Inserters = 966 KW 1 Oil Refinery = 420 KW 75 Lamps = 375 KW 2 Pumpjacks = 180 KW 2 Filter Inserters = 104 KW Maximum Usage = 38.8 MW We technically could burst our capacity now, but haven't come close to that level of demand yet. Another solution will soon present itself, so I won't be adding more steam engines.  Item Count: 38(+8) Total Production: 200k(+27% from 157k) Copper and green circuits are the two that really jump out to me here, both reaching new highs. Bounced back with a little more item diversity and actually were 100+ items short of the 200k mark but close enough. Resources ** Iron: 235k primary(19k used), 54k steel(5k used), 35k supplmental(no change), 356k western backup(23k used). We're drawing a lot more off the western field than our main one ... which is causing pollution issues out that way and there was actually a small biter attack. I haven't dealt with that yet because I have more pressing concerns, but it's definitely going to need to happen before long. ** Copper: 51k(15k used). Two more drills have been silenced. We aren't running short on ore yet but this operation will move soon. ** Stone: 377k(no change). ** Coal: 199k power(14k used), 322k factory(8k used), 594k steel(1k used). That power field is definitely dropping quickly. ** Crude Oil: 8.9/sec(-1.1). The pumpjacks are now running only periodically. Heavy and Crude storage is full.
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Oct 22, 2017 17:02
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Psychotic Weasel posted:Depending on what settings you have selected the biters may slowly migrate back in to fill the space. Just be aware of that before trying it yourself and having your base destroyed. Yep. Many ways to skin the biter problem, but it all ultimately boils down to the fact that you're going to have to invest resources in it some way, somehow, eventually. Either proactively by taking out their bases regularly, or reactively by defending against their attacks. It's one or the other. Gully Foyle posted:Popping in to say that this LP is great! Thanks!
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Oct 30, 2017 23:44
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** Solar Energy(250 RG) -- A couple minutes past the 12-hour mark this comes in. You can get it a lot sooner, and for some playstyles it makes sense to rush it. Another major change, this one to power as I've alluded to. Solar panels can provide free, clean energy forever ... with a catch. They quite naturally only work during the day, so you either need to generate extra and store it for use at night(this is where accumulators come in), or go with a solar-steam mix. My approach has alwasys been why generate more biter-evolving and upsetting pollution than you need to? We're going full solar ... eventually. There's a significant space requirement, and the setup cost is considerable as well. There are many things we need to be working on right now. It seemed a useful thing to list them and prioritize, esp. since I haven't done a minimap in a while.  Pollution filter is off here to make things clearer. ** Ore -- Iron ore field in the west, which is aggravating a cluster or two of biters. No serious issues yet, and it's also temporary -- once that field starts winding down, we're not going to be bothering them anymore. ** Steam -- Current power plant ** Solar -- Location of new solar power plant. There's lots of trees there now, but we'll remove them. ** Oil -- All the petrol-related stuff. More and more production lines are going to get moved out that way out of necessity; they require oil-related products so they really can't be anywhere else. ** IC -- Iron and Copper smelting ** Steel -- Steel smelting ** Research -- Does what it says ** C&C -- Command & Control ... that's where our control center and storage are right now. To-Do List This is pretty big right now, but there are two major ones. ** Get Solar Power Going. We need a new coal field if we don't do this soon. That shouldn't be necessary, but there isn't time to dawdle. This means getting a significant amount of automated production of the two key ingredients, solar panels and energy accumulators. We're not building either yet. We need to clear the forest as mentioned for space, but that will be facilitiated with ** Logistics Network. Time to make use of those robots we've started building. This is going to radically rework how things get moved around, stored, built, etc. ** Outfit Modular Armor. I've got the armor itself, but no equipment for it yet. ** Install efficiency modules. I need to be doing this semi-regularly ... well, I don't NEED to, but it'll make things a lot easier. ** Finish Green/Black Research. We're close enough now that I intend to just spam my way through the rest of them and then shut it down -- we'll catch up on actually implementing the new stuff after the big two priorities are handled. ** Build Combat Robots -- Due to my sucking at using the car, I find it easier to fight the biters using the assistance of these. It'd be good to get production of them rolling. ** Borders + Oil Expansion. Still a long-range thing, but we need to get to that big cluster of oil patches to the east ... and of course the sooner we do it, the less the biters grow in the meantime. Something else had to be dealt first though. We're down to eight mining drills feeding 14 steel furnaces in the copper field. That math will never work. The big copper field just to the south boasts 738k though. At our current usage rate, that would last almost 50 hours. All I needed to do was get a grid of drills set up on that thing, and I should be able to forget about copper supply again for a while. By this point in the game I like to just saturate the field with drills and forget about it, even when it's overkill like this in. 33 of them, even with maximum spacing. ** Concrete(250 RG) -- The fastest surface we can make(+40% walking speed). It also can really change the visual aesthetic. For our purposes, I'll be eventually paving all the territory we've claimed just because I can. It's a statement to the biters(even though yes, it will cause more pollution, we don't care about that as much as we once did) that this territory no longer belongs to them. This'll wait for now, but it gets added to the list. Once the copper was hooked up, it was back to getting solar going.  This location is in the west on the edge of the forest. Not a ton of room but I don't think we need it. Solar panels require steel, copper, and more green circuits than both of those combined. 15 for each panel. They take over 13 seconds each with the assembler tech we possess, and I'm going to want a ridiculously epic crapton of them. These five assemblers are at the very least a decent starting point -- and they're going to suck up a lot of materials, probably more than I am going to produce on the green circuits at least, so I'll need to balance things out with more product before I think about expanding this. Just throwing them in chests for the moment, I'm not at all worried about making too many. ** Inserter capacity bonus 2(250 RG) -- +1 to both regular and stack inserters. Accumulators are not as important yet, but they are naturally going to have to built on the other end of the map. Mostly batteries plus some iron is the formula there. ** Follower robot count 1(300 RGB) -- This one increases the number or combat robots we can control by +4. I actually don't know what it was before this, but not very many. With a few dozen solar panels done, it's time get a starter area going for that.  I'll expand this grid a rather ridiculous amount to the west and south of this. You've got to provide power connections as well, and it can certainly be done better, but here's 21 panels already working. Each one provides a peak of 60kw, so this here is 1.26 MW. That's maybe 6% of our total need. Not much in the grand scheme of things. Get a few hundred more of these down and we'll have something. I had about double this amount, so I expanded this grid a bit. As expected we don't have enough green circuits to keep them producing full-tilt, but we're getting some and before I deal with that I need to get the Logistics Network rolling.  Ladies and gentlemen, the grand and glorious roboport. Also named ... "blooddrunkreaper". That's an omen if ever I've seen one. All kinds of stats there for you in the right-side panel, but note esp. the supply and construction range. With the supply range it'll bring me items(logistic bots), the construction range is where it will build/deconstruct stuff(construction bots) and is considerably larger. To get the bots to work, simply put them in the roboport. That's simple enough. I put the first one up at central storage for a reason. Grab the bots from the chests, throw them in, and we're ready to go.  Room for lots of them ... the row below the bots themselves are for repair packs. The robots will get recharged in the port, and will repair as well if we provide them with those tools. Good idea to do that. Ok, now for storage. Here's the two kinds of chests we've researched:  The yellow one on the bottom is a Storage Chest. These are the default destination for all items within the Logistics Network. The robots will ignore anything in a standard wooden/iron/steel chest; those aren't part of the network. Replacing my steel 'central storage' chests with these logistics ones is a good first step, because now the bots have access to the items I've got here. The red one is a Passive Provider Chest. There are two other types that we'll get later. Passive providers are different from storage chests in one very important aspect; robots won't put anything in them. Hence the name 'provider'. Robots will take what they need from them, but that's all. These are most typically used as the output storage from assembling machines. The term 'passive' refers to the fact that the robots don't care how long stuff stays in these chests; there's a later version that you can build which acts differently. One immediate application of this is that everything I'm building within the supply radius of the Logistics Network no longer needs a belt system to carry it to this storage area. I can just put provider chests as their output instead, and the logistic bots will bring stuff to me whenever I need it.  I radically shrunk this image because you couldn't see it all otherwhise even on maximum zoom. Main thing to see here are the brownish and greenish squares which show the supply and construction radius. I head over to stop the building of logistics bots(because I have enough for now, and only want construction versions), and work on expanding the network(by buildling more roboports) over to where the 'solar plain' will be. It's important to place them carefully;  There's a small gap between the supply radius of this proposed location and the existing roboport. Bots from the first one won't be able to reach this one for that purpose.  One space to the east, and all is good. The corners of the supply areas are in contact. Note the yellow dotted line to the southeast, indicating they are close enough to be connected. A grid of such connected roboports will allow robots to travel any distance within it(though they'll stop to recharge if need be). I replace the output chests for the solar panels with passive provider ones, and put a few storage chests around the nearest roboport. Now it's time to put these bots through their paces and really see what they can do instead of talking about it. Well, a little more talking first.  A new section for inventory here. Under 'Logistics', the spots at the top allow me to request specific items and amounts. These are 'build-tos'. If I'm within the network's supply area, logistics bots will bring me what I'm missing. You can see them doing just that here at the bottom. I don't have to go to storage to get the transport belts I need; storage will now come to me. Again this is the job description of the logistics bot; move items around. Next, we'll take a look at the construction version, and this works a lot better if you see them in action. I missed two achievement screens accidentally by the way; one a bit ago for producing a thousand red circuits an hour, and another here for supplying the player by robot. Wasn't fast enough on the screenshot because I was thinking about something else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD9FRkwKRIA As shown, the Deconstruction Planner is used to take stuff down, and the blueprints for giving them larger-scale construction to build. Factorio's beeping yellow alerts let you know when there's a problem; no lamps in the storage chests so I placed those myself, not enough bots to do the job, etc. The combination of blueprints and robot are a powerful one for clearing forests, doing large construction projects, etc. From here on out I should have to do very little myself. *** Mining Productivity 3(300 RG) -- Now up to 6% more productivity on the mining drills. This finally wraps up the Green/Black research tier. One thing off the list.  That's 7 down. The other two I missed, by the way, were titled "You've got a package" and "Circuit Veteran 1". I queue up a whole bunch of tree-cutting to make room for more roboports, and the counter of 'missing construction bots' reaches almost 200. We've got more being built, but in the meantime I can just go off and do other things while they work. When the number gets to zero and the beeping stops, it'll be time to queue up more work for them. As is I'm up to almost 4 MW of solar during the day.  Soon I'm annoyingly interrupted by an attack on our walls -- a spot that's just somewhat out of range of the turret, as shown here. After moving the gun to cover both this location and the radar, I bring a couple more wall sections down to seal the breach. The biters are slowly starting to request my attention more often. Still ignoring them until I get some other things done, but the cost for that decision will continue to increase until I deal with them.  After futzing about with it for a bit I come up with this setup for the logistics requests. There's a lot more stuff that I want but at least these common things I don't need to go pick up. Then I up the ante on the tree-clearing:  That's a lot of deconstructing. 400+ unfilled jobs even with quite a few more construction bots on the case. The job must be done though. I spend the next while cramming efficiency modules into every last thing that can use them(assembling machine 2s and electric mining drills are the capable machines at the moment).  It's close to 'dusk' timeframe right now, so the solar contribution here is close to it's low ebb. I don't have any accumulators in place just yet. Still, it's worth taking a look at this(1-hour timeframe as always). You can see on the solar part of the graph the very regular and precise valleys and plateaus as it ramps up in the morning and slows down at night. The steam used varies but the peaks there roughly correspond to when solar is out of commission. We've made some progress, but a long way to go. I do think the rundown of what consumers take how much has pretty much run it's course here. I'm going to keep gradually adding to the solar field until we are producing a rather obscene amount. That's pretty much necessary for a solar-only approach.  Item Count: 40(+2) Total Production: 241k(+21% from 200k) Highlighted with the filters here are the copper-related stuff, all of which reached new highs and by a long ways. At least double anything we'd done before, tripled or more in some cases. That's mostly a function of the solar panels. Almost a quarter-million now on the report. Resources ** Iron: 217k primary(21k used), 43 steel(11k used), 33k supplmental(2k used), 328k western backup(28k used). Overall just sucking those things dry. ** Copper: 44k(7k used), 716k(22k used) on the new one. I need to readjust the way the belts combine so that we are using more of the old fields, both here and the iron, to clear them out. Definitely not going to be long before our original field is gone though. ** Stone: 377k(no change). ** Coal: 184k power(15k used), 316k factory(6k used), 593k steel(1k used). More of a draw from the power one than before by a bit, even with the solar and the power outage. Still should be plenty there to get things transitioned over though. ** Crude Oil: 8.8/sec(-0.1). We're drawing very little now with storage remaining full ... but we're out of petroleum gas which means soon the battery supply will dry up, and after that other things will join it. With that in mind, a couple more tanks each of heavy and light oil are needed. We'll be able to use them eventually, but right now we need the gas to keep coming. Without it, we don't get more accumulators or robots.
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Nov 1, 2017 02:32
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