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Got this game. First in the genre for me. I'm like 90 hours in and I can't stop trying to create "The Perfect Factory" (tm). I've created factories for blue, red, and yellow cubes, but I keep going to back to try and automate my factories that create advanced conveyor belts. All my ideas keep loving up so I keep trying and I never make any progress and I can't stop optimizing my poo poo holy gently caress someone help me where has all my time gone.
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Feb 24, 2021 22:04
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zoux posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve4pH3WN9gs I've avoided looking online for "solutions" to my problems. Because while I was being dramatic, I'm having a shitload of fun figuring this out on my own through trial and error however frustrating. If I just copied someone else's setup I don't think I'd be enjoying myself.
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Feb 24, 2021 22:17
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Just want to confirm something real quick. I did some napkin math and just want to confirm my findings. So... True or False, Burning oil in a thermal plant is more efficient than taking the oil and eventually cracking it into hydrogen/graphite and burning those. Ofc this is taking into account the power needs of all the buildings needed to run the cracking loop. When all is said and done it's better to burn the oil directly. Right? I read some article about infinite power loop using xray cracking because each hydrogen contains twice as much energy as each crude oil, but I think it was old and the recipe for cracking became more hydrogen expensive or something?
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Feb 25, 2021 23:58
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Smiling Demon posted:The opposite, you get much more net power from cracking. 2 crude oil is 8MJ, refined that becomes 12.96MJ (16.8MJ before refinery costs). Xray cracking the products of refining 2 crude yields 25.08MJ (36.6MJ before refinery costs). One refinery doing xray cracking yields 3 hydrogen and 1 graphite every 4 seconds. That's 30.3 MJ (8*3 for hydrogen, 6.3 for graphite) every 4 seconds or 7.575 MW. If we assume 1 refinery running cracking, 2 running plasma refining and 2 oil extractors (4.56 MW total) we're left with 3.015 MW net. This is before the 80% efficiency penalty in a thermal plant. Running it down to just the two extractors and burning the crude we have (roughly speaking because of the variance of oil seeps) 3 crude per second. that's 12 MJ per second or 12 MW. Running two extractors is 1.68 MW to run, or a net of 10.32 MW before the penalty. What am I not taking into account here?
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Feb 26, 2021 00:34
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Gully Foyle posted:1 refinery running cracking and 2 running plasma refining (as you said in your first example) only use 1 oil per second. So you'd still have 2 oil/s leftover to burn if you wanted to. Argh forgot about the excess oil.
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Feb 26, 2021 00:58
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Gully Foyle posted:1 refinery running cracking and 2 running plasma refining (as you said in your first example) only use 1 oil per second. So you'd still have 2 oil/s leftover to burn if you wanted to. I agree with this completely. I don’t have access to late game power options yet and was looking for a way to get some more power since I can’t run my blue, red and yellow loops simultaneously. I have a bunch of unused oil and was going to just burn it in the meantime since it’s infinite. I wanted to know if it was better to crack the oil or just burn it and even if my math is wrong it’s simpler as a stop gap to just burn the crude. Less hassle.
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Feb 26, 2021 01:11
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Zurai posted:You can still get that on infinite resources, just don't bother doing the math for any of your production This is one of the first games that I have a spreadsheet doing the math telling me what ratios I need for things if I scale up and down. I'm actually enjoying doing it. Which is one of the reasons why I was so interested last page in solving the efficiency thing and running the numbers, whether or not it's practical. I'm getting some kind of weird satisfaction in having the numbers work/or not work out as I expect and see it happen in game.
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Feb 26, 2021 17:03
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I abandoned my first game. I had set up automation for blue, red and yellow cubes, but I was very hamfistedly trying to create a mall for every single building I had unlocked and shoving everything that was being made into a single bus. The bus was getting unwieldly and was also in a lovely place and I didn't want to do it over again somewhere else. I kept doing it and redoing it that I was burning out and getting frustrated and just looking at it made me want to finish it. So I started from scratch and within three or four hours I have a really nice mall and I'm progressing faster and enjoying the game again.
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Mar 4, 2021 22:44
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Just hit the point in my new game where I abandoned my old game. I got here in 1/5th the time. We're cruising now.
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Mar 6, 2021 00:39
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Cobbsprite posted:One reason to refine your graphite instead of sticking with coal burning for power is that it simplifies your logistics. Raw coal isn't used for a drat thing in DSP. Graphite is used for a good double handful of things that are very useful. You just pass your raw coal into smelters to turn it into graphite and toss that to thermal plants during the early game, then cut them out and shunt that line to diamonds or blue magnets later. Graphite is only slightly more efficient from the perspective of number of power plants supported than burning the two coal it takes to make it. You are correct that graphite burns for longer. It takes 1 graphite 2 1/3 seconds to burn at 100% load. 1 coal burns in exactly 1 second. But it takes 2 coal to make 1 graphite, so you're only gaining 1/3rd of a second. Since we're talking early mid game here, let's assume Converyor Mk IIs and MkIII sorters (they have basically the same ingredients and are unlocked with the same tech). With a full MkII belt of graphite you can support 28 thermals running at 100% load. But that takes two full MkII belts of coal and 24 smelters to feed. On the flip side, I can use those two lines of coal and burn them directly, supporting 24 power plants (12 per line). I could see a use case, as you said, for burning off excess. But I also hesitate to burn excess unless it's just to get rid of an ingredient to keep the factory moving. The case of burning graphene in a fire ice factory is perfect because it's enormously painless to burn off graphene. I had half of one of my fire ice -> graphene factories set to burn excess but graphene has so little energy even 14/s isn't enough to keep 1 thermal plant running. But I would never rely on excess from a production line to be a significant amount of my power. It's the perfect case of something I'd forget about, accidentally increase demand, no more excess, power plants shut off and I'm scrambling to throw down wind turbines to fix my blackouts. It might also be a case of space or limited coal early on. In my new game I had 12 million ish coal and it was just easier for me as a stop gap to plop down enough mines on a set of veins to fill a 12/s belt and burn the coal than it was to also set up the graphite smelters to feed them. It supported me until I had a fractionator setup running. The moment I unlocked and built my first line of mini-fusion plants I deleted all of my coal thermals. It's a drop in the bucket at that point and as you scale up you need your coal for other things.
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Mar 15, 2021 04:15
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Cobbsprite posted:Also, again, making a long line to feed 24 thermals is bad. With graphite, you can just make a grid that's three wide and eight deep or four wide and six deep. Only the three or four on the end need to feed off the belt, the rest get fed from the plant next to them and feed to the next plant in line. Saves space, saves time setting it up, simplifies. I really do see your point. But we're talking about a relatively early point in the game, pre logistics stations, Mk II belts, laying spaghetti lines from veins to factories etc. When I was laying down lines of thermals and burning coal, space wasn't an issue at all. I had tons of it. And my demand for graphite was rather small. I smelted what I needed for the couple of bespoke factories I had and set up thermals on a few other coal veins. Once I hit logistics station everything was obsolete and as you scale way up using logistics stations thermals no longer really cut it. It's funny how this is conversation is basically academic and it's the 2nd time I've argued in this thread about what kind of thing you should burn in a thermal generator for whatever number of hours between needing mass thermals burning oil/coal and just building mini-fusion plants or shooting sails into the nearest star. After abandoning my first game and starting over my experience with my 2nd game taught me it takes 5 minutes to set up a quick and dirty line of coal for burning in thermals. It's a temporary step. If the way you're playing means you're ahead of the game and laying down more graphite smelting than you need early on in preparation for needing more later for additional smelting or red cubes or graphene or plastic or whatever and burning it in the meantime then I get that.
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Mar 15, 2021 05:57
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necrotic posted:You can also carry more than your inventory will hold. If you ctrl click and the stack doesn't fit it will remain in your cursor, you can do this multiple times. Then when you get back just have some storage bins ready for all of it. Holy gently caress
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Mar 15, 2021 17:42
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I keep wanting to make a planet dedicated to filling accumulators and shipping batteries off to other planets for additional power and then shipping back the empty batteries to be refilled because there is something poetic about having a finite amount of reusable accumulators powering everything as opposed to fuel rods where the resources you put into the rod are lost, but as cool as that sounds to me, every time I consider it I look at my fusion plants and go "nah". The real killer though is how much of my logistics chain would be dedicated to shipping accumulators around the universe when that capacity is certainly better spent on other things. Hydrogen is so easy to come by, easy enough to turn into deuterium, and easy enough to turn into fuel rods why would I use anything else for shipping to another planet. I mean, a factory producing a measly 1 fuel rod per second will power a ridiculous 66 fusion power plants at 100% load. And how often are you going to be at 100% power output? Mostly never unless a mistake has been made. So long as your rocket production doesn't eat too far into your production dedicated to power, then you're simply set forever.
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Mar 17, 2021 01:12
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This game is real pretty
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Mar 17, 2021 01:51
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Finally started shooting rockets into the sun today. I pulled up next to one of the nodes and was somewhat impressed the entire thing is generally well animated. Sort of mesmerizing to watch.
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Mar 17, 2021 05:31
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Is the only way to fly at planets to just kind of point your cursor in the general direction and press W to speed up and S to slow down? Boosting takes way too much fuel Yep. Boosting won't be as noticeable once you start upping your core energy amount. But yeah, when you first unlock it and are flying between planets initially it can be a bit painful. Right around the time boost energy usage stops being a concern you're going to start warping and you're going to be like "drat warping takes all of my energy" Edit: As said, pressing W just orients your mech towards the cursor and doesn't really affect your speed, although the default lowest sail speed is 100 m/s and if you slow down below that using S, I think pressing W returns you to 100 m/s.
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Mar 17, 2021 21:36
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Kurr de la Cruz posted:just lol if you're not using warpers to move between planets in a system. It's way faster and takes a lot less power. No joke last night as I was running between planets I said this to myself. Lol why haven't I been warping this whole time.
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Mar 17, 2021 21:56
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Path Notesquote:Hi Engineers!
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Mar 19, 2021 15:34
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The new heading feature is pretty neat. Only issue I have is once you set it your heading is always set until you either set a new heading or manually turn your current one off.
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Mar 19, 2021 18:19
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zoux posted:I can respect that. I'm a soft baby who doesn't want to run my tricked out mech on graphite for 20 hours (also I want to start around an O type which means fuel + warpers), I went with this. Just out of curiosity, why not bring a row of anti-matter fuel rods instead of deuterium? Save some space and bring more stuff.
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Mar 19, 2021 21:44
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zoux posted:Because I ain't got none. Ah, I thought based on the rest of your kit that you had basically everything.
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Mar 19, 2021 22:41
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My least favorite activity in the game is setting up miners. I see there's a mod for one with increased range, but man, there's nothing worse than having to run around setting up miners on stuff. They should add like a drone mining hub or something that will send out drones to hoover up all the resources within a imo, pretty generous radius. Make it use some upgraded version of the logistic drone but give it a mining laser. The current mining mechanics are just big and clunky and there's no thinking that goes into it, just put miners in a big circle around a group of veins, connect them with a belt, send to tower, repeat 15 times. This was my night tonight and I'm a little salty about it. Edit: I think someone mentioned a while ago that maybe adding a building like the oil extractor but for mines so I can just plop down one building on top of a set of veins. That'd be fine too and a huge upgrade over the current process. Edit 2: Has anyone tried this? https://dsp.thunderstore.io/package/crecheng/PlanetMiner/ It seems to take my complaint to the absurd conclusion and I don't want to do *that* far, but man after tonight it's sorta tempting. Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Mar 20, 2021 |
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Mar 20, 2021 07:18
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I didn't think to sideload the belts directly. My setup has each fractionator with it's own, individual mini-loop of hydrogen. As deuterium leaves the missing hydrogen is replaced in the belt by a main belt of hydrogen using a sorter bridge. It works really well, but my guess is that it's less space efficient than sideloading.
Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Mar 20, 2021 |
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Mar 20, 2021 19:15
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OwlFancier posted:I mean sod space efficiency it's less efficient on your loving wrist jesus. Ha. I don't think I'm fussy about it. I just enjoyed the problem of figuring out how to maintain 30/s of hydrogen through each fractionator and this was the result. It is very clicky to setup even with mods. Totally granted.
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Mar 20, 2021 19:44
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Just laid down 180 plane filter factories  I really need to fix my mall so I can build Mk III assemblers.
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Mar 20, 2021 21:40
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Just finished setting up a 30/s belt of casimir crystals. That was legitimately worse than plane filters if for no other reason than feeding that ridiculous amount of hydrogen into the system. Welp, whatever, one step closer to 30/s blue chips. Now excuse me while I run around and put mines on all of the organic crystal and optical crystal veins in a 15 Ly radius.
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Mar 22, 2021 07:14
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The Mulit-Build beta that has rudimentary blueprints is also a real cool mod that I think someone already mentioned and I can attest it is pretty cool.
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Mar 26, 2021 00:34
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SkyeAuroline posted:Doing my best not to check external resources as much as possible until I'm satisfied with my mostly blind run. Just verifying a few things real quick. Planetary Logistic Stations have three items with either a Supply/Demand/Storage setting. Interstellar Logistic Stations have five items with both a local Supply/Demand/Storage setting that the little drones will handle on the planet the station is on and a Remote Supply/Demand/Storage Setting that the big drones will handle moving between planets. You can essentially treat a Interstellar station as a planetary station with more slots if you want. You don't even necessarily need to power one end of it. If you put an interplanetary on say, a titanium mine early, as long as the mines itself are powered and you're feeding the station the minerals set to remote supply, the station on your main planet will still retrieve the item in question. Interplanetary flight is always manual. There is no automated function for it. I assume you're asking because it's annoying to do it manually, and it is. But it gets way easier down the road as your energy reserves go up so you can accelerate more before running out of energy, and finally you'll get green research followed by a practically endless supply of warpers which trivializes interplanetary flight. Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Mar 26, 2021 |
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Mar 26, 2021 05:57
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Phanatic posted:Is it just because you don’t have enough resources left in your home system by that point to fab enough widgets to assemble a sphere? It's this. It's also because you're going to want to build the sphere in a reasonable time frame. So that's when you're like drat I need to turn entire worlds into factories.
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Mar 26, 2021 15:25
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Alkydere posted:Slight edit for accuracy. Just set up a 60/s green motor planet yesterday and I already think I need more 
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Mar 26, 2021 15:47
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Rynoto posted:You always need more. Forever. Now back to work No joke, setting up my green motor factory yesterday was when I was like "goddamn blueprints sure would be nice" and went and installed the blueprints mod.
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Mar 26, 2021 16:15
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euphronius posted:The spaceports are too useful and cheap I think. I don't think so. The infrastructure needed to produce their components is not at all trivial. You need yellow chips, particle containers and titanium alloy, not to mention you need to already be building the smaller version of it to feed into it. All of those have fairly significant requirements. Also you're not just building the spaceports. You also have to manufacture the drones in significant numbers.
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Mar 26, 2021 19:13
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Don't merge belts if you don't have to, except with a tower. I've run into this situation twice now where I have a factory that is making full belts of something, but it's split up into sections and each section fills up a partial belt, but in total each partially filled belt would add up to 30 items/s. At the time I didn't really think about it and was merging the partial belts before moving onto the next section of the factory. e.g. 3 partial belts of plane filters into 1 that feeds a line of blue chip factories. It took me a while to figure out, but merging the belts was causing the slightest of backups. The last 2-3 factories in each partial chain wouldn't be able to dump their goods because the last section of their output belt wasn't merging fast enough and there wasn't any space on the belt to dump their goods. The game has a problem when merging belts. Not quite sure how to describe the problem, but I think it has to do with the fact that space needs to be available on the target belt and even a partial belt will have points where it is feeding globs of product and and any other belts merging in at that time will need to wait until the glob clears and space opens up. A tower doesn't have this problem though and thankfully in both cases I had a tower delivering remote goods that I was using to organize the next step of the factory. So I stopped merging the partial belts and just fed all partials into the tower. The backups went away immediately.
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Mar 27, 2021 17:42
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Zurai posted:This is literally one of the things splitters exist for.  Then they're broken. Unless you're thinking that I wasn't using them. By "merging" I'm saying I was using splitters for combining belts.I can provide video evidence if needed since I think it's pretty reproduceable.
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Mar 27, 2021 21:35
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SkyeAuroline posted:FWIW I run into splitter logic issues a lot. They're usually only resolved by dismantling and replacing the splitter entirely. Most recently was one that inherited tier 1 belt speed and refused to increase to tier 2 speed like the rest, even when I removed and replaced all the belts feeding them. So try replacing them if nothing else. I just removed them from the design entirely. They really weren't needed in the first place. I'll try and reproduce it later. Shouldn't be too hard. It happened in my blue chip factory and my plastic factory.
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Mar 27, 2021 21:51
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SkyeAuroline posted:Good to know. I love this. It's... mesmerizing in its complexity
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Mar 28, 2021 03:38
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SkyeAuroline posted:Lessons learned from Factorio, unlearned in the face of misunderstood mechanics, and slowly relearned. I actually just refactored the hydrogen flow there... and promptly broke everything by not paying enough attention. Interplanetary throughput is something I don't fully understand and although the numbers are there for estimating it I guess it's too complicated honestly for me to care that much and so my answer is going to be "build more towers". It's what I do right now in the end game. Build a shitload of towers, fill them with drones. On both ends mind you. A tower set to Supply will go and send drones to towers with Demand. And likewise a tower with Demand will go an retrieve stuff from towers set to Supply. It works both ways. You shouldn't need that many to start with though. Especially where you're at. Just enough to move titanium in to automate yellow cubes + bring in titanium/titanium ingots, then some silicon too if you can manage it so you don't have to burn stone for silicon and make your yellow chip production easier (stone is best used a bit later). You don't really need mass towers until you start to seriously scale up and therefore need serious throughput. One thing to keep in mind is that shipping ore is... undesirable if you can avoid it. You won't be able to avoid it forever because you'll eat through all the ore on a planet and in a system eventually so you'll need to ship in the raw materials at some point. But if you smelt the titanium early and ship the titanium ingots, that's basically twice the throughput of shipping the raw titanium ore - because it's two titanium per ingot. Likewise for silicon - it's two silicon per high purity silicon ingot. This doesn't apply to iron or copper as much because their ingots are both equal to one of each ore respectively. But if your throughput sucks right now one thing you can do is go to your other planet and plop down a few smelters for those and ship the products instead.
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Mar 28, 2021 04:54
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SkyeAuroline posted:Blueprints would be a blessing. Some of my processing has gotten... complex. X-ray cracking's entire purpose is to help you with red research, because it's a one stop shop for that. The refined oil you give up is much more important than the extra hydrogen and graphite once you need to start making yellow and purple research. After a certain point in the game x-ray cracking's usefulness, i.e. - to get you more hydrogen from oil - drops off significantly. Hydrogen is extremely common. It's so common that in my end game factories I'm just burning it off because I'm not using it fast enough anywhere to make me want to transport it and do anything with it.
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Mar 29, 2021 15:26
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Well, the game is basically finished for me. My last few nodes are in progress on the one dyson sphere I'm willing to build right now and I'm ploughing through white research extremely fast. There's nothing left besides scale up and start a new sphere and with everything finishing up that's just  Once the sphere finishes I'm taking a long break from this game.Scoss posted:As I have worked to get green science automated I found I actually sort of totally flipped around on oil cracking because I had tens of thousands of yellow science backed up in storage, so the refined oil was going nowhere and now becoming a waste product I had to store, meanwhile my needs for hydrogen and deuterium have suddenly skyrocketed because of increased need for deuterium power and products for green science. In the midgame it was definitely the case that I was burning hydrogen to get rid of it and desperate for more refined oil to get plastic moving.. I'm the exact opposite. I'm basically finished with the game and at the point I'm at I have more hydrogen than I care to deal with. I'm getting the vast majority of it from gas giants. I've put up collector rings on every nearby deuterium/hydrogen gas giant. It's enough to fulfill all of my needs including a massive 60/s casimir crystal factory. Every other factory I've started that produces hydrogen as a byproduct also has a way to burn off the hydrogen if needed. In some cases I'm not bothering and I'm just going right to the burning stage, not even bothering to put it into a tower to see if another planet will take it. When I started white research I forgot that it needed anti-matter and I had to go and add a thermal chain to that factory as well. I was giving priority to the anti-matter fuel rods and then towering the anti-matter but of course the moment I stepped away I realized that the hydrogen had already blocked it up. Frankly, I wish there was a quicker way to burn hydrogen - like an upgraded thermal plant that has a higher output so I don't need so many of the drat things to straight up dispose of the stuff. I know that particle accelerators will eat it up as well but that still produces a product that I don't really need any more and will still back up factories if I don't get rid of the deuterium. Edit: I'm profoundly unhappy with how my sphere turned out. I don't even want to brag about finishing it because it looks dumb. But just thinking about re-doing it is Next time I'll have to do something not so crappy. Edit 2: Got some cool clips at least: https://streamable.com/0blo6q https://streamable.com/l1lboi Admiring a job well done I guess.  Ice Fist fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 04:13
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Step 1: Place nodes on grid. Step 2: Connect nodes Step 3: Place shells inbetween connected nodes. The most confusing thing about the sphere interface is the difference between the two lines, which is a little strange to get used to.
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Mar 30, 2021 07:22
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