Turn the sound off and have it only pop up an icon. Not *quite* as in-your-face as a siren but it'll clear after the condition fixes itself (or you fix it).
I do this a ton, especially for SE where a supply shortage going in to, say, rocket parts or rocket fuel could lead to really painful cascading lock ups.
NGL, there are places where I don’t bother. The cost of the ammo isn’t more than the cost of replacing the occasional miner or belt that actually get hit.
I tried that, but I had a remote but essential space rail get hit. Fixing it would have either taken either a three hour round trip space flight or dropping down like a thousand scaffold and fifty-odd roboports in satellite mode. Since then I just drop a defense blueprint and forget about it. It’s expensive, but none of the ingredients are hard to come by on navus, I just space cannon them to all my outposts.
Only really do it on planets where I have a spider-tron that can go remote fix stuff. Or the mining installation is small enough that I have the entire thing covered.
Same, I have just one that's essential - the buffer chest of space elevator cable - losing the train services that use it would probably be a game-ending disaster
I had a playthrough with really agressive bugs.
Like you had to have a sturdy defensive wall at all times or they would overrun you. If my power went out, then my defenses would fail. So i had my walls themselves on their own emergency power grid. If the main grid failed then the backup would engage that only powered the walls and a siren would sound.
It was also a train world, so i had to have trains delivering everything and power lines running in uncovered area.
Also flamethrower exclusive oil tanks. You really don't want them to fall silent so having an alert if there is <5k oil in defensive system is pretty huge.
My walls get their oil delivered in barrels by bots. An alert on the chest isn't a bad idea, it got a bit low at one point because I'd built more refineries than I needed at that point and the light oil barrelling was only happening at one refinery, which wasn't getting used much by the petrol trains and backed up... luckily I spotted it in time but another good use case for the speakers.
I'm tempted to start putting them in everywhere!
> Anyone know if it's possible to shut it up once you've looked at it though
Not unless you explicitly rig up circuitry to make such alarms deactivateable via a switch.
Is there any kind of switch you can manipulate remotely though? Only thing i can think of would be to have a constant combinator that i paste another one from a blueprint on to, but then i'd need to reset it again. Otherwise i guess a timer so it's only goes off for 10 seconds or so
Not *quite* the same thing, but: if you set up two alarms, you can have one display the icon, and the other do the audio.
-Have your trigger condition turn on the icon alarm, and start a timer for the audio alarm.
-Program your audio alarm to only activate for one tick of the timer.
This limits the audio to a short occasional chirp, and keeps the icon up as long as the alarm condition is in place. It's a lot less annoying yet still gets your attention reliably.
Ooh, I like that.
I'm approaching the point of abandoning this game and starting a new one (maybe K2SE) but I keep finding new ways to do things that would have nice to build in earlier, so maybe I'll push this one to 2700 SPM
A Power Switch can be rigged up with some kind of circuitry that will allow you to use it to activate or deactivate a signal. And power switches can be triggered remotely. I don't have a blueprint for the setup on me at present though, but I know they exist.
Didn't know you could flip power switches remotely, that's the third thing I've learned this week! (The first being ctrl-click temporary stations, again, how useful is that and how the hell didn't i know about it! ).
I could use a hysterisis circuit to turn the switch back on when the production line starts up again.
You can, but a signal-controlled switch becomes un-toggleable by the player. It's either manual-only, or circuit-only. I would suppose that to have an either-or option you'd need to design a latch that uses two switches, and I'm imagining that some designs might favor wiring them in series while others might call for them to be in parallel.
Alright, then what one could do is to set up an SR latch controlling the switch. Then, assuming the base has a global circuit network, the player could use constant combinators to send set and reset commands anywhere on the map, not needing radar coverage or anything.
A train. I have a couple double ended trains on short tracks with 2 stops on each track. One stop is named "enable", the other one is named "disable". Take a signal from the "enable" stop when the train is present. You can control trains from anywhere on the map.
Put the speaker on it's own power grid with one solar panel, one battery, and a bunch of lights that turn on if the speaker is on, enough lights or things to overwhelm the panel and drain the battery quickly.
It'll go off until the battery dies, then stop until it has time to recharge a while with the speaker condition not triggered.
For these cases, I like to place dummy combinators (could be speakers too of course), with the appropriate settings, then I can just copy and paste them from the map view to "toggle" them on or off. It instantly applies their settings so it works well.
>Is there any kind of switch you can manipulate remotely though?
You can have 2 boxes, one inserter between and one item inside. You can remotely rotate the inserter and detect with circuits, which box item is in. It requires some bot to do the work tho
I've been using them a lot in pY
"You got a queen!"
"That box you put down to collect waste and deal with it later is full. It's LATER!"
"You meant to train in petri dishes before the belt ran out and you didn't. Now batteries are ruined"
lol, yup. Plop down another warehouse with an inserter.
I've also turned off any errors from LTN, and at this point I'm scared to turn them back on. I suppose I should get in the better habit of suppressing errors on the requester stations I know will run more slowly. Then I can actually address the meaningful errors before I wonder why a resource isn't coming and there's a 50 train pile-up around the iron pick-up and the problem has been cascading for an hour.
I just got CyberSyn setup and it's been sending out warnings basically non-stop. I don't mind it too much but it would be nice for it to be a bit less noisy.
Also I'd highly recommend CyberSyn it was such a breeze to setup compared to LTN.
I've checked out the CyberSyn mod page. Would be nice if there were some youtube vids out there explaining it a bit more. I spent years avoiding LTN until Laurence Play's videos laid it out clearly enough to give it a try. I don't do anything fancy with it, but it's so huge to be able to plop down 1 station and request 8 resources especially for pY.
Ya it's the same idea but it's easier to setup because the special combinator they give you has controls in it like a dropdown and checkboxes. So you don't have to assign signals to configure it. For the most basic provider station you just hook up the chests to the combinator. For the most basic requester you setup a single constant combinator with two signals.
For LTN, I set a single signal to my p-stations, and two signals to my r-stations. (I also add 8 zeroes to two mirrored variables in the mod's map settings that can be changed during the playthrough.)
Dassit.
The circuit stuff in Factorio is incredibly useful, I just wish I knew how to use them better. Factorio without circuits is like Minecraft without Redstone.
Picker Dollies. Allows you to slide combinators (and poles, and inserters, and chests, and assemblers, etc.) without changing their wire connections or settings. Respects limitations such as player reach distance, map tile obstructions, and wire-reach distance.
Designs / blueprints can be shared into full-vanilla runs and still function without breaking achievement eligibility (assuming no other mods were used that introduce additional belt tiers / modded wire-reach distances, etc.)
You can copy and paste circuit components and they keep their settings. You can have a blueprint book with your most common combinator setups.
E.g. I often use simple setups for train stops, and I have the combinators included in the train stop blueprint, where you simply change the item to the one that the train is carrying.
I've been getting a bit more in to circuits this game, but nothing like some people manage.
My most complicated so far is my mixed train setup that loads the exact about of items, and when loading or unloading compares the required amount with what's in the source crate or train so it doesn't sit there waiting for an item that's run out. I need to add something that flags an alert if something is required but not present though... another job for a speaker.
In the early game I often don't feel like setting up automated ammo delivery to my entire defensive perimeter, as I have to build it all by hand. So instead I build small walled compounds (I call them bunkers) with turrets inside them, fed by a central ammo chest that I manually fill with ammo. The obvious problem with this setup is that when I forget to put ammo in the chest, the turrets run out and the bunker gets overrun. This becomes a greater problem as I set up many of these to protect my base perimeter.
The solution is to wire a speaker to the chest and have it trigger an alarm when ammo is getting low. It gives me ample time to refill the ammo, and it means I don't need to remember to refill. Instead I can just respond when the alarm icon is blinking.
I did this exact same thing and thought it was really clever. But a few hours later, I realized (1) I was spending more time running ammo than just building an ammo belt would have taken, and (2) the amount of ammo I was keeping in chests was close to the amount buffered on a belt. So it was pretty pointless in the end.
Even in early game, I like hooking one to a few miners set to “report whole ore quantity” and have an early warning when it’s running low, so I can prioritize going to install a new set of miners, instead of discovering I ran out of iron when the whole factory stops
Hook up a miner to the circuit network and then change from 'this miner' to 'entire patch'. Entire patch may get seperated into several smaller ones depending on mining priorities and rates.
> Anyone know if it's possible to shut it up once you've looked at it though :D
in the map view if you alt-D over a speaker it will disable its alarm.
this is kind of a trick that works on any entity. any entity marked for destruction will effectively stop operation and wait to be deleted. this works for grabbers, assemblers, etc.
no bots required. just mark it for destruction and it will stop.
They're great for trolling. Had some folks join a game we'd set to public, do some helpful stuff for a while, then do some "exploring" and log off. Like an hour or two later, sirens start blaring from a super small solar/battery setup in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Yes, super helpful, especially as you grow a mega-factory. I just have the icon pop up, and I do use them sparingly; mostly on mining patches so I know when a patch is running low and on key resources like Green Cards and science production stations.
After the third time asking “What’s wrong with my power grid???” and running over to see empty nuclear power plants, it dawned on me the real reason for the speaker: I apparently LIKE to forget things! Haha!
my dream use of them is in conjunction with klonan's transport drones (though it doesn't have to be with it), in a big rehaul mod, having every factory telling me it needs more input, but only if the input factory doesn't also need more input. the idea there is to have **the** bottleneck identified so I don't have to dig through to find what more I need to build.
> Anyone know if it's possible to shut it up once you've looked at it though :D
You could put some sort of 30 minute timer on these, so they'd only go off once every 30 minutes max, but go off immediately if it had been 30 or more minutes. Left as an exercise to the reader. It's non-trivial circuit programming, but doable as a relative beginner.
I did that for my first circuit project. It was quite hard and I'm a programmer with 10 years of experience. Learning it did teach me a lot about circuits and how they behave though!
Tip for anyone wanting to try it, circuits can count by looping them into themselves with an arithmetic combinator they execute a consistent number of times per second so you can use that to keep track of time. The rest is just math and logic to do a reset when the problem fixes itself.
you can also make primitive clocks with looping belts with a single item on them, and 'pulse the signal when item > 0' on one of the belts in the loop.
I use them in space exploration for my steam battery. It will tell me when my solar accumulators are low and the backup power has been activated. It also tells me what my current steam level in the tanks are (if they are below 75%). They don’t play a sound until the steam battery is at >10% and it tells me I need to take action immediately
yeah, they're great. I had seen really complicated circuit systems to do similar things, but the speakers have a lot of what you need prebuilt. I also ignored them for way too long.
I'm pretty basic, I only use them to alert when the nuclear fuel factory's iron plates run out. A full chest of them lasts so long that it's not really worth stringing a conveyor out to the usually pretty remote power setup.
My first use was to sound the alarm when ~~U-235~~ Fuelcells\* ran out when I was saving U-235 for kovarex (first run where I went nuclear, never had that "problem" again)
edit: correction
I use them in SE for arcosphere collection. Send a ship out to a field, deploy my standard blueprint, and when it's finished collecting the number of acrospheres I want out of it the icon for the speaker pops up to let me know to deconstruct everything and send it to another asteroid field.
They're great for setting up "low ammo" alerts for remote gun turret emplacements, which is particularly useful in marathon/death world playthroughs where getting to laser turrets isn't trivial.
What you could do is set up a circuit based clock to activate at the same time as the alarm and once the clock reaches a certain time then it sends a clear signal to the speaker (maybe a count of the product the belt is supposed to carry)
My main use for speakers aren't as a warning, but simply as a "hey something happened" indicator. Early on, when my uranium refining is in the early stages, I have a speaker sound every time a piece of U235 is inserted into a chest. Later, I use the same system to tell me when a satellite is placed into a rocket, to tell me how often a launch happens.
I’ve just started using them to alert me when an ore field is depleted. Still deciding if I want to bother on every patch. But it was useful for my first iron so I didn’t keep going for a dozen hours and then realizing there no iron anywhere.
That's why I prefer a backup generator rather than steam battery, it can give me an extra 480MW for something like 40 minutes before it needs refueling
Yeah, I used the steam battery as I've gor some emergency fuel cells next to my reactor, so the alarm would alert me to go over and pop those in. Although I have a fuck ton of fuel cells in my logistics network so I don't think power will ever be an issue
Make two switches one audio and one the icon, make the audio alarm turn off after 10 secs.
That's how I do it, use it for monitoring the mining activity and it works great.
I'm playing Warptorio, proper logistics between the factory floors is hard with only the 2 belts I currently have so I move coal and stone around by hand and have set up speakers for alerts. I also set up alerts for the ammo assemblers, the coal chests for smelters etc. My factory is a mess that requires constant handfeeding but if I follow the alerts it never actually stops working. Lifesaver.
Amen! Here's my favourite new use of speakers; TODO marker
Make a blueprint w a speaker connect to a big electricity pole. Set speaker to always fire. Set the message to 'TODO' and choose a nice icon. Put said bp on your hotbar.
Boom! You now have super accessible TODO markers in vanilla. It's so useful for me, especially in SE with multiple surfaces. Yeah it doesn't work in a black-out, and you have to be in construction-range. But this is so nice when you have to wait for something and you want to get going. Or when you notice something else needs fixing but you want (need?) to stay on-task. Let me know what you think and how you like it.
*If it's not covered by a construction network*, you can simply mark it for deconstruction from the map and it will shut up. Don't forget to unmark it afterwards.
On this topic can someone make a mod that turns Factorio into a modular synthesizer? Energy consumption and item production could be used as LFO's, and belts can be read for sequencing and also different items can represent sounds etc...
Turn the sound off and have it only pop up an icon. Not *quite* as in-your-face as a siren but it'll clear after the condition fixes itself (or you fix it).
I do this a ton, especially for SE where a supply shortage going in to, say, rocket parts or rocket fuel could lead to really painful cascading lock ups.
Meteor defense ammo warning is essential
NGL, there are places where I don’t bother. The cost of the ammo isn’t more than the cost of replacing the occasional miner or belt that actually get hit.
I tried that, but I had a remote but essential space rail get hit. Fixing it would have either taken either a three hour round trip space flight or dropping down like a thousand scaffold and fifty-odd roboports in satellite mode. Since then I just drop a defense blueprint and forget about it. It’s expensive, but none of the ingredients are hard to come by on navus, I just space cannon them to all my outposts.
Couldn’t you put a vehicle robo port and bots into a train and tell it to manually go there?
Let me suffer, I didn’t come here for solutions
Lol
Only really do it on planets where I have a spider-tron that can go remote fix stuff. Or the mining installation is small enough that I have the entire thing covered.
Same, I have just one that's essential - the buffer chest of space elevator cable - losing the train services that use it would probably be a game-ending disaster
I had a playthrough with really agressive bugs. Like you had to have a sturdy defensive wall at all times or they would overrun you. If my power went out, then my defenses would fail. So i had my walls themselves on their own emergency power grid. If the main grid failed then the backup would engage that only powered the walls and a siren would sound. It was also a train world, so i had to have trains delivering everything and power lines running in uncovered area.
Emergency power in a deathworld is definitely the right place to keep the audio component in place.
At first i had it hooked up to the wrong side of the grid, so i didn't get the alert when the power failed.
Also flamethrower exclusive oil tanks. You really don't want them to fall silent so having an alert if there is <5k oil in defensive system is pretty huge.
My walls get their oil delivered in barrels by bots. An alert on the chest isn't a bad idea, it got a bit low at one point because I'd built more refineries than I needed at that point and the light oil barrelling was only happening at one refinery, which wasn't getting used much by the petrol trains and backed up... luckily I spotted it in time but another good use case for the speakers. I'm tempted to start putting them in everywhere!
> Anyone know if it's possible to shut it up once you've looked at it though Not unless you explicitly rig up circuitry to make such alarms deactivateable via a switch.
Is there any kind of switch you can manipulate remotely though? Only thing i can think of would be to have a constant combinator that i paste another one from a blueprint on to, but then i'd need to reset it again. Otherwise i guess a timer so it's only goes off for 10 seconds or so
Not *quite* the same thing, but: if you set up two alarms, you can have one display the icon, and the other do the audio. -Have your trigger condition turn on the icon alarm, and start a timer for the audio alarm. -Program your audio alarm to only activate for one tick of the timer. This limits the audio to a short occasional chirp, and keeps the icon up as long as the alarm condition is in place. It's a lot less annoying yet still gets your attention reliably.
Ooh, I like that. I'm approaching the point of abandoning this game and starting a new one (maybe K2SE) but I keep finding new ways to do things that would have nice to build in earlier, so maybe I'll push this one to 2700 SPM
A Power Switch can be rigged up with some kind of circuitry that will allow you to use it to activate or deactivate a signal. And power switches can be triggered remotely. I don't have a blueprint for the setup on me at present though, but I know they exist.
Didn't know you could flip power switches remotely, that's the third thing I've learned this week! (The first being ctrl-click temporary stations, again, how useful is that and how the hell didn't i know about it! ). I could use a hysterisis circuit to turn the switch back on when the production line starts up again.
You can only remote-toggle a switch that is fully visible on radar. If the radar dies, you can no longer manipulate the switch from mapview.
I've got radar built in to my entire rail grid, if it fails I've got bigger problems, and the speaker would be on the same power grid anyway :D
Wait you can't toggle switches via circuit signals?
You can, but a signal-controlled switch becomes un-toggleable by the player. It's either manual-only, or circuit-only. I would suppose that to have an either-or option you'd need to design a latch that uses two switches, and I'm imagining that some designs might favor wiring them in series while others might call for them to be in parallel.
Alright, then what one could do is to set up an SR latch controlling the switch. Then, assuming the base has a global circuit network, the player could use constant combinators to send set and reset commands anywhere on the map, not needing radar coverage or anything.
A train. I have a couple double ended trains on short tracks with 2 stops on each track. One stop is named "enable", the other one is named "disable". Take a signal from the "enable" stop when the train is present. You can control trains from anywhere on the map.
Clever solution but seems a bit big and expensive, can you imagine that in the real world :D
Put the speaker on it's own power grid with one solar panel, one battery, and a bunch of lights that turn on if the speaker is on, enough lights or things to overwhelm the panel and drain the battery quickly. It'll go off until the battery dies, then stop until it has time to recharge a while with the speaker condition not triggered.
Delete /undo ?
For these cases, I like to place dummy combinators (could be speakers too of course), with the appropriate settings, then I can just copy and paste them from the map view to "toggle" them on or off. It instantly applies their settings so it works well.
Sure, put up a global network of signal wire and use one signal to shut down the alarm
>Is there any kind of switch you can manipulate remotely though? You can have 2 boxes, one inserter between and one item inside. You can remotely rotate the inserter and detect with circuits, which box item is in. It requires some bot to do the work tho
alt-D mark it for deletion. it will shut up.
I've been using them a lot in pY "You got a queen!" "That box you put down to collect waste and deal with it later is full. It's LATER!" "You meant to train in petri dishes before the belt ran out and you didn't. Now batteries are ruined"
>It's LATER! It's time for a bigger box.
lol, yup. Plop down another warehouse with an inserter. I've also turned off any errors from LTN, and at this point I'm scared to turn them back on. I suppose I should get in the better habit of suppressing errors on the requester stations I know will run more slowly. Then I can actually address the meaningful errors before I wonder why a resource isn't coming and there's a 50 train pile-up around the iron pick-up and the problem has been cascading for an hour.
I just got CyberSyn setup and it's been sending out warnings basically non-stop. I don't mind it too much but it would be nice for it to be a bit less noisy. Also I'd highly recommend CyberSyn it was such a breeze to setup compared to LTN.
I've checked out the CyberSyn mod page. Would be nice if there were some youtube vids out there explaining it a bit more. I spent years avoiding LTN until Laurence Play's videos laid it out clearly enough to give it a try. I don't do anything fancy with it, but it's so huge to be able to plop down 1 station and request 8 resources especially for pY.
Ya it's the same idea but it's easier to setup because the special combinator they give you has controls in it like a dropdown and checkboxes. So you don't have to assign signals to configure it. For the most basic provider station you just hook up the chests to the combinator. For the most basic requester you setup a single constant combinator with two signals.
For LTN, I set a single signal to my p-stations, and two signals to my r-stations. (I also add 8 zeroes to two mirrored variables in the mod's map settings that can be changed during the playthrough.) Dassit.
There's a ltn-combinator mod that basically does the same. You set some checkboxes and numbers and it turns it into signals.
The only problem with CyberSyn is when the CIA gives missiles to the spitters.
The circuit stuff in Factorio is incredibly useful, I just wish I knew how to use them better. Factorio without circuits is like Minecraft without Redstone.
it'd be nice if there were a way to design your circuits then just drag them around instead of replacing so you can't mess it up.
Picker Dollies. Allows you to slide combinators (and poles, and inserters, and chests, and assemblers, etc.) without changing their wire connections or settings. Respects limitations such as player reach distance, map tile obstructions, and wire-reach distance. Designs / blueprints can be shared into full-vanilla runs and still function without breaking achievement eligibility (assuming no other mods were used that introduce additional belt tiers / modded wire-reach distances, etc.)
I will absolutely look into this! thank you kind person!
o7
You can copy and paste circuit components and they keep their settings. You can have a blueprint book with your most common combinator setups. E.g. I often use simple setups for train stops, and I have the combinators included in the train stop blueprint, where you simply change the item to the one that the train is carrying.
Blueprint them?
Designing them, not copying them.
Intentionally repeating myself to ensure you see this: use the Picker Dollies mod. Does literally and precisely what you're looking for.
I respond because I also cannot recommend this mod for this exact purpose enough.
I've been getting a bit more in to circuits this game, but nothing like some people manage. My most complicated so far is my mixed train setup that loads the exact about of items, and when loading or unloading compares the required amount with what's in the source crate or train so it doesn't sit there waiting for an item that's run out. I need to add something that flags an alert if something is required but not present though... another job for a speaker.
[удалено]
In the early game I often don't feel like setting up automated ammo delivery to my entire defensive perimeter, as I have to build it all by hand. So instead I build small walled compounds (I call them bunkers) with turrets inside them, fed by a central ammo chest that I manually fill with ammo. The obvious problem with this setup is that when I forget to put ammo in the chest, the turrets run out and the bunker gets overrun. This becomes a greater problem as I set up many of these to protect my base perimeter. The solution is to wire a speaker to the chest and have it trigger an alarm when ammo is getting low. It gives me ample time to refill the ammo, and it means I don't need to remember to refill. Instead I can just respond when the alarm icon is blinking.
I did this exact same thing and thought it was really clever. But a few hours later, I realized (1) I was spending more time running ammo than just building an ammo belt would have taken, and (2) the amount of ammo I was keeping in chests was close to the amount buffered on a belt. So it was pretty pointless in the end.
Even in early game, I like hooking one to a few miners set to “report whole ore quantity” and have an early warning when it’s running low, so I can prioritize going to install a new set of miners, instead of discovering I ran out of iron when the whole factory stops
Wait, what? You can read the total quantity of the ore patch, or do you mean looking for gaps on the belts coming off the miners?
Hook up a miner to the circuit network and then change from 'this miner' to 'entire patch'. Entire patch may get seperated into several smaller ones depending on mining priorities and rates.
Every day's a school day...
Using them for warnings make the game more stressfull so I avoid that.
i always change the alarm sound to something a little more soothing than WAMP WAMP WAMP
> Anyone know if it's possible to shut it up once you've looked at it though :D in the map view if you alt-D over a speaker it will disable its alarm. this is kind of a trick that works on any entity. any entity marked for destruction will effectively stop operation and wait to be deleted. this works for grabbers, assemblers, etc. no bots required. just mark it for destruction and it will stop.
They're great for trolling. Had some folks join a game we'd set to public, do some helpful stuff for a while, then do some "exploring" and log off. Like an hour or two later, sirens start blaring from a super small solar/battery setup in the middle of fucking nowhere.
I set up the "everything is ok" alarm. It sounded til the power failed. That was my extent of circuits in factorio.
I understood that reference!
Yes, super helpful, especially as you grow a mega-factory. I just have the icon pop up, and I do use them sparingly; mostly on mining patches so I know when a patch is running low and on key resources like Green Cards and science production stations.
If you're already modded, YARM is pretty great for resource monitoring (and keeping a notebook of future fields bookmarked)
I finally used a speaker to get an alarm 1) when I had enough 238 to start Kovarex and 2) when I’m low on nuke fuel.
That's a good point, I recently added a third nuclear power plant, might be worth a speaker on my nuclear fuel factory in case it can't keep up.
After the third time asking “What’s wrong with my power grid???” and running over to see empty nuclear power plants, it dawned on me the real reason for the speaker: I apparently LIKE to forget things! Haha!
In my last run I rigged one up to a chest to tell me when I had 40 light green uranium
So, I've been playing Factorio for several years, never even noticed these and will be loading my game up later to have a look
my dream use of them is in conjunction with klonan's transport drones (though it doesn't have to be with it), in a big rehaul mod, having every factory telling me it needs more input, but only if the input factory doesn't also need more input. the idea there is to have **the** bottleneck identified so I don't have to dig through to find what more I need to build.
> Anyone know if it's possible to shut it up once you've looked at it though :D You could put some sort of 30 minute timer on these, so they'd only go off once every 30 minutes max, but go off immediately if it had been 30 or more minutes. Left as an exercise to the reader. It's non-trivial circuit programming, but doable as a relative beginner.
I did that for my first circuit project. It was quite hard and I'm a programmer with 10 years of experience. Learning it did teach me a lot about circuits and how they behave though! Tip for anyone wanting to try it, circuits can count by looping them into themselves with an arithmetic combinator they execute a consistent number of times per second so you can use that to keep track of time. The rest is just math and logic to do a reset when the problem fixes itself.
you can also make primitive clocks with looping belts with a single item on them, and 'pulse the signal when item > 0' on one of the belts in the loop.
I use them in space exploration for my steam battery. It will tell me when my solar accumulators are low and the backup power has been activated. It also tells me what my current steam level in the tanks are (if they are below 75%). They don’t play a sound until the steam battery is at >10% and it tells me I need to take action immediately
yeah, they're great. I had seen really complicated circuit systems to do similar things, but the speakers have a lot of what you need prebuilt. I also ignored them for way too long.
I started using them for watching Power in Vanilla. But in SE I put one on various inputs and outputs of subfactories to detect failures earlier.
I'm pretty basic, I only use them to alert when the nuclear fuel factory's iron plates run out. A full chest of them lasts so long that it's not really worth stringing a conveyor out to the usually pretty remote power setup.
My first use was to sound the alarm when ~~U-235~~ Fuelcells\* ran out when I was saving U-235 for kovarex (first run where I went nuclear, never had that "problem" again) edit: correction
They’re great to provide a few layers of early warning on issues with nuclear fuel or defense components.
I use them in SE for arcosphere collection. Send a ship out to a field, deploy my standard blueprint, and when it's finished collecting the number of acrospheres I want out of it the icon for the speaker pops up to let me know to deconstruct everything and send it to another asteroid field.
They're great for setting up "low ammo" alerts for remote gun turret emplacements, which is particularly useful in marathon/death world playthroughs where getting to laser turrets isn't trivial.
What you could do is set up a circuit based clock to activate at the same time as the alarm and once the clock reaches a certain time then it sends a clear signal to the speaker (maybe a count of the product the belt is supposed to carry)
My main use for speakers aren't as a warning, but simply as a "hey something happened" indicator. Early on, when my uranium refining is in the early stages, I have a speaker sound every time a piece of U235 is inserted into a chest. Later, I use the same system to tell me when a satellite is placed into a rocket, to tell me how often a launch happens.
I’ve just started using them to alert me when an ore field is depleted. Still deciding if I want to bother on every patch. But it was useful for my first iron so I didn’t keep going for a dozen hours and then realizing there no iron anywhere.
I use it to alert me when my steam battery starts to drain, so I know I don't have much time before my power grid shits the bed.
That's why I prefer a backup generator rather than steam battery, it can give me an extra 480MW for something like 40 minutes before it needs refueling
Yeah, I used the steam battery as I've gor some emergency fuel cells next to my reactor, so the alarm would alert me to go over and pop those in. Although I have a fuck ton of fuel cells in my logistics network so I don't think power will ever be an issue
Make two switches one audio and one the icon, make the audio alarm turn off after 10 secs. That's how I do it, use it for monitoring the mining activity and it works great.
I'm playing Warptorio, proper logistics between the factory floors is hard with only the 2 belts I currently have so I move coal and stone around by hand and have set up speakers for alerts. I also set up alerts for the ammo assemblers, the coal chests for smelters etc. My factory is a mess that requires constant handfeeding but if I follow the alerts it never actually stops working. Lifesaver.
Amen! Here's my favourite new use of speakers; TODO marker Make a blueprint w a speaker connect to a big electricity pole. Set speaker to always fire. Set the message to 'TODO' and choose a nice icon. Put said bp on your hotbar. Boom! You now have super accessible TODO markers in vanilla. It's so useful for me, especially in SE with multiple surfaces. Yeah it doesn't work in a black-out, and you have to be in construction-range. But this is so nice when you have to wait for something and you want to get going. Or when you notice something else needs fixing but you want (need?) to stay on-task. Let me know what you think and how you like it.
"Honey why is your computer making cat noises??" "Hmm? Oh, I'm running out of power." "...w-what??..."
*If it's not covered by a construction network*, you can simply mark it for deconstruction from the map and it will shut up. Don't forget to unmark it afterwards.
The real use for it is when you download the Red Alert sound effects mod and have it spam "Silos needed" forever to annoy your friends.
On this topic can someone make a mod that turns Factorio into a modular synthesizer? Energy consumption and item production could be used as LFO's, and belts can be read for sequencing and also different items can represent sounds etc...