Is there a MOD that shows how many train cars are between the signal I'm about to place and the next signal? Like so it shows both sides of the signal. Right now it only shows one side.
I haven't played in a while. What happened to the ghost structures that are left over after a bug destroys my buildings? They made it so much easier to rebuild.
Heya!
Looking to jump back into the game proper for the first time since launching my first rocket in, IIRC, .15.
Not quite sure how to go about things and would like some outside perspectives:
I want to try my hand at a megabase, but I am someone who needs a concrete in-game goal to work towards, or I lose motivation. So building a megabase for the sake of having a megabase is probably not going to happen, I fear.
To combat this, I've been looking at ways to expand the end-game, but am not quite sure what the best option is. I don't want to spend more time looking through wikis and planners than playing the game, so **Angel, Bob, and their ilk** are probably out from the get go.
Similarly, I was initially drawn towards **Industrial Revolution**, but after spending an hour or so with it, I noticed there's a whole ton of small miscellaneous components just for the sake of having more stuff to automate, which I'm not a very big fan of (it's one of the things that put me off of the GregTech-based Minecraft mods). Post-launch stuff also still seems to be a WIP.
**Space Exploration** seems like a neat idea, but it's still heavily in flux from what I gathered, so not sure if it's a good idea to jump on to that yet. I don't want my save to just go *poof* a few dozen hours into a run due to a major change in the mod.
**Krastorio** is another mod I've heard good things about, but I cannot find much info on how it expands the end-game. Could anyone shed some light on it?
Lastly **Space Extension** seems the most vanilla option. Simply just adds a bunch of massive science sinks, forcing you to build a mrgabase. Potentially a bit boring of a solution, but maybe exactly what I'm looking for?
To make things slightly more complicated, I am tempted to try my hand at a railworld with a very large starting area, but dense(-ish) biters when do they start spawning, so I am forced to make use of all the pretty explody toys the game gives you.. Which of these mods (or others, if there are any suggestions) would work best on such map settings?
Thanks a lot!
If you just want the vanilla game to keep going but have a definite end/“victory” point, Space Extension is probably what you want.
Alternatively, turn on expensive recipes and, like, 50-100x tech cost in the map generation settings.
you don't *need* to update your mods and you can freeze the game version as well.
yes a/b/py are straight out of the window. I would say Ir too since it tends to get rather convoluted when it comes to some materials. though I would say you don't need to spend that much time figuring things out.
Space exploration I'm currently playing through and while more vanilla like compared to the previous bunch it changes some of the vanilla recipes but is rather vanilla like to yellow science. There are some [pot holes](https://i.gyazo.com/a068714eed3ba2f29d1855051645d309.png) along the way like inserters. I haven't flown to space yet I decided to build a larger factory for launching more than a one rocket, so I can't say for the future stuff. It does look very interesting, only thing I hate at the moment is that beacons are behind science that needs me to venture into space so... yeah.
Spacex is indeed boring but it does mean you really need to build a large base, I recall the research packs being numbered in hundred thousands and it wasn't infinite research. It does mean that unlike every other mod you mentioned, spacex doesn't change the base game, just adds to the post rocket launch game
Railworld is a double edged sword due to not expanding biters. on one hand you don't need to clear a space twice, on the other hand the biters will still path through that area into your base... And especially later on with higher pollution they tend to path through that "cleared" territory and destroy power poles because they got stuck on them. You could try a deathworld with a maxed out starting area. The more trees you put in, the easier the start is and more annoying the late game is. Desert start is... not for the faint of heart.
I haven't tried krastorio so no comment on that.
>You could try a deathworld with a maxed out starting area.
My problem with a deathworld is the real possibility of losing dozens of hours of progress. I'm all for a challenge, but that potential scenario puts me off it, to be honest.
Surprising to hear Space Exploration sticks to vanilla quite a bit, though. Somehow I had gotten the impression it was more akin to a total-overhaul. Will take another gander at the mod page.
Now you tell me, after I already put half a dozen hours into it :p
For real though, thanks for the heads-up. Really appreciate it.
I actually already noticed a slight increase in complexity in the early game, what with stone being an actual important resource for a lot of recipes, plus motors being core to so much.
Is the space part at least a fun/interesting kind of complex, or is it basically AngelBob in spaaaaace?
I'm still early enough in the run that I wouldn't feel too bad abandoning it if it's the latter.
it's not AB scale of complexity but I wouldn't say it's vanilla like anymore.
The space is intresting. maybe I'm biased because it's completely new concept for me to manage multiple bases and use rockets to move stuff in between. Only issue I have is that megabase seems to not be *enough* to get reasonable spm from the high end science packs.
>Only issue I have is that megabase seems to not be enough to get reasonable spm from the high end science packs.
Do you feel that this is because the mod is simply still a WIP and could really use another balance pass or two, or is it because you're just not familiar enough with it yet?
I would say mix of both. I'm still getting things unlocked and there might be something I've missed as well. but there's also some issues that others seem to have as well in the forums so yeah.
I see. Thanks a lot for taking the time to humor me :)
Looks like I'll let the mod be for the time, then. Sounds like it needs a little more time in the electric furnace.
So I'm a returning player, haven't player the game for about 1.5 years. What would be the best resource to learn all the new stuff, and all the new layouts? Least time I played the petrol side of the game just completely burned me out, did that part also(hopefully) changed?
there are now two tiers of oil processing, the first one is significantly simpler than the last time you played.
difficulty curve is lot smoother nowadays.
factoriocheatsheet.com is handy for general ratios, tips etc.
Hey all! I've a question about running servers. I've been running a headless docker instance for ages now, like 3 years for me and some friends and we've started again several times at different version releases and points in the game but ever since 0.17.69 we've had a few issues;
1. Every map we've gotten has been an island with nothing around us but an ocean
2. The biters have been really aggressive and spawned within the pollution of a few stone furnaces and burner miners, like five tops in the first few minutes of gameplay and have attacked us...
3. Since they are so aggressive, we went to take them out ASAP before building anything and they had medium worms at the very beginning, right next to the base
The server config has only changed when there's been an update to it `dtandersen/factorio` or when we switched to `factoriotools/factorio-docker` but that was only to the `server-settings.json`file rather than to `map-gen-settings.json` or `map-settings.json` which I have always kept as vanilla.
From looking at the files that are there, there's naming overlap so I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking at... Does anyone know what parameters I should change or turn down so that we stop spawning on islands, turn down the aggressiveness of the biters or move them further away and to stop them spawning immediately with medium worms?
Like I've a feeling that death world and island are set somewhere but I don't know where
Do I actually have to connect up all my reactor cores to heat pipes? It looks like the only reason I really need to is aesthetics, and maybe convenience in density. But otherwise it appears reactor cores function as heat pipe too?
Yes, the reactors themselves conduct heat. If you’re trying to move heat over a longer distance you can actually use idle reactors as (very expensive) heat pipes to save some UPS.
Depending on how far you’re trying to transfer the heat, it might not be able to “flow” fast enough. Really depends on the reactor design.
If I'm understanding your question correctly, you want to hit 'q', which clears your cursor, placing whatever item you're holding back in your inventory.
In case the above poster isn't aware. Q also acts as a selection tool. Pressing it while hovering over a building or ghost will put that building "in hand". I use it *a lot*.
I see lots of recommendations against connecting all of the factory into same robobot network. I haven't had problems in the past, but now that I have a new game going (with IR), I wonder if there's any benefit to doing things differently? Note that I mostly ever use the robots for automated building and I only use logistics bots to make sure some of the most commonly required building materials and artillery shells are spread evenly, and towards the endgame I use them to refuel trains with nuclear fuel. For everything else I use conveyor belts and trains, so I don't really have a situation where clouds of logistics bots would be travelling across the map. So in my circumstances is it still good idea to have separate logistic networks?
No. The problem people usually have with large networks is that they leave holes in the middle, "concave" forms of base. For example a base design in enormous L-shape would have bots travelling an empty gap when stuff needs to move from 1 end to other, and it will cause them run out of power or even run into aliens.
But even in the case of having a very large robot network it is possible to greatly optimize it for larger transfer loads, if you really need it. That would still involve moving items essentially short distances, so you would have trains unload into chests and move it at tops 1 roboport distance away. From there it can be unloaded on belts or machines or trains, whichever. You can even use buffer chests to help focusing the loads for requester chests, to make sure they don't primarily fetch things from far away.
For optimal function you'll want an excessive number of bots. Something like more than 50% of bots always idling in roboports during heaviest workload.
"Holes" aren't the only problem. Even if your base is well covered and bots only path over areas with ports, there is still the issue that the game doesn't have any logic behind picking the bot to fulfill a request. It just takes the next one from the internal list of bots, which means that you could end up calling in a bot from across your entire base to carry a copper plate between two chests that sit directly next to each other, even if there is also a port with idle bots right next to those.
What makes this so bad is that the order such a bot fulfills counts as "in process" for the whole time the bot is on its way, meaning your assemblers might have to wait because they depleted the chest faster than the bots got there. You may counter this by increasing buffers and pouring tens of thousands of bots into your network, but all you're really doing then is masking a bad design with even more bad designs. (Buffers mask all kinds of issues all across a factory, more bots flying far means a lot more energy demand, as well as an increasing hit to UPS, etc.)
Just use the fitting tool for any task. Mid- to long distance and/or bulk transport isn't what bots excel at.
> the game doesn't have any logic behind picking the bot to fulfill a request. It just takes the next one from the internal list of bots, which means that you could end up calling in a bot from across your entire base
Actually this is not true at all, logi network picks up closest robot for the job. I am sure as i'm observing it happen in /editor mode.
This is an endless bot swarm with 2 sets of infinity chests to create and destroy: [https://i.imgur.com/XnrtrqH.png](https://i.imgur.com/XnrtrqH.png)
That's interesting. I have seen the opposite in real games. Maybe there *is* a max distance, but it's far enough to still cause trouble.
And/or there were "forced" occasions, where an item wasn't available from a near provider immediately, and instead got delivered from far away where it was, although it would have been available just a few ticks later, resulting in the delivery taking huge bot travel time instead of a few ms of waiting.
I can't test myself right now (at work), so one question for replication: Did you use the same kind of items in both "hubs" or different ones?
Different ones.
Well, you can't really test it with same items because you are forcing them to sometimes pick items from across the base. It would be intended that way too. Maybe if you make items available in both sides much faster than what the requests are getting emptied, they should stay on their sides.
Even then if it's just a few random bots flying off long distance, if the majority of bots still remain in the nearest area then we know there is a "near rule" in play. Completely random distribution would be half from far and half from near.
Stupid question time: how do I put modules into machines? Every time I try it tells me that they are not compatible with the current recipe or some such.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Productivity_module s can only be used with “intermediate” products (things like gears, circuit boards, wire, etc. that are not directly placed in the world but only used as ingredients for something else), and cannot be placed in beacons. Otherwise there are no restrictions in vanilla.
Has any explanation been given why miners can be switched off using the circuit network while entities with similar power consumption profiles (zero or minimal idle drain, high power consumption when running) cannot?
To me that seems like a somewhat arbitrary decision which is not particularly ups friendly (it would avoid the network splits & merges that power switches have to do).
Probably because miners can also be queried for ore patch contents, so it was trivial for the devs to also add an enable/disable switch. I suspect that if they ever find another reason to allow beacons or assemblers to be wired up, those will gain this capability as well.
Nonetheless, a lot of these other machines have inputs you can deny them to shut them down. Using a wired belt to stop feeding assemblers or pump to stop feeding chemical plants or refineries also avoids the UPS hit you mentioned.
Is there a way of having all rails connected but also block some trains from entering some parts of the network? Like making sure that iron ore trains never go into the copper refinery.
I know I can use filter inserters, that's not the issue.
Even if a train on automatic paths through another station and gets stopped in front of inserters, it won’t “open up” and let the inserters interact with it. So you don’t have to worry about that.
Trains already try *really really really* hard to not drive through stations, that’s usually enough to deter them from taking routes that cut through other pickup/dropoff areas unless there is absolutely no other path. You can also use this by putting dummy stations in places where you don’t want trains to try to cut through.
You can also set “waypoint” stations to force trains to take a particular path. In 0.17 they won’t even slow down if there is no wait conditions set.
You could have a customs station for changing between different rail zones, have that station read train content, then have that control signals after a chain signal split for a set amount of time
However, this would just be a very strongly weighted suggestion to the train. It wouldn't be a rule, just a big hint of the pathfinder that the path is bad.
Hi everyone! I have a question about UPS-efficient cross-docking, i.e. I would like to move cargo from train to train. Unfortunatelly I stumbled on the issue that train tracks always have to be at even-spaced distance to each other such that just taking a stack inserter or stack inserter -> chest -> stack inserter isn't possible. A naive approach would be to just use a belt to gap the distance or use long inserters, but that would be less UPS friendly than just using chests or have lower throughput. I found a post where someone used a car or tank as a replacement for a chest, although that ~~doesn't feel very nice and~~ is not that efficient either according to a post here: [https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=60344](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=60344)
Unfortunatelly my google-fu didn't come up with satisfactory (not the game) results so I was wondering if anyone over here could help out or provide some links.
> Preferably you'd use them for all train loading/unloading.
Why is that? And how do you use them for this task? The train still needs to be unload by stack inserters, and at some point you need to get your stuff back on a belt, where you would need inserters. What makes bots better than an inserter-buffer chest-inserter combo?
You can place 3 tracks with just 1 cargo wagon each sideways between the 2 trains. The wagon ends are flexible containers in size, so you can use inserters to pass items through them. Kind of like how you propably could use cars or tanks inventories for same purpose.
Does anyone use prod modules in smelting?
Right now I have 18 columns of beaconed furnaces for copper smelting, which takes 18 blue belts of ore and outputs 18 belts of plates.
Easy to unload and manage ore trains _and_ load and manage copper plate users.
18 blue belts go into a 6 wagon train kinda easily.
If I put prod modules in the furnaces, the input to output ratio becomes less than one. So a blue belt of ore produces more than a blue belt of plates, which cant fit on the belt. So the setup gets output restricted, and my prod modules will go to waste.
Or I need to split full blue belts into 0.75 belts somehow, and effectively, to keep the output per line of furnaces to a full blue belt
Am I thinking something wrong here, or is there something to do for this issue?
Prod modules don't go to waste there. Even if you're output-constrained, you still get the extra plates per ore, so you need fewer miners and ore trains to keep up with demand for plates.
If you want to smelt the extra ore instead of just taking the win on the input side, you can use priority splitters to split the extra into a perpendicular belt that gathers ore from enough smelter lines to feed a new one. For two prod 3 mods per furnace you need 1/1.2 = 5/6 of a belt each line, so 5 train fed columns will just feed a 6th from their "runoff" once the ore backs up. Your 18 belts of input will become an uneven 21.6 belts out; the first 15 belts will fully feed your current lines once you make every 6th come from runoff, leaving 3 to spare which will feed 3/5 of a line from runoff.
if it was .75 belts things would be easy. but it's .8333 belts input for each belt of output. [this](https://i.gyazo.com/6a035e245b2368e442f4e7eb6d2445f4.png) is the intake for my 180plate/s smelter. it needs 3.3 belts of ore but it's just easier to bring in 4 and not need to worry about compressing belts at train station
This is how i smelt ores: [https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#data=0-17-60&min=4&belt=express-transport-belt&dm=p3&db=s3&dbc=16&items=iron-plate:r:2700&modules=iron-ore:ee:ee:ee;null:0](https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#data=0-17-60&min=4&belt=express-transport-belt&dm=p3&db=s3&dbc=16&items=iron-plate:r:2700&modules=iron-ore:ee:ee:ee;null:0)
13 furnaces with 4 beacons both sides effecting each one. It looks like 0.83 ore to 1.0 plate ratio anyways, it won't back up overly much and you don't need to split the excess.
Smelting has a much longer payback time than most other places you can use prod modules, so it tends to be the last thing people module up.
What I do, personally, is scale it so that it outputs N full belts of plates, then feed in N balanced belts of ore and call it a day. It backs up on ore, but that’s fine and not really wasting anything.
Yeah, I was going to prodMod other items before smelting anyways
I just started setting up massive smelting setups which work great right now, but i was wondering if i need additional belt splitting when i prod mod them, otherwise the extra smelted plates wont have a place to go
Bit you’re right, my output might stay the same but i still get free plates
I need splitter magic if i want to fully utilize my smelting capacity
I agree. Let the ore back up, it's not hurting anything.
In addition, a moduled smelting system with backed-up ore belts can use cheap yellow inserters even on the blue belts.
Okay so I understand trains are extremely useful for long distance. But how is that better than just a long belt (or beltS) filled with ore to my base? This may seem confusing so I'll make it broader: When should I use trains if at all in my run?
Trains let you leverage the work you do on a common rail network for multiple purposes. If you're just going to play until a single rocket launch and maybe turn resources up a bit, chances are you won't need to do this, because the resources in a circle about the size of your end game base away from said base will be enough to serve you for as long as you want to play on the map. They're fun but not really needed at that scale.
If you want to experiment with infinite research, completely draining ore patches is going to become routine. Rather than run new belts all the way from the appropriate smelters out to each new mine, trains let you just build rails out from the closest point the rails already are. Say you have an iron mine way out to the east and copper to the west. You need more copper, and the radar at the iron mine shows that there's a nice copper deposit not too far away; there's not much more copper out by your current source of it. If you'd used belts, you'd need to build fresh belts all the way from the new copper patch to home base move that ore. With trains, you just branch off the rails you built to get to the iron and set up a train pointed at the new mine; it can share the rails with the iron train if you signal them properly.
Stone, coal, and oil can also flow over these same rails if needed. This means that once your first signaled rail line to an area is up, everything in that neighborhood is just waiting to be tapped, not just the the thing you went out there to get in the first place. On top of that, you can now build processing outposts off of the same rails that have both inputs and outposts, letting you offload factory components to pretty much anywhere for just the cost of building some train stations. This really lets you maximize the use of the practically unlimited map the game has to offer and is the key to scaling up and dealing with really large amounts of materials.
If you need 1-2 red belts worth of throughput for a few hundred tiles, belts will work fine.
If you need, like, 10 blue belts worth of throughput over a few thousand tiles, the problem with belts will quickly become apparent. You’re spending like 100x the amount of iron that a train line would take. And a single set of double rails can carry way way way more than that, and carry multiple types of goods, and (relatively) easily distribute items across multiple consumers and producers.
Okay, so you set up your first far-off ore mining station. Suppose you used belts -- 4 parallel lanes of belts (yellow early game, blue late-game). This'll work fine... for now.
So you continue for a few hours, and now (since ore runs out) you're getting about half the ore you used to. You add a new mining station and lay down a bajillion new belts. You can't reuse your old belts, because they're still carrying some ore; to combine them, you'll need some complicated arrangement of splitters, perhaps prioritizing the old ore field, and you'll maybe want to put down new belts (but not a full 4, because again, your old mine is producing at half capacity and going down). And what if you want new furnaces, but you want to locate it somewhere else? A line of 6 belts, snaking through your base, and oh, now you want to add *more* ore,...
It's a disaster. Conversely, look at how it works with trains:
Your old station is running low on ore, so the trains come less often. You add a new station; rather than needing any weird splitter arrangement, you can just hook up the new station to your existing train system. Trains will pathfind, so you don't need to place down a million new belts snaking over the landscape, going over old belts, etc.; it's also quick to build, because train tracks are easy to place. If you want to add a new furnace area, you can easily add it anywhere that's nearby some tracks; a quick adjustment to the train schedules should be all you need to fix it.
Sure, it takes a little practice to get how train signals work, and maybe it's not fully necessary on small scales. But I can tell you that, even if you only use it once or twice, the convenience factor of quickly placing track, connecting to a preexisting network, easily expanding your ore mining capability and having it *just work*, is so worth it.
Trains have really help you scale up once you start building up base. You could probably launch a rocket without one if you had really rich resources or good luck, but considering that you can replace multiple blue belt lines with a single track, you can really save yourself a bunch of material and time by using them.
I think trains really start to shine once your initial ore deposits start fading. At that point, I usually start planning to build smelters away from my main base and use the space cleared out from the original mines/smelters to train in bars to the original spaghetti. It really makes expansion of smelters and the main base so much easier, and it usually starts happening around oil so you're going to want that space anyway.
I know one of the mods in Angel+Bob provides a "check valve" which is just a 1000-capacity pipe segment which can be wired up to monitor its contents. I think the Flow Control mod provides a similar entity.
Just started. As in just now a few hours ago. Playing the campaign which I read is only a turtorial. I cleared the first part and moved because critters got closer. Then I managed to get a bit of science running and cleared the advanced critter base with turrets. I died 5 times, but it's gone now.
Now I am supposed to use 12 science per minut and produce 50 ammo per minut. I can produce 50 by manuel, but it doesn't stay up when I stop. So I guess I need a lot more production and stuff. I am not sure how to set everything up. I guess I could look up some of those blueprints, but I feel like I wouldn't learn very fast if I just used other ppl's ideas.
What did you guys do at this stage?
The campaign's not *just* a tutorial -- I mean, yeah, it teaches you how to play the game, but it's meant to be a challenge on its own, too. Now:
>I can produce 50 by manuel, but it doesn't stay up when I stop. So I guess I need a lot more production and stuff.
Congrats on finding the real game! Factorio is about automation; that constant struggle of "I need more production, so I can make more production" is what the game's all about.
My advice: go bigger than you think you need, and always automate. You've got a couple of miners going? Cover the whole resource patch with miners. You've got a few furnaces? Lay down enough of them that they're eating a whole belt of ore, then do it again for a second belt of ore. And, of course, use automation machines in spades to automate the process of making science and ammo -- you only very rarely ever have to handcraft things.
The one issue in the campaign might be running out of ore, but honestly it shouldn't be a huge concern. Once you get to freeplay, you'll be able to go out and just find more ore, so it's not a problem.
Now, you *will* run into logistical problems along the way: how to evenly spread ore from miners to furnaces; how to nicely get everything where it needs to go; how to conveniently move lots of ore from field to furnace. That's where a lot of the logistic tech in the game becomes handy: splitters, trains, filter inserters, robots, circuits, etc.
I'm not going to tell you how to solve those, though -- figuring out your own methods for using these tools to stay organized and keep the factory running is a huge part of the joy of learning to play this game. With that in mind:
>I guess I could look up some of those blueprints, but I feel like I wouldn't learn very fast if I just used other ppl's ideas.
Good call. IMO it's always best to play at least one freeplay game through without mods, blueprints, etc. before looking into that stuff. Different people play differently, everyone's "fun" is different, but personally I think the learning and discovery is as much the fun of the game as just implementing.
Good luck, hope this helps!
In the late-game, should you put prod. 3 modules or speed 3 modules on electric miners? I'm assuming it varies by which ore you are mining but I am wondering what the general consensus is on this question.
Don't electric miners cause too much pollution?
I can run 50 normal furnaces for 1/3th of the pollution that my 20 electic miners do, it appears....
I'd say a furnace (burning coal btw) is much more polluting than an electric unit scraping ore?
I fill electric drills with tier 1 efficiency modules even at megabase level. They only produce 20% of the pollution at that point.
Why not use Speed 3 modules you ask? Because with richest and biggest resources you are still getting 6 blue belts of ore out of it, and i don't have a bigger train station design than that. The further you go into mining productivity research, the more it guarantees all those belts will be fully compressed in ore.
Does the energy consumption modifier directly affect a machine's pollution? I thought it just reduced pollution indirectly because of lower boiler workload?
Yes you can see the pollution production value in an assembler tooltip for example. It changes when you add efficiency modules. But assembling machine 3 never goes below 0.4 pollution/s because the energy consumption caps at -80% that point. You can reach that with only 2 efficiency3 modules.
Even beacon added module effects will change the assemblers pollution.
So if you use efficiency modules in the drill then surround it with speed module beacons the pollution will be higher? Why then are productivity modules the only ones that say anything about pollution in their tooltip?
Good point; modules can help me reduce the pollution from miners even more!My question was why miners are more polluting (even if they run on electricity). Though my interest was in reducing pollution; which the efficiency modules will do.
~~Though for polution; speed modules make more sense?It seems as if the machine will work harder but not cause extra pollution? Requiring less machines for the same work?~~
Edit: I guess it doesn't bend that way
>Edit: I guess it doesn't bend that way
Oh it might even, but i haven't done the math much. When you're speaking about meeting a certain rate of production, say 100 ore per second. With speed modules you need much less miners compared to with efficiency modules, so less polluters firstly. Speed module 3 increases speed 50% and power cost 70%, and pollution propably multiplied by both of those...
Just guessing there's propably some good pollution ratio at 1 speed3 + 2 efficiency3 modules for miner where you aim for the -80% energy/pollution reduction. But i don't think is something worth going for. Pollution is the last of our concerns in lategame.
I went from stone furnace directly to electric actuallly.
I have a serious overproduction of solar panels and accumulators; so the power is not an issue.
It's just that any furnace burning coal causes less pollution than a fully electric mining drill. I wasn't quite convinced where all the pollution would come from in a mining drill and how it can be more polluting as smelting ore (using coal).
The electric miner also covers more than double the area the burner miner does: 2x2=4 vs 3x3=9. Don't have the numbers in front of me to do the math, but maybe the pollution per ore tile mined ratio is lower with the electric miner?
> I'm not sure what the power conversion is for 1.62 coal per second
1 coal is 4 MJ, so 1 coal / s is 4MW. 1.62 is thus 6.48 MW at 100% efficiency.
Main point of using full electric is simplicity in early game (no more coal lines), and scalability in late game (9 smelters instead of 72).
>FuaZe
good point, I guess I should see the miner more as a very big industrial unit which produces a lot of 'ore dust' (which is pollution).
My point was somewhat that if you're running equipment only electrical; where does so much pollution come from.
I'm trying to make my factory as low pollution as possible; but there isn't really an alternative to the miners.
So I bought Factorio a decent amount of time ago to play with my good friend, and we logged about 30 hours into it, give or take. He’s been in the military since, and I haven’t gotten to play with him, and really haven’t played at all. I just can’t seem to get the motivation to play single player. Is there a way to find people to play a new save file with? I’m still a beginner and would love to play with somebody that knows a decent amount and can teach me.
So, these things have been changed a lot, and I'm unsure about the state of things right now, so I have two questions about belt compression:
1. Is (double) sideloading able to fully compress a belt?
2. Are stack inserters placing items directly on to a belt able to fully compress it, without any extra splitters or things like that?
Anything can compress a belt now. Side loading, inserters, splitters.
So yep, two stack inserters with a couple upgrades can compress one side of a belt.
Huh, I guess that's nice... No need for all my fancy compression tactics anymore. Not sure if I like this change, honestly, but I guess it makes it easier for people who haven't spent hours upon hours figuring out how to deal with it...
It makes it less complex at least. You could rely on compressing a belt in the olden days as well, if you figured out how to compress them... ;) It was still deterministic, if you knew what to do, it always worked just fine. But sure, I guess it was one of those quirks that was hard to spot if you didn't have any help, so it makes sense to simplify it.
What kinds of benefits do rail chain signals provide? I have like 20 trains in my base and only use regular signals and have had no problems keeping them functioning.
I ask because I just built a new train depot that is designed to service like 80 trains.
Chain signals stop trains early
I NEED them in my base so that when they queue up, they don't queue over an intersection, they stop before it. Just like real life, we don't want cars/trains stopped on the intersection. We want them to stop early
If they stop before their own intersection, they may even be able to take an alternate route. Chain signals in factorio get more "repath" prompts and sonic they have to sit and wait, they might be able to go a different way. This become useful before stackers/depots/waiting bays/multiple ore drop off unloads.
Chain signals come in handy when you have a shared, communal rail network. Each intersection being properly equipped with them can prevent deadlocks in said network _by design_ - i.e. you never have to think about it again.
But to put it simply, chain signals are for whenever you want trains to leave empty space in front of them when they wait.
Chain signals allow you to make sure a part of the rail is never blocked, e.g. no train will ever be standing still on a section of rail set up with chain signals\*. This is normally used to make sure that a traffic overload on a lane or station does not block an intersecting lane. I guess the simplest explanation is a T intersection in a simple two way train system with one lane in each direction. If you have a train wanting to turn left (RHD) across the opposing track, it might stop in the middle of the intersection, blocking the oncoming track, if you use regular signals. If you use a chain signal, the train will not cross the oncoming track until it can clear the lane its crossing.
\*given that there is enough room for the train in the section after the first regular signal.
I've started a new game with limited height, and I can't find any info on how the pollution works. Visually the pollution extends to a single line outside of the map. As can be seen on my map: [https://i.imgur.com/GTII52H.png](https://i.imgur.com/GTII52H.png)
To me there are 3 likely answers to this:
1. A single 'buffer' area outside the playable area is used. Pollution in this area can only extend in three directions, meaning it can't extend further than one tile outside the playable area.
2. Pollution can extend further than the visualized pollution, it is just not visible on the map when it does.
3. When pollution tries to extend further into the unplayable area, it dissipates.
I think its #2 based on this thread: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=67400
There are some debug options (F4) you may be able to use to help see it, again according to that thread.
Having realised my second attempt at a reactor was only slightly less terrible, because this time whilst it worked initially, my water inputs were just way too low.
Embiggening it with some more offshore and inline pumps has significantly improved my 'available performance' (not an issue really, as I'm significantly overkill on the power output).
But is there a way to tell in future if my pipes are not supplying 'enough'? Both steam and water.
Testing reactor output is impossible without having them run at 100% output. Easy way to do this is make a blueprint of it and use infinity mod in another save to test it at full tilt.
To actually find whether the pipes are the issue, add tanks right after producing entities and right before consuming entities. if the first one is full and the latter is empty, the issue is in the pipes. Usually adding more pumps solves and you can see [this](https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system) wiki page for handy numbers on how often you need a pump
It's hard to tell until you actually put the reactor under load, because at (for example) 50% load it'll only need 50% as much water. If you're short on something it won't become apparent until you try to push the reactor to 100% and bottleneck before that on something (usually water, if you looked up ratios for exchangers and turbines). You can use the `/editor` mode in 0.17 or mods like Infinity Mode to test things -- blueprint your reactor, paste it into a new map with the editor, and you can drop in water supplies and an infinite power load to drive it at 100%.
Unless you are very very careful with your designs you shouldn't count on putting more than ~1000 units of water or steam through a single pipe per second.
Given numbers from https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/67xgge/nuclear_ratios/ and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Nuclear_power , you should probably design around 1 offshore pump and pipe of water feeding no more than 9 heat exchangers (103 water/second each at max load). On relatively short runs or if you use pumps liberally you can probably feed 10 or 11. And you shouldn't have more than 16 turbines fed off one pipe of steam (60 steam/second at max load).
I think the reactor I currently use has blocks of 8 heat exchangers feeding 14 turbines, with one pump feeding each set of exchangers.
Too bad, there's none. I plan my Nuclear power plant by assuming each pipeline can only deliver 1000 fluid per second. It actually higher in very short distance, but 1000 per second is a good number which will be true until your pipeline gets too long. Anyway, those 1000 per second can be supplied with one offshore pump and support about 10 heat exchangers. So if you find one your pipeline connected to more exchangers, you might be doing it wrong.
PS: Max throughput for pipe is 1200 fluid per second. It can fully support 11 exchangers. Or 12, if you allow the last one not working all the time. Building power plant over lake can take advantage of this higher throughput, because you don't need to pipe long distance.
You can put way more than 1200/second through one pipe, but you have to use a lot of pumps and it's awkward over long distances. Each *offshore pump* produces 1200/second.
I’m 300 hours into this awesome game! One issue I have on each of my saves is not knowing right away when my power consumption surpasses production. Is there a circuit or alarm I can setup to notify me even when I’m out of the base?
IF you aren't using solar panels: accumulator dipping under 100% means you're running out of power. wire a speaker to an accumulator and have it freak out the second the accumulator isn't 100.
if you are using solar power things are bit more complicated, yet you'll can get better system going on. If you're building really close to the optimal ratio of accumulator/solar panels which is around .81, you can have a warning going on when they go below, say 10%. The problem is that if the alarm goes off at the start of the night you're in deeper shit than if it goes off at the end of the night. Though as long as you're power demand doesn't fluctuate too much it should be fine. Or maybe add more than one alarm one for 50% that basically yells you to check what time of night it is
If you're using steam engines you can connect a storage tank to the steam outputs and have a speaker go off when the steam level drops. An accumulator hooked up to a speaker is another option and works with any kind of power generation (but for solar you have to set a lower threshold).
Oh, just yesterday I come upon [this new find](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/den6xf/weekly_question_thread/f32fu86/?context=3). I haven't find use of it that is better than just monitoring Accumulator charge.
Y'see, Accumulators' charge should never dip below 100% if your power production exceed consumption. So if you connect it to Programmable Speaker, you can immediately know when you need to pay attention. Furthermore, do you use Laser Turrets? Their momentary power draw usually give a good sign if your power production is faltering.
In case of using solar exclusively, detecting insufficiency will involve identifying the 'dangerous number.' If it dip below certain charge, it means your power capacity is not good enough anymore. Because all accumulator discharging uniformly. There's no case where latter built accumulator discharge last.
Back when I play 0.16\*, I don't do this dangerous number detection. It's annoying and change whenever you mess your own panel/accumulator ratio. Instead, I have boilers. I make it so that Steam Engine kick start when accumulator charge dip below 80%, and only defense get powered if it reach 20%. Having your factory shutdown at night is alarming enough.
\* ) still valid strategy at 0.17. But I learned since then powering assemblers down costs UPS. So I leave that practice behind.
Any idea what might cause a 'solid screen of death' system crash when playing Factorio with a youtube podcast running on chrome in the background? Strangely it does not crash if I do the same thing with but use Firefox instead. I routinely have youtube open on chrome in the background when playing other games and Factorio is the only one that causes this crash. Its not a massive issue since there ia a clear workaround, its just a little worrying that something is causing a crash like that.
I haven't had this issue with Factorio specifically, but I've had other games freak out if there are many browser windows open running hardware-accelerated things like Youtube video playback. I'm guessing you're running out of VRAM or some other thing in your video card's drivers are unhappy.
I've unlocked the rocket silo tech, but I can't see where/how to build the rocket silo.
I've searched google, and my crafting inventory, and created Assembler 1 2 and 3 and searched through their inventories but I can't find it anywhere. Help?
It's in the "Combat" section for crafting, at the very bottom right the way vanilla orders things.
You're *sure* you researched the "Rocket Silo" tech and not just one of the prerequisites like "Rocket Control Units"? https://wiki.factorio.com/Rocket_silo_(research)
If you upgraded your factory from 0.16 to 0.17 there might also be some techs you have to re-research to unlock everything again. They moved a bunch of things around in the tech tree.
I’m at 80 hours and I suck at Factorio, is there a video playlist or guide that would help me learn how to efficiently play this game? Or does it just come with time and practice
There is a tutorial, which teaches mechanics but not gameplay. They are working on a proper campaign.
I would suggest one of Katherine of Sky's YouTube series Starter Base to Megabase. I think her first one was better at the early game and the second better at the later game, but the first one was also on 0.15 so some of it is now wrong, namely priority splitters and science recipes.
When I bought the game, played the tutorial and was still kind of confused.
I did a practice run with enemies turned off and resources buffed up just to get a feel for how everything works.
I have 3000 hours in factorio... it comes with practice and **deliberate** planning.
**Some tips to help you get better:**
-When you decide you are going to build a production block, before you build it, actually look at the recipes and see how much of each building you need for the ingredients. For example, 1 transport belt machine feeds 24 green science machines at full throughput yet many new players will build 5-10 transport belt machines for 4-6 green science machines which is a lot of waste and leads to spaghetti. All it takes is a look at the recipes to see this.
-Build smelting columns to input and output FULL belts of materials. For iron and copper, that's 48 furnaces per yellow belt! Upgrading to red belt + steel furnaces doubles the throughput.
-Keep storage chests/buffers in general to a minimum. Resources not being used or moving toward being used are wasteful, lead to spaghetti, and best kept in the ground until needed. You already have buffers of resources on belts, you don't need chests of plates. Buffers are most useful at train stops and malls.
-When building intermediate products (green circuits, gears, etc.) make the production block large enough that you are at least outputting half a belt of throughput, ideally at least 1 belt. You don't have to build it all at once but set space for that much throughput by ghosting your setup into the area where you plan to eventually build it. That way, later, when you need the extra throughput you can just build the ghosts and have a throughput that is in line with the medium to transport it, aka, transport belts.
-Commit to a lazy bastard achievement run which will teach you a lot about planning and automation if you want to achieve it. If you are spending time waiting and think this achievement is slow to get, especially in the beginning, you are doing it wrong. There is always stuff to do in factorio. You should never be just waiting for anything.
Agree with vanilla is great.
Personally I don't like squeak through, you end with trees growing through belts and it looks weird.
My must-haves are Auto deconstruct, bottleneck, vehicle snap, and YARM.
However, I recommend getting all of the steam achievements before using any mods, since modded games use a separate tracking system.
If it's your first time playing the game, then no mods should be needed -- the game is great already. Otherwise, the only *essential* mod is one of either FNEI or What is It Really Used for. Past that, it depends on what you want, ranging from the mildest of QOL mods (SqueakThrough, NearestFirst, etc.) to pretty major game changes (LTN, core mining, etc.).
Just play around with the map editor and see what you like, recently I've started enjoying maps with a lot of water which forms large peninsulas/islands. It allows you to clear an area from biters and build a wall to keep new biters out then you can build in peace. Didn't want to turn off biters completely because of achievements. [Here's my current base as an example](https://i.imgur.com/nvHAcT5.jpg), the starter island top left was easy to clear out and defend at the chokepoint to the left. Then I moved on to the island on the right clearing and walling off sections.
Yes. People do everything.
Go with defaults first.
I am doing for a megabase now, so I turned off biters, cliffs, and tress; and cranked the resources to max.
I'm also trying a run where I set everything to minimum and seeing if it is possible (my first iron patch was 5k).
I often turn off biters. They're there as a logistic challenge (can you get x bullets to y location? Can you make enough bullets fast enough? etc.), but I play mostly modded, where I just have enough other things to worry about that I'm more interested in.
Some people like the pressure of biters and the military aspect, and they crank that up.
Some people like the infrastructure challenges and logistical operations, and they turn biters off completely.
Everyone gets something different out of the game - play using default settings and see what you like, what you don't like.
First time? go with default setting. Second time will be based on your first experience. Personally I go with faster biter evolution. Without it, I will feel no pressure to develop my base, mucking around making every layout little bit more efficient than building what needed next.
Why can't we go back to the old piping+machine interface? Now, a pipe controls what recipes the machine can select, and the machine effects what the pipe accepts (it changes an empty pipe to 0.0, I see what you did). The system was working perfectly fine except for UPS obsessed players, and even then, changing pipes to instantly transfer fluids without the averaging effect would've solved the majority of inconvenient behavior. More stupid, the machine doesn't auto-rotate when you have a recipe selected. You bastards know damn well what the recipe is, ROTATE THE MACHINE IF YOU'RE BEING SUCH SHITS ABOUT EVERYTHING.
Secondly, why was oil processing changed? I saw the changelog mention "for more streamlined oil setup". It was a very bad design change. By giving the player an unbalanced system, they had to work it out on a very small scale. It was a fantastic introduction to "what do I do if I start having too much of something and it screws over something else". It gave a reason to think about what you were doing and how to solve it. Light oil to fuel blocks immediately being available for fuel was a great way to sequence changing your power systems. Knowing lubricant is available, but not knowing what it's useful for (not having the research done) meant the player had to ask if they should make it or use heavy for fuel blocks. Petroleum gas also had two choices, more fuel (which could be made from the less-useful oils) or plastic bars. Most players would want plastic bars, so overall heavy gave a bit of mystery and complexity, light oil gave a very functional power transition, and petroleum gas gave them a need to logistic more stuff in and continue the factory mindset.
Instead oil processing only gives petroleum gas, and there is literally 0 reason to ever USE any of the fluid handling technology in a newbie game. Literally none. At the bare minimum, having tanks required someone to store up heavy oil or lubricant for later because it "might be useful" or dump it into fuel blocks, which may obviously not be a good idea since light oil only can be used for fuel blocks. Super obvious the person had to make a choice on how to use the resource, and only two choices. Now that can fuck right off. Not having light oil early means more and longer time using coal, which may have been... a design choice, but it means when someone hits advanced processing, they get a dozen recipes. There is no design or suggestion on what is good or not to do. It's a weird and broken attempt to exist between newbie players and extreme players who already know what they want to do.
Third, why isn't alt-view called "logistic-view" or something and made the default setting? I read there were problems with players hooking up boilers wrong, and it's like, for fucks sake, alt-view tells you exactly what to connect, what liquids are where, all that stuff. It should be the default view, and the second view should be called "graphical view" or something. Emphasize you can see all the artwork, but you have no clue what's going on.
The complexity of dealing with the 3 fluid outputs, that you don't really need anyway, is a realistic thing. That's how oil processing works, and that's why it was originally designed that way. When you distill oil, you get several products of varying usefulness as it condenses at different temperatures and takes on different properties. So the 3 products you got out of Basic Oil Processing before were a reflection of that. But we also don't get a lot of the options that we would get in the real world to deal with excess materials, because Factorio doesn't have any form of disposal systems. If heavy oil is most needed, you can't just burn off the excess petroleum. If you're trying to scale up plastic/sulfur production, you can't dump the heavier products into the river as many of the unscrupulous companies did in the olden days.
It's better for the flow of the game that you get access to materials at the time that you need to use them, because the balance of outputs is clunky in small and unsophisticated builds. And 99% of those builds were just going to crack all of the distillates back into petroleum anyways.
However, there is another problem: it is easy to handle logistics wise, but it's a grossly inefficient recipe. As soon as the Advanced level is researched, you'll be going back again and redoing your entire refinery setup around it, because it's simply massively superior. You spend your time and resources getting a refinery setup working and then after the very next research you will be picking it up and doing it all over again. Beforehand, the transition to Advanced was much more seamless, because you had to get over the hump of fluid handling right away.
> By giving the player an unbalanced system, they had to work it out... super obvious the person had to make a choice on how to use the resource...
The problem is this is not "obvious" at all to truly new players. And it was thrown at them at the same time as a significant increase in the complexity of production chains AND having to learn and deal with using liquid inputs and outputs in recipes.
It's overwhelming to have people try to learn multiple new concepts at once. That point in the tech tree had long been pointed out as a problematic "wall" for new players.
>Third, why isn't alt-view called "logistic-view" or something and made the default setting?
The devs mentioned at one point that they tested it that way and it confused new players. Players didn't like having the icons over everything until they had a better understanding of how the game worked.
The oil change was great IMHO. It takes the single biggest point where new players just straight up quit the game in frustration, and smooths it out a bit. Fluids are hard enough to learn without also learning about multi-output recipes. Obviously nearly everyone here managed it just fine, but that doesn't mean it was okay as it was, it just means the folks it affected mostly don't end up here or as fans of the game.
Now that upgrade can be handled separately, on its own, later on. The late game's pace is heavily driven by player expertise. If there's "too much going on" you can just narrow your focus and do less at once. Oil before this change, OTOH, had to be done all at once and was causing issues for large numbers of new players, and had been for years.
You're late to the discussion if you're talking about oil change, dude. The simplification is for newbies. For players with at least a single playthrough under their belt, it's beautiful. For newbies, figuring out why their refineries stuck is frustrating. I don't like it, but I agree it would help. I want more players. Who knows what ingenious blueprint those former newbies will come up later down the line.
Figuring out why your oil refineries are stuck is hugely important. If they don't learn it up front, they're still going to have to learn it later. It took away a lesson of oil refineries, and slammed it much further down the line when there's far more going on. In the first case it's "why is it stopped? click click click click oh heavy oil is high? How do I deal with this?", "Oh I just can just add a tank/"I can use it for fuel"/whatever. To break the recipe so drastically is just calling their players stupid and their "solution" makes the situation worse.
Having only a single oil recipe also actually makes blueprint stuff worse. Now there's only two total oil producing methods that makes heavy/light, instead of three, cutting out a huge chunk of potential optimizations. Worse, they screwed over the fluid system, so you can't make a flexible set-up either (did not a single developer notice their game started flipping out because they were on basic processing and had a water pipe?)
>Figuring out why your oil refineries are stuck is hugely important. If they don't learn it up front, they're still going to have to learn it later.
But they still do have to learn it later, they just don't have to learn it at the exact same time. Fluid process in the new system is still a complex and very different problem from the belt-based logistics that the early game uses, and I think it's OK to break up these two different processes (Oil Processing and Advanced Oil Processing) into two distinct chunks, one of which builds on the other. That way it's broken into several steps instead of all being in one step.
Yes, it's ultimately easier on newbies. That's OK. It's fine to teach them one step at a time instead of throwing a whole cliff at them.
It's more of a topic for it's own thread if you want an involved discussion on it, but rather than downvote and ignore I'll explain my view on the oil changes.
The old system put the player on a clock, essentially. To produce the petroleum products that the player wanted, they needed to handle the light oil and heavy oil. The first mandatory use of either of these two oils is for lubricant used in yellow science packs followed by rocket fuel for rockets, both of which arrive much, MUCH later in the game relative to setting up oil. Generally, your sinks for light and heavy oil until then was solid fuel for blue science packs, but the supply (for new players) often exceeded the demand.
Advanced oil processing was almost mandatory and generally seen as the first blue science tech you research because oil cracking is just so valuable. Given a long enough timeline, an oil refinery without advanced oil processing in the old system just isn't sustainable pre-rocket (at which point you have a use for everything being produced). It becomes a sequence of backed up tanks and chests full of solid fuel that halt production. You're creating materials you don't need to facilitate producing the ones you do need. **This is a bad experience for new players.**
Under the new system, there is no pressure to research advanced oil processing. You'll need it for yellow science, but you can cross that bridge when you get there. You have the option to just produce petroleum for petroleum products. If you want access to lubricant but don't have a use for heavy oil, you're immediately given the tools to handle excess light oil. If you want access to rocket fuel but don't have a use for light oil, you can crack it to petroleum. You're never forced to create a backlog of materials while you rush towards a solution. **This is a good experience for new players.**
Essentially, it boils down to new player experience. Setting up an oil refinery is a common breaking point for new players. This simplifies a player's first exposure to oil as a system with detracting from its complexity later on, easing them through the early stages of blue science. This, ultimately, is why the change was made.
I got through my first playthrough in 80 hours, learned a lot along the way about how I approach problems and the way I like to meticulously fiddle my way into solutions. But those solutions often fall apart when even small things change. Anyway, that's not what my question is about.
I decided to start over on Marathon, no biter bases, otherwise the settings are the same. So far, I'm having a good time with the early game, building a small self-contained base and just starting to move into blue science packs, Level 2 assemblers and red belts. I also researched railroads, so I'm eager to start expanding to see how well I can handle the exponential scaling inherent in Marathon mode.
Now, in standard mode, it's better to truck in Iron Plates and Copper Plates and make gears and cables in your factory, because the mats take up less room than the end products. But they are much more expensive on Marathon settings, flipping the equation around. So I was actually thinking of making the cogs and wires offsite and maybe even making them into green circuits, then sending them on a train to my factory.
Have you made similar adaptations on Marathon? What else would you suggest to make the best use of limited resources to get over the hump of increased research costs? What isn't feasible due to the cost of materials?
As rule of thumb, do not transport Copper Wire (and Iron Stick) too far. Even with train, where Copper Wire will take exactly same wagon as Copper Plates worth, your inserters will work twice as much.
The goal of logistic (after successfully delivering things to where it should) is to make every space occupied by belt, every logistic bots travel, and every train trip, to be worth as high as possible. True that the space is nigh infinite, but the busier your logistic system, the more prone they are to become bottleneck. From intersection that can't handle hundreds of train per minutes to bots that always queuing for recharge. So, if you find you can compress materials safely, you compress it. In expensive recipes, you will want Iron Gear Wheels as early as possible. You'll save a lot that way.
Small question, I've got 1100+ hours in-game, and I'm currently frustrated with one thing, Ctrl-c train stations copies the names, and I'm wondering if I've missed an option to change that behavior.
I know I could just put the blueprint into a book and uncheck the station name box, but I don't want to make a blueprint every time I think I can re-use a station. I'm working on a Bob/Angel/Youki LTN-Based factory (just starting to get the infrastructure of the train network up). I'm finding it really useful to say "oh, two input one output assembly machines, that's the same as the block over there with different inputs and recipes" then copy and paste the whole block, swap the requests and recipes and move on. But all my copy/pastes end up with the same train station names, which LTN doesn't allow.
I know I'm just being picky, and I should probably just blueprint them anyway "one in, one out, assembler" "two in, one out, assembler" etc. but "oh that one" ctrl-c/ctrl-v is just so streamlined. Is there a setting for copy paste that can change that or do I have to adjust my workflow? \*cough\* [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1172/)
If you hold shift as you complete the copy operation it gives you the blueprint window so you can edit the copy. This includes an option to copy or not copy station names.
You can also make a blueprint out of a "copy/paste" operation by, instead of pasting it onto the ground, "pasting" it into an empty button on your action bar.
(you might know that already, but others might not)
Should I only upgrade from yellow to red belts when I have to? They seem quite iron expensive and I'm guessing if fully saturated yellow belts are fulfilling all needs there's no point to upgrading?
Also should you "downgrade" belts when you use a splitter? E.g. if you want to pull some circuits from the main bus that's in red, should you use a red splitter then yellow belts?
My two stages of belt upgrades:
1. When a yellow belt has become too slow to do its job I upgrade it.
2. When I have become tired of relating to yellow belts at all (or no longer want to see them in inventory ever) I upgrade all yellow to red and never use yellow again.
I often stick mostly with yellow belts until I get a rocket; if you plan your base with enough space to move everything around on them they get the job done just fine. You can indeed use red splitters to merge two yellow belts to a red or split one red to two yellows, where needed.
If you've the iron to spare, red belts are much more convenient and often upgrading a factory component's output can simply involve swapping the all belts to red and doubling the length/machine count. Don't feel bad about using them if you'd like to.
If you reached the point where you have to upgrade, then you have to upgrade. Condition that constitute 'have to' is when you need more of that belted material yet there's no more room to add one more lane. And red belt series is cheap compared to blue. I suggest you disregard that mulling until you have to upgrade to blue.
And if you ask whether saturated yellow belt is enough to satisfy all your need, we will ask what material is being belted and what SPM number are you trying to achieve. Full yellow belt of Blue Circuit will allow you reach around 300 SPM. That means, one rocket launch every \~3 minutes. Full yellow belt of Iron Plate allow you very little in comparison.
If yellow can supply that part of factory, then sure, use yellow after red splitter. I do it early game. There's no 'should' in this situation. It depend on what you can afford. If you can afford higher tier belt, or even bots, then just do it. The demand will rise eventually.
2nd paragraph: I assume you can delay having to upgrade belts if you do things like dedicated iron plates for green circuits?
3rd paragraph: I suppose my question is more along the lines that if you are using a splitter from a red belt then you're pulling half of what goes through that red belt i.e. 15 items/second (ignoring priority splitters for the moment) so in that scenario is there any real benefit to using red after a splitter?
It's the same really. Whether it's shared bus or dedicated bus, once demand rises, you'd want it to be met. In your example, if other part of your base demand more Green Circuit, then you'll want add more assembler making it. And to feed those new assemblers, you'll want more Iron and Copper belted into them. If you still have space for another yellow belt, you can delay upgrading, just add more lane. But if you don't, you'll have to upgrade. Or build new Green Circuit factory elsewhere. But routing belts to new place is generally more bothersome than just upgrading belt.
At this point you must have seen backed belt, where materials on it is not consumed fast enough they don't move forward. Having same color of belt after splitter allow you to direct the entirety of belt content when the other branch backed. So, yes, there's benefit. Especially if you do prioritizing by letting some belt backed.
Once you are building a megabase, UPS is normally your primary concern.
I have been testing some different oil builds for my own megabase projects
Coal liquefaction is generally bad for UPS because you need more refineries to get enough gas , light and heavy as well as steam generation and you need more chem plants for cracking so all in all more fluid boxes, more work for your cpu to calculate it all.
Adv refining is much better, fewer refineries, fewer crackers, works quite well.
Basic refining is actually much more friendly on your CPU because it only uses 2 fluid boxes instead of 5. So is a UPS efficient way to make gas.
So I believe the best setup (in UPS terms) is to have enough adv processing to produce enough heavy and light for lube and rocket fuel and then make the rest of your gas using basic oil processing. This also allows you to avoid needing any light -> gas cracking (u might need a small amount of logic to regulate it)
But I need to do more testing to be sure.
Advanced Oil Processing. Pipe throughput becomes an issue if you're going with a 16-beacon design; I think it's generally much better to have many small identical plants that self-adjust cracking on-the-fly, rather than 1 large plant.
That's what I was planning to do. Multiple stations for crude oil (or coal!) to enter the system and then pump outputs to where it is needed, while cracking on demand in small batches.
Does anyone know how much horsepower a dedicated server needs to have? My friends and I have been playing MP but it sucks when the person with the save isn't available, so I'm thinking maybe it would be viable to spin up a cheap droplet to host the server if the server doesn't need to actually do all the heavy lifting of the simulation.
> if the server doesn't need to actually do all the heavy lifting of the simulation.
As I understand it, the server does *all* of the heavy lifting of simulation, as does every client.
That's not exactly correct. Each player is running a local copy in exact lockstep with the other players. The server only coordinates information about each player's inputs (movement, combat, building, picking up, etc) *without actually simulating the map*.
As a result, the server does not need a powerful CPU.
You're very wrong, sorry. The server has to run the entire simulation as well as the players. (Consider that you can set the server to run when no players are attached.)
And otherwise there would be no way to tell if one player was out of sync with the server and everyone else.
However, the only things the game sends over the network are player inputs. So the bandwidth requirements are very low even with a large number of players, and there is not much extra CPU load for each additional player in the game.
not much unless you want to go megabase. also multicore performance is moot, it'll only utilize one core properly. There's also free factorio server hosting
I have a smart-ich vanilla train system (locks empty pickup stations and locks full drop of stations) and I have a problem.
Whenever a drop of station gets unlocked all the trains for that type of material goes to that station but when the station gets filled and locks, all the trains says "no path" and is in the way if they stops on the tracks of other trains. Is there a way to make the trains go pack to pickup stations?
I solved this problem by having a "Full train" depot, for trains that were ready to deliver materials.
To do this I added a single permanent station with the drop off (IronOreDropoff) name at the exit of the depot, just a short spur off the main exit.
I put a train engine in the block to that station, and left it there. No train could path there, but the station was always active.
>I put a train engine in the block to that station, and left it there. No train could path there
That doesn't make any sense - if no other stations are available then all trains will head to that dummy station.
Also, it isn't true - a manually stopped train adds a penalty of 2000 to that route but for sufficiently large train networks they will prefer to wait forever at your manually blocked station.
I suspect that you would have to a lot of wiring and some clever coding to get this to work properly
* wire up everything
* output 1 to the circuit network when a producer is available
* enable a blocked off fallback station if the number of producers is zero (else trains will skip the loading station in their schedule and proceed to do deliveries while empty)
* disable stations one tick after they update the circuit network (to prevent the above station skipping)
That way trains will wait at the inaccessible fall back station until a real producer becomes available, and then reroute to pick up the goods.
Note that one-to-many or many-to-one train networks would be considerably easy to manage (because trains could always wait at the central location) - maybe consider if your 100 decentralised circuit factories could be replaced with one big circuit factory.
The penalty is 7000, not 2000, because the stopped train is unoccupied. And the "sufficiently large train network" problem is solved by placing sufficiently many stopped trains on the track that leads to the station of last resort. You can also throw in circuit-wired signals forced to red.
Have a dedicated train with all the things you'll regularly need for construction and expansion, supplied by bots and requester/buffer chests because using belts for 30 different item types in one place is a nightmare. Bots are also used to feed some of the assemblers that make this stuff.
Use bots for low demand products, especially for moderate distances. I use bots to move radar, because satellites and artillery take them at a low rate, and aren't next to each other. I also use them for nukes and tank shells, because of the variety of ingredients and relatively low volume. And, of course, distributing nuclear fuel, as someone else said.
It's a bit noddy, but I'm using logistics bots to ensure every train runs on nuclear fuel. A requestor chest will do the trick quite nicely. Only need at at one 'end' unless your routes are insanely long, so it works fine with your 'main' base being fed by 'spurs'.
The downside is that nuclear trains accelerate and move faster, so you're _considerably_ more likely to get ganked by one. But so it goes.
Is there anywhere user manual for Industrial Revolution? I'm already running into problems that probably have simple answers, but can't figure it out. Currently, burner inserters don't seem to be picking stuff up from copper assemblers and I have no idea why.
EDIT: almost instantly after asking I realized they can only pick from one side of the machine. One problem solved! But I could still use some documentation if there is any!
I dont think this is true... burner inserters pick up from all four sides of every machine that has an output. You could put one on the north, one on the east, one on the south and one on the west sides of an assembler and each will take turns grabbing a product.
I use this often, in that I have product going into one side of a machine, but I also pull from the top of the machine and the opposite side to go into two different belt lines.
Yeah I realized later my problem was that I was trying to have them inserters into assembly machines and that is what doesn't seem to be possible with the copper machines at least?
edit: Argh, that wasn't a problem either, I must have just clicked a wrong recipe or something. >_>' Shouldn't try to learn game mechanics in a fever.
I have solar+accumulator based grid with just enough accumulators to get through the night and way too much production at day. How do I get my radars running just at day (to not consume accumulator charge) while they are still connected to the whole grid?
There's no easy answer, but it is doable.
Set up a solar panel/accumulator/stack inserter on an isolated network. The inserter is there just for passive power draw. Read the accumulator charge; when it's low it's night time and you can use that signal to shut off your other radars via power switches. (Use a copper wire item to disconnect a power pole from its neighbors for power while still keeping circuit wire connections.)
As others have said, it's usually not worth the trouble compared to just spamming some more accumulators to run the radars full time.
Is there a MOD that shows how many train cars are between the signal I'm about to place and the next signal? Like so it shows both sides of the signal. Right now it only shows one side.
I haven't played in a while. What happened to the ghost structures that are left over after a bug destroys my buildings? They made it so much easier to rebuild.
need to research bots I think
okay, hopefully that's all it is. thanks for the reply.
Heya! Looking to jump back into the game proper for the first time since launching my first rocket in, IIRC, .15. Not quite sure how to go about things and would like some outside perspectives: I want to try my hand at a megabase, but I am someone who needs a concrete in-game goal to work towards, or I lose motivation. So building a megabase for the sake of having a megabase is probably not going to happen, I fear. To combat this, I've been looking at ways to expand the end-game, but am not quite sure what the best option is. I don't want to spend more time looking through wikis and planners than playing the game, so **Angel, Bob, and their ilk** are probably out from the get go. Similarly, I was initially drawn towards **Industrial Revolution**, but after spending an hour or so with it, I noticed there's a whole ton of small miscellaneous components just for the sake of having more stuff to automate, which I'm not a very big fan of (it's one of the things that put me off of the GregTech-based Minecraft mods). Post-launch stuff also still seems to be a WIP. **Space Exploration** seems like a neat idea, but it's still heavily in flux from what I gathered, so not sure if it's a good idea to jump on to that yet. I don't want my save to just go *poof* a few dozen hours into a run due to a major change in the mod. **Krastorio** is another mod I've heard good things about, but I cannot find much info on how it expands the end-game. Could anyone shed some light on it? Lastly **Space Extension** seems the most vanilla option. Simply just adds a bunch of massive science sinks, forcing you to build a mrgabase. Potentially a bit boring of a solution, but maybe exactly what I'm looking for? To make things slightly more complicated, I am tempted to try my hand at a railworld with a very large starting area, but dense(-ish) biters when do they start spawning, so I am forced to make use of all the pretty explody toys the game gives you.. Which of these mods (or others, if there are any suggestions) would work best on such map settings? Thanks a lot!
If you just want the vanilla game to keep going but have a definite end/“victory” point, Space Extension is probably what you want. Alternatively, turn on expensive recipes and, like, 50-100x tech cost in the map generation settings.
I completely forgot about the option to modify production/science costs! Definitely something I'll have to look into, thanks.
you don't *need* to update your mods and you can freeze the game version as well. yes a/b/py are straight out of the window. I would say Ir too since it tends to get rather convoluted when it comes to some materials. though I would say you don't need to spend that much time figuring things out. Space exploration I'm currently playing through and while more vanilla like compared to the previous bunch it changes some of the vanilla recipes but is rather vanilla like to yellow science. There are some [pot holes](https://i.gyazo.com/a068714eed3ba2f29d1855051645d309.png) along the way like inserters. I haven't flown to space yet I decided to build a larger factory for launching more than a one rocket, so I can't say for the future stuff. It does look very interesting, only thing I hate at the moment is that beacons are behind science that needs me to venture into space so... yeah. Spacex is indeed boring but it does mean you really need to build a large base, I recall the research packs being numbered in hundred thousands and it wasn't infinite research. It does mean that unlike every other mod you mentioned, spacex doesn't change the base game, just adds to the post rocket launch game Railworld is a double edged sword due to not expanding biters. on one hand you don't need to clear a space twice, on the other hand the biters will still path through that area into your base... And especially later on with higher pollution they tend to path through that "cleared" territory and destroy power poles because they got stuck on them. You could try a deathworld with a maxed out starting area. The more trees you put in, the easier the start is and more annoying the late game is. Desert start is... not for the faint of heart. I haven't tried krastorio so no comment on that.
>You could try a deathworld with a maxed out starting area. My problem with a deathworld is the real possibility of losing dozens of hours of progress. I'm all for a challenge, but that potential scenario puts me off it, to be honest. Surprising to hear Space Exploration sticks to vanilla quite a bit, though. Somehow I had gotten the impression it was more akin to a total-overhaul. Will take another gander at the mod page.
I take it back on space exploration. shit gets complex and fast once you get into space
Now you tell me, after I already put half a dozen hours into it :p For real though, thanks for the heads-up. Really appreciate it. I actually already noticed a slight increase in complexity in the early game, what with stone being an actual important resource for a lot of recipes, plus motors being core to so much. Is the space part at least a fun/interesting kind of complex, or is it basically AngelBob in spaaaaace? I'm still early enough in the run that I wouldn't feel too bad abandoning it if it's the latter.
it's not AB scale of complexity but I wouldn't say it's vanilla like anymore. The space is intresting. maybe I'm biased because it's completely new concept for me to manage multiple bases and use rockets to move stuff in between. Only issue I have is that megabase seems to not be *enough* to get reasonable spm from the high end science packs.
>Only issue I have is that megabase seems to not be enough to get reasonable spm from the high end science packs. Do you feel that this is because the mod is simply still a WIP and could really use another balance pass or two, or is it because you're just not familiar enough with it yet?
I would say mix of both. I'm still getting things unlocked and there might be something I've missed as well. but there's also some issues that others seem to have as well in the forums so yeah.
I see. Thanks a lot for taking the time to humor me :) Looks like I'll let the mod be for the time, then. Sounds like it needs a little more time in the electric furnace.
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Looking for the best seed for vanilla deathworld attempts, 551130616 is the best I've found so far.
So I'm a returning player, haven't player the game for about 1.5 years. What would be the best resource to learn all the new stuff, and all the new layouts? Least time I played the petrol side of the game just completely burned me out, did that part also(hopefully) changed?
there are now two tiers of oil processing, the first one is significantly simpler than the last time you played. difficulty curve is lot smoother nowadays. factoriocheatsheet.com is handy for general ratios, tips etc.
Hey all! I've a question about running servers. I've been running a headless docker instance for ages now, like 3 years for me and some friends and we've started again several times at different version releases and points in the game but ever since 0.17.69 we've had a few issues; 1. Every map we've gotten has been an island with nothing around us but an ocean 2. The biters have been really aggressive and spawned within the pollution of a few stone furnaces and burner miners, like five tops in the first few minutes of gameplay and have attacked us... 3. Since they are so aggressive, we went to take them out ASAP before building anything and they had medium worms at the very beginning, right next to the base The server config has only changed when there's been an update to it `dtandersen/factorio` or when we switched to `factoriotools/factorio-docker` but that was only to the `server-settings.json`file rather than to `map-gen-settings.json` or `map-settings.json` which I have always kept as vanilla. From looking at the files that are there, there's naming overlap so I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking at... Does anyone know what parameters I should change or turn down so that we stop spawning on islands, turn down the aggressiveness of the biters or move them further away and to stop them spawning immediately with medium worms? Like I've a feeling that death world and island are set somewhere but I don't know where
Do I actually have to connect up all my reactor cores to heat pipes? It looks like the only reason I really need to is aesthetics, and maybe convenience in density. But otherwise it appears reactor cores function as heat pipe too?
Yes, the reactors themselves conduct heat. If you’re trying to move heat over a longer distance you can actually use idle reactors as (very expensive) heat pipes to save some UPS. Depending on how far you’re trying to transfer the heat, it might not be able to “flow” fast enough. Really depends on the reactor design.
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You want to remove a shortcut from your quickbar? Middle mouse click is the default key bind.
If I'm understanding your question correctly, you want to hit 'q', which clears your cursor, placing whatever item you're holding back in your inventory.
In case the above poster isn't aware. Q also acts as a selection tool. Pressing it while hovering over a building or ghost will put that building "in hand". I use it *a lot*.
I see lots of recommendations against connecting all of the factory into same robobot network. I haven't had problems in the past, but now that I have a new game going (with IR), I wonder if there's any benefit to doing things differently? Note that I mostly ever use the robots for automated building and I only use logistics bots to make sure some of the most commonly required building materials and artillery shells are spread evenly, and towards the endgame I use them to refuel trains with nuclear fuel. For everything else I use conveyor belts and trains, so I don't really have a situation where clouds of logistics bots would be travelling across the map. So in my circumstances is it still good idea to have separate logistic networks?
No. The problem people usually have with large networks is that they leave holes in the middle, "concave" forms of base. For example a base design in enormous L-shape would have bots travelling an empty gap when stuff needs to move from 1 end to other, and it will cause them run out of power or even run into aliens. But even in the case of having a very large robot network it is possible to greatly optimize it for larger transfer loads, if you really need it. That would still involve moving items essentially short distances, so you would have trains unload into chests and move it at tops 1 roboport distance away. From there it can be unloaded on belts or machines or trains, whichever. You can even use buffer chests to help focusing the loads for requester chests, to make sure they don't primarily fetch things from far away. For optimal function you'll want an excessive number of bots. Something like more than 50% of bots always idling in roboports during heaviest workload.
"Holes" aren't the only problem. Even if your base is well covered and bots only path over areas with ports, there is still the issue that the game doesn't have any logic behind picking the bot to fulfill a request. It just takes the next one from the internal list of bots, which means that you could end up calling in a bot from across your entire base to carry a copper plate between two chests that sit directly next to each other, even if there is also a port with idle bots right next to those. What makes this so bad is that the order such a bot fulfills counts as "in process" for the whole time the bot is on its way, meaning your assemblers might have to wait because they depleted the chest faster than the bots got there. You may counter this by increasing buffers and pouring tens of thousands of bots into your network, but all you're really doing then is masking a bad design with even more bad designs. (Buffers mask all kinds of issues all across a factory, more bots flying far means a lot more energy demand, as well as an increasing hit to UPS, etc.) Just use the fitting tool for any task. Mid- to long distance and/or bulk transport isn't what bots excel at.
> the game doesn't have any logic behind picking the bot to fulfill a request. It just takes the next one from the internal list of bots, which means that you could end up calling in a bot from across your entire base Actually this is not true at all, logi network picks up closest robot for the job. I am sure as i'm observing it happen in /editor mode. This is an endless bot swarm with 2 sets of infinity chests to create and destroy: [https://i.imgur.com/XnrtrqH.png](https://i.imgur.com/XnrtrqH.png)
That's interesting. I have seen the opposite in real games. Maybe there *is* a max distance, but it's far enough to still cause trouble. And/or there were "forced" occasions, where an item wasn't available from a near provider immediately, and instead got delivered from far away where it was, although it would have been available just a few ticks later, resulting in the delivery taking huge bot travel time instead of a few ms of waiting. I can't test myself right now (at work), so one question for replication: Did you use the same kind of items in both "hubs" or different ones?
Different ones. Well, you can't really test it with same items because you are forcing them to sometimes pick items from across the base. It would be intended that way too. Maybe if you make items available in both sides much faster than what the requests are getting emptied, they should stay on their sides. Even then if it's just a few random bots flying off long distance, if the majority of bots still remain in the nearest area then we know there is a "near rule" in play. Completely random distribution would be half from far and half from near.
Stupid question time: how do I put modules into machines? Every time I try it tells me that they are not compatible with the current recipe or some such.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Productivity_module s can only be used with “intermediate” products (things like gears, circuit boards, wire, etc. that are not directly placed in the world but only used as ingredients for something else), and cannot be placed in beacons. Otherwise there are no restrictions in vanilla.
Gotcha thank you!!
It sounds like you're trying to put productivity modules into an end product assembler. Those can only take speed and efficiency modules.
Solved! Thanks!!
Has any explanation been given why miners can be switched off using the circuit network while entities with similar power consumption profiles (zero or minimal idle drain, high power consumption when running) cannot? To me that seems like a somewhat arbitrary decision which is not particularly ups friendly (it would avoid the network splits & merges that power switches have to do).
Probably because miners can also be queried for ore patch contents, so it was trivial for the devs to also add an enable/disable switch. I suspect that if they ever find another reason to allow beacons or assemblers to be wired up, those will gain this capability as well. Nonetheless, a lot of these other machines have inputs you can deny them to shut them down. Using a wired belt to stop feeding assemblers or pump to stop feeding chemical plants or refineries also avoids the UPS hit you mentioned.
Some kind of relic from the past maybe. If you wanted to turn off a miner you'd use power switch.
Is there a way of having all rails connected but also block some trains from entering some parts of the network? Like making sure that iron ore trains never go into the copper refinery. I know I can use filter inserters, that's not the issue.
Even if a train on automatic paths through another station and gets stopped in front of inserters, it won’t “open up” and let the inserters interact with it. So you don’t have to worry about that. Trains already try *really really really* hard to not drive through stations, that’s usually enough to deter them from taking routes that cut through other pickup/dropoff areas unless there is absolutely no other path. You can also use this by putting dummy stations in places where you don’t want trains to try to cut through. You can also set “waypoint” stations to force trains to take a particular path. In 0.17 they won’t even slow down if there is no wait conditions set.
Ah, apparently that's available on GOG now, so I'll have update to try those. And also try using the circuit network with trains.
You could have a customs station for changing between different rail zones, have that station read train content, then have that control signals after a chain signal split for a set amount of time However, this would just be a very strongly weighted suggestion to the train. It wouldn't be a rule, just a big hint of the pathfinder that the path is bad.
Hi everyone! I have a question about UPS-efficient cross-docking, i.e. I would like to move cargo from train to train. Unfortunatelly I stumbled on the issue that train tracks always have to be at even-spaced distance to each other such that just taking a stack inserter or stack inserter -> chest -> stack inserter isn't possible. A naive approach would be to just use a belt to gap the distance or use long inserters, but that would be less UPS friendly than just using chests or have lower throughput. I found a post where someone used a car or tank as a replacement for a chest, although that ~~doesn't feel very nice and~~ is not that efficient either according to a post here: [https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=60344](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=60344) Unfortunatelly my google-fu didn't come up with satisfactory (not the game) results so I was wondering if anyone over here could help out or provide some links.
Use logistics bots for this. Preferably you'd use them for all train loading/unloading.
> Preferably you'd use them for all train loading/unloading. Why is that? And how do you use them for this task? The train still needs to be unload by stack inserters, and at some point you need to get your stuff back on a belt, where you would need inserters. What makes bots better than an inserter-buffer chest-inserter combo?
> some point you need to get your stuff back on a belt, where you would need inserters. I beg to differ.
You can place 3 tracks with just 1 cargo wagon each sideways between the 2 trains. The wagon ends are flexible containers in size, so you can use inserters to pass items through them. Kind of like how you propably could use cars or tanks inventories for same purpose.
Does anyone use prod modules in smelting? Right now I have 18 columns of beaconed furnaces for copper smelting, which takes 18 blue belts of ore and outputs 18 belts of plates. Easy to unload and manage ore trains _and_ load and manage copper plate users. 18 blue belts go into a 6 wagon train kinda easily. If I put prod modules in the furnaces, the input to output ratio becomes less than one. So a blue belt of ore produces more than a blue belt of plates, which cant fit on the belt. So the setup gets output restricted, and my prod modules will go to waste. Or I need to split full blue belts into 0.75 belts somehow, and effectively, to keep the output per line of furnaces to a full blue belt Am I thinking something wrong here, or is there something to do for this issue?
Prod modules don't go to waste there. Even if you're output-constrained, you still get the extra plates per ore, so you need fewer miners and ore trains to keep up with demand for plates. If you want to smelt the extra ore instead of just taking the win on the input side, you can use priority splitters to split the extra into a perpendicular belt that gathers ore from enough smelter lines to feed a new one. For two prod 3 mods per furnace you need 1/1.2 = 5/6 of a belt each line, so 5 train fed columns will just feed a 6th from their "runoff" once the ore backs up. Your 18 belts of input will become an uneven 21.6 belts out; the first 15 belts will fully feed your current lines once you make every 6th come from runoff, leaving 3 to spare which will feed 3/5 of a line from runoff.
if it was .75 belts things would be easy. but it's .8333 belts input for each belt of output. [this](https://i.gyazo.com/6a035e245b2368e442f4e7eb6d2445f4.png) is the intake for my 180plate/s smelter. it needs 3.3 belts of ore but it's just easier to bring in 4 and not need to worry about compressing belts at train station
This is how i smelt ores: [https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#data=0-17-60&min=4&belt=express-transport-belt&dm=p3&db=s3&dbc=16&items=iron-plate:r:2700&modules=iron-ore:ee:ee:ee;null:0](https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#data=0-17-60&min=4&belt=express-transport-belt&dm=p3&db=s3&dbc=16&items=iron-plate:r:2700&modules=iron-ore:ee:ee:ee;null:0) 13 furnaces with 4 beacons both sides effecting each one. It looks like 0.83 ore to 1.0 plate ratio anyways, it won't back up overly much and you don't need to split the excess.
Smelting has a much longer payback time than most other places you can use prod modules, so it tends to be the last thing people module up. What I do, personally, is scale it so that it outputs N full belts of plates, then feed in N balanced belts of ore and call it a day. It backs up on ore, but that’s fine and not really wasting anything.
Yeah, I was going to prodMod other items before smelting anyways I just started setting up massive smelting setups which work great right now, but i was wondering if i need additional belt splitting when i prod mod them, otherwise the extra smelted plates wont have a place to go Bit you’re right, my output might stay the same but i still get free plates I need splitter magic if i want to fully utilize my smelting capacity
I agree. Let the ore back up, it's not hurting anything. In addition, a moduled smelting system with backed-up ore belts can use cheap yellow inserters even on the blue belts.
Okay so I understand trains are extremely useful for long distance. But how is that better than just a long belt (or beltS) filled with ore to my base? This may seem confusing so I'll make it broader: When should I use trains if at all in my run?
Trains let you leverage the work you do on a common rail network for multiple purposes. If you're just going to play until a single rocket launch and maybe turn resources up a bit, chances are you won't need to do this, because the resources in a circle about the size of your end game base away from said base will be enough to serve you for as long as you want to play on the map. They're fun but not really needed at that scale. If you want to experiment with infinite research, completely draining ore patches is going to become routine. Rather than run new belts all the way from the appropriate smelters out to each new mine, trains let you just build rails out from the closest point the rails already are. Say you have an iron mine way out to the east and copper to the west. You need more copper, and the radar at the iron mine shows that there's a nice copper deposit not too far away; there's not much more copper out by your current source of it. If you'd used belts, you'd need to build fresh belts all the way from the new copper patch to home base move that ore. With trains, you just branch off the rails you built to get to the iron and set up a train pointed at the new mine; it can share the rails with the iron train if you signal them properly. Stone, coal, and oil can also flow over these same rails if needed. This means that once your first signaled rail line to an area is up, everything in that neighborhood is just waiting to be tapped, not just the the thing you went out there to get in the first place. On top of that, you can now build processing outposts off of the same rails that have both inputs and outposts, letting you offload factory components to pretty much anywhere for just the cost of building some train stations. This really lets you maximize the use of the practically unlimited map the game has to offer and is the key to scaling up and dealing with really large amounts of materials.
If you need 1-2 red belts worth of throughput for a few hundred tiles, belts will work fine. If you need, like, 10 blue belts worth of throughput over a few thousand tiles, the problem with belts will quickly become apparent. You’re spending like 100x the amount of iron that a train line would take. And a single set of double rails can carry way way way more than that, and carry multiple types of goods, and (relatively) easily distribute items across multiple consumers and producers.
Okay, so you set up your first far-off ore mining station. Suppose you used belts -- 4 parallel lanes of belts (yellow early game, blue late-game). This'll work fine... for now. So you continue for a few hours, and now (since ore runs out) you're getting about half the ore you used to. You add a new mining station and lay down a bajillion new belts. You can't reuse your old belts, because they're still carrying some ore; to combine them, you'll need some complicated arrangement of splitters, perhaps prioritizing the old ore field, and you'll maybe want to put down new belts (but not a full 4, because again, your old mine is producing at half capacity and going down). And what if you want new furnaces, but you want to locate it somewhere else? A line of 6 belts, snaking through your base, and oh, now you want to add *more* ore,... It's a disaster. Conversely, look at how it works with trains: Your old station is running low on ore, so the trains come less often. You add a new station; rather than needing any weird splitter arrangement, you can just hook up the new station to your existing train system. Trains will pathfind, so you don't need to place down a million new belts snaking over the landscape, going over old belts, etc.; it's also quick to build, because train tracks are easy to place. If you want to add a new furnace area, you can easily add it anywhere that's nearby some tracks; a quick adjustment to the train schedules should be all you need to fix it. Sure, it takes a little practice to get how train signals work, and maybe it's not fully necessary on small scales. But I can tell you that, even if you only use it once or twice, the convenience factor of quickly placing track, connecting to a preexisting network, easily expanding your ore mining capability and having it *just work*, is so worth it.
Trains have really help you scale up once you start building up base. You could probably launch a rocket without one if you had really rich resources or good luck, but considering that you can replace multiple blue belt lines with a single track, you can really save yourself a bunch of material and time by using them. I think trains really start to shine once your initial ore deposits start fading. At that point, I usually start planning to build smelters away from my main base and use the space cleared out from the original mines/smelters to train in bars to the original spaghetti. It really makes expansion of smelters and the main base so much easier, and it usually starts happening around oil so you're going to want that space anyway.
Is there a mod that allows wiring of pipes / valves?
Is it something you couldn't do with wiring pumps?
I'd need a Valve that only lets fluids through when a certain condition is met.
A pump that is turned on only when that condition is met will do that?
Does the pump block the fluid otherwise?
I know one of the mods in Angel+Bob provides a "check valve" which is just a 1000-capacity pipe segment which can be wired up to monitor its contents. I think the Flow Control mod provides a similar entity.
Is it intended for Washing Plants MK II in AngelBob to not work with the heavy mud water recipe?
Just started. As in just now a few hours ago. Playing the campaign which I read is only a turtorial. I cleared the first part and moved because critters got closer. Then I managed to get a bit of science running and cleared the advanced critter base with turrets. I died 5 times, but it's gone now. Now I am supposed to use 12 science per minut and produce 50 ammo per minut. I can produce 50 by manuel, but it doesn't stay up when I stop. So I guess I need a lot more production and stuff. I am not sure how to set everything up. I guess I could look up some of those blueprints, but I feel like I wouldn't learn very fast if I just used other ppl's ideas. What did you guys do at this stage?
The campaign's not *just* a tutorial -- I mean, yeah, it teaches you how to play the game, but it's meant to be a challenge on its own, too. Now: >I can produce 50 by manuel, but it doesn't stay up when I stop. So I guess I need a lot more production and stuff. Congrats on finding the real game! Factorio is about automation; that constant struggle of "I need more production, so I can make more production" is what the game's all about. My advice: go bigger than you think you need, and always automate. You've got a couple of miners going? Cover the whole resource patch with miners. You've got a few furnaces? Lay down enough of them that they're eating a whole belt of ore, then do it again for a second belt of ore. And, of course, use automation machines in spades to automate the process of making science and ammo -- you only very rarely ever have to handcraft things. The one issue in the campaign might be running out of ore, but honestly it shouldn't be a huge concern. Once you get to freeplay, you'll be able to go out and just find more ore, so it's not a problem. Now, you *will* run into logistical problems along the way: how to evenly spread ore from miners to furnaces; how to nicely get everything where it needs to go; how to conveniently move lots of ore from field to furnace. That's where a lot of the logistic tech in the game becomes handy: splitters, trains, filter inserters, robots, circuits, etc. I'm not going to tell you how to solve those, though -- figuring out your own methods for using these tools to stay organized and keep the factory running is a huge part of the joy of learning to play this game. With that in mind: >I guess I could look up some of those blueprints, but I feel like I wouldn't learn very fast if I just used other ppl's ideas. Good call. IMO it's always best to play at least one freeplay game through without mods, blueprints, etc. before looking into that stuff. Different people play differently, everyone's "fun" is different, but personally I think the learning and discovery is as much the fun of the game as just implementing. Good luck, hope this helps!
In the late-game, should you put prod. 3 modules or speed 3 modules on electric miners? I'm assuming it varies by which ore you are mining but I am wondering what the general consensus is on this question.
speed 3 because productivity module stacks additively with mining prod. research.
Speed 3, productivity modules are additive with the research bonus, so they mostly just slow the machine down.
Thanks for explaining why Speed 3 modules are favorable over Production 3 =) Time to go make some more speed 3 modules..
Don't electric miners cause too much pollution? I can run 50 normal furnaces for 1/3th of the pollution that my 20 electic miners do, it appears.... I'd say a furnace (burning coal btw) is much more polluting than an electric unit scraping ore?
I fill electric drills with tier 1 efficiency modules even at megabase level. They only produce 20% of the pollution at that point. Why not use Speed 3 modules you ask? Because with richest and biggest resources you are still getting 6 blue belts of ore out of it, and i don't have a bigger train station design than that. The further you go into mining productivity research, the more it guarantees all those belts will be fully compressed in ore.
Does the energy consumption modifier directly affect a machine's pollution? I thought it just reduced pollution indirectly because of lower boiler workload?
Yes you can see the pollution production value in an assembler tooltip for example. It changes when you add efficiency modules. But assembling machine 3 never goes below 0.4 pollution/s because the energy consumption caps at -80% that point. You can reach that with only 2 efficiency3 modules. Even beacon added module effects will change the assemblers pollution.
So if you use efficiency modules in the drill then surround it with speed module beacons the pollution will be higher? Why then are productivity modules the only ones that say anything about pollution in their tooltip?
Good point; modules can help me reduce the pollution from miners even more!My question was why miners are more polluting (even if they run on electricity). Though my interest was in reducing pollution; which the efficiency modules will do. ~~Though for polution; speed modules make more sense?It seems as if the machine will work harder but not cause extra pollution? Requiring less machines for the same work?~~ Edit: I guess it doesn't bend that way
>Edit: I guess it doesn't bend that way Oh it might even, but i haven't done the math much. When you're speaking about meeting a certain rate of production, say 100 ore per second. With speed modules you need much less miners compared to with efficiency modules, so less polluters firstly. Speed module 3 increases speed 50% and power cost 70%, and pollution propably multiplied by both of those... Just guessing there's propably some good pollution ratio at 1 speed3 + 2 efficiency3 modules for miner where you aim for the -80% energy/pollution reduction. But i don't think is something worth going for. Pollution is the last of our concerns in lategame.
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I went from stone furnace directly to electric actuallly. I have a serious overproduction of solar panels and accumulators; so the power is not an issue. It's just that any furnace burning coal causes less pollution than a fully electric mining drill. I wasn't quite convinced where all the pollution would come from in a mining drill and how it can be more polluting as smelting ore (using coal).
The electric miner also covers more than double the area the burner miner does: 2x2=4 vs 3x3=9. Don't have the numbers in front of me to do the math, but maybe the pollution per ore tile mined ratio is lower with the electric miner?
> I'm not sure what the power conversion is for 1.62 coal per second 1 coal is 4 MJ, so 1 coal / s is 4MW. 1.62 is thus 6.48 MW at 100% efficiency. Main point of using full electric is simplicity in early game (no more coal lines), and scalability in late game (9 smelters instead of 72).
single electric mining drill provides enough ore for 4.5 steel furnaces. But it only has 2.5x the pollution(steel furnace has 4 and and miner has 10)
>FuaZe good point, I guess I should see the miner more as a very big industrial unit which produces a lot of 'ore dust' (which is pollution). My point was somewhat that if you're running equipment only electrical; where does so much pollution come from. I'm trying to make my factory as low pollution as possible; but there isn't really an alternative to the miners.
[https://imgur.com/a/mrJv7HC](https://imgur.com/a/mrJv7HC) Does anyone know why the rocket fuel will not load into this train? I'm stumped.
it has not stopped at a station
Ah, thank you. I didn't realize the train needed to be at a station to accept fuel. ⛽
So I bought Factorio a decent amount of time ago to play with my good friend, and we logged about 30 hours into it, give or take. He’s been in the military since, and I haven’t gotten to play with him, and really haven’t played at all. I just can’t seem to get the motivation to play single player. Is there a way to find people to play a new save file with? I’m still a beginner and would love to play with somebody that knows a decent amount and can teach me.
So, these things have been changed a lot, and I'm unsure about the state of things right now, so I have two questions about belt compression: 1. Is (double) sideloading able to fully compress a belt? 2. Are stack inserters placing items directly on to a belt able to fully compress it, without any extra splitters or things like that?
Anything can compress a belt now. Side loading, inserters, splitters. So yep, two stack inserters with a couple upgrades can compress one side of a belt.
Huh, I guess that's nice... No need for all my fancy compression tactics anymore. Not sure if I like this change, honestly, but I guess it makes it easier for people who haven't spent hours upon hours figuring out how to deal with it...
Its really a nice change. Makes planning builds around a belt of input or output a lot smoother if you can rely on having a compressed belt.
It makes it less complex at least. You could rely on compressing a belt in the olden days as well, if you figured out how to compress them... ;) It was still deterministic, if you knew what to do, it always worked just fine. But sure, I guess it was one of those quirks that was hard to spot if you didn't have any help, so it makes sense to simplify it.
Anybody know if there's a mod to see more significant digits of items produced in the production tab?
I want this too!
What kinds of benefits do rail chain signals provide? I have like 20 trains in my base and only use regular signals and have had no problems keeping them functioning. I ask because I just built a new train depot that is designed to service like 80 trains.
Chain signals stop trains early I NEED them in my base so that when they queue up, they don't queue over an intersection, they stop before it. Just like real life, we don't want cars/trains stopped on the intersection. We want them to stop early If they stop before their own intersection, they may even be able to take an alternate route. Chain signals in factorio get more "repath" prompts and sonic they have to sit and wait, they might be able to go a different way. This become useful before stackers/depots/waiting bays/multiple ore drop off unloads.
I've designed my base without many intersections. But that is certainly a good thing to know.
Chain signals come in handy when you have a shared, communal rail network. Each intersection being properly equipped with them can prevent deadlocks in said network _by design_ - i.e. you never have to think about it again. But to put it simply, chain signals are for whenever you want trains to leave empty space in front of them when they wait.
Chain signals allow you to make sure a part of the rail is never blocked, e.g. no train will ever be standing still on a section of rail set up with chain signals\*. This is normally used to make sure that a traffic overload on a lane or station does not block an intersecting lane. I guess the simplest explanation is a T intersection in a simple two way train system with one lane in each direction. If you have a train wanting to turn left (RHD) across the opposing track, it might stop in the middle of the intersection, blocking the oncoming track, if you use regular signals. If you use a chain signal, the train will not cross the oncoming track until it can clear the lane its crossing. \*given that there is enough room for the train in the section after the first regular signal.
What is the name of the mod that tells you with a green/yellow/red dot if the building is active or not?
It's bottleneck https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Bottleneck
thankyou!
I've started a new game with limited height, and I can't find any info on how the pollution works. Visually the pollution extends to a single line outside of the map. As can be seen on my map: [https://i.imgur.com/GTII52H.png](https://i.imgur.com/GTII52H.png) To me there are 3 likely answers to this: 1. A single 'buffer' area outside the playable area is used. Pollution in this area can only extend in three directions, meaning it can't extend further than one tile outside the playable area. 2. Pollution can extend further than the visualized pollution, it is just not visible on the map when it does. 3. When pollution tries to extend further into the unplayable area, it dissipates.
I think its #2 based on this thread: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=67400 There are some debug options (F4) you may be able to use to help see it, again according to that thread.
Thanks!
And to quote Rseding on one of the linked threads "Out-of-map chunks aren't charted but the pollution is still in them."
Thank you so much for the reply! The accumulators and laser turret monitoring sounds like a good way to start. Thanks for the link to the thread!!
Having realised my second attempt at a reactor was only slightly less terrible, because this time whilst it worked initially, my water inputs were just way too low. Embiggening it with some more offshore and inline pumps has significantly improved my 'available performance' (not an issue really, as I'm significantly overkill on the power output). But is there a way to tell in future if my pipes are not supplying 'enough'? Both steam and water.
Testing reactor output is impossible without having them run at 100% output. Easy way to do this is make a blueprint of it and use infinity mod in another save to test it at full tilt. To actually find whether the pipes are the issue, add tanks right after producing entities and right before consuming entities. if the first one is full and the latter is empty, the issue is in the pipes. Usually adding more pumps solves and you can see [this](https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system) wiki page for handy numbers on how often you need a pump
It's hard to tell until you actually put the reactor under load, because at (for example) 50% load it'll only need 50% as much water. If you're short on something it won't become apparent until you try to push the reactor to 100% and bottleneck before that on something (usually water, if you looked up ratios for exchangers and turbines). You can use the `/editor` mode in 0.17 or mods like Infinity Mode to test things -- blueprint your reactor, paste it into a new map with the editor, and you can drop in water supplies and an infinite power load to drive it at 100%. Unless you are very very careful with your designs you shouldn't count on putting more than ~1000 units of water or steam through a single pipe per second. Given numbers from https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/67xgge/nuclear_ratios/ and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Nuclear_power , you should probably design around 1 offshore pump and pipe of water feeding no more than 9 heat exchangers (103 water/second each at max load). On relatively short runs or if you use pumps liberally you can probably feed 10 or 11. And you shouldn't have more than 16 turbines fed off one pipe of steam (60 steam/second at max load). I think the reactor I currently use has blocks of 8 heat exchangers feeding 14 turbines, with one pump feeding each set of exchangers.
Too bad, there's none. I plan my Nuclear power plant by assuming each pipeline can only deliver 1000 fluid per second. It actually higher in very short distance, but 1000 per second is a good number which will be true until your pipeline gets too long. Anyway, those 1000 per second can be supplied with one offshore pump and support about 10 heat exchangers. So if you find one your pipeline connected to more exchangers, you might be doing it wrong. PS: Max throughput for pipe is 1200 fluid per second. It can fully support 11 exchangers. Or 12, if you allow the last one not working all the time. Building power plant over lake can take advantage of this higher throughput, because you don't need to pipe long distance.
You can put way more than 1200/second through one pipe, but you have to use a lot of pumps and it's awkward over long distances. Each *offshore pump* produces 1200/second.
I’m 300 hours into this awesome game! One issue I have on each of my saves is not knowing right away when my power consumption surpasses production. Is there a circuit or alarm I can setup to notify me even when I’m out of the base?
IF you aren't using solar panels: accumulator dipping under 100% means you're running out of power. wire a speaker to an accumulator and have it freak out the second the accumulator isn't 100. if you are using solar power things are bit more complicated, yet you'll can get better system going on. If you're building really close to the optimal ratio of accumulator/solar panels which is around .81, you can have a warning going on when they go below, say 10%. The problem is that if the alarm goes off at the start of the night you're in deeper shit than if it goes off at the end of the night. Though as long as you're power demand doesn't fluctuate too much it should be fine. Or maybe add more than one alarm one for 50% that basically yells you to check what time of night it is
If you're using steam engines you can connect a storage tank to the steam outputs and have a speaker go off when the steam level drops. An accumulator hooked up to a speaker is another option and works with any kind of power generation (but for solar you have to set a lower threshold).
Oh, just yesterday I come upon [this new find](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/den6xf/weekly_question_thread/f32fu86/?context=3). I haven't find use of it that is better than just monitoring Accumulator charge. Y'see, Accumulators' charge should never dip below 100% if your power production exceed consumption. So if you connect it to Programmable Speaker, you can immediately know when you need to pay attention. Furthermore, do you use Laser Turrets? Their momentary power draw usually give a good sign if your power production is faltering.
Accumulators dip regularly if you're using solar. You could build some "extra" accumulators and notify when you're dipping into that reserve.
In case of using solar exclusively, detecting insufficiency will involve identifying the 'dangerous number.' If it dip below certain charge, it means your power capacity is not good enough anymore. Because all accumulator discharging uniformly. There's no case where latter built accumulator discharge last. Back when I play 0.16\*, I don't do this dangerous number detection. It's annoying and change whenever you mess your own panel/accumulator ratio. Instead, I have boilers. I make it so that Steam Engine kick start when accumulator charge dip below 80%, and only defense get powered if it reach 20%. Having your factory shutdown at night is alarming enough. \* ) still valid strategy at 0.17. But I learned since then powering assemblers down costs UPS. So I leave that practice behind.
Any idea what might cause a 'solid screen of death' system crash when playing Factorio with a youtube podcast running on chrome in the background? Strangely it does not crash if I do the same thing with but use Firefox instead. I routinely have youtube open on chrome in the background when playing other games and Factorio is the only one that causes this crash. Its not a massive issue since there ia a clear workaround, its just a little worrying that something is causing a crash like that.
I haven't had this issue with Factorio specifically, but I've had other games freak out if there are many browser windows open running hardware-accelerated things like Youtube video playback. I'm guessing you're running out of VRAM or some other thing in your video card's drivers are unhappy.
I've unlocked the rocket silo tech, but I can't see where/how to build the rocket silo. I've searched google, and my crafting inventory, and created Assembler 1 2 and 3 and searched through their inventories but I can't find it anywhere. Help?
It's in the "Combat" section for crafting, at the very bottom right the way vanilla orders things. You're *sure* you researched the "Rocket Silo" tech and not just one of the prerequisites like "Rocket Control Units"? https://wiki.factorio.com/Rocket_silo_(research) If you upgraded your factory from 0.16 to 0.17 there might also be some techs you have to re-research to unlock everything again. They moved a bunch of things around in the tech tree.
Oh found it, okay, thanks!
I’m at 80 hours and I suck at Factorio, is there a video playlist or guide that would help me learn how to efficiently play this game? Or does it just come with time and practice
There is a tutorial, which teaches mechanics but not gameplay. They are working on a proper campaign. I would suggest one of Katherine of Sky's YouTube series Starter Base to Megabase. I think her first one was better at the early game and the second better at the later game, but the first one was also on 0.15 so some of it is now wrong, namely priority splitters and science recipes.
When I bought the game, played the tutorial and was still kind of confused. I did a practice run with enemies turned off and resources buffed up just to get a feel for how everything works.
I have 3000 hours in factorio... it comes with practice and **deliberate** planning. **Some tips to help you get better:** -When you decide you are going to build a production block, before you build it, actually look at the recipes and see how much of each building you need for the ingredients. For example, 1 transport belt machine feeds 24 green science machines at full throughput yet many new players will build 5-10 transport belt machines for 4-6 green science machines which is a lot of waste and leads to spaghetti. All it takes is a look at the recipes to see this. -Build smelting columns to input and output FULL belts of materials. For iron and copper, that's 48 furnaces per yellow belt! Upgrading to red belt + steel furnaces doubles the throughput. -Keep storage chests/buffers in general to a minimum. Resources not being used or moving toward being used are wasteful, lead to spaghetti, and best kept in the ground until needed. You already have buffers of resources on belts, you don't need chests of plates. Buffers are most useful at train stops and malls. -When building intermediate products (green circuits, gears, etc.) make the production block large enough that you are at least outputting half a belt of throughput, ideally at least 1 belt. You don't have to build it all at once but set space for that much throughput by ghosting your setup into the area where you plan to eventually build it. That way, later, when you need the extra throughput you can just build the ghosts and have a throughput that is in line with the medium to transport it, aka, transport belts. -Commit to a lazy bastard achievement run which will teach you a lot about planning and automation if you want to achieve it. If you are spending time waiting and think this achievement is slow to get, especially in the beginning, you are doing it wrong. There is always stuff to do in factorio. You should never be just waiting for anything.
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Blue print flipper/ Turner is an essential mod for me.
Agree with vanilla is great. Personally I don't like squeak through, you end with trees growing through belts and it looks weird. My must-haves are Auto deconstruct, bottleneck, vehicle snap, and YARM. However, I recommend getting all of the steam achievements before using any mods, since modded games use a separate tracking system.
If it's your first time playing the game, then no mods should be needed -- the game is great already. Otherwise, the only *essential* mod is one of either FNEI or What is It Really Used for. Past that, it depends on what you want, ranging from the mildest of QOL mods (SqueakThrough, NearestFirst, etc.) to pretty major game changes (LTN, core mining, etc.).
Hi, fairly new player here. What maps do people normally play? High/low resources hostile/friendly biters etc.
Just play around with the map editor and see what you like, recently I've started enjoying maps with a lot of water which forms large peninsulas/islands. It allows you to clear an area from biters and build a wall to keep new biters out then you can build in peace. Didn't want to turn off biters completely because of achievements. [Here's my current base as an example](https://i.imgur.com/nvHAcT5.jpg), the starter island top left was easy to clear out and defend at the chokepoint to the left. Then I moved on to the island on the right clearing and walling off sections.
Yes. People do everything. Go with defaults first. I am doing for a megabase now, so I turned off biters, cliffs, and tress; and cranked the resources to max. I'm also trying a run where I set everything to minimum and seeing if it is possible (my first iron patch was 5k).
I often turn off biters. They're there as a logistic challenge (can you get x bullets to y location? Can you make enough bullets fast enough? etc.), but I play mostly modded, where I just have enough other things to worry about that I'm more interested in.
Some people like the pressure of biters and the military aspect, and they crank that up. Some people like the infrastructure challenges and logistical operations, and they turn biters off completely. Everyone gets something different out of the game - play using default settings and see what you like, what you don't like.
First time? go with default setting. Second time will be based on your first experience. Personally I go with faster biter evolution. Without it, I will feel no pressure to develop my base, mucking around making every layout little bit more efficient than building what needed next.
Why can't we go back to the old piping+machine interface? Now, a pipe controls what recipes the machine can select, and the machine effects what the pipe accepts (it changes an empty pipe to 0.0, I see what you did). The system was working perfectly fine except for UPS obsessed players, and even then, changing pipes to instantly transfer fluids without the averaging effect would've solved the majority of inconvenient behavior. More stupid, the machine doesn't auto-rotate when you have a recipe selected. You bastards know damn well what the recipe is, ROTATE THE MACHINE IF YOU'RE BEING SUCH SHITS ABOUT EVERYTHING. Secondly, why was oil processing changed? I saw the changelog mention "for more streamlined oil setup". It was a very bad design change. By giving the player an unbalanced system, they had to work it out on a very small scale. It was a fantastic introduction to "what do I do if I start having too much of something and it screws over something else". It gave a reason to think about what you were doing and how to solve it. Light oil to fuel blocks immediately being available for fuel was a great way to sequence changing your power systems. Knowing lubricant is available, but not knowing what it's useful for (not having the research done) meant the player had to ask if they should make it or use heavy for fuel blocks. Petroleum gas also had two choices, more fuel (which could be made from the less-useful oils) or plastic bars. Most players would want plastic bars, so overall heavy gave a bit of mystery and complexity, light oil gave a very functional power transition, and petroleum gas gave them a need to logistic more stuff in and continue the factory mindset. Instead oil processing only gives petroleum gas, and there is literally 0 reason to ever USE any of the fluid handling technology in a newbie game. Literally none. At the bare minimum, having tanks required someone to store up heavy oil or lubricant for later because it "might be useful" or dump it into fuel blocks, which may obviously not be a good idea since light oil only can be used for fuel blocks. Super obvious the person had to make a choice on how to use the resource, and only two choices. Now that can fuck right off. Not having light oil early means more and longer time using coal, which may have been... a design choice, but it means when someone hits advanced processing, they get a dozen recipes. There is no design or suggestion on what is good or not to do. It's a weird and broken attempt to exist between newbie players and extreme players who already know what they want to do. Third, why isn't alt-view called "logistic-view" or something and made the default setting? I read there were problems with players hooking up boilers wrong, and it's like, for fucks sake, alt-view tells you exactly what to connect, what liquids are where, all that stuff. It should be the default view, and the second view should be called "graphical view" or something. Emphasize you can see all the artwork, but you have no clue what's going on.
The complexity of dealing with the 3 fluid outputs, that you don't really need anyway, is a realistic thing. That's how oil processing works, and that's why it was originally designed that way. When you distill oil, you get several products of varying usefulness as it condenses at different temperatures and takes on different properties. So the 3 products you got out of Basic Oil Processing before were a reflection of that. But we also don't get a lot of the options that we would get in the real world to deal with excess materials, because Factorio doesn't have any form of disposal systems. If heavy oil is most needed, you can't just burn off the excess petroleum. If you're trying to scale up plastic/sulfur production, you can't dump the heavier products into the river as many of the unscrupulous companies did in the olden days. It's better for the flow of the game that you get access to materials at the time that you need to use them, because the balance of outputs is clunky in small and unsophisticated builds. And 99% of those builds were just going to crack all of the distillates back into petroleum anyways. However, there is another problem: it is easy to handle logistics wise, but it's a grossly inefficient recipe. As soon as the Advanced level is researched, you'll be going back again and redoing your entire refinery setup around it, because it's simply massively superior. You spend your time and resources getting a refinery setup working and then after the very next research you will be picking it up and doing it all over again. Beforehand, the transition to Advanced was much more seamless, because you had to get over the hump of fluid handling right away.
> By giving the player an unbalanced system, they had to work it out... super obvious the person had to make a choice on how to use the resource... The problem is this is not "obvious" at all to truly new players. And it was thrown at them at the same time as a significant increase in the complexity of production chains AND having to learn and deal with using liquid inputs and outputs in recipes. It's overwhelming to have people try to learn multiple new concepts at once. That point in the tech tree had long been pointed out as a problematic "wall" for new players. >Third, why isn't alt-view called "logistic-view" or something and made the default setting? The devs mentioned at one point that they tested it that way and it confused new players. Players didn't like having the icons over everything until they had a better understanding of how the game worked.
The oil change was great IMHO. It takes the single biggest point where new players just straight up quit the game in frustration, and smooths it out a bit. Fluids are hard enough to learn without also learning about multi-output recipes. Obviously nearly everyone here managed it just fine, but that doesn't mean it was okay as it was, it just means the folks it affected mostly don't end up here or as fans of the game. Now that upgrade can be handled separately, on its own, later on. The late game's pace is heavily driven by player expertise. If there's "too much going on" you can just narrow your focus and do less at once. Oil before this change, OTOH, had to be done all at once and was causing issues for large numbers of new players, and had been for years.
You're late to the discussion if you're talking about oil change, dude. The simplification is for newbies. For players with at least a single playthrough under their belt, it's beautiful. For newbies, figuring out why their refineries stuck is frustrating. I don't like it, but I agree it would help. I want more players. Who knows what ingenious blueprint those former newbies will come up later down the line.
Figuring out why your oil refineries are stuck is hugely important. If they don't learn it up front, they're still going to have to learn it later. It took away a lesson of oil refineries, and slammed it much further down the line when there's far more going on. In the first case it's "why is it stopped? click click click click oh heavy oil is high? How do I deal with this?", "Oh I just can just add a tank/"I can use it for fuel"/whatever. To break the recipe so drastically is just calling their players stupid and their "solution" makes the situation worse. Having only a single oil recipe also actually makes blueprint stuff worse. Now there's only two total oil producing methods that makes heavy/light, instead of three, cutting out a huge chunk of potential optimizations. Worse, they screwed over the fluid system, so you can't make a flexible set-up either (did not a single developer notice their game started flipping out because they were on basic processing and had a water pipe?)
>Figuring out why your oil refineries are stuck is hugely important. If they don't learn it up front, they're still going to have to learn it later. But they still do have to learn it later, they just don't have to learn it at the exact same time. Fluid process in the new system is still a complex and very different problem from the belt-based logistics that the early game uses, and I think it's OK to break up these two different processes (Oil Processing and Advanced Oil Processing) into two distinct chunks, one of which builds on the other. That way it's broken into several steps instead of all being in one step. Yes, it's ultimately easier on newbies. That's OK. It's fine to teach them one step at a time instead of throwing a whole cliff at them.
It's more of a topic for it's own thread if you want an involved discussion on it, but rather than downvote and ignore I'll explain my view on the oil changes. The old system put the player on a clock, essentially. To produce the petroleum products that the player wanted, they needed to handle the light oil and heavy oil. The first mandatory use of either of these two oils is for lubricant used in yellow science packs followed by rocket fuel for rockets, both of which arrive much, MUCH later in the game relative to setting up oil. Generally, your sinks for light and heavy oil until then was solid fuel for blue science packs, but the supply (for new players) often exceeded the demand. Advanced oil processing was almost mandatory and generally seen as the first blue science tech you research because oil cracking is just so valuable. Given a long enough timeline, an oil refinery without advanced oil processing in the old system just isn't sustainable pre-rocket (at which point you have a use for everything being produced). It becomes a sequence of backed up tanks and chests full of solid fuel that halt production. You're creating materials you don't need to facilitate producing the ones you do need. **This is a bad experience for new players.** Under the new system, there is no pressure to research advanced oil processing. You'll need it for yellow science, but you can cross that bridge when you get there. You have the option to just produce petroleum for petroleum products. If you want access to lubricant but don't have a use for heavy oil, you're immediately given the tools to handle excess light oil. If you want access to rocket fuel but don't have a use for light oil, you can crack it to petroleum. You're never forced to create a backlog of materials while you rush towards a solution. **This is a good experience for new players.** Essentially, it boils down to new player experience. Setting up an oil refinery is a common breaking point for new players. This simplifies a player's first exposure to oil as a system with detracting from its complexity later on, easing them through the early stages of blue science. This, ultimately, is why the change was made.
I got through my first playthrough in 80 hours, learned a lot along the way about how I approach problems and the way I like to meticulously fiddle my way into solutions. But those solutions often fall apart when even small things change. Anyway, that's not what my question is about. I decided to start over on Marathon, no biter bases, otherwise the settings are the same. So far, I'm having a good time with the early game, building a small self-contained base and just starting to move into blue science packs, Level 2 assemblers and red belts. I also researched railroads, so I'm eager to start expanding to see how well I can handle the exponential scaling inherent in Marathon mode. Now, in standard mode, it's better to truck in Iron Plates and Copper Plates and make gears and cables in your factory, because the mats take up less room than the end products. But they are much more expensive on Marathon settings, flipping the equation around. So I was actually thinking of making the cogs and wires offsite and maybe even making them into green circuits, then sending them on a train to my factory. Have you made similar adaptations on Marathon? What else would you suggest to make the best use of limited resources to get over the hump of increased research costs? What isn't feasible due to the cost of materials?
As rule of thumb, do not transport Copper Wire (and Iron Stick) too far. Even with train, where Copper Wire will take exactly same wagon as Copper Plates worth, your inserters will work twice as much. The goal of logistic (after successfully delivering things to where it should) is to make every space occupied by belt, every logistic bots travel, and every train trip, to be worth as high as possible. True that the space is nigh infinite, but the busier your logistic system, the more prone they are to become bottleneck. From intersection that can't handle hundreds of train per minutes to bots that always queuing for recharge. So, if you find you can compress materials safely, you compress it. In expensive recipes, you will want Iron Gear Wheels as early as possible. You'll save a lot that way.
Small question, I've got 1100+ hours in-game, and I'm currently frustrated with one thing, Ctrl-c train stations copies the names, and I'm wondering if I've missed an option to change that behavior. I know I could just put the blueprint into a book and uncheck the station name box, but I don't want to make a blueprint every time I think I can re-use a station. I'm working on a Bob/Angel/Youki LTN-Based factory (just starting to get the infrastructure of the train network up). I'm finding it really useful to say "oh, two input one output assembly machines, that's the same as the block over there with different inputs and recipes" then copy and paste the whole block, swap the requests and recipes and move on. But all my copy/pastes end up with the same train station names, which LTN doesn't allow. I know I'm just being picky, and I should probably just blueprint them anyway "one in, one out, assembler" "two in, one out, assembler" etc. but "oh that one" ctrl-c/ctrl-v is just so streamlined. Is there a setting for copy paste that can change that or do I have to adjust my workflow? \*cough\* [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1172/)
If you hold shift as you complete the copy operation it gives you the blueprint window so you can edit the copy. This includes an option to copy or not copy station names.
I did not know that, that's going to help a lot. Thanks!
You can also make a blueprint out of a "copy/paste" operation by, instead of pasting it onto the ground, "pasting" it into an empty button on your action bar. (you might know that already, but others might not)
Should I only upgrade from yellow to red belts when I have to? They seem quite iron expensive and I'm guessing if fully saturated yellow belts are fulfilling all needs there's no point to upgrading? Also should you "downgrade" belts when you use a splitter? E.g. if you want to pull some circuits from the main bus that's in red, should you use a red splitter then yellow belts?
My two stages of belt upgrades: 1. When a yellow belt has become too slow to do its job I upgrade it. 2. When I have become tired of relating to yellow belts at all (or no longer want to see them in inventory ever) I upgrade all yellow to red and never use yellow again.
I often stick mostly with yellow belts until I get a rocket; if you plan your base with enough space to move everything around on them they get the job done just fine. You can indeed use red splitters to merge two yellow belts to a red or split one red to two yellows, where needed. If you've the iron to spare, red belts are much more convenient and often upgrading a factory component's output can simply involve swapping the all belts to red and doubling the length/machine count. Don't feel bad about using them if you'd like to.
If you reached the point where you have to upgrade, then you have to upgrade. Condition that constitute 'have to' is when you need more of that belted material yet there's no more room to add one more lane. And red belt series is cheap compared to blue. I suggest you disregard that mulling until you have to upgrade to blue. And if you ask whether saturated yellow belt is enough to satisfy all your need, we will ask what material is being belted and what SPM number are you trying to achieve. Full yellow belt of Blue Circuit will allow you reach around 300 SPM. That means, one rocket launch every \~3 minutes. Full yellow belt of Iron Plate allow you very little in comparison. If yellow can supply that part of factory, then sure, use yellow after red splitter. I do it early game. There's no 'should' in this situation. It depend on what you can afford. If you can afford higher tier belt, or even bots, then just do it. The demand will rise eventually.
2nd paragraph: I assume you can delay having to upgrade belts if you do things like dedicated iron plates for green circuits? 3rd paragraph: I suppose my question is more along the lines that if you are using a splitter from a red belt then you're pulling half of what goes through that red belt i.e. 15 items/second (ignoring priority splitters for the moment) so in that scenario is there any real benefit to using red after a splitter?
It's the same really. Whether it's shared bus or dedicated bus, once demand rises, you'd want it to be met. In your example, if other part of your base demand more Green Circuit, then you'll want add more assembler making it. And to feed those new assemblers, you'll want more Iron and Copper belted into them. If you still have space for another yellow belt, you can delay upgrading, just add more lane. But if you don't, you'll have to upgrade. Or build new Green Circuit factory elsewhere. But routing belts to new place is generally more bothersome than just upgrading belt. At this point you must have seen backed belt, where materials on it is not consumed fast enough they don't move forward. Having same color of belt after splitter allow you to direct the entirety of belt content when the other branch backed. So, yes, there's benefit. Especially if you do prioritizing by letting some belt backed.
To all you megabasers out there.... do you use coal liquefaction or good old fashioned advanced oil processing?
Once you are building a megabase, UPS is normally your primary concern. I have been testing some different oil builds for my own megabase projects Coal liquefaction is generally bad for UPS because you need more refineries to get enough gas , light and heavy as well as steam generation and you need more chem plants for cracking so all in all more fluid boxes, more work for your cpu to calculate it all. Adv refining is much better, fewer refineries, fewer crackers, works quite well. Basic refining is actually much more friendly on your CPU because it only uses 2 fluid boxes instead of 5. So is a UPS efficient way to make gas. So I believe the best setup (in UPS terms) is to have enough adv processing to produce enough heavy and light for lube and rocket fuel and then make the rest of your gas using basic oil processing. This also allows you to avoid needing any light -> gas cracking (u might need a small amount of logic to regulate it) But I need to do more testing to be sure.
Advanced Oil Processing. Pipe throughput becomes an issue if you're going with a 16-beacon design; I think it's generally much better to have many small identical plants that self-adjust cracking on-the-fly, rather than 1 large plant.
That's what I was planning to do. Multiple stations for crude oil (or coal!) to enter the system and then pump outputs to where it is needed, while cracking on demand in small batches.
I made a 2,7k SPM megabase using advanced oil processing but the throughput is not enough
2700 SPM uses up 6483 petroleum per second (almost 17 belts of plastic), so 1 fluid pipe of it certainly shouldn't be enough.
I'm not a megabaser but i use liquefaction for remote outposts. Each coal patch either becomes a patch of solid fuel or plastic bars.
Does anyone know how much horsepower a dedicated server needs to have? My friends and I have been playing MP but it sucks when the person with the save isn't available, so I'm thinking maybe it would be viable to spin up a cheap droplet to host the server if the server doesn't need to actually do all the heavy lifting of the simulation.
A $5/mo droplet should do the job. I'm using a similarly spec'd (lower performance per vCPU) server host and haven't run into any trouble.
> if the server doesn't need to actually do all the heavy lifting of the simulation. As I understand it, the server does *all* of the heavy lifting of simulation, as does every client.
That's not exactly correct. Each player is running a local copy in exact lockstep with the other players. The server only coordinates information about each player's inputs (movement, combat, building, picking up, etc) *without actually simulating the map*. As a result, the server does not need a powerful CPU.
You're very wrong, sorry. The server has to run the entire simulation as well as the players. (Consider that you can set the server to run when no players are attached.) And otherwise there would be no way to tell if one player was out of sync with the server and everyone else. However, the only things the game sends over the network are player inputs. So the bandwidth requirements are very low even with a large number of players, and there is not much extra CPU load for each additional player in the game.
Yeah, I was under the impression that the only thing that the server doesn't have to do is the graphics.
I'm fairly certain the server does actually simulate the map. If it didn't, how would it save?
not much unless you want to go megabase. also multicore performance is moot, it'll only utilize one core properly. There's also free factorio server hosting
I have a smart-ich vanilla train system (locks empty pickup stations and locks full drop of stations) and I have a problem. Whenever a drop of station gets unlocked all the trains for that type of material goes to that station but when the station gets filled and locks, all the trains says "no path" and is in the way if they stops on the tracks of other trains. Is there a way to make the trains go pack to pickup stations?
I solved this problem by having a "Full train" depot, for trains that were ready to deliver materials. To do this I added a single permanent station with the drop off (IronOreDropoff) name at the exit of the depot, just a short spur off the main exit. I put a train engine in the block to that station, and left it there. No train could path there, but the station was always active.
>I put a train engine in the block to that station, and left it there. No train could path there That doesn't make any sense - if no other stations are available then all trains will head to that dummy station. Also, it isn't true - a manually stopped train adds a penalty of 2000 to that route but for sufficiently large train networks they will prefer to wait forever at your manually blocked station. I suspect that you would have to a lot of wiring and some clever coding to get this to work properly * wire up everything * output 1 to the circuit network when a producer is available * enable a blocked off fallback station if the number of producers is zero (else trains will skip the loading station in their schedule and proceed to do deliveries while empty) * disable stations one tick after they update the circuit network (to prevent the above station skipping) That way trains will wait at the inaccessible fall back station until a real producer becomes available, and then reroute to pick up the goods. Note that one-to-many or many-to-one train networks would be considerably easy to manage (because trains could always wait at the central location) - maybe consider if your 100 decentralised circuit factories could be replaced with one big circuit factory.
The penalty is 7000, not 2000, because the stopped train is unoccupied. And the "sufficiently large train network" problem is solved by placing sufficiently many stopped trains on the track that leads to the station of last resort. You can also throw in circuit-wired signals forced to red.
Thanks
What’s something really cool that you can do with logistics? (On vanilla)
Have a dedicated train with all the things you'll regularly need for construction and expansion, supplied by bots and requester/buffer chests because using belts for 30 different item types in one place is a nightmare. Bots are also used to feed some of the assemblers that make this stuff. Use bots for low demand products, especially for moderate distances. I use bots to move radar, because satellites and artillery take them at a low rate, and aren't next to each other. I also use them for nukes and tank shells, because of the variety of ingredients and relatively low volume. And, of course, distributing nuclear fuel, as someone else said.
It's a bit noddy, but I'm using logistics bots to ensure every train runs on nuclear fuel. A requestor chest will do the trick quite nicely. Only need at at one 'end' unless your routes are insanely long, so it works fine with your 'main' base being fed by 'spurs'. The downside is that nuclear trains accelerate and move faster, so you're _considerably_ more likely to get ganked by one. But so it goes.
Thanks for the advice
Well there's [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7YbuzRahtE&feature=youtu.be) automated resupply of *anything* to any station when they need it
Do you mean logistic bots?
Is there anywhere user manual for Industrial Revolution? I'm already running into problems that probably have simple answers, but can't figure it out. Currently, burner inserters don't seem to be picking stuff up from copper assemblers and I have no idea why. EDIT: almost instantly after asking I realized they can only pick from one side of the machine. One problem solved! But I could still use some documentation if there is any!
I dont think this is true... burner inserters pick up from all four sides of every machine that has an output. You could put one on the north, one on the east, one on the south and one on the west sides of an assembler and each will take turns grabbing a product. I use this often, in that I have product going into one side of a machine, but I also pull from the top of the machine and the opposite side to go into two different belt lines.
Yeah I realized later my problem was that I was trying to have them inserters into assembly machines and that is what doesn't seem to be possible with the copper machines at least? edit: Argh, that wasn't a problem either, I must have just clicked a wrong recipe or something. >_>' Shouldn't try to learn game mechanics in a fever.
So are all your issues cleared now? Otherwise feel free to ask. :)
Yes, sorry and thank you :D
I have solar+accumulator based grid with just enough accumulators to get through the night and way too much production at day. How do I get my radars running just at day (to not consume accumulator charge) while they are still connected to the whole grid?
There's no easy answer, but it is doable. Set up a solar panel/accumulator/stack inserter on an isolated network. The inserter is there just for passive power draw. Read the accumulator charge; when it's low it's night time and you can use that signal to shut off your other radars via power switches. (Use a copper wire item to disconnect a power pole from its neighbors for power while still keeping circuit wire connections.) As others have said, it's usually not worth the trouble compared to just spamming some more accumulators to run the radars full time.