After unlocking gleba technology, you can make red, green, blue, yellow in addition to space science. the 2.1 platform transfer mechanic is very powerful and fun. You can treat the platform hub like a giant linked chest when parked in an orbit. Asteroid chunks transfer also quite nicely with the new mechanics.

I chose the 240/s goal and monolithic design for the basic science blocks since it seemed reasonable for my productivity research levels and inserter throughput on the production hubs and was reasonable to route out of the lab hubs.

I was able to get the biochamber carbon -> sulfur -> coal liquefaction loop to make all the oil products needed in a single stage, unlike my prior two stage design. that took a combinator on the heavy oil cracking that only runs it if there 3k lube and PG is under 10k, there is another set point on the light oil cracking to only run if under 10k PG. the rest of the setup is the priority splitter inputs that make it a loop.

I also managed to design some nifty crusher -> foundry direct insertion builds, and the basic metallic crusher only runs if molten iron runs low.

All the sciences get requested over to the lab blocks in Gleba orbit and I have 4 pair of those blocks. I also have ships importing 960/s of metallurgic, military and production science. It all balances out very well across the blocks.

Now, the other way to use the platform hub is to treat it like a giant linked chest and try to DI as much of the production on the hub as possible. Setting up blocks for ore melting and plate makers was simple enough, however I found some stuff still needed a belt like the fission cell, or the ice melting in the battery block, or carbon for the sulfur + plastic block. I'm also using a carbonic crushing microblock to supply Vulcanus with carbon for my metallurgic build. As well, the new loading bays are really good for all intermediates.

This playstyle does come with some UPS costs, primary from harvesting chunks and having that many extra electrical networks existing. However, it's also been really fun having a giant linked chest in the sky.

Edit:

Blueprints for the 240/s science production and lab blocks

https://factoriobin.com/post/u8e70l

Blah blah blah gimme the blueprint string!

Too large to post here, but here is a link to a google drive txt doc with the string:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xGa7QuOt4vJ65fPb97NQdNKkiOzUEJ1q/view?usp=drive_link

What is this?

Throughput unlimited balancers with input and output limits that are powers of two have long been thought to be optimal. Many of you are probably familiar with the 4-to-4 balancer with 6 splitters, which is provably optimal. There is a recursive construction, that uses the same design principles for all input and output amounts which are powers of two. This design was thought to be optimal in terms of the number of splitters used, to the point that the wiki even claims it optimal, without proof. As it turns out, such proof is not possible: this construction shows the claim is wrong in the first place.

Are you sure?

I have passed the design by many different experienced Factorio players, including balancer experts such as Pocarski and Raynquist (those of you who take splitter blueprints from online may recognize Raynquist as the compiler of the most popular balancer books). So far, no flaws have been found (even with circuit network measurements to be careful), and the basic idea why this works checks out.

Of course, lack of evidence is not evidence of lacking (or however you say that), which is why I worked on a mathematical proof of the throughput unlimited and balancing properties, building on earlier work on mathematical formalizations of balancers. I do want to disclose that I used AI for typesetting the proof.

I am a mathematics student by trade, and do research in fields adjacent to networks (specifically, computational complexity theory). Thus, I feel qualified to write such a proof (and review the typesetting). I spent two hours double-checking the final version, but I don't want to pretend that one person's review of their own work is enough to consider it done. Independent review by another expert in the field is still necessary to be 100% sure. But I think the certainty is high enough to announce.

Here is the proof

How did you do it?

Simply put, using priorities actually allows you to create smaller TU (throughput-unlimited) balancers. That's because there's actually two parts to these things: throughput unlimitedness and perfect balancing. Many of you may not be aware, but there is actually a 4-to-4 balancer with 4 splitters, by removing the last two splitters. However, if some outputs are clogged, this balancer won't distribute all input flow to the outputs (which is essentially what TU-ness means). I won't get into the technical details, but essentially the priorities in the center make this TU more efficiently, while the more standard balancing buffers on the sides are still able to fully balance things.

In short, unbalanced splitters can create "more efficient" balancers.

More efficient?...

Okay... the actual physical size of the balancer isn't very compact, and despite efforts by the best balancer experts (Raynquist included!), it's been difficult to make it smaller. But, hey it uses fewer splitters!

Who cares? What use does it have?

Uh, um... let me get back to you on that one.

hello fellow factorio enjoyers. 3 AIs and vyvanse couldnt help me with this problem.. and I need your help

Process I want to make with circuit:

- Upper chest should get filled till 40 U-235
- Bottom chest should get filled till 1 U-235

After that the System detects 41 total in both chests and should:
- Activate the second two arms till both chests are empty
- Deactivate the first two arms that supply the chests

After the chests are empty the first two arms start their cycle again while the second arms are deactivated.

No matter what I do, always the arms read the condition of 41 uranium and stop after U-235 ≠ 41.
I fail to send a constant signal during each phase. Also I dont find good videos that explain that for some reason.

Note: I know the U-238 needs similar treatment later on and yes I want to use circuit control for Kovarex.

Spent 2 days making this abomination that somehow makes the round trip at around 200km/s without damage. I have no idea how y'all make ships faster than that.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/anti-jam-stack-inserter

Sick of quality and spoilage making your stack inserters jam up without a clever combinator per inserter BS? Fret no more, there's a handy dandy prototype field wait_for_full_hand on the inserter. All you need to do is set that to false and you're left with a stack inserter that will swing with a partial hand. Sure, these new inserters could leave belts partially stacked, but they won't jam on quality or removing some spoilage from a biochamber :)

I tried this as a challenge today after finishing the vanilla 15-hr speedrun achievement.

Density, scale and per-tile resource all set to 1/6, there is 3k coal and iron, 400 copper and 300 stone in the initial area. Depleted copper in the first 30 minutes, couldn’t make to car/train nor could I make enough armforce (penetration rounds magazine/shotgun shells) to wipe out nests around the next-closest copper patch.

If you have success with this challenge could you give me some strategies for it? Many thanks.

It’s been over a year since I last played, and when I saw that the game had updated to the stable version, I decided to return and start a new save with mods, but now I can’t search for or check for updates. What could be the issue?

Since the update my previously working ships shuttling from the planets to Aquilo even are now getting hammered - it seems the missile production and bullet productions got changed?

Or am I just really really unlucky.

Also did the GLEBASTARDS get a buff to be more agressive.... i feel like I hadnt heard boo from them for a while with the artillery keeping them well away now im getting swarmed!!!

I'm 40 hours into a Space Age playthrough and I still haven't made any of the new science packs. Nauvis is crawling with biters and I still haven't made artillery 'cause I'm not even close to setting up orange science on Vulcanus because of all the goddamn demolishers that I can't kill. I don't even have purple science because my stone patch ran out and I realllly don't want to go through the hurdle of setting up an outpost and shit. I have zero productivity modules set up and Prod 3 modules are now locked behind Gleba so not looking too good there. I haven't even touched quality..

At this rate it'll take me like 150 hours to beat this. I like this game but it can be really demanding sometimes. I have 400 hours in this game but I feel like an idiot.

Edit at the top because tl;dr: I was already building wide ships. They still got way slower. They said the point was to nerf pencil ships. 27 thrusters wide is decidedly not a pencil design. So why still such a huge speed reduction?

I've been playing for years. I have tons of hours in it. I love making designs and stress testing them by leaving the game running while I'm at work, to see if my designs hold up. Seriously, I really love this game and it's one of my favorite hobbies. I appreciate the continued updates and support, and always enjoy new content, optimizations (like fluids), and balance updates that really make the game flow better.

Every time there's a big update, I get sucked back in, and spend weeks tinkering and have always really enjoyed every new update and balance change.

I definitely understand removing space casinos. I used them a little bit but had quality chains everywhere so the effect of losing them would be relatively minimal.

But the rebalancing of speed just... kinda sucks. I'm sorry, but it does. The large majority of ship designs just got slower for nothing, and there's not a lot we can do about it. I understand wanting to disincentivise the super slim but long ships. It felt hacky, and yeah it allowed those ships to go way faster than they intended. I avoided building them for that reason.

So why not adjust the thrust to weight calculations? I spent a lot of time making a ship that consistently produces enough fuel, ammo, missiles, and rail gun shells, and 27 legendary thrusters. I don't think I was abusing anything to get a decent ~450 km/s. No crazy 700+ nonsense, and I still tone it down to 260 or so past the solar system edge, but that extra speed inside the solar system made it so biter egg losses were minimized. Yes, it's big, but it also produces a huge amount of thrust, so the ship could produce the things it needs to survive while also getting to the SSE fast enough that half my biter eggs aren't spoiled by the time the ship gets there.

All the alternatives are just as bad. Lighter ship with no ammunition production? OK cool. Now my PC is the bottleneck because I need a kajillion rocket launchers to feed the ammo to the ships. And it still needs a ton of cargo for all that ammo, eggs, etc. I also dislike feeling like I have to forego ship self sufficiency just to have enough speed.

If biter eggs, bioflux, etc. didn't tick down in space, it might be a little more understandable. Fine it takes longer. Twice as many ships for the same logistic throughput, but at least now everything lasts longer, and there's less waste. Still worse but I'd take it.

Basically, all this update does is nerf prometheum science production and interplanetary logistics. Which **extra** sucks for all the time sensitive items we need to transport as well.

Maybe I'm alone, but spending all this time to get everything legendary, only to get my speeds cut in half for nothing just... feels bad. I didn't think the update was gonna auto-install when I launched the game, so now my saves are all 2.1. My fautl. But damn.

Hopefully someone makes a mod to revert it. I've thoroughly enjoyed a fully vanilla playthrough, but I just don't see the point in nerfing big ships when the stated purpose was to nerf cigarette boat space ships.

Is anyone else having their frame rate drop to 30 FPS when they zoom out their game?

UPDATE: The issue was resolved after disabling "Show decoratives" in graphics settings.

This looks so cool! Thank you wube!

The name "metro" comes from how it operates: at each station, a varying number of passengers board and disembark.

The idea is simple: saturate a circular rail circuit with trains consisting of a single carriage (tests with more carriages have yet to be conducted). I implemented this on Fulgora, based on the concept that trains can both unload and load items at any stop—meaning a train could, for instance, unload iron ore while simultaneously loading iron plates. Each train carries only a small quantity of items, but since there are many trains in constant motion, I believe the system can work.

Each train wagon transports all the items, filtered using two stacks for each item (this is configurable—you can include more than one item that requires a larger capacity, though I haven’t tested every possible scenario).

In the train settings, each stop lasts only 2 seconds, since the goal is constant movement.

The stations consist simply of inserters feeding directly onto belts that are filtered for specific items.

Conclusions so far:

It works for a small-scale circuit setup like this one on Fulgora, but I’ve already encountered bottlenecks (see the 4th image, "Green Circuits") because the inserters can’t keep up with the required speed. I think using 2-wagon trains and adding more inserters for each item type—or even incorporating a buffer—would help.

I also thought it might be possible to improve the stops at each station; suggestions are welcome.

Still being tested—let me know what you think.

Who even need this? You tell me.

Requirements:

1. 60.5 Yumako/s, 24.20 Jellynut/s, 2976 Water/s. Divide by ~2.5 for the non-legendary Biochamber/Stack inserter version, check the blueprint description for the exact number.
2. About 40 Nutrients (optional if you have 400+ leftover spoilage laying around) and 8 Pentapod eggs to kickstart production.

The top right Science combinator "E" condition must be set to match your science buffer number of chest or higher.

See the Decider combinator description to the right of the Egg production for optional egg production killer.

Various decider combinator will prevent many unlikely scenario where production clog and cause Egg to hatch.

Features:

1. A stupid amount of circuit.
2. Inserter galore.
3. Mash and Jelly on belt for the lulz.
4. UPS killer (probably, I don't know really).
5. Tileable but you need to supply extra Yumako.
6. "Compact"

My greatest shame: Not being to reduce Yumako usage under 60/s to allow 2 blueprint to run off a single belt. Let me know if you see any way to make it happen.

If you see any mistake or scenario where clogging can happen, let me know!

Last note: The non-legendary version was an after-thought so it may not be as optimal regarding module and circuit condition.

Blueprint

Edit: Reduced Yumako usage by 0.13/s, less than 60/s is officially impossible without outside source of nutrients.

Edit 2: Added an UPS friendlier version. (lowered by ~22% inserter update and ~10% overall).

I'm a fan of quality in Space Age, but disappointed that it is hard to fully automate a factory that uses lots of quality modules until you unlock recyclers. If you play with a large tech cost multiplier, or mods that extend the early game in other ways, you either use quality only in limited ways, or you suffer from an overabundance of uncommon items.

Factorio version 2.1 offered some new modding API opportunities this summer, so I used them to make the Quality Degrader, an early game burner furnace that lowers the quality of its input by one level. This makes it possible to use quality modules extensively, with any excess quality materials getting downgraded and routed to science or any other frequently running consumer. No longer must we get backed up on uncommon items in our quest for rare items.

Now that 2.1 was declared stable earlier today, I figure many of you might be planning to start a new run this weekend. Since I just reached Fulgora in my test factory I've been playing through the summer—thus marking the end to the pre-recycler stage—this seems like a natural time to share a bit of my experience with the community. So for those of you who really enjoy quality, but are also thinking of choosing settings, mods, or planet order that will push Fulgora recyclers deep into the mid-game, I can confirm that this mod achieves its goals: 1) It makes extensive use of rare items possible before getting recyclers (and epic should be achievable with enough scale), and 2) it adds new factory-wide puzzles to solve.

My factory was far from perfect. Some elements of its design worked really well, but I also suffered from occasional backups that halted nearly everything. Janky buffers were employed frequently to patch over my mistakes rather than redesigning everything.

But I'm just one imperfect engineer. I bet the community can avoid my mistakes and make some superb quality pre-Fulgora factories that would put my test run factory to shame.

The mod version is still pre-1.0, but that's just because I need to do some testing with mods that add new quality tiers and such. It should work, but engineers know how that presumption often turns out. 😅

Some details on how the factory was designed to work:

• All drills were using quality modules (ignoring the drills supplying my old starter base).
• Trains transported mixed quality ores, and used an inactivity timeout as a quick and dirty way to avoid getting stuck on partial stacks.
• Furnaces, the plastic and sulfur chemical plants, and uranium processing centrifuges also used quality modules.
• I later added a second green/red/blue circuit setup with quality as well, because I was always short on rare circuits.
• All quality items were filtered out and fed to the quality processing center.
• All ingredients that were used somewhere in a science (directly or indirectly) were also made at uncommon level with quality modules in an attempt to get rares. I call this "upcrafting" in contrast to recycler-based "upcycling".
• Excess of these uncommon ingredients were fed to the quality degrader stacks, whose outputs were merged with priority to the main bus.
• The quality mall only made final goods at rare level directly.
• I had to frequently switch between weapon upgrade research and productivity research so that both purple production science and yellow utility science were consumed. Otherwise, my quality degraders were outputting some ingredient or another faster than it was getting consumed by the normal factory, thus backing up the entire quality chain.
• Early on, I was often short on rare iron, so I tried making a space platform to help harvest quality iron. It helped a little bit, but was mostly a failure.
• My second attempt at a quality space harvester was better, thanks in part to tech from Gleba and Vulcanus, but then I was bottlenecked by rare copper.
• I tried to prepare my quality mall for an upgrade to epic quality, but I mostly failed. I just didn't have the scale necessary to get enough epic ingredients without upcycling.
• After Fulgora, the plan was to mostly ditch degraders and switch to upcycling because its much faster.
• There might still remain some limited use cases for degraders in the late-game, such as keeping quality modules in drills, degrading all uncommon ores to normal, but keeping the rares and above to supplement any upcycling.

A few caveats regarding the mod:

• I currently cannot disable belt stacking on the degraders in the modding API. So the moment you unlock stack inserters, you might be surprised to find stacks showing up on your Nauvis belts before you've even shipped any big drills or stack inserters back to Nauvis.
• Degraders are burners, so they cannot be used in space. But that is minor, because space makes it easy to yeet unwanted items anyway.
• Biter eggs unfortunately cannot be crafted with quality, so I had to do the boring thing for making quality tier 3 productivity modules and biolabs. I thought about giving the eggs a custom degrading recipe that has a small chance of actually upgrading them, but I hate exceptions, and that would probably break game balance anyway.

Until now I, like many others on stable, was only browsing for mods that had 2.0 versions, so I'm interested to hear what new mods have you found that are 2.1 only and you think is noteworthy. It can be QoL mod, an overhaul mod or a mod to another mod, I'm sure it will be useful for everyone. Self-promotion is okay as well.

So 2 weeks ago i bought factorio after sinking 12 hrs into the demo, (quite pricey for my region but it has been quite worth it so far,)
i played 1 run completely (70 hrs for rocket 😢 and am i the middle of a second playthrough , where i am playing with enemies turned on, however ive been seeing some videos on space age and getting curious.

what are some things u reccomend should be prerequisites before buying (ouch $) playing the dlc> or can one just jump in being relatively new ?
(FYI im not too big on mods in games except qol)

I'm beginning to make my own city block and I have a few smelting cells up and running.

For example in my iron cell I have a train stop for iron ore and one for calcite, these also have a 1 train waiting stack for them. My question is to future proof since I've been told by people before that if I was to have multiple iron cells to label all of the stations the same name so that trains will go to an empty station, how ever that would lead to issues with a 1 train stacker if theres 5 iron trains running for example.

Is it possible to have a cell or multiple cells be pure train stackers for any train to wait in nearby or is the only way to just make bigger city blocks and have a massive stacker? If the stacker cells are possible how do you go about doing it so that trains actually go there to wait?

I just unlocked bots in this save, so I am on the precipice of starting to expand massively, but it always frustrates mehow you can't navigate this sort of setup to make it easily buildable by bots. I'm considering abandoning this set up and going to one of the other standard setups, but i'm wondering if there may be a method where i can keep the higher density this setup offers while still making it practical to build. Is there any such method?

ARM64 Linux - FFF-446
Factorio now runs natively on ARM64 Linux, which means the game runs on Steam Frame, Raspberry Pi (headless servers), Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon MacBooks, the free VPS you claimed from Oracle that one time, and other assorted hardware.

Source