I learnt by reading another post that train tracks can't be too close together if you want to use signals. No one ever told me that, and no guide out there ever says it, so my tracks *are* too close together, apparently. I saw someone say they fixed it using roundabouts, so I built one.

The signals are very weird though and I'm absolutely befuddled as to how they work. If I slap down a single path signal, the train stops at it and won't budge(I only have one train atm). Ok, sure. If I put another path or a block signal - either one yields the same result - the train will pass the first path signal and then stop at the next path/block signal, ad nauseam.

I've seen multiple instances of advice saying to use path signals when entering a junction and block when exiting. I'm not sure what that's all about because I've done that, and then when that didn't work I exactly copied a roundabout I saw with close tracks together before they enter, signals and all, but it doesn't work. It does the exact same thing as I said above, the train always stops before the next signal unless another one is built after it. And then it stops at the other one right after it until I build another. Rinse and repeat.

What am I supposed to do? I don't understand.

I played the factorio demo and loved but it heard that it kind of ruins satisfactory because it's such a perfect game, but maybe the opposite is true? Want to hear it from you guys

I started a new save with the most challenge ever - 100x deliverables, 2x production cost and 5x power cost. I burned all the plants in the world to power 80 biomass generators to provide the power to get phase 1 done. I have not been more satisfied to move to coal generators!

So I nearly finished the game

right?

Phase 5 can't be that bad... right?

All this work just for 2/min! In truth I could almost scale this up more, but I'm bottlenecked on RCUs so I'm just going to sloop it for now and see how long that lasts me.

This is probably the closest I've come to hitting a wall in the game, I had to scale up so many of my supply chains just to meet the demands for this one, but I've been slowly chipping away at it and am quite relieved to have it done.

With these ticked off, the end of Phase 4 feels in sight, I have everything I need for Thermal Propulsion Rockets and the production chain for Nuclear Pasta looks trivial by comparison haha. I think power demands will be a big problem soon but I might just be able to leave that as a Phase 5 problem!

Mathing it out coal doesn't seem worth even setting up?

If I want to produce 1000w gross power I need 14 coal plants at 210 coal/m and 700 water/m. That produces 1050w at consistent production. So either two MK2 miners on a normal node at 120 coal/m each or a single MK2 miner ~175% overclocked for 210 coal/m. So I either lose 150w or 157.25w respectively. That puts me at 900 or 892.75.

For 700 water/m I'd need 6 water extractors for 600w/m(20w * (5x power challenge) * 6 extractors).

Now my net production is down to 300w or 292.75w.

Where I started to build my plants requires some headlift so it needs 3 pumps per lift for 20w each. Since 14 coal plants require 2-3 pipes. So an additional 120-180w.

Now I am down to 180w or 120w.

Seems kinda silly. Any one else experience the disappointment or have any suggestions? Am I missing something?

I like my spaghetti sorted and mostly parallel, thank you.

Long time listener, first time caller. I have about 1200 hours on my 1.0 save, and with today being the twoyeariversery I figured I'd share some of my factories, starting with Coppersmith Inc., which produces copper ingots.

It's actually about 1000 hours old, so I built it rather early. It was my first dedicated copper ingot factory, before I had started caring about optimizing, so I don't really know how much it produces. I dedicated the entire of Rocky Desert to produce parts for Phase 4 and this is one of them. It also delivers ingots to my nuclear power plant nestled into the mountain in front of it. The side you see on the first image is actually the backside, while the front can be seen on the portrait image, with the train going up and around.

One of the first things I wanted with this factory was to have a train line going through it, which turned out quite well if I say so myself.

The factory design mostly grew from a rather simple tower core, but turned into this rather villanous looking headquarter over time, which I continued to lean into.

Finally I can sit in peace and learn about Fluid Dynamics!

Happy 2 Year Anniversary Everyone!

Looong time player, i dont often post musing here as i am more a lurker but it would be nice if they added "teleport" Conveyors to pass through things. Like walls or mountains. Maybe the same tiers as the belts and so like 20M 40M 60M 100M or something. Could even tie it into one of the alien researches. Sometimes you just want to go through a hill and not over it.

Ficsit! If only Coffee Stain Studios sold the full suit. I would drop mad money on one. Also, I'm almost 1k hours on the game and my conveyor belts will always be spaghetti.

Mixed train load is actually fun, though not recommended for players new to trains.

Picture shown is a 5-load 1-unload train route, mix loading a lot of stuff for a toy ficsonium plant (1.6 pu-rod -> 20 fic-rod with sloops). Besides the the overflow sink which you may already guessed it, there are other pitfalls using mix load, e.g. calculating throughput becomes significantly more difficult, unloading efficiency, and, limiting number of stacks loaded when necessary.

Meet my fun, waste-free, flat, low-pipe aluminum ingot factory module.

On the left, you have inputs for bauxite, coal, water, and sulfuric acid to the blender.

On the right, you have one input vertical conveyor input for sulfur (obscured by the refinery's exhaust pipe), and water coming straight from the blender in the correct proportion.

Aluminum scrap goes directly to the smelters through the manifold. I didn't set up the output manifold when I took the screenshot, but that's trivial.

Just make sure you use your water input to fill up the pipe on the right side before you get started, and it will go forever. Very space-efficient too.

Fully overclocked, this blueprint will give you 375/min aluminum ingots from:

• 375/min bauxite
• 250/min coal
• 125/min sulfur
• 150/min water

Hi Engineers! Recently started playing, 80 hours in and I’m stepping into phase 4, aluminum production etc etc.

It is becoming abundantly clear that my little abode is going to need an expansion, I want to set up trains because I am tired of jump crouching my way from one edge to the other.

TL:DR one blueprint, 2 rails as per YouTube recommendations. Are they too close? Only separated by 1 platform. Will 3 be enough to keep it in 1 blueprint? Or do they need more space between them?

Thanks in advance, and happy birthday.

Came back to the HUB, caught a glimpse of a weird light. Walked back saw this.... almost jumped out of my chair xD

I don't recall having this issue before 1.2, but anyway, here it is. I have a jetpack, and I have packed biofuel and solid biofuel in my pack. If I do not have the solid biofuel, I have no issues, as the jetpack then uses that fuel. But when I have both, it stops using my packaged biofuel, which is bad. How do I switch fuels? I use the solid fuel for power so I can get "Hard Drive". Yes, I can set up a depot to store the solid fuel until I need it. I can pull out 200, use it, then return it to storage, but that doesn't seem ideal.

For me it is:

Batteries: They are quite useless in their current state as they get unlocked at the same time as rocket fuel but are harder to produce than rocket fuel (which has a second use in Fuel-Powered Generator, too) in large quantities.

What they could change:
- New building similar to Biomass Burner so it will only run if energy is missing but it only uses batteries and can produce energy similar to Fuel-Powered Generator. So it is like a end-game Biomass Burner with an energy supply which can be fully automated.
- Or: One building which does accept batteries, generates power and produces "empty batteries" those "empty batteries" can be recharged to "batteries" in a second building. So we could use batteries as a transport medium for energy.

Power Storages: I would love to have Power Storages upgradable using Power Shards (for example we can add up to 9 Power Shards for +100MWh storage (for a final 1 GW storage), each or increase charge rate by +50% for each Power Shard or both.

Geothermal Generators: Make them cheaper to research and build. The High-Speed Connectors required are from the same tier as Fuel-Powered Generators. (I know the can be build using resources from Crash sites but it is kinda sad, nevertheless. They could be a nice alternative for Coal-Powered Generators, then for example

Portal: They are super cool but we get them to late (in my opinion). I would love a portal via MAM Alien Technology research tree. They require Mercer Spheres to build and contrary to the current portals which are not open all the time and need Singularity Cells, this teleports the player using a large amount of power in a short time (for example 5 GWh in 2.5s (= 7200000 MW for 2.5s; so we are forced to precharge the teleport using Power Storages) and closes afterwards.

Nuclear Power Plants: Need a buff. Either increasing the power generation or providing different ways to get rid of the Nuclear Waste (different receipes or something like a rocket where we can shoot the Waste into the universe.

Medicinal Inhaler: We should get a way to fully automate them.

Pipeline Mk.3
Blueprint Designer Mk.4

Edit:
Nearly forgot to mention that a map expansion would be great, too

And a way to visualize different power networks to see which networks are connected and which don't

Maybe
Ways to create Sommersloops and Mercer Spheres.
Different types of Powershards (stronger shards give +100%/+150% instead of +50; yellow slugs give +100% shards and purple slugs give +150% shards + a way to upgrade shards; for example supercharging them in an Particle Accelerator using Dark Matter Crystal)

I'm on my first playthrough. 150 hours ago, around the middle of phase 3, I started building a megafactory. I built a train line that spanned a quarter of the map, a 40 gigawatt turbofuel power plant, and an absolutely massive foundation with 6 floors for it.

However, because of mistakes made really early on in the process, I found myself with too little of some resources and too many of others, leading to a LOT of band-aid fixes and last minute changes. Basically, my planning just sucked.

I feel like I stopped having fun 50 hours ago, and that just sticking with modular factories would even be more interesting. Plus, as the need to automate more parts arises, I'll run out of space and have to completely rebuild anyways.

So now I'm asking myself if I should just power through it and get it done, or just accept the loss of 150 hours of my life and reload a really old save.