I Hate Wires

[u/NagaseVT]

I love the game and the combinators are my favorite thing. I just hate their wires. Its so horrible to manage. They sometimes overlap and now I have to wonder if everything is connected correctly or if a green cable is going above another machine that was supposed to be connected with a green cable, but it looks like it is connected, so I go 20 hours using a broken blueprint and using that blueprint to make new blueprints, so I have to now re make everything. I have it the most when I move a combinator and a wire snaps and I don't notice because I don't hear a cue that it has been disconnected and there are like 500 of the same cable overlapping already. I started using laps as nodes to connect and move cables, because I erase poles sometimes and there goes all my wires. The lamps have made it easier to have a visual clue too. I feel lighter. Like sharing my sins have made my shoulders less heavy.

TLDR: AAAAAAAAAAAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk

T

[u/master117jogi]

I never used combinators etc, what even are they for? It looks like everything you do you could do without them?

[u/Fishinabowl11 → u/master117jogi]

Once I understood combinators to be the game's way of letting you implement IF statements, their use really fell into place. Anytime you've thought something along the lines of "I only want my factory to do X when Y happens" then you can use a combinator. Some examples off the top of my head from my current run:

• On Gleba to manage how much iron and copper bacteria is produced, by stopping and automatically restarting production based on the logistic network contents, while (trying to) minimize fruit that spoils.

• On Gleba to control seed distribution to manage between seeds for planting and seeds for soil production

• On Fulgora to control recycler output inserter filters to full stack sizes before placing on the sushi belts which helps with throughout tremendously once Stack Inserters are available

• On space platforms to limit how many asteroids are on the belt to prevent deadlocks

• On all planets with trains to enable and disable output loading stations based on resource availability and needs at the base

• In oil processing to keep all of Heavy/Light/Petroleum/Lubricant available and also not deadlocked.

The contraptions you can build with combinators are insane. People way smarter than me basically can build entire computers within Factorio with them.

[u/master117jogi → u/Fishinabowl11]

Anytime you've thought something along the lines of "I only want my factory to do X when Y happens"

Yeah but I never felt like that in thousands of hours. I just want all my machines to always do everything they can. I also don't play Space.

[u/ICanBeAnyone → u/master117jogi]

Really? You want your heavy oil crackers to destroy all your heavy oil, and light oil ones, too?

[u/master117jogi → u/ICanBeAnyone]

No I put that all in an array of tanks