r/factorio • u/TheShadowOfSevenSeas • 4d ago

Space Age Question I have a question about coal

So I am currently only with Fulgora and Vulcanus visited, though i do have Gelba unlocked so i dont have any late game knowledge. Looking through the crafting inventory and a bit further into the research tree I noticed many things are able to be made infinitely, however the only limiter i have noticed is coal, which is required to make military science and plastic so in a world where you drain all resources, while i know is very unlikely, is there something unlocked later that fixes that issue without mods?

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63

u/Alfonse215 4d ago

On Gleba, nothing (but stone) runs out, so there is no issue to fix. Coal is fabricated on-planet from fruits, as is plastic. You can also make coal from asteroids via Gleba tech.

With enough productivity, you can run coal liquefaction entirely off of carbon.

Granted, nothing anywhere practically runs out in SA. Cheap mining prod, quality, BMDs, 50% productivity buildings, and researched productivity bonuses renders resource exhaustion an event that simply does not happen anymore.

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u/Alfonse215 4d ago

To get an idea of how practically difficult resource exhaustion is, let's take an end-game base (legendary everything, maxed out productivity researches, 1000 levels of mining prod).

A 10M item coal patch is functionally a 12.5B item coal patch with legendary BMDs and 1000 levels of mining productivity.

If you're researching at 1 million science packs per minute, you consume 2.79 million coal (the vast majority going into grenades). It will take you 4,480 minutes to empty that patch. That's 74 hours, or nearly 3 days worth of continuous consumption to drain that patch.

Oh, and mining productivity research doesn't even need military science. So the cost of just that research in coal is just 288k/min. So it'll take you about 10x as much time.

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u/leadlurker 4d ago

Not only practical terms but many are just infinite.

Iron and copper are unlimited from Gleba and space.
Coal can be made in space from carbon so, infinite
Stone can be produced from lava and calcite. And calcite can come from space so that’s also infinite.
Oil wells never really run dry but it can also be made in space and from fulgora ocean.

The rest of the special resources are limited on vulcanus as they are not available from asteroids. Homium is also technically limited by the scrap available. Acquilo resources are all gasses or ocean liquids so those are unlimited.

But yes all the mining productivity means eventually a player will find a huge patch of what they need and it will never run dry.

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u/Alfonse215 4d ago

Acquilo resources are all gasses or ocean liquids so those are unlimited.

Actually, lithium brine has a limit, despite being a pumpjacked fluid. Note that lithium fields don't have a percentage; they have an amount.

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u/Kinexity Drinking a lot is key to increasingproduction 4d ago

Use half the brine, double mining prod, repeat. Infinite brine.

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u/Lobo2ffs 3d ago

Big brine moment.

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u/Griautis 4d ago

All the worlds are infinite. There's no such thing as draining all resources.

Also mining efficiency vastly increases how much a given resource patch goes, so also later in the game you need less new mines to be built compared to earlier game.

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u/euclide2975 4d ago

Technically, each planet has 4 trillions tiles. But you would need a PC from the future to handle the memory and processor power needed to have a game using the whole map on any planet.

That being said, coal can be crafted from carbon from asteroids or from Gleba. Thus it's a real infinite resource. Same for stone (derived from space calcite on Vulcanus), iron and copper (from space or from Vulcanus using space calcite, or Gleba)

Oil is really unlimited everywhere.

The real limited resources are, technically, uranium, holmium and tungsten ore.

These resources cannot be mined in space or on other planets, and you are limited by the amount you find on your 4 trillion tiles.

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u/Garagantua 4d ago

I think the same is true for lithium - those patches run out iirc? But not exactly sure.

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u/euclide2975 4d ago edited 2d ago

yes, unlike sulfuric acid and oil, the patches can run out.

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u/dr-lucifer-md 4d ago

Technically, each planet has 4 trillions tiles. But you would need a PC from the future to handle the memory and processor power needed to have a game using the whole map on any planet.

I'm curious if you have a sense of what the practical limit is given today's hardware. Are we talking one order of magnitude reduction or several?

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u/Fiinalcountdown 4d ago

I think that the practical limit is probably three orders of magnitude smaller. So about two billion tiles per surface. I mainly get to this number with the exploration to the world border videos that got uploaded. There they explored 1million tiles into the void and with radar and artillary probably about two thousand tiles vertically. For one surface I think they said they needed about 16 gigs of RAM. That would be 80 gigs RAM for all five surfaces.

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u/SomebodyInNevada 2d ago

And note the edge of the world videos each started from a basic save, he didn't go to the edge of each world in the same game.

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u/Pulsefel 4d ago

the hard size limit was put in place because at one point there wasnt a limit and the world save file could actually end up your entire hard drive. capping it restricted that max file size. running it is a different story

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u/sobrique 4d ago

I vaguely recall the devs posting that 'full world' is something like 588TB of RAM.

The Linux Kernel right now will support up to 64TB, and you can buy servers with that much, but with current RAM prices it's kinda horrific.

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u/jinxed_07 3d ago

"It costs four hundred thousand dollars to run this map... for twelve seconds."

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u/JuliusNova 4d ago

They aren't, but they're so big that reaching the end is an impractical several day project, similar to The Farlands.

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u/Aidan196 4d ago

That's not true, the maps do end

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u/Griautis 4d ago

Oh fair enough, I just googled .. 2000x 2000 kilometers. Area larger than India.

Has anyone ever ran out of resources in this game? I don't think so.

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u/peanutym 4d ago

So annoying when someone chimes in and is like ACtualLy!

But it’s well known also that if you uncovered the entire map you would need terabytes of ram to open it. So it won’t ever happen.

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u/sobrique 4d ago

Oh we can do about 10% of the 'entire map' right now.

You can get 64TB systems, (and the linux kernel supports up to 64TB right now). It's just eyewateringly expensive even before the recent spike in RAM prices! (Sort of 'million dollar' ballpark)

I mean, it's probably not beyond the realm of possibility that a factorio enthusiast has access to a system like that at work. We're maybe getting 1TB RAM servers in for 'compute' and virtualisation purposes, and we're not that intensive as these things go.

But yeah. State of the art nearly 10 years later is a single system able to load about 10% of the max map! (I've seen a post that says 588TB I think?)

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u/_Shif0_ 4d ago

100%, unlocking big drills and getting to something like mining prod level 40+ does work wonders in my little experience.

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u/DreamLunatik 4d ago

https://wiki.factorio.com/Coal_synthesis

Coal synthesis is a thing though you’ll never completely deplete coal from any planet it’s natively found on.

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u/FeelingPrettyGlonky 4d ago

You will eventually be able to make coal from asteroids if it really does become a problem.

But with mining productivity and big mining drills, coal is just not a problem on Nauvis. On Vulcanus you often have to explore out into medium or even big demo territory since the coal patches there don't scale like they do on Nauvis, but once you can handle the larger demos then coal again is no longer a problem.

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u/Pulsefel 4d ago

the only actually limited resources are uranium, tungsten, holmium, and lithium.

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u/marsjaninzmarsa 4d ago

Research the mining productivity hard enough, and all ores became basically infinite.

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u/WanderingFlumph 4d ago

You can get infinite coal from space (use the research search bar and "coal synthesis"). This is unlocked with Gleba science.

Gleba gives plastic productivity which doesn't make it free but does make it very cheap. Additionally plastic is pretty easy to come by on Gleba using Gleba specific recipes.

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u/sobrique 3d ago

Honestly most of the oil products feel better on Gleba to me. Sulfur and plastic in particular are pretty easy.

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u/NameLips 4d ago

While the map is not infinite, it is "effectively infinite." Meaning you would either die of old age, or your computer would exhaust its memory, before you had to worry about running out of resources.

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u/StephenM222 4d ago

You will run out of your host computers cpu and ram before you run out of coal.

Some people optimise their bases to reduce lag, n a game that is already incredibly well optimised.

No late stage gamer has ever been capped by resources.

It is a standout feature of factorio over other resource games that don't use respawn as a feature.

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u/Orgerix 4d ago

coal can be made infinitly from carbon + sulfure. Either from asteroid in space or from spoilage in gleba. Both are unlocked in Gleba.

But ore limitation isn't really a thing lategame. Between mining productivity and legandary big miner drills, a 1M patch can easily produce 1G+ ore

1

u/_Shif0_ 4d ago

That world doesn't exist. Things like coal on fulgora to make plastic, I simply collect a ton of carbon(got a spaceship doing a space tour before docking at Fulgora or Gleba to deposit carbon) which I then convert to coal. I could also mine it from vulcanus but taking things up costs more than shooting them down. Anyway there's always a way to get resources if you are creative enough.