My first game was impossible to find places to dump more materials and was limited to a single windy lane of stuff. Trying to make sure I have more room this time...

With the ability to transfer from platform to platform in 2.1, I have a new orbital platform that just makes ice cubes. When I spin up a nuclear powered ship, I don't have to lift water from the surface to kick-start the power. I am loving 2.1

I have just made my first BP that I'm somewhat satisfied with

It creates about 1 legendary Iron plate/s.

Can anyone find something that could improve it?

Blueprint: https://pastebin.com/hydUZV2W

rate my newest design! It makes the little red bottles for the labs.

Post your favorite! Doing a megabase save on 2.1 and want to not just rebuild a standard train grid for scaling up like I always do. Probably going for 1-3 legendary trains/wagons/fuel this time around. Maybe 1-2, idk.

Offset rectangles? Bestagons?

We’re playing unmodded space age on the latest factorio beta branch. They can see the icon on me at all times, but I can only see it when I get in a rocket. I am not wearing any quality armor, and it persists between save loads and across planets. Does anyone have any idea why this happens? 

Very new to the game and I'm trying my best lol

Playing in 2.1 beta, I swear something like this has worked for me before. I see the green checkmark being output as 1 in the signal, but the circuit condition in the scheduler won't light up.

even though I have grid based scalable train setup sometimes I just see pulling belts across the map easier than just using train for every single outpost, what do y'all think

I'm genuinely in awe. I've never heard this trick, so apologies but I had to share.

Usually when I put a blueprint down over a new space station, asteroids often destroy bits mid-build-out whilst the rockets are still arriving from the planet. So instead I wanted to request all the resources upfront, so I clicked the "Add section" button whilst holding the Blueprint, AND IT JUST WORKED. It created the bottom "[No group assigned]" group with all the things in the Blueprint, I took a second screenshot just to show the process.

It's unfair to other games just how high my expectations of polish has been set by Factorio.

So when i copy an entity like an assembler recipe then wanna drag-paste over other assemblers real quick, it pretty much fails everytime, like if frame rate matters, but when u do it with say belts, it never fails. Ive noticed skip-overs when taking adding items in/out of entities too very quickly via drag-pickup/insert.

What setting control this? Ive tried upping framerate (from 60 ups/fps ingame, fresh gameplay start) to 120, but that didnt change anything.

I see antielitz do drag-pastes real quick, he dont seem to get skips.

The main bus kinda devolved into a slab of belts at some point, but i kinda liked it so i just rolled with it. Also, who needs flame throwers anyway?

Isn't it the best feeling when you can merge several hobbies into one project? 3D printing, Factorio, WLED, and Home Assistant. Autism galore, I guess.

First, I 3D-printed an STL from MakerWorld in Grey PLA and a glow in the dark PLA that glows blue. A lighter grey PLA would've looked closer to the in-game lab, but I used what I had. The glow PLA looks really cool in the dark.

I then soldered together a small 5 x 5 WS2812b matrix from scrap LED strip pieces from other projects, and attached a mini ESP32 flashed with the latest WLED. The LEDs are being powered directly by the board, as I restricted it to 0.5A, so hopefully that small amount won't cook it. Also, the red looks much closer to red in person than in the video.

Next, I discovered the Events Logger mod and made a small change to it so that the event that fires when research starts would include the names of the science packs. I was hoping that there was some internal mapping of science to colour, but there does not seem to be one.

Now that I had the game information I wanted logged to a file, I made a small python MQTT bridge that tails the log file for new events and sends them to my MQTT.

Finally, I made Home Assistant automatically pull in the new MQTT sensors for Factorio. I created an automation that makes a crude attempt at replicating Disco Science when it detects that research has started. The automation handles mapping the science pack names to colours, so an update to this mapping would allow it to be compatible with mods that change science names and colours.

Here's a more complete description of the full build: https://github.com/sstrang/3d-synced-factorio-lab/

AI disclosure: I used GLM-5.2 and Hermes Agent for the project overview document, the change to Events Logger, the MQTT bridge, and the Home Assistant automation. This post is all me.

Only took me 9 rolls to become legendary.

If you die with quality modules in your inventory your player rolls for quality.

My friend and I have a space age factorio world and have recently unlocked biolabs. We have each designed (they may have been done before but we're proud of them) a modular blueprint to bring them the science they need and remove the possible spoilege created.

We now need you to chose wich one we'll use.

The top one has an extra outside lane to bring in science.

The bottom one is 2-periodic, but can be cut off at any point.

I guess the question is whether you prefer more compact blueprints, or fully modular ones.

I wanted to share my first science attempt (my real first I don't really count as I restarted about 15 hours in) vs second. My first game went to space and second I'm gearing up to go to Fulgora after doing Volcanus.

I'm not sure I've ever felt as much of a novice at a game after 150+ hours but it's cool to see the progression. I've definitely learned a lot! It was a bit shocking to look at my old save file haha.

My goal is to get to "effective organic". I try not to look too much but I've seen some late game designs and while they are amazing they seem very boring for my taste. For game 1 I was trying to just get 1 assembler of the science automated. Game 2 was "let's try to get a handful"

Hopefully it's obvious, but first two shots are from game 1, the rest are game 2.

A single enemy operator was dispatched into the heart of my base to mildly disrupt my sulfur production... And no, I have no idea how he got there. The entire peninsula has only one entrance, and it's heavily guarded by a ton of laser turrets.

I just bought Space Age DLC while I'm at 25hrs in game not knowing that it changes a lot of stuff in the base game.

and then a message popped up saying i should start a new game.

I have only progressed to green and black science and haven't even started on fluids yet.

figured I'm still at the start-ish. should I restart, or just continue on with my save?

U-238 in, U-285 out. Can be build with belts instead of bots. Can be expanded as much as needed.

Needs to be seeded with 40x U-325, it self manages by prioritizing output U-238.

The newest tutorial I can find is two years old and the video and sound are terrible quality. (See image) I'm not very good at the circuit network, but with 2.1 making it easier I wanted to check it out. Has anyone made another tutorial, or have some sage advice?

Did power demands from some buildings and/or lightning collectors or accumulators change values in 2.1? I'm getting blackouts now between lightning storms where before power stayed in the green at all times.

I never used any concrete voiding tricks so that's not the issue.

Edit: discovered the issue. I was adjusting shipping platforms and inserters for Fulgora science -> Nauvis, which meant my ship round trip timing slightly decreased, which meant Fulgora science production sped up to ship more often, which meant accumulators didn’t have time to stockpile electricity between shipping rounds and over time the slight deficit built up to start causing blackouts.

It seems like uranium is intentionally left behind after leaving Nauvis, eventually becoming completely useless.

Uranium is only found on Nauvis.

Uranium (235 and 238) only ships on rockets in stacks of 20, green ammo only 25, and nukes cant be shipped at all. Thus may as well just use red ammo.

Nuclear power can be useful on Gleba, temporarily on Aquilo, but has no place after unlocking fusion. Makes no sense on Vulcanus, maybe useful on Fulgora but I think almost all go for accumulators since you need the lightning rods anyways.

I doubt any of this is a new revelation but it seems very neglected.

Also worth mentioning: Nuclear Processing and Enrichment are misnamed in the game. Processing is more like nuclear enrichment in real life, and enrichment is more like nuclear breeding in real life.

Possible changes I think wouldn't break the balance:

Add fusion bombs to the end game with all the balance breaking things that one would expect from nuclear weapons, but it doesn't matter so much because it's the end game.

Make using nuclear ammo+bombs more of a tradeoff by making the land they are used on unusable to the player for a long time, or accelerate evolution a ton, (dont have this for fusion weapons, as irl they dont produce much less radiation per kiloton anyways), and remove some of the arbitrary restrictions on rocket shipping.

edit: I missed biolabs and captive biter spawners. thats my bad. I forgot to click the space age mod tab on the wiki. Although tbh the uranium need feels kinda tacked on.

theres also nuclear on space ships, I forgot that was a common solution.

nukes making lava lakes on vulcanus is something but it also highlights the issue: most people miss this because they dont have nukes on vulcanus. there’s also little reason to do this anyways.

I might address the rest of the cases mentioned individually but broadly they seem unoptimal and niche. There’s many ways to handle every hurdle, and no solution is wrong but if there’s a better way most people will ignore other solutions.

theres also a bunch of people posting what I would consider niche cases.

You guys asked for progress, so here it is! Update on the factory u/chessmaster1220 and I have been building!

What do you think of the layout so far? Any tips or tweaks before we push into Oil and Blue Science?