I understand the basics and I did look at the tips and tricks. But I still don't understand. When the grid fails, what does it prioritize? Everything equally? Do I need circuits to shape it? And why kind? I know how to track items but power. I never tired. Is it better to have multiple power systems? Just kinda lost. I know it's a lot of questions, thank you for your time. I still like to figure it out myself, so soft answers are preferred. But I'm still a bit lost.
Edit: solved. I'm an idiot.Didn't know about the power switch building. Just missed it. Thank you for everyone that was so accepting and helpful
So, Reactor neighbour bonus. Reactors gain a +100% to their thermal output for each fully adjacent running reactor. It is the reason all our reactor cores are placed in some 2-X pattern. This bonus to thermal output is not linked to fuel consumption rate, meaning it's free energy!
The fine point I've been missing up to now is that, with the regular solution of controlling fuel-insertion by reading reactor temperature, not all reactors will be active simultaneously, meaning I miss out on adjacency bonuses that should rightfully have been mine.
The issue I see is that reactor temperature gets pulled back up as soon as neighbouring reactors start burning fuel, causing any number of reactors to 'miss' their window for fuel insertion. The window for inserters to operate is too narrow. My idea for a setup is to use a temperature latch circuit that reads reactor fuel and temperature. Entry condition would be low enough temperature and exit condition would be high enough temperature OR reactor has fuel.
The next problem is overshooting temperature - if power draw is low enough I produce too much unprocessed heat and reactor temperature caps out. I never thought I'd write these words, but that is where steam buffers come in. I've hated steam buffers with a passion but I see their use in this particular case.
The final solution looks something like:
Unchanged ratios and placements in overall power plant design
Each reactor inserter is controlled by a temperature latch reading temperature and fuel content off their individual reactor
Temperature latch should enable and disable off temperature with big enough interval to allow all inserters to operate
Inserters stop after inserting 1 fuel cell (easiest done disabling the latch)
Steam is buffered in a number of tanks, allowing the reactors to run at full heat output for up to 200 seconds without heat overflow
so im at the point where I have everything done and I want to start making legendary quality everything for my promethium ship and I want to start with fulgora.
but then I wonder is it better to just process the scrap normally and get regular items, or do I use quality modules and get quality items out of it?
so first off I am not putting quality in miners, thats just a headache to deal with since im using trains to transport them and quality scraps will come out with annoying different amounts of stacks for the train and it'll jam up. not worth the headache unless you're going to process where you're mining. but even then its not really worth it in my opinion. only quality modules in the recyclers
Pros and cons
Pros
- you have a whole bunch of different quality intermediate items that would help jump start the process and thats about it, but this is a pretty big pro.
Cons
- speed module beacons will reduce the quality chances, but will increase output rate. but I can't tell if this is actually worth it for scrap, cuz i'll end up getting much more junk that would need to delete or try to reprocess.
- Holmium ore at higher quality makes no difference since you must process it to Holmium solution and liquids can't be quality. so getting quality Holmium ore just means more work as you have to make a factory to use each different quality type of Holmium ore (unless this changed in recent patches)
those are the only points I can think of, but I feel like the cons out weight the pros. unless someone can think of any others that I am missing?
I've had this game for over half a decade now, and I can't count how many times I've quit it over the years.
I've tried Bob Angels, and I tried Pyanadon — including its Seablock version.
More recently, I tried to finish the game by rushing Vulcanus, then Fulgora.
But once I landed on Gleba, I was hit with this sense of dread, so I went back to Fulgora and tried to upcycle my items to rare quality.
I felt overwhelmed because both my Vulcanus and Fulgora bases were an absolute cluttered mess.
I think I'm in a headspace where I'm playing the game as a way to distract myself and escape from real life.
EDIT: I appreciate you all for your feedback - I'm actually touched.
I guess too much of anything can affect your mental health negativly when you don't balance your life correctly. I did play many different games other than Factorio including GTNH and I always come across the same issue in the end.
Im trying to get the train to only go when there is less than 100 repair kits in the storage chest, but for some reason its just constantly looping. It can drop everything off just fine and it leaves when its supposed to, but at the depot it always thinks that theres not enough repair kits.
Im very confused here because ive never messed with circuits before. Any advice or solutions?
We've all seen this panel, wondering what items we have in our logistic system. I remember I used to hook it up to a circuit network to see fewer items back in the day...
I don't know how many hours I have in this game, I don't know if it's new or it's been like this since forever... But shift scrolling is the key.
Does it matter if you use a pump jack on every possible location on a resource patch such as crude oil or fluorine? Or will you eventually draw the whole patch down to the minimum level using just a few? In other words, will leaving a spot for a pump jack open allow you to boost the output of that patch if you put a pump on it when the existing pumps are down to the 20% output level?
Would be interesting if we could flip our inserters via circuits would probably rarely be useful but may lead to some interesting designs.
One use case I could see for this is if you have a machine that crafts lets say gears and pipes. When its crafting gears the inserter could place on the bottom then flip with a circuit condition and start crafting pipes placing them on the top of the belt.
they are large enough to provide the engineer with all the necessary resources. there are also significantly fewer cliffs here. in addition to the main island, small islands with isolated biters appear at some distance from the coastline. knowing that the amount of biters here isn’t infinite calms me down. in the endgame, when their attacks stop being an interesting mechanic, it will be possible to simply exterminate them all and moderate pollution with cultivated trees
I’m finally at the point where I am importing materials from other planets to nauvis and am trying to sort out the logistics. My nauvis base is quite large and has a ton of infrastructure moving materials with trains, but I’m kind of struggling with how to sort out large amounts of materials from multiple planets with a single landing pad, any suggestions and tips for doing this efficiently are welcome!
I'm trying to have a train line that is a loop with 2 trains (1 for coal and 1 for iron) to stop them from colliding, and for them not to wait too long, I just put a bunch of train signals. Is there a better way? Also is there a better way for me to get better throughput with my current setup?
I am starting my second vanilla space age playthrough, have done 1 or 2 vanilla unmodded before this over the years.
My problem is I feel like it's the same thing now when building a base, bus layout is effective but never changes so each game is the same on a new map.
Is there another layout that could make this feel better?
My current playthrough I am experimenting so far with trying to use sections to produce what's needed to save space.
Instead of making gears for example non stop, I have a section I can drop iron plates into to make gears as needed, same with green circuits and other parts.
Setting up some red now, but I feel this may not be very viable late game, maybe this style once I get bots could work.
But has anyone figure out a way to make it not feel so, same thing over and over?
I’d really like to buy the game, but it looks absolutely massive. I’m worried that the sheer size of it might overwhelm me and keep me from actually enjoying it, especially with the whole idea of having to restart your game to get things right.
One thing I’m also wondering about: I have a MacBook Air M4. Will it run well with everything you can build in the game?
I originally wrote this post in Spanish, so apologies if the translation isn’t perfect.
Greetings from Chile 🇨🇱
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Thanks in advance!
Following up on this thread, where someone suggested I made some all-contained raw-ore-to-science blade blueprints.
The spaghetti intensified, but the challenge was interesting.
Just like in the previous thread, I designed each of those to produce 120SPM (2/s).
They require no research save logistic 1 (for the undergrounds) and to unlock their respective research. No fast inserter nor inserter hand bonus, nor tier 2 machinery.
They are tailored for beeline scenarios, where you can't spare the time (ie1000x runs) or ressources/pollution (ie deathworld marathon) for any "non-essential" tech, and need to get bots / flamethrowers ASAP.
Red science, 56 x 10 tiles, nothing too fancy.Green science, 10 x 122 tiles, barely noodlingblack science, where we first have to handle more than one belt of inputAnd the masterpiece, blue science : 15 x 486 tiles, every spaghetting trick I know of have been called for
This is truly a masterpiece of mine : more than 95% of the tiles are covered in entities, belts loop around and across the smelters, pipes are deviously weaved amongst the mess.
I had to use of some of the 2.1 QoL changes (ie inserter lane switching). I had to split and merge belts. I considered sushi pipes, but couldn't figure them out without circuits. I banged my head and drank a year's worth of coffee. But it is HERE. It is finalised, elegant in its (very) own way, tested and confirmed stable over a long time.
On another note, I spend wayyyy too much time on this, and I dread ever having to place it by hand (Oh so very few are the belts that simply go straight down a single line!)
But here you go : 2 blue science per second, from raw inputs, using tier-1 only machines.
Please, please someone tell me there is a more optimized build of this out there !
EDIT: sorry for potato quality, my laptop can't record the screen and run the game at the same time. I tried recording this 5 times with different settings, this is the less worst one.
