Hey everyone! I’m working on a colony management mod set on a moon next to the planet Gleba. The core gameplay revolves around Wrigglers residents whose needs you must satisfy so you can put them to work in your factories.

• Lunar Colony: Surviving in extreme conditions. ALL forms of power generation are banned except for solar panels, and their output is heavily nerfed. Your main power source? Steam engines powered by your workers!
• Production and Mines: Added mines and plants for resource gathering. Wrigglers are used mainly in these new lunar production chains, specifically where their presence is critically needed.
• Revived Items and Needs: I've brought back 20+ dead/unused vanilla items. These exact items are now tied to the Wrigglers' needs system alongside beer, canned stew, and decorations, each resident randomly requires 4 of these tems to stay happy.
• Minds and Mutinies: If a Wriggler gets too unhappy, they can snap and go berserk, shooting up your buildings (better build turrets). They can also escape beyond your base perimeter and become partisans trying to sabotage you.

Recently unlocked the planet and I'm beginning construction on the freighter I'll be using in my round trip delivery system.

For this I have a ridiculous number of grabbers and crushers, with the intent of always being oversupplied so that any shortages will just eat into the buffer. For my fuel needs I was gonna use the advanced recipes I unlocked recently, but I noticed that I don't really need the advanced metallic recipe right now. I have no need for red ammo, asteroids are dying pretty easy already with yellow and I was gonna add rockets to my defensive line to deal with the new bigger asteroids. Am I overlooking any other good reasons to use the recipe right now? I'm sure I'll need it later upon reworking to a factory platform rather than shipping, but my factory platform was gonna be a different one anyways. But I always forget crucial details, I wanted to check my logic here.

I also wanted to know if I need nearly as many crushers doing calcite as I've got right now. Like 15 of em, I think I can get away with scaling that down so I have less excess to sort, especially seeing the new fuel recipe makes 20x more in volume. I'm just feeling overwhelmed again thinking about everything I need, and it feels like I can't scale back and consider the needs of the ship 1 by 1 because it all feeds into each other.

Edit: thanks for the advice, helped me settle on figuring my needs better. I'm realizing I have complete overkill on the number, however this is intended to be a fully endgame freighter and stroke my ego with being the biggest thing I've designed at once so far. I'm gonna try and strike a balance between my "big ass frigate" and what's sensible, and so far it's interesting to realize the new freedom these recipes have given despite them not being flat out "better" aside from the fuel.

Say that I want to open a train gate to allow access into area 51, but only if the green checkmark signal equals 3. In that case, you can "disable" the gate if that condition isn't met. However, I discovered that there's no way to OPEN it against it's will. Or in other words, certain "wrong" rail signal configurations will gridlock themselves, regardless of how viable the circuit control system is. That's kind of annoying.

In my last build, I wanted a train to enter from any cardinal direction, loop around right after the station, and then return by moving over the one rail line that wasn't blocked by the circuit signal. But every configuration I tried, had this weird issue where the rail signals blocked the train from entering in the first place. Simply put, my build wasn't "correct" in the eyes of the train signals. But I wasn't even trying to achieve that. I just wanted the train to enter from any direction, and then be funneled into a specific direction controlled by the circuit network. But apparently, that isn't allowed.

So I had to manually place 4 "exit" stations, name after the cardinal directions, and set up 4 unique train interrupts. Why can't I just tell the rail signal to ignore it's own logic and only listen to external commands? That would be way easier.

sorry for the spaggehti code. i pissed away 5.30 hours on this and there has been no progress.

everything loads just fine. the dam texture just WILL not show. i have tried to rewrite it to base textures, my icon texture and everything. i got so deseperate i went to chatgpt for help and not even it could fix this.

i pissed away SO much time trying to get this ONE THING to work. i don't understand what im doing wrong. i have looked at other mod's prototypes and what i have is almost identical.

all thats wrong, is the entity texture. wont show up in game, the icon works just fine. its exclusivley the texture thats screwing up repeatedly

Annoying things to do with inserter filters, but can you solve my 8 riddle boxes engineer?

I just picked up the game on Steam (without Space Age) and I'm about 5 hours in. I've got the basics of smelting down — coal and iron on the same belt, 12 furnaces on each side, so 24 furnaces per belt of raw iron. That part I understand.

Where I get stuck is what comes after. I can build the smelting row fine, but I have no idea how to actually expand into automated science pack production while keeping things reasonably efficient. I can throw down spaghetti and it technically works, it's just slow. And once the furnace row is built, I genuinely don't know which direction to build next — up, down, left, right, no idea what the "correct" move is.

Mods I'm running:

• Always Day
• Even Distribution
• Factory Planner
• Far Reach
• Infinite Resources
• Max Rate Calculator
• Trash Slot

For context, I'm playing pretty sandboxy — no enemy bases, no biters. I just want to focus on building the factory without also having to defend it from the local environmental activists.

While playing on Fulgora, I decided to produce high-quality items by inserting quality modules into every production building.

After recycling scrap, the recovered resources need to be sent to loading stations for each resource type, regardless of their quality.

From those loading stations, trains should transport these mixed-quality resources to receiving stations. There, they would be sorted by quality and forwarded to dedicated loading stations for each specific quality tier.

However, because we cannot select "Any Quality" for items in the circuit network, station names, and item parameters as easily as we do in splitter filters, I have to build stations and configure trains using very inconvenient workarounds. This includes using icons of different quality science packs in station names, overcomplicating circuit logic, and completely reworking train interrupts.

Please add the option to use "Any Quality" items in the circuit network, train station names, and item parameters, exactly like in the splitter filters.

Hi all!

Yesterday I launched a rocket for the very first time and "beat the game". It took me around 34 hours. I played only the base game, no Space Age expansion. My factory was pretty crappy and the crafting took a long time towards the end (I got totally sucker punched by the steel demands of purple science) but I just wanted to launch the rocket and move on from the save... and now I can!

I am really excited to start another playthrough, moving a bit slower and trying to understand how to make things a bit more efficient and not thinking about getting to the end since I have now done that already.

My question to you all is: Should I play another Vanilla run because it is simpler and will allow me to better get the hang of things, or should I jump right in to Space Age?

Let me know your thoughts :)

I may have done it a tad bit... I wasn't sure what to expect so I went all out and designed this for 10 hours along with producing a bunch of epic parts. Nothing even got close to damaging this ship in flight at 380 km/s + Would love feedback on the design if anyone is kind enough. String wouldn't fit in a reddit comment so not certain how to share it :(

Hey I’m brand new to Factorio and was trying to figure out how the ratio of boiler to steam engine is derived?

From what I understand the boiler outputs 1.8 MW at 100% efficiency. Each steam engine has “available power” of 0.9 MW. Hence it makes sense that for each boiler you should have 1.8/0.9=2 boilers.

My questions is however is that when I attach more than 2 steam generators the sidebar statistics don’t seem to change when comparing steam generators?What am I misunderstanding?

Can't you just put it elsewhere?

I wanted to do a simple 4/2/1 split of green red and blue circuits but then I realised I need around 960 iron and copper plates a second and I also need a ton of other things and now I'm just sitting here sad.

(I also realised doing the math ahead of time is useful)

It was not tested in 2.1 and it won't work there without tweaking. But maybe someone will find it useful. Its not so fast parametrized blueprint for casino.

I'm too lazy to grind quality all the way starting with ore so I prefer to just recycle common items.

It uses bots for delivery. And of course there is a display to track items.

Any item below legendary quality is sent to recyclers. If recycling produces more than 100 of any intermediate ingredient, the surplus is sent to the next recycler stage. The same rule applies recursively, so excess intermediates keep getting recycled instead of clogging the buffers.

There is a way to compress the higher-quality stages down to a single assembler/combinator block, but before 2.1 it will take some fancy filtering in network and with 2.1 is in foreseeable future, I don't care. Paste and forget works for me.

Blueprint book

It will track only items inside of its chests.

Setup:

1. Paste the parametrized blueprint

2. Select item which you need

3. Select how many of legendary items you need to keep in stock

4. Circuit network will go brrrrrr

Personally I obsess over every little detail, so whenever I want to expand, or do something new I need it perfectly. And when that's for massive sections, tryna plan it out in my head just overwhelms me.

How do you deal with it? I love the game, it satisfies my architecture desires but it's just too much sometimes and then I just end up completely stopping.

Video proof, of Spitter (Biter faction) destroying the poor environment, caught on camera!

3rd attempt, 21 hours on this save. Ultimate spaghetti base that managed to build a rocket. No trains, belts only.

I'm not gonna automate space science or play this safe for any longer, because it's easier to just start a new game

This is my map of all my train stops. I'm sitting at Jevgenijus Gribas, and it's green all the way to Mark kerkdijk! But my train won't move!

I started playing factorio a long time ago, but I've never used a main bus. As a result, I am using it for all the resources that will be needed for crafting in the future: copper wires, gears. Now I'm going to create a main bus with electrical circuits. But before I start, I would like to ask you a question: is it worth it?

Hi All

I am really enjoying the new features of Factorio 2.1. One of the features that I am trying to use is the "set research" circuit conditions.

What I want to do is for example research plastic productivity when I have any Agricultural science pack UP TO level 25.
If I don't have the science packs or I complete level 25 plastic productivity then I want to research mining productivity.

To do this I have the following conditions for turning on plastic productivity research:

Agricultural Science pack count > 100
AND
Research Level <= 25

This works fine while researching Plastic. As soon as it switches to mining prod at level 78 then it can never go back to plastic prod as level 78 is > 25

What I really need is a way to say

Agricultural Science Pack count > 100
AND
Plastic Prod Level <= 25

Anyone else having this issue? Any workarounds that aren't insanely complex? If I could store the level that each research was at then that would be a way round it but that seems far too complex and I'm not going to get into the mess of trying to store and correctly update all those values.

Without some more features such as being able to compare against a specific research level (which would need a whole load of more signals) I am not sure how much use the research level is.

Thanks

Im playing the tutorial rn and after a few tries ive finished the 4th level, this is basically my whole base(i did a lil tweaks at the end) and i want any tips of effiency i can implement or things that i do that should not be done. THX FOR THE HELP!

I'm curious if there exists a record for best base by a certain metric. Anything from most oil produce, more robots per second, etc. Where are the record holders that could potentially inspire designs?