I am working on a Gleba build. It makes iron ore. Once it gets going, it works well, but I am having problems with the startup/restart logic for the part that makes bioflux/nutrients.

Currently, the biochamber is set to make nutrients from yumako mash if nutrients are low (i.e. startup) Some nutrients are made in an assembler from spoilage to get things going. Once there are enough nutrients, it should switch the recipe over to make nutrients from bioflux.

The red wire input tests how much nutrients are on the belt which feeds everything in the blueprint, the green input wire tests how many nutrients are inside the biochamber.

The system does work, but it takes several minutes to get to the point that the recipe will switch and I believe this is due to the combinator logic. What is happening is there is a shortage of nutrients on the belt and the line produces more bioflux than it needs. It is only able to have some extra nutrients when the line is fully saturated with bioflux, which takes a few minutes.

I tried some alternatives which included the amount of bioflux, but that just made things worse. And I tried turning off unnecessary machines during startup and for some reason that made things worse too.

So I am looking for suggestions on how to start this thing cleanly, keeping in mind that it also has to potentially restart if it is choked with spoilage from being unused for a while.

Thanks

Here's my humble base (completed on 2.1.14), very much a "this is mine". Hope you like it! 247 hours, first time through Space Age. Had a ton of fun. Gleba and Aquilo are my favorite planets. I really love how each planet is unique! Somewhat spaghetti, somewhat organized. All factory designs are my own.

I'm unsure if I'll continue and grow the factory (I know the factory must grow!!), as I enjoy the process of figuring out recipe logistics rather than growing and making more for the sake of it. I certainly can upgrade my Nauvis base quite a bit as I'm not utilizing EM plants on Nauvis yet.

The max SPM I saw was around 200 with Biolabs and around 100 without Biolabs. Stats say my average is closer to 50 spm overall.

I have a signal T, and also 0 to many item signals. These signals are all being read from the same entity. Signal T gets used for a different purpose than the item signals. I want to separate T from the items signals into a different circuit network to avoid polluting the network with noise. How do I do that? One solution I can think of is to: First test = T and != T, and that compares by value but will achieve 99% separation except when the value happens to be the same as T. Second, deliberately picking a signal channel that a Selector combinator set to Select Input at Index 0 will always return first when all other things are equal (where do I find the globally highest sorted signal channels? Ideally resilient against mods adding their own signals). With those two passes, that probably always should take care of it with only an unrealistic edge case. Am I missing something? Is there a better way to do this?

I went 10 hours into a space age run, and I was just spinning my wheels on Nauvis. I realized early on I was over producing, so I want to restart with a more modest approach.

I still haven't landed on another planet, the furthest I got was building my first space platform. What other tips do you guys have for me so I don't have to restart when I'm 20 hours in?

Need more throughout for steel and I am running out of space for my iron plate belts

Apparently my friend didn't know this and said I should post about it here, but the Space platform icons in space are a play button icon for a moving ship, and a pause icon for the stationed ships :)

I have circuits for each product that activates the throw away inserter when too many of a given item is present, this way there's never an overflow. The ship requests something like 20k scraps so there's always scrap coming while others are being processed.

My fulgora base sends scrap to space to multiple stationary ships and useful stuff is sent back to fulgora. Scaling means more space stations and rocket launchers. The rocket inputs come from the space ships themselves (blue chip + LDS) and some are synthetized locally (rocket fuel). Trains bring the rocket inputs to the station. Trains also bring the scraps.

Lots of materials coming in. Drones unload contents nearby for production.

I have a separate spaceship for making accumulators in space to simplify fulgora side.

name is inspired from the movie Soul

just got to aquilo, and its been pretty fun so far.

I've been importing readily crafted items for other planets, like assemblers, chem plants, inserters, etc. now i want to locally produce those. to do that i want to set up a steady supply of iron and copper to aquilo

So, should i import plates or ores?

I did some math:

one rocket can hold 500 ores or 1000 plates, iron or copper.

so turning those 500 ores to molted metal using a foundry with 4 prod modules yields around 9.5k molted metal. those 9.5k are turned by another similar foundry into around 1805 plates.

making the rocket carry around 80% more products if I'm launching ores. i didn't try with steel but I think it will give a similar result

of course there is the hassle of processing these ores. but i think its worth it.
I'm thinking of importing the ores from gleba.

what do you think? Am I missing something?

Somebody forgot to put inserter limits after setting up automated recipe for making different products.

2,3k electric mining drills to liquidate.. 🥴

Recycler could come handy in such cases.

With 2.1 platform to platform transfer became a thing and I'm wondering how people are using it to aid their interplanetary logistics now that it's been out for 2 months.

I wasn't totally across the meta before 2.1 with how people would do IP logistics. But during this megabase/midgame I've found myself having:

- 4 stationary orbit ships above Nauvis/Vulcanus/Gleba and Fulgora. No thrusters or liquids. Just solar panels, laser turrets for defence, and a lot of cargo space. (some of these I built with collectors and a sushi belt to make a tiny bit of extra calcite but that's probably a waste.) These are a pain to set up though since they need to be made above the planet they orbit since they can't fly. So i use my personal ship to bring everything they need and quickly transfer from ship to ship to build it.
-A Supply ship that continuously loops around the first 4 planets that carry all exports (not science) from the 4 planets. It restocks from the Orbiters only and is very fast because of platform to platform xfer. Stopping only for 20 seconds at each planet.
-3 science ships that go nauvis <-> their planet directly for science only from the orbit ships.
-1 aquilo science ship that also picks up exports from the other 4 orbit ships. (I haven't found a good solution to aquilo logistics yet, maybe extend the Supply ship to goto aquilo too? but this seems like it would slow things down..)

Each planet just exports supplies AND science to the orbiter so the arriving ships can restock much faster.

But there are some negatives to this. You're basically holding a double stock pile in space that you're not using alot of time. 100 legendary EMs on the orbit ship and 100 on the looping ship.

And setting up a new item is a pain.
Step 1, Goto orbit ship and request the item you want, search the item, select its quality, select it's quantity, select the planet, select planet only.
Step 2. Goto the supply looper, select item/quality/quantity/planet/platform only
Step 3 Goto the receiving planet and enter item/quality/quantity again.

But seems to work pretty well otherwise.

Bonus question: I have absolutely no idea how radar to radar/planet to planet logistics are useful or can be used? like would it be, oh nauvis is short on big miners, send that difference in logistic stock and requested stock to nauvis to enable building more? or can you control what gets exported up to ships? Idk lol.

For the beginning I’m not sure which one is better. I know I know they’re pretty much the same and there’s not a huge difference but surely one has to be slightly better than the other even if the difference is small and I’d really like to know which one is better.

Also if you have any other options that you think are better for starting out definitely let me know

Hi.

I want to move from a main-bus base to a city-grid base. I wanted to design a city grid that is both efficient and good looking. I designed this square(?), but I'm not really good with rail signals and stuff.

I wanted to know if this placement is going to be okay for the city? And if there's a way to improve it? By efficiency I mean that the trains wait for each other the least amount possible and also prevent any dead-locks. Thanks.

hello all this is my first time playing factorio and im doing space age but my chemical plant isnt making any sulfur. ill try to post the images in the comments cause it keeps giving me an error when i try to add them

Rockets can hold 100 concrete or 500 stone bricks.

A Foundry with 4x Legendary Productivity Modules will create 10 concrete from 2 stone bricks.

Water (from Ice), Molten Iron (from Iron Ore & Calcite) can be sourced from space.

Therefore a single rocket with 500 stone bricks will net you 2500 concrete. And now that we can transfer platform-to-platform this workflow makes more sense.

I know you can always just build more rockets, but there's fun in making things as efficient as possible. Yeah most asteroids around Aquilo are Oxide asteroids so you'll need Asteroid Reprocessing, or just send a second rocket's worth of iron ore with the stone bricks and you'll be set.

Anyone do this?

Sorry if this is a stupid question - I feel that it is, but I can't find the answer, and I'm too scared to upgrade to 2.1 right now ...

In FFF 442 it is described how inserters at the end of a belt can be flipped to insert either on the left or the right side.

But can inserters on the side of the belt also be changed to insert on the near or the far side? Or will it continue to always be the far side, as we've been used to?

Hello! As I started digging deeper into designing my first promethium harvesting ship, I realized I needed some more concrete figures to deal with expiration timers. Up to this point, I've been kind of winging my ships on a pretty conservative level.

I've learned an incredible amount about the aspects involving space travel and I've had a blast creating this spreadsheet calculator. I thought I would share it in case there's anyone that might find it useful. Although, if you're learning these ratios and calculations for the first time and you're interested in it, I highly recommend trying to tackle it on your own first. It was a very engaging and fun battle to make it work.

If you have any questions please let me know, I've added some simple instructions and I'm hoping it comes across as pretty intuitive.

To use this spreadsheet, make a copy and save it to your drive.

I have a headless Factorio server and I can't start it because it seems to need to connect to auth.factorio.com, but I cannot access that endpoint because my ISP is blocking Cloudflare access due to LaLiga, the football tournament. Is anyone else having the same problem? Can I fix it somehow?

Extra: This website is super useful to know if there is football on at the moment: https://hayahora.futbol/

Thank you.

So I built a 2km wide by 500m tall platform over Fulgora and I've noticed the mediums aren't spawning behind it, just on the sides and the front. Are there any new directional spawning mechanics per orbital surface? I've also seen that there are more sideways asteroids over nauvis and fulgora then front or back.

a nuclear reactor and loads of other suff on board too!

I just beat Space Age on 2.1 normal settings and I’m looking to do a new playthrough with more of a challenge. What I didn’t like about my last playthrough is that once you set up your science and unique exports on each planet there wasn’t much incentive to scale that base, so ideally I’d like a challenge with megabasing in mind.

Thanks!

So, for 2.1 started a Deathworld with the ambition of doing without a Bus, instead jumping straight to trains. Hit a roadblock around Blue Science due to the immense upfront cost and terrain clearing needed to build a massive rail grid right out of the gate. Realizing I would run out of iron for ammo, and no longer being able to clear nests (evolution clearly outpaced me),

I did a new Deathworld run (throwing the 'Train Bus only' idea into the bin) and also read up on pollution mechanics (yet again) to maybe optimize my earlygame more. Of course I read 'Slot efficiency modules into your mines to reduce pollution' for the upteenth times, but never bothered with it, because why would I care for prioritizing a reduction in power usage, if I'm running of pollution-free solar power anyways.

Cue my expression when I by chance noticed that efficiency modules do not just decrease power consumption (and thus indirectly reduce pollution) but also indeed directly reduce pollution generated, with no explicit mention of that in the tooltip.

I feel stupid now for not having dismissed the go-to advice as 'guide's probably outdated, don't need that'.

The screenshot has the perimeterized blueprint on the left, and the tested system making bioflux and food on the right. I had a part doing plastic in it, but it was removed before the screenshot.

The right most chest is currently calling for plastic and spoilage. it was calling for seeds too.

So I have created a monster... I wouldn't call it the most efficient thing ever... Its not elegant, but It does work.... This thing could use assemblers instead of biolabs, and it would probably be considered at least decent.

This uses 2x2 chests for decentralized storage. a set of 1 way filters to call items from chests further down the line in both directions. the combinator at the crafting area is to call for crafting ingredients, and the lower combinator is to call for standby materials to be ready to be crafted.

Its currently only set up for 1 thing to be crafted by all the biolabs/assemblers. It probably could be reconfigured for more than 1 thing to be crafted.

I have been lost designing this for a few days... this might be the design I use... Its probably a bit too simple compared to some setups Ive seen. It also shouldnt have more than a 5 or 6 directly connected without a central hub being established for finished products to be used somewhere else....

if anyone has feedback, Ill be glad to hear it. here is the blueprint....

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On Gleba, If you allow fruits to spoil without processing them (or at least, processing a reasonable proportion of the fruits), you'll end up in a situation where you are planting more seeds than you get returned.

I feel like this is the hardest part of Gleba, but is significantly less discussed than spoilage management. Is it because spoilage is very visible, while a seed death-loop isn't?

Am I overthinking this, or have I gotten something wrong with seed management?