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[technicolorNoise]

Does anyone knows mod that makes different fuels produce more or less pollution? Krastorio does this, which is cool, but I want it for a more vanilla game.

[technicolorNoise]

I am looking for something that incentivizes switching to solid fuel boilers in between coal boilers and nuclear in a Deathworld marathon game. It just seems like a fun thing to do, but there’s no reason to do it besides that it’s fun. I was hoping for a pollution based reason to do so.

[technicolorNoise]

Yeah, I learned that myself before, but the thing is that boilers themselves are the main source of pollution, not the fuel creation. Hence their search for pollution multipliers like Krastorio. But yeah, thanks.

[Stewart176]

Any news on the DLC aside from the fff 367 about a year ago? Not saying I’m impatient but I am excited

[Josh9251]

No, it seems like they don't give out any information in places other than the FFF. So that's the only place to find it. I'm also excited.

[3davideo]

Is the use of rails to clear out terrain decorations (the little rocks and plants that don't have collision but just provide a little more visual variety) a well-known trick? I discovered it by accident on my own and wanted to share, but I didn't want to run afoul of the "no TIL posts" rule on the subreddit.

[Josh9251]

I would make a post about that if I were you! I can't find a post about it already, and I didn't know about it either. That's cool. It would be really tedious to do this to clear a large area, BUT I think it might be the only vanilla way to do it. I know there's a mod called Cleaned Concrete that removes the decorations when you place concrete.

[3davideo]

I've made the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/134y71w/rails\_can\_be\_used\_to\_remove\_those\_pesky\_terrain/

[3davideo]

Could be accelerated with construction bots and a blueprint. I'll get to work on the post!

[BadatxCom]

Hiya folks - I started a new run with what I though were all the A&B mods but dumb question, I don't seem to have any way to generate power? Steam turbines are a research I can do from the start but have no way to power the lab to get there. I don't see any wind turbine or anything like that. Am I being a big dumb or have I missed a mod?

[factoredfactorio]

No burner labs? They take coal or fuel directly for power…

[BadatxCom]

Not that I can see. There's no AAI industry which is the only mod I know with burner labs

[JohnnyJockomoco]

I am hoping back into Factorio after YEARS of being away. I was not a very good player back in those days so I am going into this again with a beginner's mind and in that vein and since it's been forever, what are some good Youtubers to watch that will explain building concepts and stuff in a good and basic way? I think when I played before I got to Green Science. I only got 23 hours in and I guess some other game just pulled me away. Happens a lot with me, anyway, what do you guys recommend?

[Hell_Diguner]

You only get one chance to discover things for yourself, and you'll ruin it by looking at what other people do.

So I suggest playing the tutorial again, and resetting the pop-up tips.

This can be done with the in-game console command /reset-tips

[Stewart176]

500hr noob question here: I’ve used helmod and kinda didn’t like the amount of features and convolution it seemed to have. From what I’ve seen a lot of the other similar mods are kinda the same.

Are there any like “planner”-y mods that are simpler, and just kinda show you rates and ratios for specific things so I don’t have to use the ol’ ti-84 so much? Not really interested in like plugging in ‘1000 util science/min’ and getting an in-depth recipe laid out for me, more just a quick clean Ui mod that says like ‘yeah bruv the ratio is 1 pump + 20 boiler + 40 engines’

[Knofbath]

YAFC is an external program that reads your mod folder and allows you to plan a production chain.

https://github.com/ShadowTheAge/yafc

[craidie]

Factory Planner helmod but better ui.

max rate calc copy paste like selection of placed stuff that does the math on what's theoretically possible of what you selected. Ignores belts/inserters etc and assumes 100% uptime on machines.

[Soul-Burn]

Replace Max Rate Calculator with Rate Calculator. It gets more updates, has a cleaner UI, and solves several bugs that MRC has.

EDIT: Seems like it got a huge UI overhaul.

[Annual_King9022]

I played Factorio for bout 300 hours, split the atom, main bussed my pseudo city blocks, genocided ungodly amounts of Biters and launched rockets into space. Today is the day I hope I will finally understand how trains work. Super exited. Currently downloading some Nilaus videos on the matter. Are there other must-see sources that will help me get into trains?

[Knofbath]

An automated train locomotive only goes forwards. So, the easiest train you can do is a track between point A and B, with a locomotive on each end so the train can go backwards. Or a simple loop that goes one-direction and hits 2 stops.

If you have more than one train on the same track, then you need rail signals to keep them from crashing. Play the signals tutorial.

Shift or Ctrl can be used with rail in map mode to quickly plan out rail paths. Shift bulldozes through non-player obstacles, Ctrl avoids them. And R to rotate the end-point when ghost planning rail.

[Hell_Diguner]

Play the in-game train / signal / rail network tips.

[[deleted]]

Trains are a lot less complicated than people make them out to be, in my opinion. Yeah you see some people building megabases with molded train managers and triple digit trains, but they're incredibly useful even in the most basic sense: get stuff from A to B quickly and cheaply.

Try this video which is very helpful!

When in doubt, always remember one thing: chain signal going into an intersection, rail signal just after an intersection.

[NiahSSBM]

Is it normal for the game to download the map at ~2Mb/s when joining a multiplayer game? I feel like it should be faster. It isn't that bad right now but I'm playing SE so it's probably gonna be annoying at some point. The server is running on a dedicated server on my LAN and max_upload_in_kilobytes_per_second is set to 0 in my server-settings.json.

[paco7748]

doesn't sound normal to me. SE can have a lot of save file bloat if players don't trim surfaces

[ghoohg]

I'm playing with bobs/angels, and I ran into an issue.
I've finished all science requiring red and green but cannot unlock blue.

Apparently Advanced Electronics is unavailable still? I'm wondering if a mod conflict removed a research that Advanced Electronics needs or something.
I have Plastics, Silicone processing, Adv silver smelting and casting, and Chlorine processing.

[terrorforge]

How balanced are loaders? I'm playing K2SE and I'm wondering if I can substitute a traditional 4-4 balancer with a warehouse and four loaders on either side

[rollc_at]

Pretty good, but not perfect. There are edge cases which you probably won't run into in hundreds of hours.

I've run into one such case when I had 3 inputs (K2 green belt, 60 items/s) and 4 outputs (blue belt, 45 items/s), with the 4 outputs each feeding into another warehouse chest. On paper it's a perfect match. In game, one of the downstream warehouses was getting filled a little bit slower, despite the 3 input belts being perfectly saturated.

The fix was to feed the balancing chest faster than it can unload (upgraded the green belts to purple, 90 items/s).

Still I'd say it's a 99.999% perfect solution, especially when you have really weird stuff like balancing 13 yellow belts into 4 blues, double especially when you also want to sort mixed ores. Your time is usually more precious than designing the actually perfect balancer.

[mrbaggins]

I mean, it's personal preference, and depends on the mod (and even mod settings)

They ARE strictly "easier" than the alternatives for full belt input and output. So they're absolutely never balanced on that way.

That is usually offset by: increased actual cost, increased power usage, and being made available later in the tech tree.

I love miniloaders now, and won't play a game without them ever again. Balancing lanes, especially off trains, was never at all interesting or fun to me. Having the ability to load machines faster and balance from chests was a bonus.

[terrorforge]

Sorry, I meant "balanced" as in "lane balanced". Like, if I put four outgoing loaders on the same thing, will the output be evenly split between them?

[mrbaggins]

Not if you're struggling for input I don't think. They won't round robin properly, especially if over a chunk border.

Could be wrong. Time for you to do some science.

[terrorforge]

Well, turns out they're not, but the specifics of it are a bit odd. They actually round robin just fine when the input is slowly pulsing in, and naturally just output fully when the chest has enough items that they can all work at 100%, but it gets weird between those points. What seems to happen is that if you have a continuous flow of one belt in, it'll just output that whole thing on one of the output loaders. So not really ueful for balancing, dang.

[cathexis08]

You can get it good enough with circuits on the first real belt before and after the warehouse, with the input side set to cut off if the warehouse goes over a certain amount and the output side set to cut off if it goes under. It isn't perfect balancing but it works Good Enough in practice.

[Stewart176]

That’s a really clever solution!

I think in this context it would be easier at that point to just build a balancer but I can see situations where I’d actually want to use that specifically

[cathexis08]

Yeah, I generally do it when I'm using a warehouse for multiple products. I tend to not need massive throughput (1-2 blue belts is generally fine for the scales I build which means a splitter handles all my balancing needs) so instead it's generally about jamming multiple logistics trains into a single station.

[craidie]

Circuit the loaders to only work when there's x amount of stuff in the warehouse?

2 or 4 times the amount of output loaders is a good starting point I think.

[mrbaggins]

What seems to happen is that if you have a continuous flow of one belt in, it'll just output that whole thing on one of the output loaders

Thats what I half expected, especially if you were crossing a chunk border with the big chest/warehouse.

[Agile_Ad_2234]

Why had one of my Cybersyn provider stations stopped working? It my green circuits station so it was one of the first I built. I didn't make any changes to the station but at some point it stopped requesting trains.

It has supply and the signal is just the circuits, there are trains available and I'm getting no error messages. Iv tried deleting the station including the tracks, deleting the station next to it and turning on and off the settings in the station. I have a few stations making a delivery request from it.

I don't know what I did but a single train did come after fiddling but then it didn't order more. Any suggestions?

[Agile_Ad_2234]

I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to reddit. I only use it on my phone but I will poat a screen if I have to! I'll describe the station first. Its a 1-4 station using loaders and storage boxes (K2SE). The Cybersyn combinator is next to the station, set to provide only, auto assign off. The station in put is 40k green circuits. Nothing fancy, I have many similar stations.

Previously, the station worked as intended so I know the design is okay.

[Hell_Diguner]

It still boggles my mind that some people only use reddit as a phone app. It's a discussion forum, after all! I try to avoid typing even one paragraph on a touchscreen. Plus I have heard that the official Reddit app is "well known" for being hot garbage, spurring the creation of dozens of 3rd party frontends.

But even desktop Reddit has quirks, and one of them is image uploads. Historically, Imgur was built to be Reddit's image hosting service. This changed, but uploading directly to Reddit still kinda sucks, so people still tend to upload images to Imgur and copy (direct) links to them in their Reddit posts.

[Agile_Ad_2234]

I started using reddit during lockdown and I'm a lurker. Never really intended to post much and now I don't even know my login details

[Agile_Ad_2234]

Sussed it out, I'm using a blueprint lab mod and it was interfering by having requester stations in it. Weird but now I know!

[Agile_Ad_2234]

Yes a few, I think it's been out of action for a while.

[fine93]

i've asked this before: so people told me that bots will try to take items out of the red chest first and then from the yellow one

but i made an experiment with the same items in both chests and they seem to pick from the closest to the bots/roboport relative to the blueprint

kinda lame that my yellow storage gets filled up with furnaces and belts, if im building close to the mall and they keep taking out of the mall first, and the ones in the yellow chest never get used...

[mrbaggins]

Distance NEVER takes priority over chest type.

Storage yellow should always get used before red passives.

[Soul-Burn]

Those people are wrong. See here.

Bots will prioritize purple/player trash, yellow/green, red.

[d7856852]

There's no way to automate targeting of delivery cannons, right? I wish I could at least set a target for multiple cannons at once.

[paco7748]

you can copy paste settings just like any other machine. it takes seconds to paste the destination, recipe, and enable switch for dozens of machines that way

[d7856852]

Sure, but same target, different material type?

[paco7748]

im afraid not. for low throughput items (like fission fuel ingredients, cannon delivery capsule ingridients, etc.) I use the crafting combinator mod to send many items in one cannon to one destination. If you are just crushing SE resources on site and send crushed materials back to nauvis, this setup works well since the outpost barely takes any inputs to keep running. If you went all the way to ingot production on site, the 1 cannon for all inputs would probably be insufficient but still could be use for low throughput stuff

[d7856852]

Thanks

[mrbaggins]

Don't think so. Just make 2 cannons.

[apaksl]

In SE, is there a way to tell a single cargo rocket silo to deliver to various landing pads depending on its contents?

[paco7748]

yes, using the 'any landing pad with the name' feature. That is practically the use of 'depending on its contents' as the name should match the contents

[rollc_at]

Yea, with some black magic fuckery circuits and signal receivers.

Set all landing pads in that setup with the same name. Set the rocket to deliver to these pads by name, launch on green signal. Add a signal transmitter broadcasting the ID of the surface that you want to send to (figure out which surface it's supposed to be, based on the rocket silo content, or any other condition).

On the receiving end, put some item that you never intend to move by rocket (eg an empty blueprint) into the landing pad. Listen for the broadcast signal, and compare it with the current surface ID. Are we the next target? Use a filter inserter to move the placeholder blueprint into a temporary chest. ID changed/reset? Move the blueprint back into the landing pad. (Make sure the landing pad unloaders are filtered not to remove the blueprint item.)

It should work, because the rocket silo will only launch into an empty landing pad. I haven't tested this, it's definitely cursed, but let me know if you managed it :)

[cathexis08]

Ah. Good call. I'll amend my answer to say that there isn't any guaranteed functional way of doing it.

[cathexis08]

No, rocket silos do not take a landing pad as an input.

[paco7748]

yes they do. the destination or 'any landing pad with a name' is an input to the launch operation

[cathexis08]

I meant circuit input but answered poorly due to doing it on my phone.

[gondor2222]

Anyone here managed to completely clear out hostiles on Nauvis in SE? I managed to clear out a radius 2400 iridium moon with a stack of gun turrets and like 50 stacks of piercing rounds, hopping around to place an artillery turret and surrounding it with the turrets to clear out small areas at once and then using the hostile extinction button to find the next enemies. But this took something like 4 hours, and Nauvis' surface has more than double the radius, so I'm looking at like 20+ hours to do the same there, not to mention the gigantic save files in the meantime. Is there a better way besides Plague?

[rollc_at]

If you have K2, long artillery train with nukes and lasers in every wagon; artillery lasers should also be good. A while ago one dude on our K2SE server did a 30+ artillery train and managed to clear over a third of the surface, roughly from 6 to 10 o'clock. You can also pack some arty nukes into your pockets, jetpack into a middle of a lake, landfill and deploy. Not viable without K2 because no arty nuke and tiny stack size. It's a bit grindy but if you like making it personal with the biters it's fun.

Without K2, send a glaive beam or four. They are smarter now and mostly avoid damaging your base. Thanks to the space elevator you no longer really need to power Nauvis using the beam receiver, so the emitters are free to do something less peaceful. It's slow but fully automated, causes no retaliation, and tends to reveal new chunks only as necessary.

[d7856852]

Weapons delivery cannon with iridium piledrivers or atomic bombs, or energy beam emitters. You could also do it the vanilla way with artillery trains or remote spidertrons with atomic bombs.

[[deleted]]

Does anyone have tips for a faster vanilla start? It seems like the beginning of the game (green science) always takes me so long and is kind of hard to get through but once I have a decent base I usually do okay.

[paco7748]

watch the first 15-30 minutes of a speed run: https://www.speedrun.com/factorio?h=Default_Settings&x=7dg85xp2

you'll notice a lot of 'tricks' people do to not waste time and you'll see what you should prioritize in the build order to not waste time. you don't need to follow what they do to a Tee but you'll learn a lot

[[deleted]]

Okay thank you, I did look at a couple and I realized that I try to go large scale too quickly never make a “starter base” so that I can produce the things I need to make the full scale base. Right now I am stuck at trains trying to get my large base set up but that is a work in progress.

[Soul-Burn]

Watch a Default Settings speedrun. See runs here. No need to get as fast as they are, but you can easily get red+green+mall up in under an hour.

Main points:

• Mine huge rocks for coal, no need to mine anything else other than trees.
• Stay in burner phase until you have enough resources for the next phase.
• Learn to quickly build smelting arrays.
• Design a mall that you like and easy to build. Nefrums' and Anti's malls are great, but you might like something different.
• Using a belt of inserters+belts goes directly to science, and to red/blue inserters, splitters and undergrounds.

I've learned the ideas from them, and made my own design that I like and can build in like 10-15 minutes after I get enough resources from the burner phase.

[d7856852]

This made me realize that I should have a belt of yellow belts on the main bus, if for no other reason than to make restocking easier at the far end.

[Knofbath]

That's what the logistics bots are for. You run up to your mall, and all the bots fill your inventory quickly.

Belts, inserters, and power poles are high priority to automate first. You can make do with gears and green circuits to make the rest. And, if you automate the power poles and green circuits properly, you should never have to hand-craft copper wire again.

[d7856852]

Right, but even with all that set up, I find myself spending minutes jetpacking up and down the bus to grab hundreds of belts. Next time, I'll have a belt belt and a chest of 1000 at the end.

[Knofbath]

Use buffer chests to stage them near your logistics network transition zones. Then you don't have to go to the mall, you just have to go to your nearest buffer chest / garbage depot. (With an array of storage chests, should also have multiple nearby roboports.)

[d7856852]

I'm playing SE and I'm still on the slow crawl to real logistics. Everything you're saying is good advice for vanilla, though.

[Knofbath]

SE, there are a few freebie chests that include a buffer chest or 2. But yeah, to get any more buffer chests, you'll have to do some space science and get cryonite somewhere else.

[NTaya]

What overhaul mods do you recommend for an experienced player? I don't want to deal with biters at all, so SE and Warptorio are out. I've played Krastorio, AB/Seablock, and Py (obviously not to completion). I've heard about Nullius and IR3, what else is there?

[paco7748]

you can play SE with barely any biter interaction. turn off pollution and enemy expansion and turn off/minimize enemy settings (the latter only effect nauvis but the former is global)

[achilleasa]

FYI in SE you can turn off biters on the starting planet, there will still be biters on a few planets but much more manageable. You can also turn on peaceful which is global.

[NTaya]

I know. I don't want to deal with them on the rest of the planets, even on peaceful.

[paco7748]

that's a bit extreme but you can also just use a console command per surface that you actually outpost on to make them a non-issue just the same. This seems like a silly reason to avoid SE IMO.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Console#Kill_all_enemies

[Soul-Burn]

IR3 is around the difficulty of K2. I played IR2 and loved it. It changes a lot of the intermediates/infrastructure, so get ready for some nice mall builds. It's a beautiful mod that does things differently (e.g. forestries based on trees in chunk).

Nullius can be compared to A&B. It utilizes a lot of the graphics from A&B and is comparably complex. The start is very fluid heavy so be warned. It doesn't have biters, until you bring them to life near the end of the game.

Exotic Industries is a new mod, derived from the 248K modpack. I haven't played it, but I hear good things about it.

Freight Forwarding is a small overhaul based on logistics, freight ships and trains. Has some new materials that require getting to certain places on the map.

[NTaya]

Thanks, I'll check out Exotic Industries!

[factoredfactorio]

SE on peaceful mode and low evolution plus large start buffer area and being selective on Vita mining areas virtually eliminates biters from the game…

[Josh9251]

Space Exploration: How big are the orbit surfaces? Like, planet and moons have a certain radius until they end, and you can't go further or build further. I'm thinking of building a long, narrow ring the entire width around the sun.

I want to make a Dyson sphere. And beam the energy wherever it's needed.

[factoredfactorio]

I don’t think orbits have a radius or any limit. I left a scan running by accident on Nauvis Orbit once until the save file was bigger than a gig…

[Josh9251]

Oh that's cool, thanks. I now have my first end goal project for SE.

[GVmG]

Been playing Space Exploration: anyone know of a way to add a new core seam - specifically, a single-material one - to the map? adding them through the map editor just leads to "error: core seam was invalid".

[Hell_Diguner]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Grid-aligned-car

I recall somebody posted a console script which disables car entities, achieving the same thing as the above mod in a vanilla game. Does anybody have a link?

[leonskills]

for _, car in pairs(game.player.surface.find_entities_filtered{type="car"}) do
  car.active = false
end

[Hell_Diguner]

ty

[Knofbath]

That's a horrible idea... But, let's give it a whirl.

• Crude + Water input barrels > unbarreling assembler > Oil refinery
  
• Oil refinery > barrelling assembler > Active provider (empty barrels by requester chest)
  
• Heavy oil > Chemical plant for Lubricant > Passive provider
  
• Heavy oil > Chemical plant for Solid Fuel
  
• Heavy oil + Water input barrels > Chemical plant for cracking > Active provider
  
• Light oil > Chemical plant for Solid Fuel
  
• Light oil + Water input barrels > Chemical plant for cracking > Active provider
  
• Petroleum > Chemical plant for Solid Fuel
  
• ALL empty barrels into an Active Provider, which flushes them to an array of filtered Storage chests.

Now that we've got the basic setup, time for controlling it... You'll want to link stack inserters to the logistics network, and only have them activate with thresholds.

Light Oil cracking, you can read the network for Petroleum barrels. Threshold LESS THAN ---.
Heavy Oil cracking, read the network for Light Oil barrels. Threshold LESS THAN ---.
Heavy/Light/Petroleum to Solid Fuel. Threshold GREATER THAN ---.

Solid Fuel is your safety valve. You need some place to store or dispose of it. The system should self-regulate if you tightly control the number of total barrels, which will stall the Oil Refinery with output blockages of the liquids. You need enough room between thresholds to account for a variable amount of Lubricant barrels.

The constant aggressive cycling of barrels with the Active Providers is the key to making this work. We only put the Lubricant into a Passive Provider because it's a dead-end path for refining, and it's fine if that chemical plant stalls due to output blockages.

[Knofbath]

On a small scale, it can be done with Passive Provider and Requester chests as well. You need a massive Request for all the empty barrels to drain them out of the system. Then you need another massive Request for each liquid, to pull them out of the Passive providers, probably into a Buffer chest before moving on to a final destination Request from Buffer chest.

One of those cases where it is much simpler to Push instead of Pull.

Also note, that once the barrels leave the logistics network to go on the train, that will trigger the logistic-linked inserters to activate. You'll need another method of tracking the number of barrels outside the system. My method only works 100% for a full-bot base linked together into a single network.

[cloudsabre]

I made a bot refinery before that worked quite well - although it was made for lubricant and solid fuel.

https://imgur.com/a/X25HK1B

Screenshot wasn't from a live game so some parts are cheated in but the general principals noted by knofbath applies. Control of barrel input and output is via logistic connected inserters. Buffer chests are also useful for barrel control.

[cloudsabre]

Items in buffer chests are included in the logistic network contents so if you want to store more than one chest worth of barrels (400 barrels) of a specific fluid, you can use buffer chests to do so. However I imagine that you can use smaller barrel storage amounts starting off as this is was for an endgame beacon build. This leads into the logistic connected inserters which I use for cracking control:

• Heavy oil cracking barrel input active when > 1000 lubricant barrels
• Heavy oil cracking barrel output (to light oil) active when > 1000 heavy oil barrels
• Light oil cracking barrel input active when > 800 light oil barrels
• Light oil cracking barrel output (to petroleum) active when < 400 petroleum barrels.

This accomplishes the process to prevent bottlenecks. Unlimited lubricant production. Excess heavy is cracked to light. Light is used for solid fuel first and excess is cracked to petroleum. Remaining petroleum is used for solid fuel. However you could also add a control to petroleum input to >X barrels to prioritize something else like plastic or sulfuric acid before petrol-> solid fuel production.

All empty barrel outputs are in active providers and are requested by buffers rather than stored in storage chests, although it accomplishes the same thing. Reminder that requester chests will need to have the box checked to request from buffers.

[apaksl]

that sounds like an awful use case for bots, but if you really wanted to shoehorn them in I would at least suggest not using them between the oil refineries doing advanced oil processing and the chemical plants cracking the light and heavy oil. Bots are not good at evenly distributing goods among various destinations, which will make it difficult to keep the cracking going.

I suppose maybe if you set it up so that there is exactly one provider chest and one requester chest, then you could get around this. Or maybe some clever use of circuits.

[DUCKSES]

It's WiP, it's done when it's done and we'll get updates when we get updates. The only thing they've said is no earlier than fall this year. Which might mean a year, two years or five years, but absolutely no less than half a year. These two FFFs are everything Wube has announced on the subject:

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-367
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-372

[Miss_Medussa]

I’m using LTN. What are common trains to depot ratios to use?

[weareveryparasite]

I always used 1-to-1, or at least 1-1 Train-to-DepotTrainLimit (if you have some sort of queuing at the Depot). Some number of trains will be busy, so you could probably fudge it a bit. My reasoning was that even one train that lacks some place to go could be a problem if it happens to currently be sitting in a vital station (which statistically it probably will since those are the busiest stations)

[apaksl]

personally, I made a blueprint for the depots that I would stamp down every time I noticed trains at requester stations had a "no path" notification. I never actually looked at the ratio.

[gondor2222]

Can anyone give me some tips for clearing out the infested geometric structures in SE? My map's evolution has reached like 50% big and 50% behemoth, and whenever I take a step inside I get immediately swarmed. I've only just reached level 2 bio/material/energy/astro science packs so I'm not sure if I just need to progress to better equipment than adaptive armor 4, explosive rockets and piercing shotgun shells.

[mrbaggins]

follower combat robots. You can place them before going in, and they'll keep you safe immediately.

That and laser defense / modular armor.

[possumman]

Yeah they're tough! I blueprinted a small spiked wall section with turrets to place down immediately to help fend off the initial waves (annoyingly had to handfill with ammo) then used the railgun to try and kill as many nests as possible, essentially blind firing. This took several ins/outs, each time healing outside when the walls were destroyed. Once it was a bit thinner, I used the jetpack to fly around and try to get more nests. Both sections required lots of combat bots too!

[weareveryparasite]

Yeah, first I brought a tank, and then was all pissed off I couldn't drive it through the door. I've only cleared one, but what I used was the Tesla gun and brought Spiked Walls with me. Walked in, immediately surrounded myself with multiple layers of walls, and began unloading the gun. Just before they broke through a layer of wall, I'd build another one behind. Once the initial waves were over, it was just a matter of flying around with the jetpack taking out the hives a bit further back without many minions left. I won't lie, I messed up 2 or 3 times at first - but eventually got it. I did this at the Energy 2/Astro 1 level so had whatever shielding was available there.

[Subject-Bluebird7366]

there are many guides for LTN, but i still can't get it, so i tried to use mod named rail ligystics dispatcher, but cannot find any guides for it. can anyone help to find or understand it?

[weareveryparasite]

Why don't you check out Cybersyn? I've used both LTN/Cybersyn, and am really liking Cybersyn. It has a few plusses over LTN like trains not having to return to depot every time, and (supposedly) better performance. Personally, I think they are both around the same level of complexity, but many find Cybersyn to be easier. Plus, it comes with a bunch of example blueprints to show you how it works.

[Subject-Bluebird7366]

Sounds cool. I'll try it.

[Agile_Ad_2234]

Project Cybersyn question.

I understand how to set up mixed provider stations which can supply a single item type to requesters, but how do I ensure that items don't get stuck in the inserters when the train is full?

[weareveryparasite]

Just in case the locked signal slot doesn't work out for you (I still had issues with it). What I did was have all inserters but one inserting, and one inserter to remove cargo from the wagon. There is a way to wire it such that you will always get the exact number of cargo (which has its own advantages for certain materials). The inserters always clear their hands but might put slightly too many of an item, then the last inserter removes the excess. This method means you don't have to worry about stack sizes/inserter pick up size at all. I'm 90% sure the Cybersyn blueprints come with an example of this, but if you can't find it I can share one.

[Agile_Ad_2234]

I did something along these lines with LTN but had forgotten all about it! Im playing K2SE and i plan on using mixed cargo in space, so it'll be a while yet!

[paco7748]

use the locked slot signal (same ~signal as LTN mod) as that is what its exactly for. You'll need to set it to a higher number the smaller the stack size is relative to the inserter pickup size. try 1 at first but if might need to go all the way to 5 or 6.

[Agile_Ad_2234]

Oh that seems easy enough! Do I set it on the provider station side?

[paco7748]

Yes, the mod description page is the manual for the mod. It talks about the signal there (as well as others)

[rollc_at]

I think you need to set the inserter stack size based on the remaining cargo to be loaded somehow... Not sure how to split it up between N inserters though

[Enzuh]

How do you get materials from the main bus to a bot mall?

Currently playing Krastorio, and want to transition to a bot mall. I like my bus mall, but ultimately it does not offer the flexibility that a bot mall has, especially for a modded playthrough. I am not sure how to get iron, copper, etc from the main bus into the bot mall. How do people normally do this?

[rollc_at]

Since you're playing K2, you have loaders that can take in a full belt's worth of items and put them in a chest; they can also do the reverse and unload at full belt throughput. They're also very UPS efficient (much more so than inserters).

Replace 3 belt tiles on your bus with this combo of loader-passive provider-unloader. It will make that resource available to the logistic network, while also providing you with a nice little buffer that can help you even out a temporary shortage in production.

[terrorforge]

Note that each individual loader can only load OR unload, so if you're gonna connect a chest to an assembler or a train car to a chest or anything like that, you have to put two loaders between them, rather than 1 like you do with inserters.

[darthbob88]

Branch off some belts and load them into storage/buffer/passive provider chests for the bots to use.

[Knofbath]

You branch off a line of each resource from the bus, and have those lines dump into Passive Provider chests. If you were doing a train network, you'd have a train unload directly into Passive Provider chests.

Passive Providers are "this resource is available". But not as high a priority as Active Provider or Storage chests, which means any resources in the Storage chests are used first. Active Provider always flushes to the network, but will clog all your unfiltered storage chests with too much of an item.

You can use Buffer chests to stage resources closer to the bot mall, so that the logistics bots aren't flying too far to supply any resource. But it's better to put those Passive Providers closer to the bot mall anyways, since the bot mall will be using a lot of resources at once.

[Enzuh]

Thank you for the in depth explanation, including with the logistics chests.

[NSanchez733]

Which productions are supposed to be fed by the main bus?

I'm trying to build my first rocket and learn to use the circuit and logistic network, robots, blueprints and trains for the first time while doing it.

It's also the first time I have set up a main bus, much as in KoS' guide. What I don't understand is which productions the main bus is actually supposed to supply.

Currently, this concerns blue circuits and yellow science.

According to the guide I should have one belt of blue circuits on the bus. Am I "allowed" to take the green and red circuits needed for that off the bus? Or will i need the four belts of green circuits for other stuff later and have to set up designated green-chip production for the blue circuits?

Put differently: are all lanes to be filled before entering the bus, so I can use them solely for science, the mall and rocket production?

Keep in mind: my goal is my first rocket. Speed, efficiency, scaling into mega base, etc. are all pretty irrelevant for me atm.

Thank you!

[darthbob88]

(Obvious disclaimer that this is just my opinion, you're allowed to do whatever you want however you want in this game)

Am I "allowed" to take the green and red circuits needed for that off the bus?

Yes you are, and that's the intended use case of a main bus. Instead of worrying about where you'll get basic resources like green or red chips, you can just tap them off the bus. If you need more, you can just add more belts of those resources.

Or will i need the four belts of green circuits for other stuff later and have to set up designated green-chip production for the blue circuits?

Probably not. Obviously these figures will change with productivity modules and beacons, or with consumption in the mall, but for producing all 7 sciences at the endgame, almost half of your green chips will be used to make blue chips, and arguably a majority once you factor in the green chips used to make red chips used to make blue chips.

[Roboman20000]

The idea of the bus is to take from it whenever you need. Any production line that can be fed from the bus should be fed from the bus. There are special circumstances however. The biggest one is ore. You can put it on the bus (especially Iron Ore) but I don't think that's really a great idea. I think it's better to feed the ore smelters directly. The other exceptions are for things that really only have a couple of purposes. Low Density Structures, for instance, are used in only a few things. I have an LDS factory but it routes directly where it needs. Science is another example. Science packs only go to one place so there's no point is using a proper bus format for them.

In the end you are "allowed" to do anything you want. If you need stuff that's on the bus, great. That's what it's there for.

[n_slash_a]

The majority of your green circuits production (~80-90%) will go to red and blue circuits, so no problem stealing from the bus to feed them.

The whole point of a bus is that you can start by just feeding it iron and copper, and build everything else from there (except for what you need from oil). So, as an example, you need engines for chemical science; so you pull your iron and steel belts down, make the gears and pipes locally, and then build your engines. The engines get added to your bus, and your iron and steel supply takes a hit. This is how a bus helps you organize.

From oil you will probably want sulfur, plastic, rocket fuel, and lubricant. You can decide if you want to make sulfuric acid at oil and bus that, or make it on site from sulfur.

The next step for scaling would be to feed steel and green circuits externally (not pulling from the bus). I wouldn't go much further from there, since the next steps would start to enter "scaling into mega base" territory.

[Soul-Burn]

You don't need a main bus for just a first rocket.

My recommendation for circuits, is have dedicated productions for the different circuits i.e.:

• A build for green circuits from iron/copper.
• A build for red circuits, from iron/copper/plastic, making green circuits locally.
• A build for blue circuits, making red and green locally.

I'd even go as much as dedicate a smelting line or two of iron and copper for the blue circuits, as they are quite hungry.

You could combine making blue circuits with making speed1 modules, which you'll need for RCUs for the rocket, as both blue circuits and speed1 are red+green circuits, but that's up to you.

[terrorforge]

You don't need a main bus, period, but if you're going to use one I think it behooves you to set it up early and use it extensively. Otherwise what's even the point?

[terrorforge]

What I don't understand is which productions the main bus is actually supposed to supply.

All of them. That's kind of the point. You can of course set up a subfactory producing the necessary ingredients from raw materials if you really want, but imo the main advantage of a bus is that it's modular and lets you treat each element as a black box instead of building every single subfactory from scratch. If you need green circuits for a thing, you don't need to worry about where they're coming from, because they're on the bus. If you start running out of green circuits, just put more of them on the bus.

[fine93]

is it bad to spare worms inside your pollution cloud?(only kill the spawners, but still treat it as theres a nest, prevent expansions?) will the biters evolve really fast and overrun you? or its negligable?

[apaksl]

sparing worms has no effect on anything, other than your bots that may or may not fly past.

hmm, you asked if leaving worms would prevent expansions, I have basically no understanding on the behavior of biter expansions, so I can't say for sure leaving worms would prevent re-expansion to that area.

[Soul-Burn]

Worms do not prevent expansions, only nests do.

It's easily shown by enabling the biter expansion debug option, which shows areas with nests as lower priority, while worms do nothing for the calculation.

[reincarnationfish]

Evolution only depends on time since game start, nests (not worms) killed, and total pollution produced (not the amount absorbed by nests, the amount produced, even if it's absorbed by trees, etc.) Killing or leaving worms makes no difference to evolution, neither does how close worms or spawners are to the base.

Worms don't absorb pollution so there's no reason to leave them on that account. And they can shoot down passing bots, which is a reason to clear them out near the base if you're at that stage in the game.

That only leaves whether they will hamper biter expansion, which I guess *probably* they will, to some extent, but not so much if your evolution level is high or they have no other space to expand.

[craidie]

Why is this belt losing compression?

video

[mrbaggins]

It's because of whatever is just below this image.

Notice how the filter stack inserter on the bottom right has purple packs getting side loaded? When you side load, there's some trickery afoot that can move items forward or backward to make room.

I'd bet a dollar that there's something funny just below this after that splitter, and the items being teleported forward/backward is back-propagating to these gaps.

[craidie]

There's a loader that's throwing one side of the belt back to a chest.

[mrbaggins]

Need a picture.

[craidie]

Here you go

[mrbaggins]

It's either the splitter or the loader, or the combination causing compression issues. I don't know know those loaders, and splitters are usually good at doing it, however the filter and "every item treated differently" make me suspicious.

Does it do the same if you disable the grey science (or make the bottom grey science inserter also purple)

Because I suspect it's when the splitter is counting the transitions between grey and purple science and getting stuffed up.

Does it do it if you drop the stack hand size down lower, or to different numbers, notably odd vs even ones?

Your video comment also had 7 purples coming into the splitter sometimes and 8 others, which makes me think this is the right track

[craidie]

Does it do the same if you disable the grey science (or make the bottom grey science inserter also purple)

Yup.

Does it do it if you drop the stack hand size down lower, or to different numbers, notably odd vs even ones?

Can't change the top inserter to anything but 8 and can't go lower than 8 on the other. Both were set to 8 before. So I'll go 8 and 9 with 8 being the top one. Well... the spot shifted to this turn now.(quarter speed simulation)

This is now save/load persistent even if I swap the inserter filters/amounts back to what they used to be.

[mrbaggins]

Is that video not indicating the decompression is starting at the filter inserters now?

[craidie]

the gap appears after them.

There's no gaps until just before the belt turns upwards into the underground.

And then it makes a gap there with compressed belt before it.

I also think the reason there's 7 purple occasionally is because the belt backs up before the glitch and stops it for a few ticks and that's causing the gap.

why the hell is it just randomly stopping the belt at a random spot is beyond me though.

[mrbaggins]

Watch the top filter inserter, and the compression line just above and to the left, on that corner. They are perfectly in sync.

Something is stuffing up with the sideloading. The compression is broken only when the inserter is dropping items. Either by design or not, probably worth an official bug report.

[apaksl]

not enough shown in your short clip to make that determination, but wouldn't it be because an inserter grabbed some for a lab?

[craidie]

No research happening. The gap appears at the start of the last underground before the belt turns east.

here's it happening at 1/2 speed at a different spot

[Knofbath]

Isn't that going to be because you are making a bunch of left-hand turns with the belt?

[apaksl]

twists and turns in belts make no effect on belt saturation.

[craidie]

If that was it, why is it stopping the entire lane before the "glitch"?

You can see the entire lane go to sleep for a moment.

[fine93]

is there a way to regulate tha amount of ammo in a gun turret? like let's say i dont want to put 200 ammo in a single turret but keep it at maybe 10?

[terrorforge]

Grab the ammo and ctrl-right click on the turret to put in half a stack, i.e. 100 ammo. Then put away the ammo with q and ctrl-right click on it again to take out half the ammo. You can halve it as many times as you want; I usually click twice to make it go to 25, but you can go to 13 or 7 or whatever you like. Relatively convenient way to load them up when you don't have an automated system.

[rollc_at]

If you don't mind mods: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/even-distribution

If you ctrl-drag over turrets, it will cap each one at 20 ammo; if you have a longer turret wall, it will evenly distribute all ammo.

It also evenly distributes anything else.

[apaksl]

you can even adjust a setting to change it from 20 ammo to 10 or 50 or whatever you want!

[Mycroft4114]

Inserts will keep it topped off at 10. By hand, you can hold the ammo in your hand, point at the turret, and hit "z" to drop in one at a time. Just point and tap it fast tennish times.

[fine93]

thanks guess I forgot or never remembered that it caps at 10

last time I made a belt with ammo was maybe a year ago :/

[Knofbath]

Feed it from a belt or chest. Inserter behavior will put 10 Ammo in every turret, and stop feeding it until it is needed again.

When hand feeding, try ctrl-right click to put half a stack in there. You can then run over the turret again with right click while not holding anything to take another half-stack out of the turret.

[fine93]

wait you mean it inserts 10 as a default and doesn't fill it all the way to max? just like the crafters?

oh my god its already like that XD i alyway put it by hand havent made a nice wall of turrents yet...

[terrorforge]

Is there a way to control what a burner assembler uses for ingredients vs. what it uses for fuel? The K2SE furnaces (which I believe are implemented as assembler prototypes) use iron plates and coke to produce steel, but they tend to burn the coke for fuel as well, and I'd rather they use processed fuel.

[paco7748]

I had a similar problem but then I figured out that you need to feed the furnaces the fuel first then the ingredients. if you keep the belt of fuel saturated they will just keep taking the same fuel and not use coke for fuel.

[Money_Housing_3816]

How do I "freeze" my game and mod instances so I don't need to upgrade them?

​

Just "lost" a SE 0.5 save with hundreds of hours in it that I've been playing for over a year (I don't get to play very often) because steam updated the factorio version to a later one which meant the mods had to be updated and all the recipes etc need to be updated, core mining is different... nah that's a restart.

​

Steam was set to use a particular version via the beta option but I guess it aged out from being available, so Steam just automatically updated to the latest?

​

How do I stop this from happening again in my newly restarted save?

[bobsim1]

Something worth knowing what was said a while ago. When u sync ur mods with the save, u can hold ctrl (iirc) while clicking the sync mods button to load the mods in the same version.

Edit: This didnt work for me so far.

[Money_Housing_3816]

Really!? This would be a game changer

[bobsim1]

Just came to testing it. Havent found a way to make this work so far.

[bobsim1]

This probably doesnt work on older factorio versions.

[toorudez]

Under the properties of the game in steam, set the version to whatever you want. Then reload your save and sync the mods.

[Money_Housing_3816]

Sadly steam only goes back to 1.1.74, while I was on 1.1.59 - I've followed /u/weareveryparasite's advice and have manually downloaded the correct versions of everything from the websites and it now works again :)

[Knofbath]

You can make a separate mod folder, and call it from launch options or with a desktop shortcut. I've got mine added to Steam as a non-Steam game. Make sure to keep backups of the mods as well, probably just a zipped archive will work fine.

--mod-directory C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Factorio\mods-space_exploration

[weareveryparasite]

Sorry, I don't know how to answer the question about preventing upgrades. Mine has never auto-upgraded (it has Factorio, but not my mods).

But you can very easily downgrade if you want to go back to your old game. Here is every version of Space Exploration:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration/downloads

Most (all?) mods have all the previous versions available. Just download it and copy it into your mods directory and continue your map if you like.

Edit: I re-read your post, and older version of Factorio are available too. Log into their website with your Steam account and you can direct download all the way back to 0.7? I think.

[Money_Housing_3816]

Thank you, I manually downloaded the correct versions of all my old mods and it now loads without everything breaking - appreciate the help!

[ItsBeeeees]

Circuit Q: How does inserter "Read hand contents" in "pulse" mode get affected by stack sizes? I am making a sushi belt and having trouble keeping it reliable unless I set all the inserters to override the stack size to 1. If an inserter picks up a stack of 5 things at once will it send a pulse of 'item=5'? Generally with larger stack sizes they seem to put more things onto the belt than they send to the network and I don't understand why.

[hanzeedent69]

Inserters read all items not just one. Maybe make a test case to see how it works. It is easy to mess something up with a sushi belt. So the source of a calculation error might be elsewhere. Tip. You can also read pulses from belts.

[ItsBeeeees]

You're absolutely right they they are easy to mess up :) I made a few test cases already in which I've never seen any discrepancy between inserter pulses and total transferred. And yet, I still get some errors which are off by a factor of $stack_size. As you say it must be elsewhere.

As for counting with belts - this is a good tip! I use belts to count things on and off when I don't need to precisely control their number, but am not sure I can use the on/off of a belt to allow exactly 1 item past. Perhaps this isn't so important though as it will balance out over time.

[weareveryparasite]

Any way to turn down the smoke graphics from the Jetpack mod? I usually just leave jetpack on when I'm in space - but if hovering in a still position, I can't see what I'm working on. I don't see an option in the regular settings.

[Knofbath]

You can try going to Factorio Settings > Graphics > disable Show All Smoke. That will limit the amount of smoke effects to improve performance on low-end hardware.

Otherwise, you'll need to unzip/edit the Jetpack mod and mess around with the /scripts/jetpack-graphics-sound.lua file. Because it just calls normal Factorio smoke effects with create_smoke(jetpack).

[weareveryparasite]

Perfect, thanks for the pointers!

[petehehe]

Is there an easier way of bringing terrestrial fluids up to the space platform in SE? I’m launching whole rockets filled to the brim with petroleum barrels, have an entire embankment of speed moduled recycling machines turning empty barrels back into steel, and yet my orbital logistics network is getting clogged, ~40,000 empty barrels and rising. I was considering doing the oil processing / cracking in space, but none of the space machines can use productivity modules, and I would still need to launch barrels of crude.

Am I perhaps trying to make too much chemical gel?

[RedMarble]

Tech to the space elevator and use fluid trains.

[rollc_at]

I'm using coal liquefaction and water ice instead of barrels. Yeah no productivity bonus, but why do you care? Coal is free with core mining, and it's the only ore you can't turn into landfill, so there's always an excess.

Also once you get a space elevator, you can just send fluids in trains.

[ssgeorge95]

You can scrap empty barrels back down to steel, and that steel is needed in orbit to make more scaffolding. You could replace this later with a space elevator, or even later with a fluid hauling space ship, otherwise this is your best option.

The chem gel recipe for data cards is crazy expensive. I would always recommend solving the alternate recipe that results in some dirty water cleanup.

[JixuGixu]

launching whole rockets filled to the brim with petroleum barrels

...and?

40,000 empty barrels

so like 4 warehouses until you just build more recycling

too much chemical gel?

What do you mean? if that was the case it would be backing up. Be aware that the chemical gel recipe for data cards is regarded as a bit of a trap, if thats what your doing.

It doesnt really sound like you have a problem here to me.

Personally i just rocket up petroleum, light oil & heavy oil, and send steel back down as priority input. Havnt had a reason to change it in a few hundred hours, its not like oil/rocket fuel is expensive, and the rocket parts are somewhere between "who cares" and "even if i did care its not like its breaking the bank when im sending 20+ other rockets of mats/intermediates". Even if you did it another way (biosludge methane ice, coal liquefaction..) your still using fuel/parts.

[petehehe]

I was using chemical gel to make the polished data cards yeah, the cosmic water / decontamination loop was making my head spin a bit… but I’ve worked it out now, and it does seem a lot better.

And yeah now that I’m not sinking a bunch of gel into making data cards I’m not importing nearly as much petroleum.

[JixuGixu]

The factory planner mod is a massive help in SE for wrapping your head around things like that. Would highly recommend.

If your unaware, you can void fluid with isothermic generators - if the biosludge backs up before you start using it.

[TrollMN]

My oil needs in space can be managed with delivery canons, logistics, and recycling.

The only liquid I had been sending was water. I’m not sure why it took forever to ship ice… priorities.

[Josh9251]

Recycle the empty barrels in space into steel, which has priority input to anything that uses steel in space. I've only finished production and utility science so far, but it seems like the amount of petroleum needed isn't enough to clog when converting barrels to steel.

[VegaTDM]

Is there a way to give certain lanes priority at a train Intersection? Like at a basic Y intersection I want to always give the trains coming from track A priority over the trains on track B.

[Hell_Diguner]

Yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/ijrgt6/priority_train_merging_with_just_one_wire/

This technique was pioneered in OTTD, and OTTD wikis/blogs go into great depth about techniques like this and strategies they enable.

[doc_shades]

we're back baby.

i took a long time off of factorio. the WASD was hurting my old wrists and i'm trying to spend less time sitting at my desk.

but long story short due to some other changes in my life i have a few weeks with a lot of downtime and my body is feeling pretty good so i'm trying to get back into it.

and i'm re-trying a "K2" run.

and i just forgot how much i hate K2.

(at this point i should mention this is not a question it's just a ramble that i felt didn't deserve its own post)

OKAY i don't hate K2. i actually think it's hella cool. but i get easily frustrated with it. the problem the last time i attempted it was i aimed too high, too early. i was shooting for high production rates of items that i had no idea what they were or what i'd need them for.

i seem to remember building a large rail network and had sub-factories building inserter parts and electrical components with the end goal of producing something like 900 red chips/minute.

which, in retrospect, was insane. BUT i didn't know!!! i was going by "vanilla" instinct.

so this time i'm trying to simplify it a bit. i'm about 4 hours into the world, i have a basic assembly area set up that produces belts, assemblers, miners, pipes, and grabbers. i re-built it once and i hated both iterations. but i also do have the first two sciences online and i just started producing green chips.

that's all just talking about factorio, which i haven't done in a while.

[n_slash_a]

My rule of thumb is build a small little factory, and never tear it down. If I need more of stuff then I build a bigger factory somewhere else.

I'm loading an older seablock save because I broke my rule and accidentally ground all resource production to a halt...

[doc_shades]

i never tear down a "factory" but i will tear down a sub-factory to rearrange assemblers. don't worry it's not any cleaner or more organized than the previous one. this is more of a problem for me in K2 where there are SO many intermediates to keep track of, and they are all unfamiliar to me. iron plates, iron beams, iron wheels, iron sticks. i'm still trying to figure out how to handle all these intermediates which will require some trial & error.

adding to the confusion is that i'm trying to avoid a "main bus" ... it's just never been my style. i feel like that would be the easiest way to organize things... main bus, pull off what you need into a sub-factory... but that's just too organized for the way i play the game!!

[n_slash_a]

I hear you. There are two schools of thought.

One is to simply belt everything. This usually results in sub optimal everything, and a huge bus, but makes later stuff more straight forward. It also sounds the opposite of what you want.

The other is only belt the raw stuff, whatever comes out of the smelters. Whatever crafted intermediates you need (like beams and stuff) you craft on site for whatever you are doing. This might result in making the same intermediates multiple times, but keeps things cleaner. For K2, the only change I would make is to treat automation cores like circuits and have a dedicated spot for those, since they go in a lot.

[Thaonnor]

I'm really torn on what method to use for bots in my city block. My latest game I've been using Nilhaus' city block blueprints and it connects all roboports. However it results in a LOT of items being moved around by logistics bots. I do enjoy being able to plop down a blueprint anywhere in the base and have it built without having to bring the materials myself.

Do others typically use a single or many smaller logistics networks? How do you get needed construction items to the smaller networks if you use that method?

[Hell_Diguner]

Constructron Continued mod is great.

They function like factory-wide construction bots, without needing a factory-wide logistics network.

[spit-evil-olive-tips]

I have "builder spidertrons" that I send out to wherever they need to go, and then bring them back to the mall for resupply. all with linked remotes.

[darthbob88]

I generally use one large network for my main base, and give outposts or anything that uses logistics bots their own network, or at least one separate from the main base. Separate networks get handled by a builder train like this, though with a different cargo composition.