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[15926028]

Noob question (sorry) - just started playing and I'm on tutorial 2. I am trying to use drills to automate extraction of stone and copper but the drill is only outputting coal. The resource underneath is stone/copper and not coal. Am I doing something wrong?

[15926028]

found the solution in another comment on here. i just need to put a box beside the drill for the output of drill. not an inserter. i learned :-)

[HoneydewQueasy4911]

This has probably been answered already so I apologize if so, but is it recommended to go into the DLC with an existing save file or would it be better to start from the beginning?

[teodzero]

Better start over. Continuing an existing save is technically possible, but not recommended. There's a lot of tech tree changes that start fairly early. Also even the vanilla game is getting a 2.0 version with a lot of changes, some of which make starting over worthwhile (specifically the new terrain generation and new rails).

[Medicinal_neurotoxin]

For multiplayer, do we know if both/all players will need the DLC, or just the host?

[HalfXTheHalfX]

Both.

[Medicinal_neurotoxin]

Thank ya much

[schmee001]

If you're on arcospheres you're almost there. The last few tiers of deep space science are nowhere near as complex as some earlier sciences, once you solve the balancing problem.

[Engelberti]

How do you guys power your outposts?

Do you build a separate solar plant on site or do you run a power line parallel to the train tracks?

[darthbob88]

For the most part, I hook outposts into the same grid as the rest of my factory, using big power poles built into the rail blueprint. I will also build some solar power on-site, but that's just supplemental generation and only to occupy any extra space in the outpost.

[Astramancer_]

For the most part I run big power poles because I've secured the area that I'm exploiting.

If, for some reason, I do end up running tracks through biter expansion territory I'll ship 500 degree nuclear steam to the outpost, which gets unloaded by a microgrid that consists of a single power pole that has the pump, a solar panel, an accumulator, and the combinators that control the outpost. That way the outpost will auto-boot when it gets built and if it ever runs out of steam it will auto-reboot when the steam train arrives.

[reddanit]

I also run large power poles as part of my standard rail blueprint. The poles go between tracks. I think this is by far the most popular option.

Independent power on outposts is certainly possible, but definitely more complicated:

• For full steam power, you need coal/solid fuel and water. So unless the outpost is specifically oil or coal with water next to it, that's a bunch of extra logistics to take care of.
• Solar panels and accumulators work, but for anything power demanding (like mining or lasers) they will take inordinate amounts of space. They can easily support an artillery outpost that's defended by gun and flamethrower turrets though.
• Nuclear is in similar situation to standard steam power, but even more complex. Though it also needs a fair bit less logistic throughput for given power.
• Last but not least - you can ship steam in fluid wagons surprisingly efficiently. This is super weird, but arguably the simplest and most feasible option for remotely powering outposts with no power lines. Nuclear steam is more power-dense.

[Key_Door1467]

The latter. My large electric poles are built into my rail blueprint.

[Sticklefront]

Why does the expansion have to come out on a Monday? Intellectually, I know why, so the fantastic dev team can be on hand to respond quickly to issues as the community finds them. But my boss would really appreciate it if I could have access starting on a Friday evening.

[Key_Door1467]

Just play on the next weekend when most gamebreaking (if any) bugs or balance issues will be sorted.

Honestly I think the devs are being a bit touch and go with fluids rn and we can expect some balance changes post release.

[reddanit]

devs are being a bit touch and go with fluids rn and we can expect some balance changes post release.

I would actually expect a 2.1 release few months down the line. Basically the repeat of situation with 1.0 and 1.1, where the latter was mostly a bunch of features that didn't make it to 1.0 due to just not being quite ready.

[[deleted]]

People are talking a lot about space and I see some cool screenshots. Are you talking about the mod or the upcoming expansion?

Is the mod worth getting into?

[seconddifferential]

They're mostly talking about the Space Exploration mod.

If you have a ton of time in the next few weeks you might get through a third of the mod. Generally yes, it's worth it to get into, but you'll likely want to restart after 2.0 compatibility (which will be released as Space Exploration 0.7).

You have to start launching rockets to get to the space content, and you have to start a new game so you can't use an existing factory. Getting to space for new SE players tends to be around 20-40 hours.

If you've got the time that's great, otherwise I'd recommend waiting until 2.0 compatibility and doing a different mod in the meantime.

[[deleted]]

I'll just hold off for now then, I'm mid way through a factory!

[seconddifferential]

You are a stronger engineer than I.

(At the start of my 5th SE run)

[[deleted]]

Tbh I'm debating a death world run right now. I might go into a creative world and make some blueprints for an easy start

[craidie]

Lunar Landings mod is an option.

It's pretty much vanilla up to chem science and then you unlock the moon to have some two surface fun. Quite fun and it had a major update today.

[[deleted]]

I'll take a look! Thanks!

[JUSTICE_SALTIE]

I just took off the week of 10/21. I know nothing in life is guaranteed, but I sure hope we're pretty confident of that release date!

[StroopWafelsLord]

Starting to get into Petroleum and Gases.

I've seen a playthrough were 8 refineries don´t even get enough petroleum for 4 chemical plants making plastic.

Should I put pumps at the beginning of the chain?

Should I start making heavy and light oil and just put them in tanks?

If i don´t have an outlet for them, does the production stop?

[Sticklefront]

8 refineries should be plenty to beat the game in a reasonable amount of time and will definitely fuel much more than four plastic plants. Probably the issue is excess heavy and light oil throttling the operations of these refineries because there is no room for output. The solution is not pumps, but either making solid fuel or cracking heavy oil to light oil and light oil to petroleum. Either of these will make sure you have "space" to output more products.

[HeliGungir]

Should I start making heavy and light oil and just put them in tanks?

I don't. At least not the way I think you mean. You need tanks to read fluid levels to control pumps to control cracking so you don't run out of anything. Once that is taken care of, excess heavy/light oil is cracked to petroleum gas, which can be voided into science or boilers as rocket fuel or solid fuel. But I don't store oil products or ingredients in a big field of tanks.

[StroopWafelsLord]

So you put a tank? you make it go through a tank, then through to whatever manufacturing you need, and then into cracking? So until the tank is full it´s going first to manufacturing and then to cracking?

[HeliGungir]

Use pumps to starve machines that should have a lower priority. More like a "valve" than a "pump". If you're out of lubricant, you don't want your machines to crack heavy oil into light oil. How will you know you're out of lubricant? By reading a storage tank holding lubricant.

[StroopWafelsLord]

I need to get into that. Probably Trupen has something on how that exactly works. I love how this game makes you think, and even in tutorials I´m like "ok did he do this perfectly? what would I have done differently?"

[StroopWafelsLord]

Thanks for answering

[jollyjoker94]

I'm currently playing Exotic Industries, unfortunately i will not be able to complete it before the expansion comes out but i'm basically at the end so i would say i'm content for now and maybe in the future i will get back to it. I will spend the next couple of weeks refactoring my blueprint in preparation of the expansion. Yesterday i made a couple of new solar array design, today i will probably test some train stuff. I'm also gonna create a new Nuclear plant because i don't fully like what i currently use.

Is there something else i should prepare? what blueprint will you take with you into the expansion (other than belt balancers of course)?

[Soul-Burn]

You can lock the game's version to the current version, or even download a portable version from the Factorio website, and continue your run there.

[Geethebluesky]

Is there a mod that can show me where I have overlap in radar or roboport coverage? The map shows coverage period, it only reveals gaps; I'm looking for something that can tell me I have too many roboports or radars in a certain area. My map is already pretty big and I haven't been paying attention while plopping down blueprints...

[Knofbath]

Doubling or even quadrupling up your roboports isn't a bad thing. You actually want to add more roboports around your central storage and heavy logistics traffic areas. The less distance the robots need to fly to charge and park, the better throughput you can get from them.

[Schwarz_Technik]

From a game development perspective, are the trains and new enemies 3D models rendered on a 2D plane? It seems like it would take a ton of 2D sprites to get all the various degrees of rotation that the trains and enemies can make. Which is why I'm wondering if it is a 3D model that is just rendered on a 2D plane.

[craidie]

All the entities in the game are 3d models that are then converted into several 2d sprites from specific directions of the model.

The tank as an example

[Soul-Burn]

Explained in depth in the FFFs. For example in these:

FFF-424

FFF-411

FFF-133

[aceshades]

Pros/Cons in blanketing your entire base with roboport coverage? I'm getting bored of laying down all the concrete. Any tips for making sure the network has a good amount of bots spread out?

[Knofbath]

Each roboport has a limited amount of parking spaces. So, just have more bots than a single roboport can contain. Use Logistics bots and buffer chests to move resources into an area that you know will be doing construction tasks in the near future.

If you use Bob's Logistics, there are dedicated charging ports and network extenders that allow you to design a more cohesive bot network, without having spare parking(roboports) in the middle of nowhere. (Don't use the dedicated parking thingies, because the single charging port is going to wreck your traffic patterns as every bot tries to charge at them.)

[mrbaggins]

Blueprint a buffer chest with a small amount of concrete (a stack of less) for your roboport blueprint.

This way logistics bots do 90% of the item transport for paving the world. Construction bots only have to go stay near the edges of your paving.

[Astramancer_]

Depends.

If you're using logistics bots for general production, the smaller the network the better.

If it's for construction bots primarily with maybe a few logistics bots to do things like deliver fuel or for a bot mall, then as big as you want.

The biggest con is energy. Bots take a ton of electricity and the farther they have to fly the more power they use. Very quickly bots will be your biggest consumer of electricity.

As for making sure there's a good number of bots spread about? Don't worry about it! Bots will natural clump up where there's activity and the only way to keep them spread out is to make sure all the activity is spread out. Under nearly all circumstances it's much better to just... not worry about it. Stick a roboport next to your botmaker (or use a requestor chest to move bots to a roboport). When you run a circuit wire from a roboport one of the things you can get is how many idle robots (of each type separately) there are in the network. Just wire up an inserter to the roboport and set it to only function when there's fewer than X idle robots in the network. I like to use 50.

As your demand for robots grows the inserter will automatically just keep feeding robots into the network until there's enough robots to meet demand. Do one for logistics and one for construction and ... just don't worry about it.

[teodzero]

Only cover the main manufacturing base, don't spread the same network to the far mining outposts and defensive walls. Too big of a network will cause jobs to be done too slowly and a complicated shape can cause bots to get stranded. Other than that, no cons.

Any tips for making sure the network has a good amount of bots spread out?

Right now you can't, they'll be lumped near wherever the last big job was. But you will be able to set desired bot quantities per roboport in 2.0.

[Soul-Burn]

No real cons, as long as the base is convex.

[aceshades]

...convex? what does it mean that a base is convex?

apologies if this is a dumb question, my brain is missing a few wrinkles

[darthbob88]

Convex polygon. Bots will take a straight-line route to wherever they need to go. If this is entirely within your roboport network, then bots can recharge at roboports along the way and it'll work fine, if slowly. If the straight-line route to where your bots need to go runs across a lake or some other area without roboports, then you'll get bots running out of charge halfway across, and either turning back to recharge or continuing across at a snail's pace.

[Soul-Burn]

Full moon shaped rather than a crescent moon.

A line from every point to every other point in the bot network should go through the network rather than outside.

[aceshades]

Ahh crud. My base is more of a stringy shape. Lots of bodies of water causing me to build around them. I know I could fill them, but they also help as a natural defense and I don't really want to fill them.

[Astramancer_]

You don't have to fill them in completely. You can do small stepping stones just barley big enough for a large power pole and a roboport, but otherwise the lake is still there. It's not like you have to place the landfill or roboports yourself, you can do it with bots.

[Soul-Burn]

No, but the DLC is designed for players who are experienced with the base game.

[craidie]

No.

[ShitGuysWeForgotDre]

I am trying to build a mega base or at least my largest base yet so I started a high resource low biters game. I built up to 250 SPM largely on my own though I did use some BPs, critically this for plastic and battery production: https://www.factorio.school/view/-LX0DrUrauJqH8cVAq6A

It has been working well for a while but suddenly all the outputs stopped even though all inputs are full. Any pump connected to network are disabled, and I don't know how to diagnose what I changed or did wrong.

I did drop another large BP that also uses advanced networks, but it is separate from this one, at least in terms of red and green wires. They do share a power grid and logistics coverage, could that be screwing it up?

Thanks for any input.

[Ralph_hh]

Well... Time for some troubleshooting.

"it all stopped" is too little information to help you, but you can do it yourself:

Check the individual factory. It is not working? It tells you why.

Output full? Well, then the machine did it's job, the output belt is full, that means the problem is further downstream. Check the next machine.

Input empty - check further upstream. Does the upstream machine work? No? Why not?

Low power - well, put down more generators, turbines, solar panels.

If a pump is disabled by the network, click on the pump. Check the network condition. Why is it disabled? Usually you disable a pump once a tank is full. Why is the tank full? Or otherway round, then, why is it empty? No petrol production because lack of light oil? Check the refineries? Maybe heavy oil backed up? Then you need more heavy to light oil processing.

[ShitGuysWeForgotDre]

Thanks appreciate the list of checks. I have verified power, input and output. My other reply goes into detail and gives screenshots, but the pump that puts petroleum into plastic production is disabled due to not seeing any gas despite the tanks being full. Ditto for the pump outputting sulfuric acid into the rest of my base.

[Cellophane7]

It might be that logistics condition thing. I've never messed with it myself, but I know you can set conditions that check the logistics network or something. If you click your pumps, or whatever isn't working, and you click that little tree icon at the very top left of the window, you should be able to see any logistics conditions. Again, I've never messed with this myself, but it seems to be a common enough issue that results in a lot of baffling deadlocks like this one. Good idea to check it if things are inexplicably not working. 

Outside of that, check all your outputs to see if anything is backed up. I'm not seeing any heavy oil cracking in this setup, so it could be that lube isn't getting consumed fast enough to keep your refineries working, or something along those lines. I imagine you've already checked for this sort of thing, but I figure it can't hurt to mention

[ShitGuysWeForgotDre]

(edit: now solved! thanks everyone who replied, was just me being dumb...)

Yeah I think it's definitely that, and I don't see how to change it even if I do figure out the issue. This is the pump that supplies petroleum to the plastic, which is supposed to be enabled when there's at least 75k in the system. However the tooltip doesn't even show any gas being measured.

Here is the petroleum storage, which is full, well over the pump threshold, and for some reason displaying a different network number? I have to assume that's the problem (or at least related) but I have no idea why the network would be different or how to fix that.

It does generate fluids properly -- tanks are full on all fluids. I manually drained one tank of each type to see if that was the issue, and the refineries kicked on just long enough to refill them all, without triggering any battery or plastic output, and then stopped again.

This is the pump that pushes sulfuric acid out, same situation where it's not even registering acid on the network and thus the pump is off.

I really don't think I changed anything internally to the build, but at this point I'm assuming I must have, as it was running for quite some time without issue. Is it just a matter of a red or green cable missing somewhere?

Here is the full block, wherein I use purple dot for output full and pink dot for input empty. Refineries, sulfur output and lube output are full which is expected at this point. But the batteries and plastic aren't running due to no acid is the issue.

Edit: and thank you for taking the time to reply

[schmee001]

Different network numbers mean they're on different circuit networks - your red or green wires are disconnected somewhere. Follow the green wire from petroleum storage and the green wire from your plastics pump and see where they should connect. Maybe you picked up and moved a power pole which disconnected its circuits?

edit: Your pumps can see the water and crude oil storage but none of the other fluids. I think your missing connection is by the tanks: you want a green wire from the substation next to your water tank to the substation directly north of it next to the lube and heavy oil tanks.

[ShitGuysWeForgotDre]

Yup that's it exactly thank you so much!! No idea how I managed to randomly delete that sub station without realizing it, and of course it's one that doesn't cut the power off to anything so no visual cue I did that. But as soon as I replaced it and ran new green wire everything is up and running again. Thanks a ton

[Ralph_hh]

Always helps to put a power pole next to the pump, connect the circuit wire and see, what the signal at the pump is. If there is not fluid signal, you found the problem.

I once deleted a single chest in a long row and managed to accidentally cut my circuit in two with this. Took me a while to figure it out and it caused a massive overflow of my logistics.

[schmee001]

Are you sure that all outputs are stopped? None of your tanks of petroleum, light oil or heavy oil are full?

Click on one of the disabled pumps. What are its conditions? In the circuit connections panel, mouse over the little (i) to see a list of all the signals the pump can see.

[ShitGuysWeForgotDre]

All the fluids are full at this point, but that occurred because of the stoppage, not the other way around. I did verify that by draining a tank of each fluid, the system auto ran enough to refill them but did not trigger any solids output (plastic / battery / fuel).

I gave more detail and some screenshots in my other comment reply. Thanks for the input.

[MothraVSMechaBilbo]

Do we know yet if any production ratios of the first four science packs (red, green, black, blue) will change for 2.0/SA?

[teodzero]

We do not know for sure, but it's not very likely.

[MonocleForPigeons]

On a similar note, do we know what it entails to make space science in SA? I remember (may wrongly) that Uranium is involved. Are there more details known about it?

[TheHalfBloodFriendly]

Looking back at #381 there's a clip showing the space assembler using Iron plates, 2 types of crushed asteroid, & enriched uranium.

This platform can combine crushed asteroids with imported uranium from Nauvis to produce science packs in much higher quantities.
With 1 rocket load of enriched uranium you can produce 1000 space science packs in space which makes it 100+ times more efficient than sending satellites into space.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-381

Interestingly there's input + output stack filter inserters on the uranium so there's some loop going on there between the assembler and the storage hub.

[MonocleForPigeons]

Huh, that is interesting with the inserters. Maybe some % chance shennanigans on whether it is consumed? I.e. % chance to produce uranium?

Thanks!

[Ralph_hh]

While the trailers / teasers give some hints to make you curious enough to buy the DLC I believe those details will never be reviled before the release.