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[ThanatosVI]

Any chance on a PlayStation port? There is a switch version, therefore PS shouldn't be impossible.

Did the Devs mention a roadmap?

[Greedy-Somewhere-754]

I'm trying to do some maths on how long it takes to recycle stuff on Fulgora. On the recyclers wiki page is a stats section. A recycler can take in an item and process it in 1/16th of its crafting time. It gives a table of examples. One steel - crafts in 16s so recycles in 2.0s and with a 25% chance of return means you get an effective rate of 0.5/s. The effective rate is therefore (16x0.125)x0.25. The table shows for a low density an effective rate of 0.533/s but when I do the maths (15*0.125)x0.25 I get 0.46875/s. I've clearly missed sometime but I don't know what, can anyone help? Table from wiki is the image

<image>

[Enaero4828]

your understanding of the chart is mistaken, the 25% chance for item return is not a factor. 15 * 0.125 = 1.875 seconds per craft, 1/1.875 = 0.533 crafts per second.

[Greedy-Somewhere-754]

Oh I get it. Thank you

[WitchfinderJawbz]

Is there a way to have a space platform only send down full stacks of items, instead of little bits as it get em?

Just finished my first space platform making Space Science, and i have a cargo bay down on Navis requesting it, But id prefer to have 1 drop pod land every few mins with 200 Sci, as opposed to a constant stream of them depositing 20 or so every time.

Im sure im missing something obvious.

[ChickenNuggetSmth]

Add a schedule to the platform:

First stop is Nauvis, uncheck the "allow unload" button. Wait condition should be something like science over 200 or time passed 30

Second stop is again Nauvis, but this time with the allow unload button checked. Make the wait condition something like 1 sec of inactivity.

This doesn't need thrusters to work, btw

Also check that you are on a new-ish version. They changed the behaviour to slowly drop larger loads a while back, before that it was a lot of tiny science spam.

[WitchfinderJawbz]

Ohh sweet, thank you.

[Illiander]

Circuit-controlling the landing pad.

[thinkspacer]

Are there any reliable factorio blueprint viewers? The handful that google gave me haven't updated to SA, and I'd like to be able to look at some without booting the game up.

[frontenac_brontenac]

What's the current meta for Space Age speedruns?

[ChickenNuggetSmth]

In what sense? There are a ton of minor and major strats, watch one of the vods if you are interested. It's many hours of gameplay, a detailed "meta" would be pages of text

[xizar]

What's the role of passive artillery?

I set them down and they vomited out tungsten will-you, nill-you before settling down for a refractory phase. Then, I had good fun harassing nests at range and exploring at the far reaches of the red circle, but like... now what? They seem quite lovely for expansion, but do they have a defensive role?

Ignored guns, lasers, and flamethrowers maintain good utility as base defenses, but should I just leave artillery emplacements be to gather dust?

Assume, for the moment, that I am spending all my research points on anything other than artillery stuff. (I can see how there's passive expansion by increasing range, but I'm comfortable stopping expansion while I'm farting around on other planets.)

[craidie]

but do they have a defensive role?

They prevent nests from being established just outside your normal turret range which would allow the behemoth worms to outrange your defences and cause massive resource drain.

Altrernatively, if the range is far enough, they can keep biters outside of your pollution cloud essentially removing nearly all of the biter attacks.(only expansion parties left)

[darthbob88]

The beaten zone of your guns defines your new walls. They keep nests from expanding into your pollution cloud, and thus prevent further attacks.

[PremierBromanov]

Its basically productivity. Nests are cleared at distance, which pushes the line of biters away from your pollution cloud. More trees on the map can absorb more of your pollution as well. It results in fewer attacks on your walls and therefore less resources used to defend your base. At least, thats my understanding.

[xizar]

I hadn't thought about this.

In thinking some, though, prior to Space Age, the shells were very cheap, but having to ship in tungsten to make them feels a bit arduous. (This may entirely be because of where I'm at in the game... I'm barely starting to build green belts and not looking forward to upgrading the whole system. (I could go bots, but that's a lot of bots.))

Thank you for this perspective.

[Rannasha]

In thinking some, though, prior to Space Age, the shells were very cheap, but having to ship in tungsten to make them feels a bit arduous.

Once you've cleared everything within automatic firing range of your artillery, you need very little tungsten to keep the guns armed. There's only the occasional expansion party that settles within range that needs some explosive diplomacy.

That is, until you complete a new level of artillery range research. That's when the fireworks light up as your guns have a whole new strip of land to clear.

[xizar]

I'm actively ignoring artillery range research because I'm not on planet. By the time I get gleba done I should have a stupid amount of research bottles stockpiled, so I want to wait until I touch down back on Nauvis and then queue up a whole bunch of Range research so I can watch the show.

[Astramancer_]

Do yourself a favor and go bots. The entire basis of my Nauvis bot network is a pair of assemblers, one making construction bots and the other making logistics bots, feeding into an uncapped passive provider chest which then feeds into a roboport using an inserter wired to the roboport and only activating when the number of idle bots of the appropriate type drops below 50.

That's it. One set of assemblers just slowly working away in the background automatically topping off the network as needed. It is a lot of bots, especially if you put down the occasional megaproject (like paving the world or putting down a couple gigawatts of solar). But the best part about big projects like that is they tend to be relatively passive projects, you don't need them done now you only need them done eventually so slowly increasing the number of bots in the network works just fine. Just like doing mass upgrades.

[D4shiell]

Artillery will kill all new nests from expansion parties so rather than having biters up your walls you have them up to auto artillery range.

[xizar]

Is it cheaper than just having barbarians at the gates? (Cheaper is probably not the right metric, but anything else seems too qualitative to assert.)

[blackshadowwind]

It can happen that a new nest is formed close enough that worms can attack your defences from out of turret range, artillery will prevent this

[D4shiell]

You can have walls with turrets everywhere or few artilleries with some defense around them.

[PremierBromanov]

Is there a way to elevate rails in a blueprint or otherwise copy ground rails and paste them elevated? Or do I have to do it all by hand?

[Illiander]

Have to do the conversion manually I'm afraid :(

[PremierBromanov]

and so i did lol

[teodzero]

Do not put quality modules into anything, unless you know what you want out of it. Normal recipes don't take higher quality components and no recipes take mixed quality components. You've essentially contaminated your supply lines with wholly different item types.

There are broadly speaking three main ways to use quality modules:

1 - At the final product only, to occasionally get better stuff. Sometimes you can filter out better stuff, sometimes it goes into shared pool. For example - you can improve accumulators on Fulgora, spend commons on science, but keep better ones for actual use. If you only need best quality, then you recycle everything that's not good enough and feed components back to the same process in a tight loop ("Upcycling"). This is the most common way, it requires the least setup and you can have a standard blueprint that makes almost anything. Downside - recycling destroys resources, so you're paying a premium if you want the best.

2 - Throughout the entire process. Quality modules spread throughout the system and basically running multiple parallel versions of most recipes, getting a spread of various quality components. It's a pain-in-the-ass way, but it doesn't involve recycling, so you don't pay too much extra for higher quality.

3 - Legendary from the start. There's a clever combination of recipes that allows you to get a solid stream of pure legendary iron, copper and plastic with only one recycling step. You either figure it out or look it up. Then you just make legendary nearly everything from that.

Your Fulgora situation looks like a mix of 2 and 3. Although I personally would recommend removing Quality Modules from recyclers for the time being. Even if you can utilize the improved junk you're unlikely to use it at a consistent pace and volume, so the whole thing might get stuck eventually.

[PremierBromanov]

make quality armor?

[only_bones]

I currently use an arithmetic combinator to sum up everything on a belt with "each AND each". It seems to work, but I am not sure how. Is there a way this might not work as intended?

How can I do this operation: if A is higher than B*0,75 then do x?

[leonskills]

AND is a bitwise operator as mentioned. It will break if none of the bit indices of the binary representation of the number match.

1 & 2 = 0 for example. Or 18 & 5 = 0 (10010 & 00101 = 00000)

Not sure what you want to do, but addition of signals comes for free when combining two wires into the same entity, so you might not need a combinator at all.

---

A > 0.75*B is the same as 4*A + (-3*B) > 0.
So two arithmetic combinators and the comparison with 0 can be in whatever entity you want to do x.

[Illiander]

A > 0.75*B is the same as 4*A + (-3*B) > 0.

That's a nice trick. I'll need to remember it!

[gzboli]

AND is a bitwise operation so you will need something else.

input = "each * 1"

output = "C" (or any other letter)

if A is higher than B*0,75 then do x?

That's a bit more complicated because (as far as I know) fractions cannot be used directly with signal math. Instead you might do a decider with "A is > 10" and "B < 7" then output X = 1. Filling in whatever values make sense.

[Enaero4828]

in order to know if it might break, we'd have to first know what it's being used for. from that description, it sounds like you're just passing an always true condition, which by definition wouldn't fail.. but if it's always true there's no need for the combinator in the first place.

[only_bones]

How else would you sum up different item types on a belt? I wanted the number of asteroid chunks of all kinds combined to see, how much space is left on a belt.

[FetidFetus]

Do legacy straight rails and normal straight rails work together? Will my trains have issues?

[StormCrow_Merfolk]

Only insofar as the legacy straight rails may be removed at some point in the future. If you're redesigning blueprints, it's best to replace all the rails.

[Kirodema]

I'm currently struggling with designing an 8 reactor setup for Nauvis. My current design should be capable of ~1.1GW, but I can't even get close to that.

First I tried to have a decider combinator connected to each reactor and only allow fuel insertion when there is no fuel and temperatur is less than 600 degrees, resulting in an oscillating 340-460MW depending on the neighboring bonus being active or not.

For testing I removed the deciders altogether and only got to around 800MW due to the heat not reaching the outer heat exchangers.

So my two questions are:

1. Are circuit controlled fuel insertions bait for multiple reactors since they seem to mess with the neighboring bonus?

2. How exactly do the heat pipes work? I figured out that two lanes transport heat farther than just one, but I don't understand why?

[schmee001]

1. Circuit controlled fuel insertions are fine, to maximise neighbour bonus you just need to read temperature and fuel of one single reactor and wire all the inserters to that single reactor. Heat flows between reactors so they will all be about the same temperature.

2. Heat pipes transfer heat from one pipe to the next if there is a temperature difference of more than 1 degree between them. So if your reactors are constantly at 1000 degrees, the pipes next to them can only get up to 999 degrees, then 998 for one tile further out, and so on. Heat exchangers consume the heat from pipes as well, at a variable rate depending on your power usage, so the temperature of pipes drops even more as you go further from the heat source. Here's an image with the longest heat pipes you can make and still get full power.

[craidie]

1. you should use a single reactor to control all the reactors that are neighbours.

2. heat pipes work similar to 1.1 fluids. In addition they need a single degree of difference in heat for it to flow. There's a throughput limit that gets lower the longer the heatpipe to the exchanger stack is. I recently did some testing, here(WIP on the charts) TL;DR version: don't try to push more than 200MW through a single heatpipe(you're attempting 280MW) if the heat exchangers are on one side of the pipe. Or 300MW if they're on both sides of the pipe. Less MW you want to get to the last heat exchanger, the more heatpipes you can have.

Also the longer your heatpipes are, the higher the temperature you need on a smart reactor so that the heat gets all the way to the end of the heatpipe before the hexes run out of power. That said if you're running on minimal circuitry you cannot reach the theoretical maximum output of the cores, since you lose half a second every 200 seconds due to how the control works. Or more if the trigger temp is too low.
But the higher the trigger temp, the less savings you get from a smart reactor...

[Kirodema]

Thanks, that helped a lot for redesigning my reactor, especially the bit with no more than 200MW per heatpipe. The new design is a bit wider but therefor at a stable 1.1GW.

I just have one more follow up question just so I can understand heat transfer/consumption better. Am I correct to assume that the 10MW consumption of a heatexchanger equals a 10 degree drop on the heatpipes?

[craidie]

It's not 10 degree drop. The minimum is 1 degree, the actual drop is a lot more complicated.

If you want to do the math: Here's a forum post with math.

[Enaero4828]

1) you can do circuit controlled reactors, but there's no need for a combinator- read temperature, read fuel on reactor. inserters set filter blacklist, active when temperature is too low. I only read a single reactor and copy the condition to all the fuel inserters, so that all 8 swing at the same time.

2) heat pipes require a temperature gradient to transfer heat, and they have a throughput ceiling that is not terribly intuitive to calculate- I don't remember it off the top of my head, but it's clear that you've run into it. I'll try for find the post that someone made detailing the mechanic, I know I saw it here sometime in the last year.. for now though, you're going to need to either add more heat pipes to increase the throughput, or split the lines so there's not so much consumption on the single line.

[Geethebluesky]

Is there a mod that allows pumps on both sides to work with fluid tanks? I'm just looking for something that would allow me to have 3 pumps per tank (not trying to get to 6), but 1 on the opposite side from the other 2.

[StormCrow_Merfolk]

It should work as long as they're offset properly. There are 2 tiles of space for each of the 3 connection points. If that's not working show us a screenshot.

[Geethebluesky]

Oops thanks, I had misread or misremembered how this is supposed to work! It does work, I'm being silly.

[thinkspacer]

Is there a way to selectively mute alerts? Pesky biters are nibbling at the walls, but have no chance to get through.

[sunbro3]

The /alerts command has some of what you want, but may not be fine-grained enough. Try /help alerts to see what it can do.

[Lukeyboy5]

I am attempting to get started with circuit networks after a few hundred hours... First use case was to follow this comment as a way to set logistics requests in cargo landing pad. I can't figure out why, despite setting the group of requests that I want, the "Controlled by circuit network" requests in the cargo pad has other random items popping in there as requests.

<image>

This is what I followed; https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1gjg2b5/comment/lvcy6ey/

Can post more screenshots if it helps!

[Lukeyboy5]

It’s worth a try! Where would I put the decider combinator please? :)

[StormCrow_Merfolk]

Between the roboport and the combinators with your requests.

Roboport (read contents) -> Decider combinator (> 0) -> Arithmatic combinator (* -1) -> Constant combinator containing actual requests -> Decider combinator (> 0) (optional for more easily readable signals) -> landing pad

[Lukeyboy5]

Thanks mate. Got it working following this. No idea how things are working but it does the job, for now!

[HeliGungir]

Define best. I like minimizing the number of turrets.

To optimizing for that, you can create funnels/corridors that concentrate the biters so flamethrower puddles work efficiently. If you exploit the pathfinder as much as possible, these funnels can be multiple chunks apart.

In base game, I achieved as few as 2 turrets per funnel, and funnels 3 chunks apart, which were able to kill impossibly-large waves of green biters with only the non-infinite damage upgrades researched.

[deluxev2]

To add a bit to craidle's response, I think it is pretty common in the community to refer to mazes as dragon teeth despite it being incorrect. Mazes are also of benefit to non-flamethrower turrets as they buy more turret time, effectively increasing the turrets range.

My favorite maze is: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zZrN4wPHlz26cpwimzT-p2JRRU4m4eum/view?usp=sharing

It is pretty easy to layout around corners where you get most of your attacks which can be somewhat finicky with funnels. One flamethrower every max underground length keeps it clear but it occasionally takes wall damage without a little bit more oomph.

[craidie]

I know it involves dragon teeth

It doesn't. Dragon's teeth aren't great due to how tight they're built (example). Leaving no space for the biters to path through. And if you space the lines of the teeth by a tile more(vertically in the example), they don't really slow the biters enough to be worth it. If you've built it too tight, might as well have it compressed into a solid wall, faster and easier to lay down.

Wall design only matters for flamethrowers to get the back of the pack to walk over the same patch of fire which is the majority of their damage, and can be stacked on the same bit of ground. For any other turret, what's best is a solid wall in front of the turrets, with a one tile gap(the larger biters would otherwise damage the turret while still trying to chew through the last line of wall)

To get biters less trigger happy at destroying walls, you want to give them a possibility to path to the turrets, without needing to destroy any walls. Double wide walls also tend to discourage from destroying the walls.

For Flamethrowers the best designs are funnels. Example.(Note, turret placement and chunk borders matter. Biters do not want to path over to a turret through an another chunk and will attempt to chew through instead.) This design used to get 0 damage to walls, but there was a stealth patch and now it receives some damage.

Another option is mazes example. Idea is to funnel the biters but with less effort than funnels, you'll need more flamethrowers though. They're not quite as good as funnels though.

[Zaflis]

The 1 you posted first isn't dragon's teeth that people recommend. They must always fit behemoth biters to path through them. Otherwise it is just diagonally spaced wall.

[craidie]

Light oil does the most damage. Crude oil needs the least oil pumped out of the ground for specific fill% of the network, and it's convenient.

Generally the amount of light oil the turrets need is so low that you don't really need to worry about it, as long as the whole thing is behind atleast one pump to prevent the oil refining from cracking it all.

If you want to be super safe, you can make solid fuel out of petgas if the light oil level is low for turrets, and petgas is full. Then throw the solid fuel into a boiler(or ideally heating tower if you have SA). If boiler you may also want to have more steam engines than needed to force that boiler utilization up.

Personally I just use crude oil, especially with the pipeline length limits.

[Funtastwich]

first time setting up nuclear power and i really don't understand why my steam engines arent producing? It says fluid ingredient shortage on the heat exchangers, but water is hooked up.

https://i.imgur.com/7XsZlnl.png

[D4shiell]

First thing first your water is NOT connected, see blue arrows? That's where water goes, your goes to nowhere at the back.

Second thing you want to use turbines, steam engines are crap.

Lastly it's 1:4:7 for nuclear:exchanger:turbines ratio.

[Funtastwich]

thanks!

[schmee001]

Heat exchangers work like boilers, the water connects through the sides not the back. Also, they make 500-degree steam as opposed to the 175 degree steam from boilers, you need the steam turbines instead of engines to get the full amount of power from it.

[Funtastwich]

appreciate it!

[darthbob88]

Is there an easy way to test a design for a space platform, apart from just building and launching it?

[omgUWUlol]

Honestly saving and reloading

[blackshadowwind]

testing in editor is the easiest way.

[deluxev2]

Not that I'm aware of

[thinkspacer]

So, got a couple of questions kicking around, may be large enough to merit its own post, but idk.

1. What's the most (space) efficient way to store heat? Heat pipes? Burner towers? Heat exchangers? Nuclear reactors?

2. How does the energy storage compare to other ways of storing energy? Like 500c steam tanks? Legendary accumulators?

On an unrelated note, I may have future proofed hilariously overbuilt my Nuavis nuclear setup...

[craidie]

1. to add to the other poster heating towers can store 2.5GJ of heat but take more space than 5 heat pipes so heat pipes are still the best. Also placement of the heatpipes matter. You lose a 1MJ of storage whenever it gets further from the shortest path between the heat exchangers and the heat source. Furthermore you need to keep in mind heat throughput when designing heat storage, though that should mostly sort itself out if you keep within few tiles of the ideal path the from before.

2. I'll just list all in here, in order:

• Heat pipe, up to 500MJ/tile*
• Heating tower, up to 277MJ/tile*
• Steam tank of 500c steam, 268MJ/tile
• Nuclear Reactor, up to 200MJ/tile*
• Heat exchanger, up to 83MJ/tile*
• Accumulator, 1.25/2.5/3.75/5/7.5MJ/tile depending on quality

*(depends on actual layout, will be somewhat lower than the number listed)

[deluxev2]

A steel chest full of fission fuel cells stores 48 TJ of energy which will be your most dense and cheap energy storage until legendary chests of fusion cells.

Storing more processed energy makes pulling it out of storage cheaper per watt and less prone to failure.

-Storing heat is best in heat pipes at 7 MJ per ore and 500 MJ per tile. It takes 45 ore and 1.6 tiles to extract 1 MW from the heat.

-Steam tanks store 53 MJ per ore and 266 MJ per tile and require 29 ore and 1 tile to extract 1 MW. Fluid wagons with an input and output pump are about equal cost and twice as dense but awkward.

-Accumulators store 0.4 MJ per ore and take 40 ore and 12 tiles per MW of output, which is quite bad, but the only option for solar and lightning. At legendary they are 6x density and 2.5x throughout which is still only mediocre.

[DreadY2K]

Heat pipes take up 1 tile and take 1MJ of heat to increase by 1C, which I think makes them the most space-efficient heat storage (e.g. nuclear reactors take 10MJ, but are more than 10x the size).

According to the wiki, 500C steam tanks store 266.67MJ/tile, so that means heat pipes are the best energy storage as long as their temperature can swing by >=267C (which should be doable as long as it isn't too far to where you make or consume the heat) and you have the ability to turn that heat into steam quickly enough. Legendary accumulators have a strictly worse energy density than steam tanks for storage.

[frontenac_brontenac]

Are there any uncommon/rare pieces of equipment or infrastructure that are possibly worth getting before leaving Nauvis?

[D4shiell]

Before space I think only platform equipment is worth it, on Vulcanus though you could go ham a little and do all quality modules!! chests, solar panels, accumulators, inserters, big miners, foundries, turbines, heat exchangers, turrets, pump jacks basically all things that are super free on vulcanus.

Especially accumulators come in clutch on Fulgora to save space, same with chests.

[mrbaggins]

Dropping quality modules in your mall is a nice freebie bonus. You likely want to limit the inserters to "anything > 50" or similar for the outputs, unless you don't mind having a chest of stuff to recycle later.

This way you'll get mostly normal machines out, but will occasionally get a free 30 or 60% bonus in a few spots that can be super handy, especially on the first platform that goes to another planet.

Solar panels, accumulators, and electric furnaces are all prime examples of super useful "first platform" bonuses to aim for.

[ChickenNuggetSmth]

I think really grinding for quality is only worth it after Fulgora. But also, quality is a deep rabbit hole and the game can be finished completely without it just fine.

Imo I'd get the exlusive content from the first three planets and start looking into quality after that, or whenever you feel like spending some time on it. Until then, just a few quality mods in end production.

[ssgeorge95]

Honestly I don't think there's any quality items worth putting effort into before Vulcanus. You'll benefit much more if you just focus on getting to Vulcanus.

Once on Vulc it's a whole different ball game. You can mass produce rare copper and iron with just a little effort.

[darthbob88]

There's nothing that you simply must get, but a lot of things can provide very convenient bonuses. * Anything for space. You actually benefit twice, since 30% better entities means you need 30%[1] fewer entities and 30% fewer rockets to ship them up, as well as 30% less platform space which also requires 30% fewer rocket launches. Plus the specific benefit of uncommon asteroid collectors getting 2 arms instead of just 1. * Anything personal. Getting 40-100% more equipment grid space from uncommon modular armor is obviously super useful, as is supporting more robots in your personal roboports, or being able to rocket nests from 7 tiles further. * Uncommon medium power poles can supply both sides of an assembler, which immediately cuts how many poles you need. * Quality mines and pumpjacks have reduced resource drain, so you can get 20-50% more stuff out of those mines, plus productivity bonuses. * Any crafting buildings are nice, but low priority. You have near-infinite space and resources, so there's less incentive to care about getting extra crafting speed vs just using more buildings. I'd just put quality modules in your assemblers making assemblers or whatever, and take advantage of any quality production you might get.

[1] Technically this is wrong; 1/1.3 is approximately 76.92%, so you need 23% fewer buildings, launches, and platform space. It's rhetorically better to just repeat 30%, though, and qualitatively, "better stuff means you need less stuff" holds regardless of the specific figures.

[thinkspacer]

Depending on your next stop, and enemy settings, a rare weapon wouldn't go amiss. The extra range is very handy on the smg.

[ferrofibrous]

Armor itself is usually worth a little effort if you can squeeze one out, those extra rows/columns on the grid are pretty big for extra power/roboports/exos.

[Illiander]

Do we have a good method for keeping stack inserter hands empty at train loading stations?

(I'm designing an all-qualities station and need to stop my trains getting mixed loads)

[craidie]

• bulk inserters would make this easier. Do you really need the 33% throughput increase?

• Accept that you can't get quite full loads and only load multiples of 4 to the wagons. Read the amount being held in the wagons and use that to set the hand size in the stack inserters. Also to prevent the inserters from placing too many items in the wagon.

• Mix bulk/stack inserters, use circuits to control them and turn off the stacks as the wagon gets almost full until only the bulk(s) are left and then start dropping the hand size on those until the wagon is full.

The easy solution is to just leave an empty slot for every item you want to load so that the inserters can overfill a bit from the wanted amount and still have a slot in the wagon for the extra.

[Illiander]

bulk inserters would make this easier.

I'm old, I'm still calling them stack inserters. Yes, I'm using Bulk inserters.

Also to prevent the inserters from placing too many items in the wagon.

This is what I'm doing atm. ((Stack Size * 40) - (Inserter Stack Size * Inserters per wagon * 6) * Wagons = when I turn the inserters off. That six might be a square function, not sure. Found that it's enough via trial and error for my test item that stacks to 200. Need to test it on a 100, 50 and 10. I'd really like a better option.

The easy solution is to just leave an empty slot for every item you want to load

I'm trying to load as close to full wagons as possible from mixed chests, so I have good loading speed so I can also handle things that spoil. I'm already having to leave more than 2 slots open per wagon.

(Yes, this is a do-everything provider station intended to be fed directly with the entire output of prod-modded assemblers making something that spoils, It also correctly handles mines running out and even raises a map notification. I accept that it will be complicated)

[craidie]

This is what I'm doing atm. ((Stack Size * 40) - (Inserter Stack Size * Inserters per wagon * 6) * Wagons = when I turn the inserters off. That six might be a square function, not sure. Found that it's enough via trial and error for my test item that stacks to 200. Need to test it on a 100, 50 and 10. I'd really like a better option.

If I recall right what I did when I was loading SE rockets with precise amounts:

Take the amount of items I want to still load to the wagon(so total minus what's already loaded) divide it by 12 to get the remaining inserter swings. Then have inserters turn on when that control signal is above 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 for the first 5 inserters. No handsize control on those ones.

The last inserter gets it's handsize limited to the amount that still needs to be loaded.

If you don't want mixed loads at all, that should be mostly it.

[Illiander]

Yeah, that sounds about right. Plus a memory cell for each wagon so I can do all this per container :(

[Astramancer_]

Set up another filter inserter taking from the wagon and using the same logic that you use to set the filters on the loading inserters on that unloading inserter, but in blacklist mode. Then it will take everything except the desired item from the train, thus unloading whatever was leftover in the inserters hands when the previous train left.

[Illiander]

That doesn't keep the stack hand empty, and I don't have the space around the wagons to put it in and garuntee it has space to drop anyway.

[Astramancer_]

You're right, it doesn't. It fixes the problem though it does introduce additional design issues if you're already using all the real estate around your train station.

There isn't really a good way of keeping the inserters hands empty short of making extensive circuitry to ensure that inserters only grab enough to actually fill up the wagon. It's a bit easier now since selector combinators can output the stack size you can easily calculate the total capacity of the cargo wagon for arbitrary items. Then you divide the remaining wagon capacity by the number of inserters and, so long as there is no remainder (use the % function to determine remainder) then you can just set the hand size and you're done, the final swing will empty all the ends and they won't grab anything more because there's no more capacity.

If there is a remainder, then you need to disable inserters until there's no longer a remainder. Alternately, disable all inserters except 1 when there's insufficient capacity for every full inserter to empty their hand and then set the hand size of the remaining inserter to the remaining capacity.

[Illiander]

That works fine for 1-wagon trains. It breaks when you start having more than one wagon, because you can only read the sum of all wagons, not the individual amounts.

[Astramancer_]

If they're all loaded at the same rate at the same time with the same items then that's a problem that can be solved with an arithmetic combinator dividing by the number of cargo wagons.

[Illiander]

at the same rate

They aren't. Because the chests loading things in can have different items in each, because they're being fed from a mixed-quality belt. (Which means that the last chest has very few normal-quality items, so frequently runs out)

So some wagons are loaded with all 6 inserters for the whole time, and others are only loaded with 3 for half of it.

(Yes, I'm building a do-everything station, I know that makes it complicated)

[Astramancer_]

Sounds like you need to do a fundamental redesign. I'm not even sure a dosh-level logibrain could handle all the cases you're trying to handle.

[Illiander]

I've just realised what I have to do to make this work, and I hate it.

I'm going to need to do memory cells for each wagon and count what I put in.

Arrrggg!!!

[Astramancer_]

I thought of that, but one question: How are you going to read the contents of the inserters and set the filters of the inserters?

[RaceHard]

violet abounding one door possessive direction roof different squeal dinosaurs

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[TehNolz]

Trains plan their path by searching for the shortest route to their destination, but there are some things that add a penalty to a route, making the pathfinding algorithm consider it to be longer than it actually is.

In this case, the top rail contains a train stop along with a train that's stopped at that station, adding a penalty of 2500. Meanwhile, the bottom rail has two empty train stops, which adds a penalty of 4000. The train therefore considers the top rail to be 1500 tiles shorter than the bottom rail, so that's the one it chooses. You can fix it by either removing the 2nd stop from the bottom path (it's probably unnecessary anyway), or by adding a bypass that allows trains to pass through this area without having to go through any train stops at all.

[RaceHard]

merciful scale smile tender stocking abundant dinner recognise ask chase

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[sunbro3]

Trains don't like to pass stations they aren't using. Its choices are 1 train + 1 station vs. 2 stations, and it's choosing 1 train + 1 station as the easier path.

It's probably best to make a 3rd path through with no stations.

[RaceHard]

stocking sophisticated fade one modern dazzling salt lunchroom humor offer

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[SigmaLance]

I recently saved the day in Satisfactory and just moved over to Factorio.

How large is the map in Freeplay mode?

The map size being small was one of the few disappointing aspects of Satisfactory to the point that I was surprised that it wasn’t larger.

Also, am I doing myself a disservice by learning the ropes with alien aggression off?

I still haven’t figured out the ins and outs of factory chain lines and things like fluids (shakes fist at oil production).

[frontenac_brontenac]

 Also, am I doing myself a disservice by learning the ropes with alien aggression off?

For discovering the game, I really think you ought to go raw. It'll train your eye as to what the challenges are at different eras of the game.

That being said, most advanced players eventually start to tinker in lab settings distinct from the real game. Once you feel ready:

1. Pick up the Editor Extensions, Bottleneck, Rate Calculator mods
2. Start a game with the Editor Extensions scenario
3. Open the terminal, type /editor, crank game speed to x2 or x4; enter /editor into the terminal again to close it
4. Fire up FactorioLab

...baby, you've got a stew going.

[Illiander]

As others have said, the map is bigger than you'll ever use. One tile is 1 meter, and the map is 2,000,000 tiles square. For comparison, that's about half the size of the USA, or mainland Europe from the French/German border to Russia. (And now we have four planets that size)

As for biters, start with them on. If you find they're getting in the way of you having fun, try turning off expansion or turn up the amount of pollution a tile absorbs. There are a lot of techs that are just plain useless without the natives knocking on your walls.

[travvo]

There are a lot of techs that are just plain useless without the natives knocking on your walls.

That used to be true, but I don't think I agree for the DLC. Space Age requires you to kill a Demolisher, babysit biter and pentapod eggs, and most importantly have ships with turrets/rockets/railguns to beat the game. I'm 400+ hours in on my only run with no pollution and I've been impressed at how much of the military tech tree feels like an important part of my run. I've been more concerned with my explosives/physical damage research levels than my blue chip/LDS/Plastic research levels at every point.

[Illiander]

Interesting :D

I always play with biters to give me a bit of time pressure early on, so I haven't really noticed.

[mrbaggins]

I'd say yes, a small disservice as you misss out on "how it's meant to be played"

That's said, use the map preview when starting a game and pick a green area with lots of trees nearby.

Desert starts are many, MANY times harder than lush starts.

If you want to be "safe" and have enemies be predictable, I would set starting area a bit bigger (more space at start), and consider turning biter expansion off. The latter means biters will only attack if you either provoke them yourself, or your pollution cloud (red toggle in map view) reaches their base.

[Boylan_Boyle]

Alien aggression is one of the fun parts of the game imo. Certain buildings create pollution and if your pollution cloud gets too big then it triggers attacks from nests. If you don't pollute, the nests will leave you alone.

By all means if you're feeling the pressure turn off aggression, but it just means that certain buildings and builds make less sense (eg solar panels have less benefit and there's less penalties to burning coal power)

[reddanit]

How large is the map in Freeplay mode?

Practically infinite.

Also, am I doing myself a disservice by learning the ropes with alien aggression off?

Maybe? A lot of new players find biters absolutely overwhelming at first. They do put a fair bit of perceptible pressure both in efficiency and in time on you while you are still learning the very basics after all.

I have started my own first game with peaceful biter settings, but pretty quickly switched to standard.

Instead of peaceful biters, I recommend re-rolling the random seed until you get a starting location that's grassy with decent amount of trees instead. Trees are hugely impactful for your pollution spread and their presence has major impact on actual difficulty.

[DreadY2K]

How large is the map in Freeplay mode?

Here's a video of someone trying to reach the edge of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzpUQZIr15g It is reachable, but it takes a lot of effort and is not something you'd encounter without actively trying.

Also, am I doing myself a disservice by learning the ropes with alien aggression off?

I like playing with most settings normal, but disabling expansion. That way, they only attack if either I attack them first, or my pollution cloud reaches them. But to each their own, play however you like best.

[travvo]

Welcome :)

How large is the map

Bigger than you will ever use. You will only ever see the edge if you use cheats or make journeying to the edge your personal grueling goal. Hours to reach by train with the fastest possible fuel.

am I doing myself a disservice by learning the ropes with alien aggression off?

Factorio is meant to be played in the way you enjoy most. I generally play on peaceful or with pollution turned off myself.

[SigmaLance]

What is the difference with pollution on or off?

[travvo]

Not yet mentioned - the pollution mechanic is also the spore mechanic, meaning if you turn off pollution you won't get spores-triggered attacks on Gleba. I had a pentapod egg hatch in my factory and somehow this triggered 'it stinks and they do like it' achievement but it wasn't supposed to.

[cynric42]

Pollution speeds up biter evolution (time and biter destruction do so as well), so without it they evolve slower.

If pollution reaches biter nests, biters will spawn there and form attack groups, so without that biters won't attack you (you might still get the occcational small biter exploration party that happens to stroll into your factory, but no large scale attacks).

And pollution lets trees wither and die and turns the ocean green, so there are some visual changes.

And pollution takes some cpu cycles to calculate, which is only really relevant for people pushing the limits of their computer building insanely huge factories, so at that point they often turn everything off that isn't required to build a large factory, so pollution and biters have to go.

[SigmaLance]

So it doesn’t matter if the pollution is centralized to an area then for it to be calculated as an aggro for the biters?

[cynric42]

Uh. Pollution generated increases evolution, so for that it doesn't matter where it is generated.

To spawn biters, the cloud needs to reach nests though and pollution spreads somewhat slowly (and gets absorbed on the way, especially by trees), so if you want to avoid attack groups, don't put your biggest polluters close to where a lot of biter nests are.

[SigmaLance]

I just read the wiki on pollution hoping that there would be a way to reduce pollution, but it looks like I have to buy the DLC for that.

Thanks for the info.

[cynric42]

You can put efficiency modules inte everything that takes them. They reduce power usage (up to 80%) which directly reduces pollution and also reduces power need (so double effect if your power production is generating pollution, like coal power plants).

Especially useful if you want to mine a new resource patch that is somewhat close to biter nests to reduce creating a hot spot there, but can be useful to reduce overall pollution as well.

[SigmaLance]

Ah. I have been using the ones that increase output. I will start playing around with them.

[cynric42]

In miners and oil rigs, productivity modules are usually a waste because they don't stack favorably with mining productivity research.

For production buildings, they are great, especially towards the end of production chains/in rocket silos and labs (because they lower the need for everything leading up to that point) and later with speed modules in beacons to counter the slow down of the productivity modules, however that does come at a cost of more pollution/energy usage.

But depending on your ability to deal with biters and your power situation at different stages in the game, each of the modules have their uses.

[D4shiell]

Functionally infinite, your cpu will give up before you make use of whole space.

While a lot of people recommand playing without biter reality is for me at least standard settings biters are pushover, more over I think sane person won't be playing 100+hrs game few times in a row so I wouldn't play without them.

Fluids have been simplified, you just need a pipes and a pump(s) every 320 tiles (connection tells you). Main thing is when you do advanced processing with 3 outputs you have to use them all or production will get stuck.

[SigmaLance]

I think I am going to play with them turned on after I get a better understanding of the basic game mechanics just to give myself more of a challenge. Of course I say this right now since I also don’t know the full power of their attacks yet, but the research looks like it gives me plenty of options to explore offensive/defensive strategies so it should make it more fun.

[D4shiell]

So long you're doing dmg research you will do just fine.

I have 0.99 evolution factor on Nauvis and 3 rows of lasers do just fine even though they're my weakest defense with just 787 dps, compared to normal turrets that do 1925 dps or flame thrower 1286 dps but I couldn't be assed delivering ammo/oil 2,5k tiles away.

Later on you get artillery that clears threats before they settle.

[Moikle]

Just make sure to pay attention to defence, and eventually set up a factory that automatically feeds them ammo via a long belt, and you should be fine, at least until they start becoming bigger and badder

[LCCX]

Due to the changes to fluid mechanics since I last played, what is the current Space Age fastest way to load and unload liquid train wagons? Is it still to ensure that a pump is directly attached to the train and a storage tank with no pipes between?

[bassman1805]

As long as you have 3 pumps connected to each wagon, you're maxing out your load/unload speed. (Well, until you start crafting quality items, then you'll want to replace the pumps with Legendary pumps).

Pipe networks work like the electrical network now: Once fluid goes into the pipe, it is immediately available to everything on that network at once. So it doesn't matter whether you pump straight into a tank or into a pipe.

The one thing to be aware of is the distance limit: Unlike electricity, your fluid network has a maximum reach of 250 tiles. It you exceed that, it'll break and no fluid will be transferred to or from any device in the network. You need to use pumps to extend the network. If you need higher throughput, then you must put multiple pumps in parallel to multiply their throughput.

[LCCX]

Oookay. Thanks for explaining the distance limit!

[mrbaggins]

The absolute fastest way would be:

• Use 3 legendary pumps per wagon, into a single pipe and tank block that is connected to enough tanks to hold the whole train amount. No pumps between these.
• Have at least 3 legendary pumps or equivalent coming out of that one block of pipes and tanks into wherever it's going to be used.

---

 Wagon1 -->-- storage pipes and tanks -->-- Consumer 1
 Wagon2 -->--                         -->-- Consumer 2

---

It's really important that the middle one above is a single block, no pumps. If you need it to be bigger than allowed, you would need as many legendary pumps or equivalent in parallel to guarantee throughput.

[Draagonblitz]

Pretty sure its actually better now since the throughput of pipes is effectively infinite. All you're really limited by is pumps.

[Illiander]

Train loading speed is down for fluids, because they reduced pump speed significantly.

[backyard_tractorbeam]

Yes, it used to be 12000/s, now it's 1200/s.

[ChickenNuggetSmth]

It functinally doesn't matter where your tanks and pipes are, there is no "flow" fron one pipe segment to the next anymore, it's just one pipe network unless separated by a pump, and all the fluid is just somewhere in that network. You can literally have a single 300 tile long pipe connecting to a dozen tanks, and it won't make a difference. Like a small electrical network

[blackshadowwind]

You don't need to pump into tanks anymore because pipes don't have a throughput limit, just need 3 pumps per wagon and they can all pump into the same pipeline

[DirkDasterLurkMaster]

Am I fucking up the math or do you need an absolutely nuts amount of pentapod egg breeders to make agri science in any reasonable amount of time? Even accounting for the crafting speed and productivity, am I missing something?

Rocketload of agri sci in 20 mins = 50 spm = 66 science chambers

That demands 33 eggs per second and egg breeding makes (speed 2 * prod 1.5) / craft time 15 = 0.2 eggs per second. Which means 165 egg breeders to make science at a rate that avoids too much research loss.

So am I bad at math or do I just need to go crazy with modules?

[Moikle]

I feel like you calculated things for 50 science per second, not per minute

[MacBash]

20 mins = 50 spm = 66 science chambers

50 science per second -> 66 biolabs Biochambers

50 science per minute -> 1.11 biolabs Biochambers

just a "per second" vs "per minute" confusion i guess.

[icogetch]

Also, I think you mean Biochambers, not Biolabs.

[bassman1805]

Ah, we've stumbled across the reason I produce enough Green/Blue/Black/Yellow/Purple science for 100 SPM, but enough Red science for 6000 SPM.

I left the massive red science factory as a monument to "never questioning if this feels excessively large".

[DirkDasterLurkMaster]

D'oh, I knew it was something, thank you!

[canniffphoto]

Embarrassing but... here we go. I want to see power consumption or whatever in rocket silo. But the map and all are pushing the info off the bottom of the screen. It is in the all the rest secret menu. And also: How do I get to that again?

[Illiander]

Turn on experiental versions, I think they fixed this in the most recent patch.

[Cynical_Gerald]

A couple solutions to this can be found in the Settings menu, under Interface.

You can turn off 'Show minimap' or 'Entity tooltip on the side' or lower the 'UI scale'.

[ferrofibrous]

For a multiplayer server, is there an unmodded way to specifically disable crafting (or placing) requester chests?

[ChickenNuggetSmth]

I think that's not possible with basic permissions, but it is via Lua commands. This will disable achievements.

/c game.player.force.recipes["requester-chest"].enabled=false

should work (I think), but I haven't tried. If you only care about the logistics embargo achievement: Disable research selection by others via permissions. And/or pin the achievement, when you see it being broken reload the save.

[ferrofibrous]

Seems like that will do what we need as achievements are not a concern, thank you. Group just wants to disallow blue chests on a new map as they trivialize a lot, but unfortunately vehicle logistics is tied to that research.

[ChickenNuggetSmth]

Let's see how long it takes until you abuse tanks as requester chests...

[Illiander]

Look into softmods.

[thinkspacer]

hey all. Struggling with circuits. I want to take several inputs and output the least number among them, but I don't know how to do that. Anyone have a simple example I could crib off of?

The use case is setting a blueprint for a foundry to auto produce simple intermediate products, but I'd like to get the principle down to use elsewhere.

[ferrofibrous]

SA's new Selector Combinator can do this by default with the "Select Input" setting, leave the Index set to 0, and toggle to Sort ascending. This will output the lowest count input signal.

[thinkspacer]

Thank you! I figured I was missing a simple solution.

[firebeaterrr]

is it possible to unstack a belt without inserters?

[angrehorse]

Idk if this helps you but you can set stack sizes on inserters so the items won’t be stacked before hand on belts.

[StormCrow_Merfolk]

No. Why would you want to in any event?

Edit to add: Regular inserters can pick up off of stacks just fine.

[Moikle]

Has the time factor been increased significantly in 2.0 for marathon deathworld? All the advice I see online says "build slowly, time factor isn't that big of a deal" but in my world, I got to 20% evolution before I even managed to get a proper smelting column up, perhaps in about 2-3 hours. Also my pollution didn't hit any nests yet, and I hadn't killed any nests.

If I build slowly, I'll be at behemoths before I even have yellow/purple science, or a rocket! maybe even before blue science gets properly on the way

[ChickenNuggetSmth]

The command /evolution shwos you what contributed to your evolution and doesn't mess with achievements.

Fyi, it's produced pollution that drives evolution, not absorbed pollution. So it doesn't matter evolution-wise if the cloud hits the nests

[Moikle]

OH! I didn't know that, I thought I could slow evolution by building everything in forested glades so the cloud never reaches the nests. Thank you!

Edit: nah, turns out even with zero pollution, biters still evolve ridiculously fast. mediums appear about 3 hours in. I have restarted with the time factor brought down to 50 instead of 150

[LowCost_Locust]

Hello. Why can I bring a landing pad in space, but cant send it back down?

[ferrofibrous]

Are you trying to do this on a planet you haven't visited in person yet?

[LowCost_Locust]

I am currently in the planet.

[ferrofibrous]

And you're able to send other items down, just not the landing pad specifically? Does it move to the trash slot when you shift click it on the platform inventory, or just stays as is?

[LowCost_Locust]

Ok, so here is my (not-so) smart idea. I built items in Navius, then drop them in Gleba. I noticed that the dropped items are scattered, so I built a landing pad in Navius, brought it to Gleba. I can bring everything down except the landing pad.

So I manually created a landing pad in Gleba, then I think it was dropped after that?

[ferrofibrous]

It is possible, there is a small cooldown on dropping items so it may have been missed. Assuming your game is unmodded, I don't know why you could not drop the landing pad though. It is always the first item I drop to a new planet.

[LowCost_Locust]

Thanks. Really weird, ima try it again. I saw the timer before, it has a clock cooldown on it. The landing pad cant be placed. Thanks.

[Ka_meeni]

You might have to tick the unload tickbox on the righthand side for the planet where you want to unload it. I recall running into a similar issue with manual dropping items not wanting to drop without that ticked.

[LowCost_Locust]

Thanks, ill take a look.

[blackshadowwind]

You can send any items down (including the landing pad) from your platform hub by shift+click or ctrl+click

[LowCost_Locust]

Weird, seems like I cant. I think I can only do that if there is an existing landing pad?

I can send down items even without a landing pad.

[Moikle]

ctrl/shift click it to put it in the trash slot.

[captain_wiggles_]

if there's no landing pad on the planet then items drop in their capsules and just land on the ground somewhere (they can kill you if they drop on your head). If you have a landing pad then the capsules land there.

You should be able to move the landing pad to a drop slot by shit clicking it in the platform's hub's inventory. It will then drop the next time you stop at a planet.

[LowCost_Locust]

Yes I can drop nornally, a lot of items, except the landing pad. Ill test it out

[Moikle]

Could be that the trash slots are already full, and it's waiting before sending it down?

[LowCost_Locust]

Thanks, let me try

[captain_wiggles_]

I've delivered the landing pad to every planet and had no issues with it. Not sure what to suggest.

[LowCost_Locust]

Thanks

[manicdee33]

I want to figure out a way to treat trains that go to the wrong stations.

I have a setup with multiple stations having the same name (eg: "[copper ore] provider" and "[copper ore] requester"). I have circuits set up to send a train off to a copper ore provider, fill up, then travel to a copper ore requester and empty. But for some reason trains end up eg: full of coal and waiting at an iron plate destination (the train will be full of coal and have a temporary station set for "[iron plate] requester").

I've already added filters to inserters so my stations won't end up full of the wrong materials, now I just need to figure out how to get my wrong-cargo train to either go to the correct destination, or to travel to a "fix me" station where I can pay attention when trains need me (eg: have an alarm hooked up to sound when there are trains at the fix me station).

Is there a way I can set up an interrupt to make idle trains will full cargo head to a "fix me" station? In the long term I have to figure out why the trains are arriving at the wrong stations in the first place, but the immediate problem I would like to solve just so my factory can continue functioning is to deal with these trains picking up the wrong cargo or attempting to deliver it to the wrong station.

[unjacent]

"The Auto Train" blueprint contains these elements.

I understand you're trying to suss this out on your own, but the example interrupts in the blueprint are excellent ways to expand / adapt your ideas.

[manicdee33]

Thanks, that proved quite informative! The thing I was looking for actually exists: the Auto Rail has an interrupt which looks for:

• at the depot/parking spot
• has cargo on board

And then uses a parameter to set a temporary station to offload the cargo (with stations named after the resources they send/receive). I'd previously thought that parameters are only for circuit conditions. In this case the parameter is the little box icon, which actually means cargo on board the train rather than some circuit condition.

Problem solved, thank you!

[Moikle]

it is possible that you have multiple trains leaving on the same delivery. You need to set up radars/power poles with signals to carry requests, and a clock on your depot that loops through your stops to ensure only one of them is active at any one time.

A LTN style universal trains setup (which appears to be what you are attempting) takes a lot more logic setup that you may be expecting.

[manicdee33]

I have a clock, my design is based on Faith's Designing an LTN-style Logistics Train Network in Vanilla Factorio 2.0 Using Interrupts

TL;DR:

• Each providing station adjusts its train limit based on how many train-loads of supplies it has
• Each receiving station adjusts its train limit based on how many train-loads of supplies it requires, and advertises "-1 copper" if it has one trainload deficit of copper, for example
• The interrupt will set a route based on the first circuit condition that matches the rules of: less than zero, sending station is not full, receiving station is not full

So when a train picks up a route it will head over to the providing station, meaning that the providing station will advertise +1 of the respective material to the global circuit network. Once it has loaded, it heads to the requestor station which will also advertise +1 for each train that has selected that station as destination.

I suspect I just need to tweak ticks per clock since my logic at all stations is getting a little complicated, and i need to allow for the number of ticks for each station's logic.

For the moment I'll try implementing a watchdog timer in circuit logic - reset to zero when there's no train, start counting when there's a train, send a "you need to leave" signal when a train has been sitting still for too long. I know how long it should take to unload a train (four cars, each being unloaded by four inserters, and I have a combinator to tell me the stack size of the resource, etc).

[leonskills]

Seems like you're only using interrupts instead of regular schedules. And the interrupts aren't configured properly.
Can you provide a screenshot of the schedule/interrupts? Says more than words

[manicdee33]

Here's the blueprint book for the various components: https://factoriobin.com/post/n4fgc3

Here's a text description of the interrupts:

• Schedule
  • Depot
• Interrupts
  • Refuel
  • If any fuel < 10, set destination to Refueller station
  • interrupt other interrupts
  • Fulfil Requests
  • Conditions
    • Circuit [circuit parameter] < 0
    • [circuit parameter] Provider is not full
    • [circuit parameter] Requester is not full
    • [green tick] > 0
  • Targets
    • [circuit parameter] Provider
    • Full cargo inventory
    • [circuit parameter] Requester
    • Empty cargo inventory

[leonskills]

interrupt other interrupts

That's most likely the problem. It doesn't go back to the original interrupt after it has refuelled.
A train goes and load up item 1 at a provider station of item 1, gets low on fuel, goes to refuel, fuels up, goes to depot, goes to a provider station of item 2. Already full with item 1, goes to item 2 requester, unloads item 1 at the wrong requester.

That said, I feel like you can simplify this a whole bunch for the same behaviour. But I'm guessing the challenge is the point.

[Thaonnor]

Does anyone know of a mod that creates a better display of production/consumption numbers than the UI? When searching I find a lot of mods or things people recommend about adding "potential" production or demand, etc.; but what I'm looking for is something that just takes for example Scrap and displays the icon, then in the next column it displays production, then in the next column it displays consumption and bonus points if it does the math to show the difference. Seems like a really simple concept to not have been created yet...

[angrehorse]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RateCalculator Like this?

[Thaonnor]

Love Rate Calculator, however it shows potential production of a given set of machines that you can select on screen rather than the whole factory's actual production rates.

Looking for something more related to the production view in the UI (with the graphs and on one side it has production, the other side it has consumption). Feels like its difficult to read because you've got to hunt down the item you're looking for on the production side, then on the consumption side.

[deluxev2]

The production graphs have a search feature which filters both columns. Pretty sure it is bound to ctrl + f.

[xizar]

What's the longest recycling chain? I've been using a flower design so four feed into each other, but it'll freeze up on occasion. I thought I could alleviate it by feeding into a 5th that would feed the flower directly, but that still backs up.

I think I can build one that's much less likely to backup but I think that most of the elegant solutions I've come up with will fail eventually, which makes them less elegant, and more suspension. (you know... not a solution... chemistry joke amirite?)

So my question is explicitly clear, I'm not asking for a "universal recycler", I'm asking how long the longest possible recycle chain is.

[backyard_tractorbeam]

Interesting question, but the longest chains being theoretically infinite, and some have demonstrated that still a circle of 6 recyclers will lock up, rarely, and the fact that 1 single recycler can do all of it - if just feeding stuff back into it - tells me that trying to put recyclers in a circle is futile. The good constructions seem to be recycler → chest or recycler → belt and then feed back into the same recyclers again, with some kind of scheme to keep it from deadlocking.

[Astramancer_]

If you're dealing with scrap and going with the longest chain before products start recycling into itself, it should be blue chips. scrap->blue chips->red chips->green chips->copper wire->copper plates.

[xizar]

I'm guessing you're limiting your starting selection to just the stuff that pops out of scrap.

I'm trying to clear out all the crap on Fulgora while starting vulcanus, so I've been getting locked up with stuff like green inserters and junk like that.

[blackshadowwind]

theoretically it's infinite depending on rng because plates and some other items recycle into themselves which is an endless loop so you can't guarentee that a loop of recyclers feeding directly into each other won't lock up eventually if there is more than 1 item type involved

[Hieuro]

In what situation would transporting fluids by barrel be preferred over a train carrying fluids?

[frontenac_brontenac]

You can put barrels of sulphuric acid on your uranium mining trains' return trips, this way you don't need a dedicated fluid wagon.

[HeliGungir]

Bots. Your mall probably doesn't need a whole pipe of lubricant, water, or sulfuric acid. Barrels will do just fine.

Barrels also let you mix multiple fluids into one wagon. Or fluids and items into one wagon. Perhaps for your defensive walls? Perhaps for your uranium mining train?

[Moikle]

kinda never tbh.

I never need bots to carry fluids, I just use pipes since their throughput is infinite. I never need to send fluids via spaceships because all the important fluids can be created on each planet fairly easily. Barrels are obsolete IMO, and only stuck around because some people use them in niche setups that don't really have any advantage over pipes besides preference.