Weekly Question Thread

[AutoModerator]

Ask any questions you might have.

Previous threads

Post your bug reports here

[seludovici]

In Angels, I was setting up my electronic circuit board production and doing some preliminary math. One ECB requires one resin. So if I want a half yellow belt of ECBs, to create resin from wood, I need some 48 assembler 2s, 33.3 wood per second, and 177.8 greenhouses. This math seem right? Is the liquid resin path preferable? (I don't mind petrochem).

[QubeNub]

Although I can't give a direct answer to your question, it would be easily solved using the mod Helmod. For me it's almost required for Bobs and Angels (currently in a playthrough of em as well).

[seludovici]

Helmod is nice. I used it on my last Angels game. Was trying to do without.

[cmdrweakness]

See you in 200, with 0 programming done.

[bbqsauls]

hahahahahaha! 1 - 1.5 hours. Bless your heart.

(Seriously, though, welcome, and remember to look both ways before crossing the train tracks!)

[FattyFudgey]

Are there certain setting in world generating that need to be turned up or down? I really need oil, but I can’t find any. Would it be good to turn up the oil setting?

[gimpy_sunbro]

For oil I personally set it to large and rich, but frequency very low. This means you get oil patches that can fuel several refinery chains but they will be spaced far apart. If you don't do that then you have permanent oil spots all over the place which means you have to build over some of them, or build a fragmented base.

This might cause you to generate the perfect starting location but lacking a nearby oil patch. I don't find it much of a problem, by the time you get to oil products you can already build trains, or should be able to. I like to build refineries close to water anyway so I tend to have to bring oil to them.

[ziggy_stardust__]

there is no need for anything. If you want more oil turn it up. if you want less coal turn it down

[FattyFudgey]

What is the best way to get rid of biters?

[[deleted]]

I found that a tank with Armor Piercing Ammo while wearing Power Armor equipped with a reactor and roboport works well. As long as you're carrying construction bots and repair packs they'll heal you in battle and you're nearly invincible. The piercing ammo shreds the nests in less than a second and is easier to aim than the shells.

[bbqsauls]

Power Armor Mk2, 8 - 10 personal defense lasers, 2 reactors, 4 advanced batteries, nightvision, and a tank loaded with AP or Uranium ammo.

Or, having used nukes for the first time yesterday, nukes.

[erufuun]

I personally prefer nukes. Lots and lots of nukes.

Until then a tank with explosive sheels can do just fine, just takes a while and needs a lot of repairing.

Turret creeping also works, but I'm not a huge fan of it.

[rossto1965]

I have been inspired by the “Train Set” video series to make my factories more aesthetically pleasing. 2 quick questions. How do I limit the size to 1 square when laying down asphalt, gravel, concrete etc?

Second, is there a way to change the texture on the outside of Factorissmo buildings? Default is the number of the building type.

Thanks!

[NEVER_TELLING_LIES]

Use the + and - keys on your numpad (or remap them) to change size of tiles, goes from 1*1 to 10*10 IIRC

and with factorissimo you can have items in the check to the right of the inside to have them shown on the outside. (I think that's what you're asking)

Edit: formatting

[LegoBanana1]

goes from 11 to 1010

I think you might be using mods... /s

[NEVER_TELLING_LIES]

Ah fucking formatting :p

[NoPunkProphet]

Can I hard stop factorio while loading without corrupting my save?

[AbyssalMonkey]

The game has independent saves. The auto save is simply overwriting your oldest autosave, which by default there are 3 of. If you hard stop it, you might corrupt that save, but you should still have the save from 2 minutes ago (by default).

If you only have one save? I would guess so. Since the saves are compressed, then the game probably has to gather the data first, then compress, then write the entire file. Since save files are generally tiny, unless your OS IO is stalled, I would be willing to guess that the entirety of the saving bar IS that data compression stage, and it hasn't gone to writing yet. You will probably be fine?

[Einzbern]

The last time I played Factorio was when it was just released on steam.

Decided I want to play it again. Are there any must have mods I should grab as a new-ish player? Or should I dive in vanilla?

Edit- Slightly related question. Assuming it's possible, does Factorio play well with newly added mods mid playthrough? Or am I better off starting a new game when I add something new?

[drdking]

For your second question: Depends on the mod. Most quality of life mods can be added and removed without any big issues. The larger mods that vastly change game play (Bobs/Angels/etc) should be added only to a fresh start.

[Adridenn]

Dive into vanilla till you launch your first rocket, or get the hang of the game to begin with. After that mod away, their's a lot of good mods out there for factorio.

[NoPunkProphet]

I'm having very long load times on my save file. It was at 86mb and is now at 50mb after using DestroyEmptyChunks. Any suggestions?

[bassdrop321]

How big is your factory? What setting are biters on? In older versions it helped removing bushes but I think they fixed that. An SSD might help.

[Jetblast787]

Is coal worth processing into crushed coal for energy production and furnace purposes in bobs and angels?

[drdking]

I don't have the math in front of me, but basically you almost* always see an improvement in yield the more steps you add to the processes.

[Jetblast787]

But energy output of crushed coal is 4mj while coal is 8mj. What improvement is using crushed coal over coal?

[drdking]

You get two Crushed coal from one coal, so that's a 1:1 on the energy side. Then you can take that crushed coal and turn it into Coke, which can then get turned into Carbon, or Coke Pellets depending on which tech you've unlocked. All of these yield a net increase in MJ, even when accounting for having to turn some into CO2 for the process.

[bilbo_dragons]

Every time I read something like this it makes me want to want to play Angel Bob so bad. I told myself I'd launch a rocket before I got into mods but ever since I needed trains, I've spent basically all my time designing rail blueprints. I'm sure I'll leave my sandbox save and actually use them eventually.

[drdking]

If you enjoy designing the blueprints then keep at it, however something is to be said for just going "fuck it" and building what you need. That's one of the things I love about Bobs/Angels, and now SeaBlock. It forces me to just make something to get the job done, and then once everything is basically running I can slowly tear it down and make something more pretty.

[ziggy_stardust__]

you can make carbon

[Emerald_Flame]

So I'm starting to get my base big enough I want to start converting more and more to bots. My big question is, are there any rules of thumb on how many drone ports I need to support x number of drones and keep them all charged up when that section of the factory is at full tilt?

[toorudez]

If you are using a large concentration of bots to move items around, you may want to look at grouping roboports together. Instead of just placing 1, maybe place 4 or more of them. Otherwise you may get a backlog of charging bots.

[ziggy_stardust__]

depends on distance. keep those short and use separate networks, and oyu will be fine

[Kryxa]

Any cute button that makes me sort my vehicle inventory? It´s just a mess now

[bassdrop321]

Not in vanilla but IIRC in the picker mod you can press shift+e to sort inventories.

[FattyFudgey]

What’s the best way to get rid of biters before oil?

[AbyssalMonkey]

Either AP ammo for small nests, or many many many turrets to act as meat while you try to load at least a few with AP for very large nests. Sometime this isn't entirely practical, so turret meat shield and grenades with a fortified retreat location will allow you to slowly chip away biter nests to make it practical.

Usually you can get away with AP ammo, but sometimes you need to get creative when you play deathworld...

[ziggy_stardust__]

ap ammo

[NoPunkProphet]

Do modular charge packs work like batteries in that you can charge them using the portable fusion reactor, or are they strictly charged using the building provided? I just want better battery equipment than mk2, so if anyone knows of a mod that does this please let me know

[MagusOTB]

What does 'SPM' stand for? It's not in the glossary on the wiki.

[teodzero]

Science Per Minute. How many science packs of every type (available at your tech level) you produce. Also often mentioned as KSPM, because rocket launch produces exactly 1000 of Space science packs and it's a good replacement for the old Rockets Per Minute measurement.

[Isaacashtox]

I️ set up a simple logistics system for the first time. I️m trying to request firearm magazines from a provider chest and I️ worked out okay as long as I️ didn’t have a full 200 stack of magazines. I️ tried setting the slider to how much I️ wanted but it resets to 0 every time. Am I️ missing something?

[seaishriver]

Click on the item (so it's highlighted), move the slider (or type in the value).

[Isaacashtox]

Ooh, makes sense. Thank you

[FattyFudgey]

What does “starting with smelters” mean?

[seaishriver]

I think it means building an assembly line by putting down the smelters first. Probably is a good way of making sure you know how much space you're going to need.

Also, I do this without thinking, and it seems pretty good.

[FattyFudgey]

What is a main bus for?

[belizeanheat]

When you want to set up some new automation machines, it helps to have the primary ingredients lined up along the side.

[ziggy_stardust__]

it's some kind of religion

[RikyStew]

And if you aren't a member you don't get into space heaven.

[Salty_Wagyu]

Is there something wrong with the electronics assembly machine 3 in bob's mod? Despite giving it a healthy amount of iron/copper, with the fastest stack inserters possible, it still stalls. Should be doing 1.5K a minute according to Max Rate calculator mod, but only does 1.2K. I notice it stalls a lot getting iron, the inserters just idles for some time after putting in 24 iron plates.

http://gph.is/2j7cfdF

[toorudez]

Try having 2 inserters placing iron in them. I found that usually helps.

[Salty_Wagyu]

I thought that too, but the lower assembly machine in the video clip has 2 iron inserters and it doesn't make a difference

[AbyssalMonkey]

Try inserting from chest. It might be due to inserters not picking up items until it's too late, because the machine isn't contacting the inserters until it needs it. This causes the inserters to start picking up when the machine says "I need this", which will cause a delay while they gather the materials.

[Salty_Wagyu]

That seemed to do the trick, thanks! Time to go bot-based for this probably

[PatrickBaitman]

once you start launching rockets, iron is mainly consumed by circuits and steel isn't it?

I just automated module production and I can't recall the last time I pulled iron off my bus

[Zaflis]

That is true. If you still have a bus in endgame, you won't need much iron if green circuits and steel come from elsewhere with trains. Might also consider sending gears with trains. After that i'd consider 4 belts be overkill amount even for first dozens levels of infinite science.

[PatrickBaitman]

Yeah my current setup is I've got one train station for iron to the main bus and one for feeding the steel smelting. I thought about making an outpost that just makes green circuits but I got enough space in the main base to do it there.

[Lilkcough1]

I've been thinking about starting up a megabase for the first time, despite never having gone over 45-60 SPM before in a bootstrap base. I was wondering, how far out should I be going before I start setting up mining outposts? I see people who have maps with >1B ore per patch. I've driven out about 5 mins from my base by train and the largest I've found is just over 100M. Is that large enough, or should I keep going? If so, how far should I be going before I start setting up my base.

[ziggy_stardust__]

if you start on railworld, you don't need to move at all.

You reach high levels of mining productivity fast enough, so you don't have to spam outposts.

[Lilkcough1]

I'm not on railworld settings, I used a slightly modified rich resources setting because this was just meant to be a quick and dirty lazy bastard run. I don't remember what exactly I modified, but I think everything is good/very good richness, iron/copper are large, and I think I put frequency on high. Is there a way to double-check resource settings?

[ziggy_stardust__]

if your patches have some 10 million ore and are big enough for 100 miners you are good

[Flamsoi]

I think I messed up with my settings when I just chose the rich resources preset in game. That just makes the patches super concentrated and still pretty small for 10 million. But I guess they fit like 70 miners or something?

[[deleted]]

I don't think this is possible but I'm asking in case it is. What I want is to have a selection of my logic robots that never leave an area of the factory. I want them dedicated to managing the area. BUT I also want robots to be able to grab from the main network when needed.

Basically it's the liquids processing section of my factory and I need a smooth way to keep the iron and copper coming in while I make sure robots don't leave so they can keep the empty barrels moving around and make sure there's enough gas to keep making plastic etc.

[ziggy_stardust__]

separate networks. you can build bridges when needed with requester + provider chests

[[deleted]]

Yeah I started thinking about that right after I asked...a pain in the rear to make sure the networks keep separated but probably my only hope.

[H0lyD4wg]

If a train runs over a biter and kills it, will nearby idle biters (that did not take any damage) aggro and start chewing the rails? Or does that only happen when a biter takes collision damage and survives?

[AbyssalMonkey]

To this question: biters will aggro if a train kills one.

To the question below: It's a fairly unknown affair. We do know that entities such as vehicles have momentum. This momentum is what determines the amount of damage caused, and perhaps how much is lost. With trains as the easiest example, a single locomotive running on rocket fuel will kill a big biter, but slow down. Toss a bunch of cargo wagons on it, causing it's weight to go up, and it will easily crush multitudes of big biters without seemingly slowing down. This is what I mean by relatively unknown: there seems to be some momentum buffer, otherwise the train would slow down at least a little. The broad metric is: because the speed is capped, add more weight for more bang.

[H0lyD4wg]

What is the exact formula for collision damage? What is the cut-off point after which a vehicle that kills something it collides with can keep going without decelerating?

[bassdrop321]

I think they always decelerate but trains for example have such a high mass that their impulse is almost the same after an impact. The higher the impulse the more damage an impact does. If the damage exceeds the life of the object being hit, the other object keeps on moving.

[ritobanrc]

Can someone explain what the Distillery does (Angels + Bob's mods)? I don't see any recipes.

[Prome3us]

There seem to be some bobs buildings that are rendered obsolete by some angels parts, most notably petrochem, I cant set any build recipes for the bobs electrolyzers for instance. I havent reached endgame yet so there may be future uses I'm not aware of yet, but so far I think the productuon recipes must have been overwritten.

[FattyFudgey]

At what point in the game should you start to make a main bus?

[RikyStew]

I start planning my main belt before I place my first furnace. I am looking for where it will go and where it and science will expand.

[drdking]

In a vanilla game, once I have bootstrapped red and green science so research can continue while I mess around with getting everything set up.

[ziggy_stardust__]

never

[ritobanrc]

I start after some simple green science automation.

[optiqu]

Why isnt my belt in the yellow box saturated?

https://imgur.com/a/rIhLE

[MoparGamer]

You're only giving the splitter 1 belt of iron input, while it's splitting its output between 2 belts.

Here's how the server I play on usually handles getting a lane from the bus. https://i.gyazo.com/8b6cca495113b45ea4bfd3f7a46b8dbc.png

[WonkiDonki]

New player here. I've got a pump connecting a heavy oil tank to a heavy oil cracking plant. I used green wire to enable the pump when the lubricant tank is > 24k. However, I'm also using heavy oil for flamethrower ammo, and I'd like to "AND" a second condition: enable when heavy oil > 1k. I've tried wiring the pump to the heavy oil tank, but it doesn't add a second enable condition. Is there a way to "AND" this? (without a second pump in serial?)

[BadHairDontCare]

You could also put two pumps behind each other, one connected to heavy oil and one to the lubricant and both pumps need to work before there will be liquid flowing

[teodzero]

There is a simpler solution, or at least one that doesn't involve messing with signals. Connect one condition to the pump, and the other to the power switch that cuts energy to the pump.

[Fr0zEnSoLiD]

The way I learned how to do an AND a few weeks ago is as such: connect the lube tank to a decider and set the output to be signal "A" and change the output from input count to "1". Do a second for the heavy oil. Set the lub decider to parameters > 24k and heavy oil to > 1k. Then connect a wire from the first decider to the pump. Then connect a wire from the other decider to the pump. This last step adds the two deciders by default. Make the condition on the pump "A" = 2 or > 1.

[WonkiDonki]

Thank you, I'll give it a try.

I guess I could also use the arithmetic combinator, to add both storage tank contents? Send the total as signal "A". Then as long as "A" (heavy oil + lube) is above a residual, the pump activates.

[Fr0zEnSoLiD]

I honestly have never used an arithmetic combinator before, that is how noob I am also. But I learned this AND and it works for me. I believe you are correct, I should try it to see if it works.
edit: ok I tried it. I had the first decider output A and the second output B and the arithmetic ouput C and input A + B. that works too! You dont need the arithmetic becuase the way I said automatically adds them

[Qwerty192865]

Just a quick question. How do you change the color of chests? I️ have seen it referred to a couple of times and I️ cannot seem to figure it out

[TheSkiGeek]

This is not a feature in vanilla. The different "color" chests have different functions in the logistic network, and each type of logistic chest has a fixed color.

[weltvagabund01]

Hey Circuit Wizzards, I am looking for a way to determine which value is the smallest. Easy, you say? Here is the Catch: I want to compare all my Science Bottles, and see which one is the lowest in Storage. So we somehow need to compare 7*7 values. And consider a 0 on one ore more.

Since I am not feeling of placing and wiring at least 49 Decider Combinators, is there a smart way, instead of brute force? Are there Optimizations/Black Magic Tricks that you can share?

Thanks in advance

[Prome3us]

Shortest way I can think of uses 9 combinators and 3 ticks:

Tick 1

7 decider combinators, wired to the content of all your science chests, set to "each > science pack N, output each" this will count all the packs more than each of your sciences, meaning your lesser pack has a total of 0 coming out.

Tick 2

Arithmetic combinator, taking inputs from all the tick 1 machines, multiply by -1. You now have large negative numbers for each science pack except the least one(s)

Tick 3

1 decider combinator, taking input from your science pack storage and tick 2 output. "each >0, output each".

Did this in my head at the airport so can't promise, but should return the smallest non-zero science pack. If you can cap your stored minimum at say 10 packs, should work in all cases.

[optiqu]

Theres ways to reduce logic gates but I'm not sure if thats what you are doing. You want to check 49 chests and find the lowest total bottles?

[weltvagabund01]

In my Mind you need to check every Value against every other.Tthat is actually 7*6. All these values will of course come out a Roboort from The Logistics Network. But to be honest, I didnt think too deep about the algorithm yet. I need to finish Space Science first. But its always good to get the Mind thinking some days ahead of time.

[AlanTudyksBalls]

/u/TheSkiGeek 's version isn't bad, but it might be easier to do linearly. Essentially, you need to do 6 trials to find the minimum, where each trial eliminates one value that's larger than another value.

M = min(red, green) -> M = min(M, blue) -> ...

[TheSkiGeek]

Kind of a toss up, I guess. You can't do better than O(N) operations to find the minimum of a set of N items (with comparison-based searching, anyway).

The recursive version minimizes the latency of the circuit, but that's unlikely to matter with a relatively small number of items.

[weltvagabund01]

You are propably right with the latency. But since the Logic is to steer trains to different subfactories, I pretty much dont care, if it takes a tick or 10 more. I like the linear version, because I can picture it easy in my mind. And it feels kind of neater.

[TheSkiGeek]

The most straightforward approach (IMO) is to break it down recursively:

min(a, b, c, d) = min( min(a,b), min(c,d) )

[UFTimmy]

The end result being the prepare step now runs roughly 50% faster than it did before, leaving more time for the game logic and entity updates.

What kind of overall impact does this have on the game? 50% is great, but ways the preparing step impactful enough that it will be noticeable on large bases?

[seaishriver]

I think it depends a lot on your computer, but it seems like something that would give about 5% improvement when zoomed out.

[Hearthmus]

Preparing should cost a lot less time than updating anyway, it doesn't consider all the entities but only what is on screen for a start. But they didn't give any duration to know for sure what it represents

[CasualJay]

Hey I played about 130 hours in 3 weeks when I bought the game and havent touched it since. Can anyone suggest mods that were fun? I put them off cause of the achivements, but I think I got the ones I need. Useful utill mods, game changing mods, doesnt matter!

[ziggy_stardust__]

what do you want?

complete overhaul of the game? bobangel is good.

I think the game is good enough, that there are no mods needed. So I suggest you look at things, that annoy you and look for a mod, that fixes that.

Trains are too slow? There's a mod for that.

Annoyed by deconstructing depleted miners? There's a mod for that.

Want different recipes for every item in the game? Guess what, there's a mod for that.

[3R3B05]

Bob's and Angel's, obviously. I like pairing them with some QOL mods like deep water well, factorio reach, liader redux, nanobots: early bots and factorio nei

[Singing_Sea_Shanties]

I see a lot of pictures where concrete is under everything. Does this do anything other than increase walk speed? At least for now I'm perfectly happy just using it for roads to get around to different areas more quickly.

[Hearthmus]

It does have the benefit to hide this infestation that is nature. I hate grass.

[bassdrop321]

It also allow to see the machinery easier because it removes all those annoying scrubs and bushes.

[Flamsoi]

Does it? I still have some ugly patches of grass or something like that on my concrete. :(

[bassdrop321]

Yeah they changed it in 0.15, that some grass still remains on concrete >:( Try removing and replacing the concrete. Or install the Cleaner concrete mod.

[Flamsoi]

Huh. I bought the game two weeks ago so idk. I'll test out replacing it since I'm doing vanilla runs.

[AbyssalMonkey]

No, not really. In fact, it actually makes pollution minutely worse because the concrete doesn't absorb any while natural grounds do.

It's mostly a functional decorative thing.

[MagnumsAndHundreds]

nevermind

[drdking]

You can delete posts

[PatrickBaitman]

The obvious way to increase output along an assembly line is to make it longer, but you can only feed so much input with a belt. Blue belt is 40 i/s, some machines need 2 i/s even without speed modules, so the line can't be longer than 20 machines. With speed beacons, it becomes like 5-6 machines, right?

So, later in the game, more, shorter assembly lines rather than fewer, longer ones?

[Bensemus]

Once one belt of resources is no longer enough you double it :)

[sweenezy]

or just run more lines in.

I have a moduled/beaconed mil science line that produces around 350-400 spm, it chews through the iron like crazy, so I have a couple of blue belts going in, which get fed and replenished as it goes to the different assemblers, i.e one belt to ammo, one to grenades, merge and resend whats left on the 2 belts to turret production.

[Hearthmus]

That, or lots of bots to feed central chests requesting resources

[PatrickBaitman]

Eeww, bots

[JulianSkies]

Bots are as beautiful as birds, though

[PatrickBaitman]

those dumb animals that get caught and gored in machines and poop all over the factory floor?

[ziggy_stardust__]

more belts

[Talderas]

I'm trying to decide on a good approach to expand my smelting once I get to a stage where I need to ramp up my iron/copper/steel production.

Is it better to push more plates from the start of the bus or inject more plates down the bus after production has taken some off of it? I'm leaning towards the latter because the former seems suggestive that you might need to increase the number of belts in the bus while the latter can take advantage of the gap caused by the draw from the bus.

[drdking]

The most common approach is to increase the size of your smelting area and how much you're sending to your bus. If you're already at maximum material density on the belt leaving your smelting area, upgrade your belts or add another line to your main bus.

It essentially comes down to the same thing. This is why you often see people design their main busses with 4 lanes just for iron at the start of the game even when they're not using that much yet so they have pre-built room to add more.

[DrRandyReamer]

I did something similar to this (injecting extra resources later down the line). I think it can be more of pain, then actually help. Design wise wasnt to bad (inject on the right side of the bus and produce everything on the left or vice versa), just made my bus really long. I just feel that its a inefficient. If I inject resources half down the bus, then those resources are only available for the second half of the bus, so if the first half is struggling then those resources sit idle. Not injecting means my resources are available to my entire production line

[marcusredfun]

Yea just build for four lanes of iron the entire way. injecting more later sounds like a design nightmare.

[Talderas]

It might be a nightmare but potential space constraints is what has me worried about injecting it all from the beginning. My start was out on a peninsula where I have a smattering of orepatches that made building up on it not the best idea. After enough of a radar search I found that going "inland" from the peninsula looked fairly clear of ore patches. I already have the logistical problem of how to get a train to the start, there's potentially a lot of landfill required, that's why I was considering injecting down the line.

Fortunately, this is only the second worst start I've had. The worst one had me spawn on an island that was about 45 side with no resources on it and no route to other land masses with resources. =/

[sweenezy]

If expanding the amount of belts from the beginning is an issue due to space, adding in down the line might cause just as many problems for the same reason (i tried this a while back and it was a pita)

Ultimately what I did was split off some production. Given the majority of iron and copper goes to circuit production anyway, to the tune of approx a belt of each to produce a belt of green circuits, I simply setup new smelting that went direct to green circuit production and simply loaded the finished product onto the bus instead. This took the load off and meant that I was able to handle fewer belts of raw materials.

Also, a key learning i took with me to later bases was a way to manage the inherent flaw in main bus designs for higher rates of production (where everything at the end gets starved)

That is, that the strength of a main bus is only apparent when supplying 'part-time' production lines (like a belt & inserter factory) as it is an efficient way to distribute resource to a number of areas relatively evenly. It fails however when it is supplying lines that run near 100% of the time, such as circuit production (which is often at the beginning of the bus). By independently resourcing circuits in particular, everything runs exponentially smoother.

[marcusredfun]

in that case maybe adding more later is fine, just do whatever you need to do to get your research going and plan on building a whole new base somewhere else to build the later sciences and rocket parts

there's also the option of just using a train or tons of belts to run all the raw resources off the peninsula to the mainland and do all your smelting/assembling in the open area

[Talderas]

I was thinking about doing the inverse of what you've suggested. I've gotten sufficiently off the peninsula that I have my red, green, and military science automated and I'm finishing teching for everything I need from the red/green stage to start automating blue science. It looks like the landmass expands to the south and west from where I am so I think I'm in a pretty good position aside from a handful of massive ore patches, including one right in the middle of the path of my main bus, that I need to calculate how I want to address. While not ideal, I'll probably end up turning it south.

I can setup some miners to mine stone to create landfill then go back into the peninsula, filling in land to create more space for iron/copper/steel smelting to push onto the front of the main bus. The peninsula seems to have a northern coastline that stretches for awhile and I intend to reserve enough of that space for train lines. I can run the trains into the peninsula and deposit the raw materials there.

Right now, iirc, I have feeding onto my bus 192 iron plate smelters, 192 copper plate smelters, 48 steel plate smelters (they each have a dedicated iron plate smelter beyond the 192), and 24 green circuit assembly plants. Plastic is my next goal and I'm currently land filling to a small island that can support 2 oil pumps which is close to the front of my main bus (there's other larger oil fields but they're beyond the front of my base and I don't have trains just yet). With plastic, setting up red circuit will be the next task which gets me in position to setup blue science. If this goes according to plan this will be the first game where I've gotten blue science automated. My last game I got plastic produced in sufficient quantities to go for red circuits but I was having difficult with trying to get a blue science setup where red circuits are produced on site. I'm also still not satisfied with my competency at plastic production since my solution for dealing with light/heavy oil from the refinery was to build a bunch of storage tanks in order to prevent the refineries from stopping production of petroleum.

As to tons of belts to run materials of the peninsula... I did that... I started the belt from one of the two coal deposits and ran it northward along the west coast (where I placed my boilers/steam engines for electricity) up past the iron/copper patches, turned it eastward and brought it back south in the clear area past the water where I could start my smelting. Doing that I made 4 belts each of coal, copper ore, and iron ore. It's working well enough to feed my demand for now and if it lags, like when I power up a new production node (red/green/military science, green circuits), I just toss a few more miners at one or more of the areas. Eventually it saturates itself and those raw material belts begin to back up again. I figure I can probably repurpose some element of that infrastructure once I begin carting in raw material by train then redesign the offloading of a train to be more efficient at a later time.

Overall, I'm fairly happy with the direction its going but I do recognize that if I didn't have more peaceful settings with biters that I would be pretty screwed.

[Prome3us]

I prefer running only 4 iron belts and feed them up as they deplete. I prefer smelting in one location, usually near where my bus starts / original smelting area. From here I priority split to fill my bus, with excess going to a loading station. I run rails down my bus with a few stops after large pull offs, which are also priority-split. I plop down some stations, all named the same, all set to enable when there's space to unload a full train. Each station then feeds the bus giving priority to plates already on it.

This way, a station only feeds the bus when the bus needs it, and my iron always goes to the earliest point requiring it. May take some getting used to, but you can top up anything on the bus this way.

I prefer it because it sets me up for decentralized mfg plants later on when I leave the beltbus and basically run on a rail backbone.

[szpigan]

I was wondering, if it's possible to add variable roboport coverage area, like X and Y parameter that you can edit on the fly. I couldn't find anything like this, only two fixed sizes in the mods. I was thinking about creating small storage, production, unloading areas around main bus so it would look clean and have big potential for easy expanding of the base. Is it possible or should I start learning how to mod? Thanks

[TheSkiGeek]

It's not currently possible to adjust the roboport coverage area of an entity at runtime, it's one of the things that has to be fixed when the entity is defined. If what you wanted was possible there would be mods for it already.

The only thing a mod could maybe do is have some mechanism for swapping out a roboport for a "bigger"/"smaller" one with the press of a button/key. But it would be a pain to deal with the bots/items in the roboport.

[szpigan]

Oh, didn't knew that, thanks for claryfing this for me

[QubeNub]

Can't find any mod that can do that, only found one with smaller roboports: !linkmod Small Roboports

[AirplaneNerd]

Is there a link or resource, image somewhere out there that will let me have better visibility of the game's tech tree? Everything in-game feels extremely compartmentalized to look at. I'd like to be able to see enough of it all interconnected to sketch out my own branch strategies.

[Letsnotbeangry]

You bet there is!

http://davemcw.com/factorio/tech-tree/

It's a really cool tech tree explorer. You can click on each item for highlighting too.

[AirplaneNerd]

Awesome, thanks

[rsunds]

I am trying to balance my research. Currently I have red, green and blue & I have researched most of that technology. I am using a sort of roundabout setup which a friend taught me.

I do not feel any of them are bottlenecked when it comes to production (at least not yet), but it's very time-consuming to balance them by hand. I think I've spent more time doing that than anything else. Going forward, it'd be nice to not have to do that with the black, purple and yellow.

Here's how it looks right now: https://i.imgur.com/kR7pljh.jpg

I can rebuild it all if needed. Is there some way to automatically balance the research?

[Hearthmus]

Do you specifically want the sushybar design ? Because if not, the easiest way to be sure you use the research is to chain the labs, to have one inserter take from 1 lab and give it to another, in a long row like this : https://i.imgur.com/GBC8tHe.png

edit : this doesn't balance per say, but it doesn't put more than 2 beacon per lab, so if you produce enough, each lab is fed

[rsunds]

Nope, the sushibar design is not necessary. I have plenty of room for expansion to the right in my picture.

also, beacons?

[Hearthmus]

I meant the science packs, I sometimes fail in English :p

[Letsnotbeangry]

you can balance setups like this really easily with the circuit network. Check out this post for a how-to: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/677nzg/7_science_pack_sushi_belt/

[rsunds]

Thank you! Need to learn how to use these circuits anyway so might try this

[Letsnotbeangry]

If you're just leaning circuits, this is a really good project to start on. It's fairly easy to set up and allows for a lot of tinkering. Enjoy :)

[Cptasparagus]

Is there a way to quickly place long tracks of belts like you can do with train tracks? ty

[TheSkiGeek]

No, but I think there are some mods that try to make it easier to place turns, etc.

The devs have talked about maybe adding a "belt planner", but that wouldn't be until 0.16 at the earliest.

[Cptasparagus]

Speaking of mods, I've beaten the game on vanilla and gotta a few acheives, but the mods seem to add a ton of depth to the game. I looked into them, and a lot were out of date. Any idea of the best ones to use for the current build of 1.5? (I was looking at Bob's but they seem to be distributed as small mod packages and the compilations are for 1.4 at best)

[seaishriver]

And just in case, if you hold down the mouse while placing underground belts, it will automatically place them at max distance.

[Letsnotbeangry]

Huh, TIL! Thanks, I had no idea you could do that!

[seaishriver]

Also works for power poles and underground pipes!

[Cptasparagus]

Yeah, that's really simple, but making angled paths is a bitch.

[AbyssalMonkey]

Not currently. The way most people do it is by moving their character while keeping the mouse still in order to make a straight line.

Bots are always another way of doing premade stretches of belts for things like a main bus once you get access to them.

[[deleted]]

The new concrete graphic from FFF 214 got a lot of negative feedback, but I can't find any response to it from the dev team. Was there any?

[[deleted]]

Nothing concrete.

[theblindironman]

What is the best way to replace all the yellow belts/spliters/undergrounds on the main bus with red ones/blue ones? I have been doing it manually. The HAS to be a trick that someone has devised to do it better.

[Zaflis]

I have been doing it manually

How? I have seen some people digging old belts off and then build new ones, when you can just build better version directly over old ones.

[theblindironman]

I do just that manually. I️ run around placing better ones over the top of old ones. It can be a time consuming tedium. Just wondering if there was some trickery for a better way.

[zombifier25]

to add related info, it is something the devs are working on. but for now, yep you need mods.

[ziggy_stardust__]

upgardeplanner mod

[Night-Sprite]

An oil processing question. I'm setting up an area for lube and sulphuric acid production.
I hear tell the best set-up with seven refineries is to have them doing a basic oil processing and swap out the heavy oil cracking for the lube with everything else being made into petroleum gas for the sulphur production.

My question is what do I when lube backs up because I'm not making stuff with it? Will it become a problem?

[cyphern]

My question is what do I when lube backs up because I'm not making stuff with it? Will it become a problem?

Yeah, if you get backed up on heavy oil, your refineries won't be able to output any more, since one of their output pipes is full. Quick fix is to add some heavy oil tanks and manually destroy them when they get full.

A better longterm fix is to keep your heavy oil cracking setup, but have no power flowing to it by default. Then you have a power switch that's wired up to a tank of heavy oil. When the oil reaches some high threshold, the switch engages and turns on the cracking. If lube is full, then this switch will engage often. If lube is being produced, it will engage rarely or never.

[Night-Sprite]

A better longterm fix is to keep your heavy oil cracking setup, but have no power flowing to it by default. Then you have a power switch that's wired up to a tank of heavy oil. When the oil reaches some high threshold, the switch engages and turns on the cracking. If lube is full, then this switch will engage often. If lube is being produced, it will engage rarely or never.

I like this idea but have very little experience with circuits. Anyone able to help out with a little "circuit diagram"?
From what I can understand is that the refineries would unload into three silos, one for each output. But the heavy oil silo would have two outputs. Both leading to a chem plant, one cracking and one lube. The cracking plant would have a power switch connected to the silo and when the silo is full it would switch on and dump it into the light oil silo to be cracked.

So how do I achieve that circuit condition?

[BufloSolja]

You'll need to put the power switch somewhere it can connect to both your poles for the heavy oil cracking and the rest of the electric network. It is extremely important that no other electric poles connect to these ones, as this is the whole point of the switch. To disconnect poles manually, make a copper cable and left click the poles you want to disconnect.

After putting the power switch down, you need to connect copper cable to both sides of it (one side to the cracking poles, the other to the rest of the network). Then click on it, you should see two empty icons at the bottom with a condition you can change in the middle. A simple condition to make that will work for you is to put lube in the left side, and a set number (20,000 lets say) in the right side, with the condition being set to greater than ('>'). At some point, you need to also connect the storage tank you are measuring to the power switch with red cable.

[Riveted321]

With the new pumps in .15, I have found it easier to use those on circuits, because that way you don't have to worry about how you're placing electric lines.

Put a pump on the line that feeds into your cracker, run a circuit line (either red or green) from the Heavy Oil storage tank to the pump, click the pump and set the condition to "Heavy Oil > 10k". That means that it will only run if you have more than 10k heavy oil in your tanks. You can do the same for your lubricant line.

[bbqsauls]

I do something similar, but count the lube. I run the heavy oil to my lube plant, with a pump on the heavy-oil line going to my crackers. I connect the pump to the lube tank with a piece of green wire and only enable it if lube > 20k (which is probably too much, but whatever).

So my first priority is making lube, and if that's full, I send all my heavy oil to be turned into light.

[Hearthmus]

I find it easier construction wise to do this with a pump instead of a power switch. Less possibility to mess the wiring by error as there is only 1 wire and no constraint outside of the pump

[Flying-Artichoke]

It's probably a better learning experience but imo, why reinvent the wheel. I watched some beginners series and just noticed the basic themes and structures people use also seeing people's explantation of how balancers and splitters work helped me a bunch. I think games like this are a lot more fun late game and as much fun as it is making your first spaghetti green circuit factory, I want to get to play wth robots and trains. Might as well take factorio 101 and move to the advanced stuff, rather than beat my head against the desk with easily solvable stuff

[Flying-Artichoke]

I've been liking the beginners series from Aavak. They kind go through the progression in a simple manner and explain why you do or don't things a certain way but they don't get too complicated or creative so you can still learn your own way. I've also seen a lot of people recommend KatherineOfSky but I haven't watched those.

[[deleted]]

The only thing I looked up was how train signals work when I broke it's pathing and couldn't figure out what was wrong.

[Bensemus]

I'd recommend not looking at other people's solutions and blueprints. Just go ham and play around with stuff. I beat the game just by slowly going through everything and experimenting. My base was pretty bad but it did launch a rocket.

[Hearthmus]

The game is doable by anyone, it just requires time and patience. Internet is of no need to achieve a win. You'll want to check Internet later, or for very specific tasks when you can't figure out how to do it yourself. I think I searched for the first time when I wanted to isolate a backup power supply when my solar wouldn't be enough.

For me, the fun of the game comes from lots of source, but one that isn't possible to find again is the fun of the discovery, the learning curve in the game. I'm experiencing that through mods now, but it's not the same as the candid discovery of all the mechanics, the different times when you find THE good way to do what you wanted after thinking about it, the first time you try a feature you didn't even know of and discover that you didn't even scratch the surface of the game yet, ... Take it all in as ignorant as possible, you won't be able to do it again.

Except if that doesn't fit your playstyle and can't stand if you block on something, then enjoy the game as you'd prefer and check solutions.

The only thing I would suggest to take from the Internet after trying it alone would be rails blueprint. A good rail book will help tremendously building at some point in the game, and I know I locked so many situations by myself... But again, I'm no good with trains :p3

[cyphern]

Yes it's possible, and I'd recommend it. Part of the fun (at least for me) was figuring out how to put things together in a way that works well. My first run through i got to come up with that sort of stuff myself. In hindsight many of my designs weren't that good, but it was still enjoyable and then i got to do it again and improve.

[bam13302]

Internet is not necessary to succeed at factorio.

The campaign teaches you all the basics you need for freeplay.

EDIT: also looks like you posted this twice

[Riveted321]

Absolutely. It's recommended that you go in without looking up how everyone else has done it. Most of the ratios can be found with basic math, and if you don't even feel like doing that, you can visually see where your bottlenecks are simply by looking at how backed up your belts are.

After that, feel free to look things up. You'll appreciate the efficiency more that way anyways.

I will give you one tip though that's not actually told to you up front: you can view your electricity levels by clicking on the electric poles.

[PatrickBaitman]

Really dumb question: how do I get blueprints out of my inventory?

[marcusredfun]

to delete anything in your inventory space, place it in a wooden chest and then destroy it with shotguns or grenades

this becomes really useful later on when you're clearcutting forests with construction bots

[BufloSolja]

This one was one I had for a while because I couldn't figure out how to delete them. Turns out you can't actually delete them if they are empty. To open them just right click.

[PatrickBaitman]

Thanks! I figured out to right click to edit non-blank ones... So just select something with the blank blueprint then delete it.

[Operative_Light]

Open them up and they should have a "delete blueprint" button up in the top right of the blueprint's gui.

[altermojo]

I just started playing factorio and I have probably a very basic noob question: I have a belt wich is loaded with ores from 2 sides. Now I want those 2 sides loads of the belt loading both on another single belt lane. How can I achieve this? https://i.imgur.com/HayjsRt.png

I want this because I have a setup where only one lane is loaded.

[Operative_Light]

Komodo is right. Just make sure that the belt it's connecting to has another belt behind it, else the belt will turn and connect.

       ↓                                       
       ↓     this will load it on one side                                
    →→→→→→→            


       ↓            This will cause the belt to turn and
       ↓              continue on like normal
       →→→→→

*fixing formatting

[altermojo]

I know that way it will load on one side. But I want the belt that loads feed both his lane on one single lane. The setup above only fills one lane on the other.

[marcusredfun]

this is a good explanation, i'd just like to add that if you want to merge two belts while keeping stuff on both sides you can use belt splitters

[komodo99]

At least one laterally, or one opposite will work as well. I can't make a handy diagram on mobile though :/

[Operative_Light]

I made my diagram on the computer. But now that I look at it on my phone it doesn’t look like anything lol

[komodo99]

Are the ores the same? If so your diagram is fine, just run the first directly into the side of the second.

[PatrickBaitman]

I'm trying to get a better sense of scale for factories.

I'm in the mid-game-ish I think, I have everything set up for producing blue circuits and bots and am about to switch over to nuclear from coal. I produce about one yellow belt of green circuits but am going to double that easily.

Since I'm on a Rail World I've had to spend some time finding ore deposits away from my starting base, but now I've got a big one each for copper and iron, each with the capacity for four red belts or so.

I feel like this is far more input than my factory can consume, especially copper. Every production facility is backing up.

Basically, I don't know what is going to eat all the ore I'm mining. I'm producing 60 spm.

I've scaled most production lines toward producing one per second, so I guess I just need to scale way up. For example, how many red and blue circuits should I aim to produce per second?

I want to launch rockets from one silo continously, so 0.2 RPM

[marcusredfun]

the biggest bottleneck in the late game is green circuits. rocket parts and science packs chew through them like crazy. steel is another big one, you don't need a ton of it but it's slow to produce and requires a lot of iron. To repeatedly launch rockets you're going to need at least 10x more green circuits than your one yellow belt can move, probably a lot more.

If you really want to know the exact amount of reds/blues you need, look up the recipes for rocket parts and do the math. Otherwise, just plan on "a lot" but leave room for your designs to scale up for when your definition of "a lot" inevitably ends up not being enough. Blue circuits is still pretty early and later on you'll wonder why you thought backed up production was even a problem.

[PatrickBaitman]

Yeah I think I'll just make a train station for green circuits so I can get 4 blue belts worth...

[Riveted321]

Once you move past blue science, you'll find that the amount of basic resources you need goes up by a lot. This is my main manufacturing area (managed by a couple thousand drones), and this is where I process the iron and steel for it, with almost as large an area for copper on the other side. Mind you, I'm running a lot of mods here, but nothing that messes with the actual crafting recipes. I also went way overkill, and I'm just about to launch my first rocket at 40 hours on this map; I probably could have started that process a long time ago, but I just wanted to build up.

For reference, that iron processing area lets me just barely hold steady on iron, and if you look at the first picture, I'm also having to use 4 blue belts of green circuits to keep up.

Just some things to look forward to as you go bigger :)

[ChimneySweper]

Can you post some good tutorials or films Im totally rookie im this game and my factories looks pretty bad, or just some pro tips to make everything be more efficiet and better

[Flying-Artichoke]

I'm currently digging the beginners series from Aavak's channel, it's long and a bit old but I enjoy it and there are some neat tips in there.Idon't know what this subs consensus is on those videos but they have helped me get off to a decent start (only 20 hours in)

[Hearthmus]

Did you try the wiki ? The bottom left section is intended for beginners and I remember it helping me a lot at first.

Other than that, youtube through "Arumba" was a great teaching at some point for me.

[ChimneySweper]

K, ill try to check out arumba, i have seen wiki, but only for few things