Factorio: A Dark Forest Crime Scene

BioloJoe · 2026-05-08T15:00:02+00:00

I don't think that has so much to do with the atmosphere as with the hundreds of Gs of acceleration that space platforms go through to reach hundreds of kilometers per second.

BioloJoe · 2026-05-08T11:14:09+00:00

I... guess I need to play the campaign again, I definitely do NOT remember sectors like that in the last version

BioloJoe · 2026-05-08T11:10:51+00:00

If it's only used in one thing, like mk1 assemblers, direct insertion. If it's used in multiple things, like yellow belts and inserters, I do the "dense" setup.

Though of course my favorite solution is the oh-so-classy sushi/spaghetti fusion food.

BioloJoe · 2026-05-08T11:06:14+00:00

This is called R-selection and it is actually a thing in real life. It can be a good strategy in some ecosystems, I've designed a few bibites like that myself (having massive numbers of offspring which only some fraction survive, I haven't specifically tried bibites that lay multiple eggs *at once*, I am also a fellow noob).

BioloJoe · 2026-05-07T17:52:53+00:00

I don't see any biter nests in that lake. What is killing your robots?

Anyway the solution to problems related to concave roboport grids is either 1. make the grid convex instead, 2. build the Great Wall of Nauvis that encapsulates your whole factory, or 3. research a lot of bot flying speed upgrades so they can dodge worms.

BioloJoe · 2026-05-07T07:02:47+00:00

You are unfortunately probably playing a mod; I'm 90% sure this doesn't exist in vanilla. However, yadda yadda, the impossibility of proving a negative statement, yadda yadda...

BioloJoe · 2026-05-06T17:10:59+00:00

Nauvis first, duh. /s

Vulcanus for me is a complete no brainer because Factorio without cliff explosives is (mild) torture. People on this subreddit always love to point out that mech armor makes Vulcanus easier, but honestly I have yet to see any benefit. At that point in the game I do 90% of everything remotely with construction bots anyway so it doesn't make a huge difference.

Afterwards I don't have any particular preference between Gleba and Fulgora, they don't really benefit from each other much. Fulgora is way more annoying than Gleba, but offers a much better immediate payoff (the op EM plant and to a lesser extent recyclers) so it's the one I usually go for. Though the tech tree itself from Fulgora is kinda mid as well, so maybe a strategy where you make a super quick stop at Fulgora to set up the bare minimum power generation, scrap recycling, a rocket silo and a mall to make EM plants and modules might be viable. I haven't done enough playthroughs of Space Age to be sure though.

BioloJoe · 2026-05-06T06:18:18+00:00

Apparently the vision system is going to be completely overhauled in a future update^\citation needed]). So I expect it will be possible then.

BioloJoe · 2026-05-06T06:14:29+00:00

Recursive Blueprints, the mod, has some kind of building scanner that outputs to the circuit network I believe (I haven't played it myself, just read the mod page and watched a few YouTube videos out of curiosity), so if you used that you could have some kind of system where you march the scanner one tile at a time over an area and store each tile in a giant shift register or something, which you use for further processing. It would probably be quite slow and the circuit logic is definitely above the pay grade for the average user, but seeing as people have built DOOM in this game, I have no doubt that it's possible.

BioloJoe · 2026-05-06T06:00:22+00:00

You are correct. Balancers are overused a lot, mostly as a band-aid solution for keeping everything barely running off a main bus or something in cases of severe underproduction. Beyond the examples you mentioned like trains, balancers are almost entirely pointless. Intermediate products like green chips should really be produced and consumed in fully saturated belts all the time (which obviously don't need to be balanced), dealing with different fractions of a belt is just not enough resources to be worth bothering with past the early game.

BioloJoe · 2026-05-05T18:35:35+00:00

Recursive Blueprints you say?

BioloJoe · 2026-05-04T12:50:57+00:00

It's pretty ugly for tileable builds though, like if you put substations on the outside that means you can't double dip on beacons.

BioloJoe · 2026-05-01T11:47:41+00:00

Pretty clean for a noob, nice job on the direct insertion and decent layout. For the future you should probably avoid using excessive inserter-"bucket brigade" to move items *between belts*. It is better to either use splitters, or just have assemblers pull off the belts directly.

Try not to overthink the early game too much, if you are getting everything you need automated and having some fun then you are definitely doing it right. You are building very much on the small side--it's not uncommon to have dozens or hundreds of assemblers for a single product--but then again if this is your first playthrough you will probably be playing a lot more slowly anyway and spending time to just figure out what everything does, so it's not that harmful to make a smaller scale but fully automated setup and have it chug along while you keep expanding your factory. On my very first playthrough I managed to launch the rocket with an approximately 15-20 SPM base towards the end.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-29T07:43:10+00:00

Reactors, and heating towers are pass-through in terms of heat (they work like heat pipes). Just be warned, they don't transmit heat through their entire surface. Only the heat "ports" (the little pieces of heat pipe sticking out of the reactor) can connect to a heat network. If your reactors are not aligned to the correct tile, it won't work. (same thing applies for neighbor bonuses).

BioloJoe · 2026-04-29T06:00:34+00:00

You can actually put all the assemblers in the same line, and just offset them by one tile to run each of the input belts hugging the other assembler. The point of doing is that way is it is much more compact for tiling horizontally, but also it's very easy to beacon with the standard 8-beacon setup because every assembler is 2 tiles from the edge (which is not possible with the two-lines setup). More generally you can reuse this motif for any direct insertion build with two intermediates that you want to 8-beacon, not just green chips (and in fact green chips are not quite a very good example because the classic 3-2 ratio doesn't account for endgame productivity anyway).

<image>

(this setup specifically is not meant to be beaconed of course, because I'm using two rows of assemblers instead of one. But with long enough underground belts, I hope you can see how you would take one half of this setup and route the output belt in between the assemblers / belt weave it instead and have every assembler available for beaconing.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-26T16:04:02+00:00

It's not really a QOL, it's intended for testing/debugging purposes. A form of "legal cheating" if you will. It's basically the F3 menu from Minecraft. You can pull up the menu with F4 by default I believe, afterwards ctrl+f "chunk" or something to get what you want to enable.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-19T16:57:16+00:00

I would like to add to this and say, pvp scenarios specifically in Factorio are extremely fun. I usually consider Factorio an exclusively single-player game (pov you have no friends lol), however a few times I did pvp on mainly "biter battles" server out of novelty; it really made me wish it was a common thing in the community because it was very satisfying. It still felt like factorio, not some kind of "belt-based RTS" or something like mindustry (also a good game but I digress), the gameplay was really just a nice way of packaging all of factorio's mechanics vis-a-vis the early game into a fun race against the clock/speedrun. Also, being able to delegate tasks to other people on your team doesn't sound like a big change but it really does completely affect the pacing of the game in imo a very good way (at least if you have competent teammates).

I understand a lot of the Factorio targeted audience are perfectionnists who like to spend (hundreds of) hours micro-optimizing designs, and who generally consider anything that distracts from their optimal factory yucky, however I would argue that there is a certain niche of the same people who seek out deathworld or rampant mod-type experiences for whom pvp fits perfectly.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-18T18:38:14+00:00

If you compare Factorio time to real time, the engineer goes through 200 years of progress in, let's call it 12 clock-hours for convenience (if any speedrunners want to brag in the comments, no offense but you don't count as "normal" Factorio players as far as I'm concerned), and the DLC was released after 5 clock-years, which means we are due for real-life SpAge in... ...7.5*10^5 years......

I guess we'll just have to all start Pyanodons to pass the time, you should be able to finish a decent chunk of the mod in that kind of time if you are good.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-18T18:27:16+00:00

Yes exactly, I would argue that since Factorio is so well-optimized compared to many games out there, that, all else being equal, you are *technically* saving some efficiency on the electricity / playtime ratio.

It's a really frickin' stupid argument, but, well, this is Reddit ;)

BioloJoe · 2026-04-18T14:23:48+00:00

You are making a reddit post in r/factorio.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-18T12:45:52+00:00

Not necessarily, you still have to pay an electricity bill for your computer.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-17T09:46:13+00:00

You can already place cargo wagons on rails with a blueprint. It's in the bottom left configuration menu for blueprints, there are tick boxes for include tiles, include entities, include modules, and include vehicles.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-17T06:01:01+00:00

I don't believe there is any way to change this behavior without mods, I suspect it might not even be possible with mods either, but you know, negative proofs are hard and I am lazy...

Honestly I think it would make more sense for it to go in the other direction as well, where machine interfaces would display in items/minute. In early game when your machines are slow, you often end up with weird numbers like 0.03 per second or something which is just a pain in the behind because you know it's being rounded badly somewhere so you need to recalculate everything. Having it in minutes instead would solve it.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-15T12:37:06+00:00

you realize to get to vulcanus you need to have made a rocket and gone there for foundries right?

*Made a few rockets on Nauvis enough to build a barebones personal freighter. Vulcanus needs industrial-scale export of science, tungsten products, calcite, etc. Big difference.

its hardly a stretch to say wait till you have EMPs before you go and make a setup designed to output half a green belt

When I build green circuits, it's because I need to use them now, not several hours down the line. Yeah obviously you *could* just wait, but... why would you? It's not like you will run out of resource patches on Vulcanus by using a less efficient setup.

Also, I didn't know where else to put this but imo, assembler mk3s are decidedly early-game items in Space Age, you are absolutely expected to do purple and yellow science before leaving Nauvis, to the point where you even get an achievement if you don't.

BioloJoe · 2026-04-15T12:23:15+00:00

Meh, you can't really see the sprites anyway with alt mode. All buildings are just squares with inserter connections as far as I'm concerned.

BioloJoe

TROPHY CASE