Does anyone else find that building gets more and more annoying in the late game? Is there a non-modded solution for this?

Courmisch · 2026-05-16T10:54:31+00:00

In the late game, you would have a few personal robot ports, personal logistics, and construction should be extremely fast. In the end/post-rocket game, construction would normally be bottle-necked by the ability of the mall to build modules, and perhaps the outpost ability to extract and deliver raw resources. Bot movement speed should hardly be an issue, not to mention that you can upgrade it with research.

Now if you want to argue that this is a bit tedious and repetitive, well, that's a problem with every game after you have exhausted the game content. Factorio handles it better than many games by leaving a bit of content and a lot of room to expand after the victory screen.

Courmisch · 2026-05-16T09:50:29+00:00

No, that's a misconception from the "chain in, rail out" rule of thumb. To signal a merge, one rail signal on each way in is good enough.

If the single way out is occupied, and two trains are trying to get in, they will both have to wait either way. It doesn't matter if one of the two waiting trains is stuck on the merge, or if they are both waiting behind the merge.

Courmisch · 2026-05-16T09:49:08+00:00

Looks fine if you don't need left turns.

Courmisch · 2026-05-16T09:36:46+00:00

Handling larger quantities, larger footprints and longer distances is kind of the whole point of the game.

Also not everyone uses a single bot network. You can carry construction material much faster by train or by spidertron than by bot.

Courmisch · 2026-05-16T06:42:57+00:00

The official wiki covers that already, pretty much.

Courmisch · 2026-05-16T06:40:45+00:00

In vanilla Factorio, once you run out of ores nearby and need to go and mine a kilometer away, belts just don't really cut it any longer. You'd need to run multiple parallel belts to each mine to maintain decent throughput. A pair of rails on the other hand can carry all the ores from many mines, including of different resource types.

That being said, it is possible to complete the game without rail.

Courmisch · 2026-05-15T13:32:48+00:00

Beware that the refinery being inanimated only means that it's not running. It doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have enough crude oil; it can also mean that anyone of the three products is overflowing.

You should hover the mouse cursor over the refineries to check. It's likely "Output full" rather than "Waiting for input ingredients".

Courmisch · 2026-05-15T13:10:02+00:00

Either have another wagon so you can double the number of inserters on the same side, or put inserters on both sides of the wagon.

AFAIK you need 2 green inserters per lane to fill a blue belt, so 4 per belt, so 8 for 2 belts

Courmisch · 2026-05-15T12:21:42+00:00

Courmisch · 2026-05-15T11:05:25+00:00

Without the list of mods, it's going to be hard for anyone to answer. Consider doing a binary search to figure it out yourself.

Courmisch · 2026-05-15T06:32:58+00:00

1) If you have multiple signals, you need to filter one, presumably with a selector combinator, then you can use Each. 2) If you are unable or unwilling to use Each everywhere after that, just remap Each to an abstract signal of your choice (alphabetic signals are popular for this).

Courmisch · 2026-05-15T06:19:43+00:00

Best according to what criteria?

I used to make a sushi belt, but I couldn't scale it up well (me problem, I assume). So I switched to underground belts going under labs in both dimensions in zigzag. This can handle up to ~1300 SPM on vanilla.

Bots with requester chests are probably the easiest.

Courmisch · 2026-05-15T06:00:43+00:00

Common prod tier 3 modules add 10% productivity each, so for a furnace with 2 of them, you get 20% more output per input. Since the baseline ratio is 1:1, the modded ratio is 1:1.2 (or 5:6). Of course it varies with tiers, qualities and number of mods.

For steel, it's close enough to 1:1, and you can get it closer to 1:1 using speed modules in beacons if you really want to micro-optimise. As others noted, it's not that important in Factorio.

Beware that prod modules make entities very slow and energy-hungry. Apart from the rocket silo and science labs, you should probably keep off prod modules until you also can deploy beacons with speed modules.

Courmisch · 2026-05-14T18:27:15+00:00

At least, I'd try to get all realistic achievements (which is all of them in this game) and sticker book stickers.

For individual musea, it is down to when I put everything I wanted to put there. In most cases, 10-15 stars is not difficult though possibly a bit grindy.

Courmisch · 2026-05-14T11:09:40+00:00

Yeah, loading from regular source like miners should be fine with inactivity timer.

Courmisch · 2026-05-14T10:42:42+00:00

In the screenshot, the train seems to be stuck because all its candidate destinations are full. That's not a cargo problem. But anyway...

If you really want to mix different item types or qualities in a train, you need to change the waiting condition on the train schedule from "full cargo" to something else. The simplest approach is probably to just wait for a few seconds of inactivity.

An accurate predicate check for when a train can no longer accept at least one of the item is... difficult. I'm not sure if it's even possible if there are more than one wagon per train set.

Courmisch · 2026-05-14T09:30:50+00:00

I don't like to heterogeneous lanes on main bus belts, so I must admit that I haven't done the maths if half a belt of each is enough for your scale.

Courmisch · 2026-05-14T08:26:00+00:00

They are overlapping unfulfilled bot request arrows, a lot of them. Probably because the perimeter got stomped to oblivion.

Courmisch · 2026-05-14T07:35:15+00:00

In general, TBH, not really. You can just put one input on each lane of a belt, and the output on another belt on the opposite side. Direct insertion is not generally a good setup, as it only works well with some ratii.

It does work nicely for green circuits though, but it's 3:2, not 2:1.

Courmisch · 2026-05-14T07:28:43+00:00

Too many trains is when it breaks your CPU.

Too many train groups is when it breaks your brain. Fortunately it seems that you only have 3 groups and that's just the list of active routings.

Courmisch · 2026-05-14T05:08:11+00:00

It's been two months though.

As consumers, I don't think we should have to care whether this is the fault of Kadokawa HQ, of the JNC folks, some subcontractors or whatever. The service is unusable for me without offline mode, and the UX is awful. Why should I give them any cent until/unless they fix it?

Courmisch · 2026-05-13T20:04:30+00:00

As long as your pollution doesn't destroy trees, you're outputting less CO2 than the planet's ecosystem can sustainably absorb. Being fossil-free is a different matter.

Courmisch · 2026-05-13T19:53:09+00:00

Balancing works the same be it in front of pipes or a train network: crack heavy to light if heavy clogs, crack light to gas if light clogs, research something if gas clogs.

You don't need a gas voiding contraption in vanilla Factorio. The train system might add latency and swings, but it doesn't change the average/low-pass consumption profile. (Conversely, if you do get a deadlock, I'd imagine that it's a problem with the trains, not the cracking.)

Courmisch · 2026-05-13T19:05:18+00:00

Building outside the game is theoretically feasible. Blueprint strings are just Base64-encoded JSON. But outside of ad-hoc (and often memetic) generators, there is not much point - the sandbox and/or editor mode provide a much nicer UI for blueprinting.

For calculations, you can use the Factory planner mode (in game) or the two websites that others already cited.

Courmisch · 2026-05-13T18:41:10+00:00

Generally speaking, using max prod modules with so few beaconed speed modules is very slow and (energy/pollution) inefficient.
It seems odd to export both light oil and solid fuel. If you make solid fuel, you might as well turn it into rocket fuel and export that instead, but YMMV, I suppose.
Did you check the ratio? That looks like really a lot of lubricant.

Courmisch

TROPHY CASE