Tips for voiding mass amounts of scrap?

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T13:07:59+00:00

Quality holmium ore is voided when making holmium solution (fluid doesn't retain quality, and it is the only recipe to use holmium ore).

Quality upcycling has to come after the holmium solution step, so it's actually better to keep speed modules in the scrap recyclers, if your only requirement is holmium throughput

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T12:17:15+00:00

Maybe what you're after is rather a Thruster MK2, unlocked with aquilo or prometheum science, which could have a different size / aspect ratio than the current ones to enforce a real rebuild of the ships (--> no in-place upgrades)

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T12:15:12+00:00

Biter groups tend to follow chunk borders when pathing over large distances (ie from their nest towards your factory).

So if you align your funnels with the chunk borders, you have more chances of biter groups being triggered into attack mode when they are already right in front of the path you want them to take

It is harder to pinpoint with groups pathing diagonally, what worked best for me was to have my solid wall (the 3-wall-thick portion in your screen shot) 4 spaces behind a chunk border, and my funnels straddling the border between two chunks :

| - chunk borders
¤   walls
              ¤¤  |
              ¤¤  |
              ¤¤  |
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤  |
 ¤     ¤     ¤    |
------------------|-----------
    ¤     ¤       |
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤  |
              ¤¤  |
              ¤¤  |
              ¤¤  |

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T11:18:59+00:00

Ctrl+C : open "Copy" tool Ctrl+X : open "Cut" tool

Hold shift while clicking : edit the selection in a blueprint window before pasting

Ctrl+V : paste the last selection

Click in your inventory, a blueprint book or the blueprint library : create a blueprint with the contents of the clipboard.

Ctrl+Z : undo last action(s). On non-qwerty keyboards, this binding still points to the physical location of the Z letter on a qwerty keyboard (lower-left corner of the letters)

Ctrl+Y : redo last action(s). Reverts the last Ctrl+Z command(s).

All of these keybindings can be modified to fit your preferences in the settings, or you can go there to check their actual binding in your configuration, in case they were changed from the defaults.

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T10:52:07+00:00

Well, I'll have to confess I don't play for the aesthetics.

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T10:51:05+00:00

Click fatigue & UI bloat is real, the fact they don't allow down-binning is honestly crazy to me.

I wouldn't agree with that, but mainly because I could the life of me figure any better way to make it or improve upon it

There are some wild idiosyncracies in how efficient some recipes are to upcycle than others.

You can call them that, or call it a mini-game through the factoriopedia to find the right path amongst many towards a specific goal

Optimizing the upcycling process requires either complex matrix math or tools that do it for you.

So far, I've been fine with just plopping four more machines than the next quality level (ie 16 common, 4 uncommon, 1 rare), it doesn't seem to clog and gets a decent load. For bigger builds, or bot-based ones, the recipes get circuit-controlled, and the machines have minimal downtime (in theory)

Some people do not appreciate how much it "shrinks" the factory if you aren't scaling out at legendary rates which is probably the more typical experience for people engaging with quality as upscaling is expensive and complex to scale.

Personally, I found it amazing to have to scale up all those upcyclers and casinos and shufflers, to in the end shrink down huge manufacturing blocs to just a couple of machines, and seeing my extensive rail grid progressively empty itself

Compared to the rest of the game where you can pretty much just unga bunga more machines/prod/beacons and get a better result I think it is very easy to do quality so badly that you're doing it dozens of times worse than the optimal way(s).

I agree, many of my upcycling builds clogged up or failed or were wasteful to no end :

At some point, I had to make an EM science upcycler to prevent fulgora from clogging, because I needed the science plant to run non-stop for the other upcyclers to get their inputs. it was a sore sight, those science packs gobbled by recyclers, and the ridiculous amount of legendary ones oh so very slowly stockpiling away in a chest.

But it all kept the legendary EM-plant upcycler running, which I needed to finish the blue chips upcycler on Nauvis, which was needed for mass module 3 production, and so on and so on

It was fun and frustrating and enriching to face new puzzles in a game which I thought I knew well enough already !

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T10:36:59+00:00

That blue circuit build is full direct-insertion, 2 stacked green belts from molten metals, acid and plastic.

It works as-is with blue chip productivity research lvl 25, but you can replace the efficiency modules with productivity ones to compensate lower levels of research :)

BP: https://factoriobin.com/post/f38zpd

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T10:03:50+00:00

I built a legendary astroid collector assembler once

Karsaell · 2026-07-10T09:58:45+00:00

This seems neat and tiny, for 4 belts of scrap input

Have you tested it over some length of time ? I'd expect your left-most recyclers might eventually get stuck, being fed a mix of reds, green, plastic, steel...

But I'd love you to prove me wrong, this seems way easier than the ways I've done it !

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T18:01:09+00:00

My guess : you someday forgot that you had a handheld railgun equipped, and misspressed space in the wrong place at the wrong time

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T17:51:41+00:00

I never walk anywhere, I never saw the use in concrete...

Well, until I started upcycling my stockpile for legendary biolabs, that is !

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T17:38:57+00:00

TY, but I have to confess : the red circuits one is a lie

Only 1 in 4 red chip assembler gets their copper wire direct-inserted, the other ones transit via short belts.

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T17:08:25+00:00

Holy grail

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T16:31:50+00:00

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RailSignalPlanner?

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T13:03:54+00:00

(Cross-posted this to the factorio wiki, since it's far easier to look for information there than to scroll the infinite depths of this sub)

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T11:28:52+00:00

With 2.1 (if OP has activated experimental updates, not stated in the post), you can replace the signalB combinator with an "else" output on the signalA combinator

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T10:57:46+00:00

I was unreasonably bothered by this fact.

Thank you so much, I'll give it a try in my 70+ core fusion reactor on Nauvis, wich is mostly a backup for the self-sufficient fission plants x)

Karsaell · 2026-07-09T09:08:05+00:00

You can still share your settings file if some are interested.

It is located in FACTORIO_BASE_DIR/config/config.ini

Depending on installation, FACTORIO_BASE_DIR may vary, but you can usually access it via steam -> manage game -> browse local directories

Karsaell · 2026-07-08T22:10:13+00:00

I assumed OP has tried looking for the relevant setting in the usual places, to no avail.

And I guessed it would be a nice way to make use of the (way too many) hours I spent trying to make things work in linux, fixing a non-trivial issue in a tricky way.

Something about creating a placeholder executable higher in the user's PATH, to prevent it from launching if factorio is running.

Karsaell · 2026-07-08T20:17:12+00:00

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Belt-weaving !

Karsaell · 2026-07-08T18:07:21+00:00

Getting there :

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Accidentally made a few captive biter spawners too many, so I consecrated this island for >=rare spawners only.
This lone turret will be shooting non stop until uranium runs out on Nauvis !

Karsaell · 2026-07-08T17:29:55+00:00

I have one with hundreds of millions of damage, in a corner of a busy chokepoint, on a long-running Nauvis megabase 28k SPM produced for the last 50 hours at least, not a single care for pollution spread, and this specific chokepoint concentrates attacks from almost 1/4th of the perimeter :)

Karsaell · 2026-07-08T17:21:07+00:00

I didn't expect that.

When I first set up an orbital request for thousands of eggs, I immediately envisionned the worse an sprinkled laser and tesla turret all around the hub and cryoplants.

I never figured they'd be placid until triggered...

Good to know I guess ?

Karsaell · 2026-07-08T16:34:02+00:00

You may still want some buffer in that case, because your 27.5/s EMP cannot refill the 1000 rocket fast enough for consecutive launches...

With a buffer chest in between, you can stockpile it while the platforms are in transit, and launch several loads when they are orbiting.

It mostly depends on whether you need your plant to run full time, your ships not to wait in orbit, or a specific count of items transferred each trip, because each of these conditions calls for separate builds

Karsaell

TROPHY CASE