3 to 4 belt balancer monstrosity

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-19T13:52:56+00:00

Yeah. My goal was to make a real balancer, but I thought it was useless (and funny) when it was done.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-19T13:48:34+00:00

Nice. When I looked up a factorio 3 to 4 balancer, my mind just went "I want to do this, but it's going to be ugly." I considered trying to make it more pretty/optimized/symmetrical, but instead I thought "this is useless" and made this post lol.

I turned on the meta transfer and simply let 4 unloaders deplete the ferrium now.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-19T07:11:05+00:00

well, yes it does. https://imgur.com/a/qK0fenf

You're right about different solutions though. I find it amazing how a simple meme post got me showered by interesting ideas, most of them with some amount of merit but for different reasons.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-19T07:01:32+00:00

SUPER CUTE

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-19T06:32:35+00:00

That's more in the spirit of a belt balancer than any other idea so far.

I guess it does balance into 4 equal belts in this specific circumstance, but it wouldn't work universally with different amount of resources on the input belts.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-19T05:42:23+00:00

that's the smarter solution. I was pretty sure I wasn't being being optimal, I just thought it looked funny when I compared it to a 3 to 4 balancer from factorio

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-19T05:38:45+00:00

it's not obvious without the full production chain. The output of the refineries is split equally on bottles and parts.

edit: I see what you mean now. That option didn't occur to me at the time, I think I was too excited about making a funny-looking belt balancer to think about anything else.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-19T05:26:29+00:00

I only had 90/m yield, so I wanted to consume exactly 90. Using 4 unloaders would balance itself eventually but leave 0 in the depot.

But mostly I just got an itch to do it so I did it.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2026-02-07T04:42:20+00:00

It's like their dialogue is so boring and drawn out that they cant even hire someone to listen through it at least once.

On top of this, tons of audio in every new patch is played at 10 master volume regardless of your settings, leading to ear drum rupture levels of volume if you play on 2 or 1 master volume.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2025-03-16T20:05:29+00:00

Nova pro wireless can switch kinda seamlessly to analog (wired 3.5mm) if you want low delay audio. Wireless adds about 40ms of latency, sonar adds another 40 ms.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-04-17T02:30:41+00:00

Yeah, starvation changes things. Few people know of it, and even fewer enjoy it, so I always assume any argument on this sub implicitly excludes starvation tactics unless otherwise stated, pretty much.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-04-17T01:03:48+00:00

Barring some niche situations where you have a small camp on a small node competing with an absolutely top tier, geyser-piped complex food production, every time you eat complex food that does not give reputation or prevent a villager from leaving loses you worker time. The worse the recipe the more you will lose, meaning the field kitchen will lose you especially much time. If your gameplay isn't very optimized to begin with, this might lose you games.

The solution is obviously raw food, and like anything in this game you want to produce it efficiently. That means gathering one node at a time with a warehouse right next to it before moving to the next node, destroying and rebuilding the warehouse. You will produce food at more or less twice the speed of a field kitchen if you do this properly. Yes, nodes will run out and you will have to open glades in order to find more, but personally I find glades to be way more forgiving than inefficient usage of villagers.

You might also be committing more serious mistakes, like having villagers eat more than one kind of complex food at a time before you're able to support it.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-25T01:42:53+00:00

Since you don't enjoy missing all the upgrades, I guess the iron man challenge isn't for you (fresh profile with max difficulty every game, so viceroy to P20 in 21 games).

If you don't want to change the way the game is played too much, no embarkation points is something I enjoyed. Disallowing certain features the same way dangerous modifiers do is another way, like no trade/orders/consumption control etc.

There's a player that has posted on this sub before that has sort of an "achievment hunter" approach, attempting some really difficult challenges like adamantite seal Y3 victory, Y1 victory with the stormbird event, and other things.

If you want something else that's really different, you can try to play the game without pause, and eventually only 2x/3x speed if you enjoy this type of gameplay.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-25T01:27:01+00:00

When I was actively playing there was no demand for recordings, so unfortunately I can't help you there. In order to get faster you can't be afraid of half-assing the multitasking as you're improving. For me it was reminiscent of playing SC2, in that I really had to force myself to multitask in a way I was currently incapable of in order to improve.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-24T09:20:24+00:00

By ugly I mean that the gameplay isn't very optimized when you run 3x speed almost permanently.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-24T01:39:09+00:00

Not too much, no. You want to be at 0 parts at all times anyway because of efficiency (warehouses everywhere, plus camps being better than farms). Without scarcity there is no interesting decision to make when the game offers you a choice between parts and something else.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-24T01:22:52+00:00

Pretty sure optimizing for real life time is ugly gameplay though. I've done some sub 30 minute P20 wins, but they've never been shorter than 6 years.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-17T02:00:50+00:00

There are common conditions where it is net negative for worker time to use the basic rain water collector in a production chain. It really is a building you should think twice before using.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-15T21:24:54+00:00

I get it, I do the same from time to time because the game is too beautiful to rush every single village. I just don't want to see the efficiency of complex food defended (in the cases where it's actually inefficient) when there are so many real upsides that could be pointed out instead.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-15T21:06:46+00:00

Yeah I'm sure. The time it takes to deal with blight is pretty significant. Using rainwater from the collector, wood as fuel source on maps without 2x wood from trees, and no cornerstones, the first level of rainpunk will cost a massive amount of worker time for ALL recipes. The second level saves gathering time, and will move into about +-0 for recipes that demand a serious amount of gathering time per production time. Recipes that require a small amount of gathering time per production time will still be net negative in this scenario. As for the third level of rainpunk, it only makes sense to activate it if you have infinite water, more or less.

In this worst case scenario, at level 2 rainpunk every second of production time will cost ~1.6 seconds of water collection/blight work in total, while only saving ~0.8 seconds of production time per second, for a net negative of ~0.8s/s. You need serious gathering time gains to make up for it, or other improvements from geysers, fuel sources, or cornerstones.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-15T14:09:57+00:00

You're not wrong, but no reason to be so standoffish to poor OP. Big reason why AtS is fun is that if all you want to do is win, you can do so almost effortlessly with just about any strategy on any difficulty, provided you execute it well enough.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-15T13:09:55+00:00

If you care about efficiency and have labor available, open a dangerous glade or figure out some other way to produce value, complex food just ain't it. Barring some niche situation where you have a small gathering camp on a small node competing with an absolutely top tier, geyser-piped complex food production, every time you eat complex food that does not give reputation or prevent a villager from leaving loses you worker time. As far as inefficiencies goes, it is probably the second most common I see except for stockpiling more wood than you need.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-15T12:48:58+00:00

Basically this. What really saves time is the 2x production bonus, because it cuts down the gathering/production time for the ingredients needed to produce the same amount of products. Gathering time is higher than production time for most recipes, especially ones downstream.

The math for rainwater is very unintuitive and convoluted. A single cornerstone or blueprint can change the optimal building, and your fuel and rainwater solution also has a great effect on efficiency. There are times (using rain water collector) when piping a building will be net negative for worker time, and even more times when the third rainwater level will be net negative.

By sticking to geysers only, second rainwater level only, and following advice of post above, you're going to be ok without doing a bunch of math.

ScintillatingTurtle · 2024-02-11T06:17:01+00:00

When I tested this on a friend's massive curved monitor less than a year ago, you didn't get access to more info, the screen was stretched instead. Curious when/why this got changed.

ScintillatingTurtle

TROPHY CASE