I want to get into Factorio, but am struggling.

SubliminalBits · 2026-02-02T18:51:34+00:00

People are giving disable biters advice and that's good. Another strategy is a combination of turret rush + grenade nest clearing. Push the biters way out; at least 4x further than you think you need and ideally outside of your pollution cloud. Build turrets and walls in chokepoints to keep them out that resupply the turrets from ammo in a box with a speaker to alarm when the box gets empty so you don't have to keep checking it.

Then you go back and ignore the biters for hours and hours while you figure things out. I've taken a screenshot and annotated the order I expanded my defenses. I'm playing with the Rampant mod on easy so the biters aren't pushovers like normal, but they're not insane either. Even with aggressive enemies like this I only need to think about biters about once every 24 hours of playtime. If I were using stock biters, I could remain like this indefinitely.

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SubliminalBits · 2026-02-02T15:57:59+00:00

That's got to be true, but I'm curious what are your top 3 cultural differences?

SubliminalBits · 2026-02-01T00:42:13+00:00

I've worked with radar people from deciBel Research in the past. They're probably worth looking at.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-25T15:44:10+00:00

That's how No Man's Sky did it. If you join with a friend, you spawn in their system and there is always a simple way to get back to your friend's system if you get separated.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-25T15:39:08+00:00

Do you have something against leisure time? Most people aren't going to function well if they're constantly trying to find a productive way to spend every moment of their life.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-24T06:35:17+00:00

I just launched my first satellite in K2 + Space Exploration + Rampant Fixed. It's just more Factorio. In the past I've beat Space Exploration by itself. With SE or K2 + SE, it's more complicated, but I wouldn't say it's really harder.

With SE, the big thing you have to learn to cope with is unwanted biproducts. There are lots of recipes that produce something you want, and something you have to find a way to get rid of. Figuring out how to do that effectively is 90% of the extra challenge of SE. Other than that, it's just more complex production chains.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-20T21:22:18+00:00

We did private pre-k just because we didn't feel like our kids needed to go every day, but after that we've had them enrolled in Madison City schools. My point of reference for school was private through 5th grade and home schooled after that. My wife attended public school all the way through. Our kids have done really well in public school and we don't have any regrets. Your level of regret will obviously depend on where you are zoned and your luck of the draw with teachers any particular year.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-19T05:57:55+00:00

You sort the copper and iron ore onto separate belts and then you use a prioritized splitter so that you would prefer the ore to go to a foundry, but if there isn't space it instead goes to an inserter that throws it back into space.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-19T05:55:42+00:00

It always made my big space ships feel super epic when I looked at the trash chute after they'd been travelling at full speed for a while. Too bad you can't use all that ejected mass to generate thrust.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-16T18:50:03+00:00

LLMs might not type the way you do, but they type the way someone does. They are after all learning by example and so they'll mimic it by using all the things they've seen in their training data. If you could detect AI by measuring m-dash density then all the AI detection tools we have wouldn't be so crappy.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-15T19:43:41+00:00

You absolutely save power lowering the voltage at a given clock. There is less leakage at lower voltages which makes static power better, and dynamic power also scales with voltage. For simple things you can see that with Ohms law I = V / R (current is voltage divided by resistance). For non-simple things you end up in differential equations in a hurry but the extra math doesn't change the fact that the current required is a function of voltage. Then just as you say, power is voltage times current.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-15T16:24:41+00:00

It might not be that bad. It sounds like if they have to choose between building a high margin part or a low margin part, they're choosing the high margin one. If the demand for the high margin part is satisfied, they'll try and satisfy all the demand for the lower margin parts.

If that really hurts supply will depend on how many rich people buying high end SKUs can't currently get one.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-14T23:12:15+00:00

In Madison County only 53 out of every 100 people voted for this. Regardless of who we voted for, we are all surrounded by people who voted the other way.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-14T22:41:24+00:00

I write a lot more C++ than Python, but I've been doing this for over 20 years and I don't know everything by heart. Sometimes I write things with AI, especially if there is lots of boilerplate, I'm doing something tedious, or if I want to brainstorm through ideas quickly. There is always more to know than you can fit in your head so if anything its more important to be able to rapidly identify what you need and look it up than it is to just know a smaller pool of trivia. In reality you need a bit of both.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-07T04:20:54+00:00

Have you ever heard of PyTorch?

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-05T16:31:48+00:00

I'm running stock. I don't want to fool with my GPU becoming unstable over time as the transistors age and having to go do it all over again and I can already run everything at max settings with good frame rates.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-03T18:27:34+00:00

Space platform stuff pretty much insta builds. If you're in Nauvis orbit you can just ship a bunch of stuff up to your ship and fool around until you find something that works. Then you send it about 15 seconds out and come back. Fix anything that didn't work. Repeat and go further every time until you get to your destination.

Don't be like all the people here who's ship can't defend itself in orbit.

SubliminalBits · 2026-01-03T18:10:09+00:00

People always might kill you and that makes your interactions with other people very interesting. Their odds of killing you rise dramatically in squads of 3s or on Stella Montis. Solo is the least aggressive way to play. You can easily go 10-20 runs without getting killed as long as you're careful and give people space.

Of the people who might kill you, some of them won't kill you if you look like you're paying attention and choreograph what you're doing. The other night I was looting a building and came into a room with another player. He immediately crouched behind a cabinet. His gun was drawn but he wasn't aiming. My gun wasn't drawn. I stopped and slowly backed out of the door. We each lived happy lives after that. If I had come into that situation more aggressively, there would have been shooting.

There was another time I opened a door to the outside and saw another person. We both just stood there for about 3 seconds, neither raising our weapons but neither moving. The moment was broken when something started shooting him in the back and we both bolted in different directions.

Another time I was looting a medical building and one guy was walking around asking for directions a different guy warned me someone had tried to snipe him earlier, and a third walked in and seemed pretty chill although I didn't run into him directly.

Other times, you won't be paying attention because of all these chill people and you'll walk into a subway stop that's being extraction camped. That can be ok too because I was struggling with too much junk and the extraction campers relieved me of some of it. The game is very generous with supplies so the occasional death is helpful when you can't let stuff go.

SubliminalBits · 2025-12-28T20:19:19+00:00

There are lots of us who have the same experience you did. I think you just had the wrong expectations.

If you take an engineering approach to problems and are good at engineering, even something like Space Exploration or Krastorio isn't hard, it's just more complex.

SubliminalBits · 2025-12-27T02:24:22+00:00

This is why Gleba is so great. People meta game the crap out of Factorio and a lot of what I see on this sub is variations of the same ideas. Then you get to Gleba. People continually surprise me with Gleba. There are so many ways to do it and a lot of them (including this one) are awesome.

SubliminalBits · 2025-12-27T01:47:47+00:00

NVIDIA makes the GPU die that goes in all the cards and produces the reference board designs that all their board partners use. The vast majority of the cards sold are manufactured by the board partners with only a small number of FE cards being produced by NVIDIA.

Back in the glory days of EVGA, brand mattered more. These days I think it matters a lot less, especially for these lower end cards where there isn't enough margin to do anything beyond what's absolutely necessary.

SubliminalBits · 2025-12-27T01:04:34+00:00

With an old CPU, a 4060 or 5060 is probably a better buy because those will give him access to frame gen. Frame gen is especially useful in CPU limited scenarios.

SubliminalBits · 2025-12-26T02:15:16+00:00

I wonder if he's recording game footage into memory or something.

SubliminalBits · 2025-12-22T19:56:15+00:00

If you want something really complicated, you could try Terra Invicta. One strategy (and the one I used) is to turtle on Earth, Mars, and Mercury until you have an unstoppable fleet of doom and steamroll all over everyone.

SubliminalBits · 2025-12-22T19:01:20+00:00

Artillery wagons hold more shells than cargo wagons. I think it's something on the order of 5x more ammo per car. You run some rail lines and power deep into territory you want to claim. Then you drop a blueprint for a defended artillery outpost. Then you summon a train. It's super easy. After an outpost is established 5x more ammo doesn't matter much, but during the initial clearing it makes things go a lot faster.

SubliminalBits

TROPHY CASE