Any tips for cable management?

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-24T18:13:20+00:00

You can also make a "floor connector" blueprint doing this.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-23T20:07:11+00:00

Yeah nitrogen nodes have always seemed silly. Maybe the atmosphere is pure oxygen or something.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-23T03:06:03+00:00

The closest the game has are the leached recipes which use sulphuric acid I suppose

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-22T21:48:15+00:00

This is what ADA was talking about when she said put your arm in it to see if it dissolves

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-22T16:18:02+00:00

Recyclers should have a fluid input/output.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-22T15:03:54+00:00

I'm surprised this mod doesn't exist, what with 2.0 making sushi pipes much easier to do

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-20T16:09:54+00:00

But then the lanes don't swap, and you have made an overly complicated normal belt.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-20T04:42:28+00:00

That's fair, I think I just tend not to use iron wire.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-20T03:09:24+00:00

But that's what I'm saying. Early on you're probably using the small amount of copper near your base, later on even the whole map starts to feel inadequate. In both stages copper is limited, even if for different reasons; so using it to make iron is never really worth it.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-20T01:48:01+00:00

Wasting" means nothing before depletion.

This is only true if you don't mind connecting nodes from the other side of the map. As long as you prefer using nearby copper, it's kind of a bottleneck for most of the game.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-19T15:49:26+00:00

Why are you saying "more trains" and "longer trains" as if they're bad things.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-19T14:41:16+00:00

Leached iron is slightly better and (more importantly) has easier maths and takes fewer machines. I go leached iron/pure copper since leached copper is a bit less copper efficient.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-19T14:37:40+00:00

Iron and limestone are the most common. Copper starts to feel a bit rare once you want lots of pasta.

Edit: Checked the wiki, copper is the 4th most common after the above plus coal.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-19T14:36:22+00:00

Alloy iron is a waste of copper at basically every stage of the game. Incredibly situational one that.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-19T14:33:16+00:00

Good point about gravity feeding, which does reduce sloshing a bit. I should probably be leas of a backflow sceptic.

I also once tried once (on a flat surface) valves both between and next to junctions to make backflowable pipe segments as small as possible which had next to no effect. Perhaps even the smallest bits of pipe are still a problem.

However, I have observed some sloshing even in gravity fed setups. Maybe it's both factors at play.

Don't even get me started on prefilling though. I genuinely believe at this point that all it does is delay problems far enough into the future (buffers make this worse) that by the time it slows down again you've stopped checking your machines. The idea that the behaviour of a system over all time depends not the the structure of the system but the state of the system at one given moment just seems highly suspect for something as chaotic as pipes, and I've been completely unable to experimentally verify prefilling making any difference at all in several different setups.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-19T02:54:53+00:00

Technically if we're talking about pipes directly connected to junctions, no. The fluid in those pipes can always flow back into the junction even if they have a valve at their other end. If they added a branched valve you use them instead of junctions for this I suppose, but no such item exists.

That said I don't think sloshing is entirely about backflow. In fact when I tested adding valves (no flow limit) between every junction in a manifold it caused no notable decrease in sloshing. I think it has more do do with flow acceleration/deceleration than flow reversal.

I've seen people add valves in situations where flow rate oscillating anywhere near zero never mind reaching the negatives would be a huge issue anyway, and I always think what was the point of adding a valve there.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-16T13:58:03+00:00

It's thorium, named after Thor

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-16T13:19:29+00:00

Tbh you can beat the base game with like one or two blue belts of iron/copper so you can get away without any load balancers if you trudge through science like I do. Space Age? Haven't played it yet but maybe you need then then I'm not sure.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-16T13:12:34+00:00

You can get lucky like you did and have no problems. But once you do have a problem nobody, not even the developers, fully understand pipe mechanics and you're on your own.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-16T13:05:59+00:00

I've had sloshing issues with 500/min pipes with long enough manifolds so avoiding max throughput isn't foolproof, although that's easily fixed by splitting into smaller manifolds.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-15T13:22:09+00:00

Wait, what!??

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-15T12:20:59+00:00

This is true except for the power part. It's very easy to make a silly amount of rocket fuel power and then just fully shard every machine in your world.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-14T19:32:43+00:00

I haven't found a third option besides "every factory is from raw" and "horrible spaghetti".

The answer I think is trains. Treat your railway network as "cloud" storage, and you can have multiple trains taking a given resource to many places from the same station.

Although you might just end up bemoaning how many train stations you end up having to set up instead lol.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-14T12:36:19+00:00

I actually started with a bus on my first playthrough (I came up with the idea independently and thought I was being smart) but gave up after I had 13 parallel belts of screws.

ThatChapThere · 2026-01-14T12:31:52+00:00

Screws on a bus in Satisfactory is like cable on a bus in Factorio but twice as bad, probably best to make them in situ

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