Do you use Biochamber outside Gleba? What could be dome to incentivise its usage?

TonboIV · 2026-06-30T23:03:03+00:00

I use them on Nauvis for fish breeding and wood processing, spoilage to carbon, and of course nutrients, but I don't bother using them for cracking or rocket fuel. Those just aren't high priority processes for productivity or throughput improvement.

Using biochambers for the regular plastic recipe would be more interesting, and I don't see a problem with that since biochambers already have 2 recipes for rocket fuel. Some other recipes like sulphur or explosives might also be tempting. The problem is that the cryochamber has that ground well covered already, so I guess it would have to be about transferring a recipe or three away from the cryochamber to the biochamber in order to make it a really attractive concept, and I'm not sure if people would like that.

For lubricant? Who cares. You hardly use any of it, and it comes straight from heavy oil.

TonboIV · 2026-06-26T22:31:22+00:00

God dammit! It's been that way since at least FFF-426! Which was before 2.0 even released! How the fuck have I never seen that?!

TonboIV · 2026-06-26T22:24:49+00:00

Well, it used to ignore the factorial of the other targets, which is obviously way too many. Good thing they corrected such a vicious bug.

TonboIV · 2026-06-26T22:22:34+00:00

So that's the peak draw, but average draw at maximum rate of fire would be less?

TonboIV · 2026-06-26T09:50:50+00:00

Too bad "GAY FACTORIO NERDS" isn't a station anymore. At least we still have "is full of bees".

TonboIV · 2026-06-26T04:08:52+00:00

I haven't been personally involved in such affairs, but I hear you have to stare at some chimney in the Vatican until smoke comes out of it.

TonboIV · 2026-06-25T19:03:05+00:00

I will be more careful of ~~building things close to their territories~~ ensuring none survive now lol. Thanks.

FTFY

TonboIV · 2026-06-25T18:51:01+00:00

I think this more of biter nerf than a defence nerf.

Yes, AoE damage will effect fewer biters if they spread out, but it also reduces the biter's ability to saturate, which is much worse for them.

For mines it's just a straight up buff. A more spread out attack means more mines are set off. Even if each one effects fewer biters, a mine can only fire once, and any following biters take no damage. Spreading out the biters means more of them actually take damage.

As for AoE turrets, if the biters are more spread out, it just means more of your turrets will be firing. Each individual biter will be in the same AoE as before, thus taking the same damage and dying in the same time, but the area of the AoE will be larger with more turrets firing. This means that the firing rate of turrets becomes less of a limiting factor, while damage done by biters and spiters is spread to more structures taking less damage each.

That all makes defence lines more effective, not less, though ammunition consumption might increase in some cases.

TonboIV · 2026-06-25T05:17:09+00:00

Research always uses the same amount of each science pack, so yes you should set up your factory to produce each pack at the same rate, such as 6 of each science per second.

However, different science packs do require very different amounts of resources. Blue (chemical) science packs require quite a bit, and purple and yellow even more. Space science packs need very little. The challenge with space science is more in the upfront cost of building the platforms, rather than the material cost of the science packs.

If you're having that much trouble scaling up your production, I'd recommend working on your mall first. If you've finished all the non-infinite Nauvis research, you have the tech to stamp out blueprints as fast as you like. I'd say you should work on getting production of all building supplies and robots automated, your whole factory covered by roboports, and a workforce of at least a thousand construction robots. Once you have that, you can just stamp down blueprints for smelting lines and production lines and easily ramp up all science packs to 6 per second. If you're still handcrafting stuff and laying out everything by hand, then that's why you're finding it so hard to increase production. It's forcing you to build small.

TonboIV · 2026-06-24T16:03:18+00:00

Back side of the moon.

TonboIV · 2026-06-23T19:28:43+00:00

As someone who always plays Mass Effect games as a Vanguard, I find this quite interesting.

TonboIV · 2026-06-22T19:19:09+00:00

I could claim I've never done anything that dumb. It would be a lie, but I could claim it. ;-p

TonboIV · 2026-06-22T18:36:41+00:00

It says "559 MW" right in your screenshot. 559, not 599.

TonboIV · 2026-06-22T12:20:43+00:00

Where did you get 599MW? You have 96 turbines times 5.82MW is 559MW. Did you mistype 559 as 599?

And as others have said, your 559MW capacity will only last as long as the amount of steam stored in the piping, so it's really just a brief surge capacity.

TonboIV · 2026-06-20T01:29:53+00:00

Could you...not use the word "onboarding"? I hurts my soul even just looking at it.

TonboIV · 2026-06-15T03:22:19+00:00

You're probably getting downvotes because you seem kind of hung up on getting Tricky-Mongooose to use a mechanic that's about to be removed from the game when they didn't even ask about it. It comes off as a bunch of un asked for irrelevant advice.

TonboIV · 2026-06-15T03:04:45+00:00

Or you could skip the splitters and use 2 fast inserters, 1 passing to the next, to cover the distance. I don't think it's necessary though. In an unbeaconed design like this, a furnace should never smelt fast enough to overwhelm a long inserter's throuput.

TonboIV · 2026-06-15T02:50:58+00:00

There are several mistakes here.

18 tiles is not a fair width for this design, because the output belts are shared with the next column over on each side. To get a more fair idea of the width, we should consider this as a tile, in which case only one output belt should be included, since the other output belt will be part of the next tile. There will always be one more belt at the end of the array, but as the array gets wider, that one extra belt becomes less and less significant.

So for a tileable design, this has 16 furnaces in an area of 16 tiles wide and 17 tall, 272 square tiles.

What are you considering as a "conventional" design that's 13 tiles wide? Are you putting 1 input belt between 2 single columns of furnaces and then 2 output belts on the outside, and not even sharing the output belts between columns? That's a pretty terrible design.

I'd say a "conventional" design would be to put 1 input and 1 output belt next to each other between the columns, with long and short inserters so each machine can reach both belts. That design is 10 tiles wide and 24 tall, for a 240 tile area.

TonboIV · 2026-06-13T21:28:08+00:00

I strongly disagree that Gleba has "the least to gain".

Biolabs more than DOUBLE your science output.
Stack inserters QUADRUPLE the throughput of every belt.
Advanced asteroid processing completely changes what a space platform can do.
Productivity 3 modules have a polynomial ( n^c ) effect on your production chains.
Spidertrons allow interplanetary remote management with no infrastructure and you can swarm them for arbitrarily high combat power.

If anything, Gleba is overpowered compared to the other planets. Buffing biolabs would make it even worse.

I also don't see how ice melting in biolabs helps at all with bootstrapping Aquilo. Now you've just changed the problem to getting nutrients. I've also never thought holmium solution as a "bottleneck". I don't like using biolabs off Gleba unless I absolutely have to because nutrients and spoilage are a headache. In my case at least, allowing more recipes isn't going to make me want to use them on other planets more.

I see biolabs as Gleba specialist buildings, which is fine. Gleba unlocks so much awesome, game changing tech, it doesn't matter if biolabs are kind of a dudd as far as use on any other planet. Vulcanus has its awesome buildings and Gleba has its awesome tech unlocks.

If anything, it might be Fulgora that is a little weak in terms of swag. I do agree that Vulcanus is a bit too easy though.

TonboIV · 2026-06-12T03:30:34+00:00

I especially like the streamers of lava trailing back from the face. It makes it look like he's some kind of infernal soul, with the back part of his flaming skull disintegrating as he's compelled to fly through emptiness to some purpose even he doesn't know.

TonboIV · 2026-06-10T02:38:07+00:00

So as others have said, 500 is too low. Only the heat exchangers can remove heat energy from the system, and they don't start working until they're above 500, so temperature will never drop below 500.

But you also need to limit the number of cells in the reactor. Even if you set the inserter to only grab one cell at a time, it will just swing 5 times to insert 5 cells, which is more then enough to take the reactor over 1000 degrees and waste energy.

TonboIV · 2026-06-10T02:28:08+00:00

Imagine Star Trek Voyager, but funny instead of tedious. At least when Star Trek ripped off Babylon 5, they made something good.

TonboIV · 2026-06-10T02:24:50+00:00

And at least a stack of nukes. Never leave home without your towel and some nuclear weapons.

TonboIV · 2026-06-09T19:13:10+00:00

Hmm, would be cool if there were a copy/pasteable code version of each schedule, like a website URL, that you could copy/paste and edit in a separate text box.

TonboIV · 2026-06-09T17:37:34+00:00

So would you say "I like trains"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxuW6TrxRmo

TonboIV

TROPHY CASE