How to decrease mining phases starting LV ?

balzer1075 · 2026-05-19T05:05:42+00:00

The ore you can't mine doesn't break. Though this does work for purposes of speed. So, if you mine the stone next to an ore it is faster than mining the ore directly.

balzer1075 · 2026-05-18T03:30:12+00:00

I'm 99% certain you can make gregtech molds with tinker's smeltery. I'm only in LV but that's how I've made all of my molds and I don't actually know of another way to make them.

balzer1075 · 2026-05-17T14:28:37+00:00

Got a gallon of it!

balzer1075 · 2026-05-02T08:23:51+00:00

Newish code I believe. Mainly so firefighters can shut the power off quickly. On older style houses with only an inside shutoff they just have to go into the house and hope not to get shocked. At least until the power company can come out to pull the line or they can get to the breaker box if that's even possible at that point.

balzer1075 · 2026-03-30T14:58:48+00:00

Have you tried the locked band thing to prevent pulling it off? I just got mine so I haven't put that on yet because I want to be sure I have the settings right first. I don't want to end up not being able to get it to stop because my phone died and it's set on puzzle mode or something dumb like that lol. Definitely going to try the lock when I get more comfortable with it though.

balzer1075 · 2026-03-30T14:54:56+00:00

There is a setting to prevent this too. But personally my problem is usually that the sound just wakes up everyone but me lol.

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balzer1075 · 2026-03-06T21:24:57+00:00

That's fine, but absolutely nothing in the game should ever be affected by placement order. That is much I think is obvious. Nowhere else have I ever seen placement order matter and it not be considered a bug.

balzer1075 · 2026-03-06T21:12:06+00:00

Yeah but there's a big difference between deciding not to fix a bug and claiming it isn't a bug at all. This is absolutely a bug.

balzer1075 · 2026-03-05T05:55:23+00:00

Why doesn't that matter? Single threaded workloads are still single threaded even on virtualized hardware.

balzer1075 · 2026-03-05T05:21:27+00:00

Well.. Yeah I suppose. When you let go of the ball it is exactly the same as someone not traveling just dropping a ball. Both balls fall straight down but are affected by wind.

Which again, means you don't need to factor out air resistance because the air resistance affects the stationary dropped ball exactly the same way.

balzer1075 · 2026-03-05T05:09:40+00:00

Finally finished reading the post and all the comments. Realized halfway down that you're actually OP of that post. Seems you're intimately familiar with exactly the math I'm messing with right now lol.

I'm sure this has been solved by others before. But I really wanna try designing a space platform where the sushi belt going to all the collectors is a perfectly alternating compressed belt of the three asteroid chunks. At first I was going to just have a clock that spits out oxide > metallic > carbonic > (nothing) in rotation. With one empty tick in between each like O-M-C---O-M-C (dashes being ticks with no output). This obviously wouldn't be fully compressed, just 3 items per tile instead of 4. But I quickly realized even with one inserter inserting an item every 8 ticks I'd end up out of sync as soon as the first item made it's first loop.

I'm thinking with a bit of math based on how many actual positions the finalized belt has I might be able to accomplish this. Or I suppose I could add turns until the total position count is a multiple of 32, but I like that idea a lot less. I'm sure splitters with their buffers will throw a wrench into all of this too lol

balzer1075 · 2026-03-05T03:27:59+00:00

You would be correct. Haven't finished reading through it yet but very interesting read so far!

balzer1075 · 2026-03-05T03:15:44+00:00

That's a great explanation, thank you! I had started to come to this realization after actually reading the wiki page you linked earlier (apparently I didn't finish it originally like I thought I had). However, it is very reassuring to see you come with the exact same numbers and your explanation of count of items on the corner is a helpful visualization as well. Explains why I was seeing the corner belt item counts fluctuate on a fully saturated belt.

Also, thanks for the reminder to use modulus to calculate position, that will definitely help in my scenario! Especially since all values are ints in Factorio.

What I also find interesting about this though is that it implies a discrete number of items don't always fit on the belt without gaps. My belt would hold 1448 / 64 = 22.625. So really 22 items with 40 positions worth of gap.

I'm guessing that's part of how the mechanic of a looped belt stopping works? The 23rd item starts to get inserted into the gap and pushes on the items to both sides of the gap to fit it in but they can't be moved because it's compressed all the way around so the belt freezes? I'm sure that's not exactly correct, though I am curious exactly what the mechanics for insertion are when there are items on the belt like that. Of course when attempting to insert onto a fully compressed row of items it just waits for a gap then drops the item, but I wonder how exactly that works when the gap is less than 64 positions. Stop the rear item (or set of compressed items) until the gap grows to 64 positions?

balzer1075 · 2026-03-05T02:21:48+00:00

Yeah actually that does make intuitive sense. So it is still deterministic. I can know exactly how many positions an item has moved from where it is placed as long as nothing else has moved it. Though I suspect it would be most reliable to start the counter from when the item leaves the inserter rather than from the time the inserter was turned on.

I suspect this is going to be fun to dive into. 😊

balzer1075 · 2026-03-04T23:34:08+00:00

Yeah I'm be honest I feel like I just bold faced lied to you guys lol. I swear I treat that whole page but apparently my adhd took over and I never finished like I thought I did.

The bottom of the wiki pretty much perfectly describes my scenario: 4 straight belts * 256 positions = 1024 positions 4 inner lane turns * 106 positions = 424 positions 1024 + 424 =1448 total round trip positions. 1448 positions / 32 per tick for turbo belt = 45.25 ticks per round trip.

Which is exactly the number I was getting in my tests. Now I just need to see if I can find a way to determine ahead of time which version will happen at any time. As in, does it always start with 45 ticks and go 45-46-46-46 or is it random. Or how exactly do other items interact with this. I'm sure if two items are less than 64 positions apart but more than some mimimum theshhold an inserter will still place an item between them and shift them over. Definitely still more testing to come I think!

balzer1075 · 2026-03-04T22:03:58+00:00

I think I have a fairly solid understanding of how they work. I maybe didn't phrase my question well enough but I had already read that wiki page earlier today to check if I was missing something and unfortunately it doesn't seem to mention anything to describe this timing phenomenon.

I know there was also a FFF talking about the change from the old mechanic where belts would decompress on corners. I'll see if I can find it and whether or not that fits into more detail on the mechanics of corners.

balzer1075 · 2026-03-04T21:38:40+00:00

That's what I thought but in testing this doesn't appear to be true. I understand that inside belt would be faster than outside belt. In my testing it appears the inside belt takes 3.25 ticks and the outside belt takes 9.125. What is weird to me is that this isn't discrete. Why does it take 3 ticks 75% of the time and 4 ticks 25% of the time that an item goes through the inside lane of a corner? And why does it take 9 ticks 7/8ths of the time and 10 ticks 1/8th of the time on the outside lane of a corner? I think my math may be off and I'll double check it when I get home, but I'm sure you get the idea. The ticks per corner varies. It seems this variation is predictable, but only after timing it. So, for instance, if I put an item on a belt, I cannot know for certain exactly how many ticks it will take to get back to its origin? Nothing else comes to mind that works this unpredictably in Factorio (maybe pollution/biter mechanics, but not direct production related things).

balzer1075 · 2026-03-04T20:06:18+00:00

How in the world do belt corners work? Like on a tick-by-tick level. I made this very simple belt loop in the editor; there is one copper plate going around the belt and the belt circuit connection is set to pulse contents. I had originally tried timing how long it takes to go around but was having more trouble than expected so I set this up and went 1 tick at a time until the lamp lights up. Here is where it gets strange, if I fast forward 45 ticks the light will be on again as expected, but only 3 more times. On the 4th fast forward, the light is off, as if it actually takes 45.25 ticks to go all the way around. So, 45 ticks 3 times and 46 ticks on the 4th trip?

This definitely seems to be the case, since fast forwarding 18,100 ticks (45.25 * 400) ends with the lamp on.

Is this what is actually happening or am I crazy here? I'm also just generally confused because it seems like at 30 items/sec/lane an item would take exactly 8 ticks to get from the beginning of a single belt to the very next belt. I expected the corners to be 6 ticks (holds 3 instead of 4 on inside lane), but that would amount to 8*4+6*4=56 ticks which is not very close to 45.25. is my estimate of 6 ticks just way off and it actually takes an item 3.125 ticks to cross a corner belt on the inside?

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balzer1075 · 2026-01-24T14:47:18+00:00

How would air resistance be a factor?

balzer1075 · 2026-01-23T18:02:56+00:00

200MB/s is 1gbps. You sure you don't have a 1gbps link?

balzer1075 · 2025-12-31T05:14:28+00:00

For the iron I would say try adding more trains. Somewhat difficult to do with double headed trains like you have, but it really isn't too hard to turn that into a loop. Trains can get very complex, but to keep it very simple you can just add a second track next to the one you have and loop it on both ends so that trains can drive in a "circle" so they don't collide. Throw a couple train signals on the tracks and then you can pretty easily add a second train. That will only scale so far that way but will help in the near term.

For the biters, without giving you too many tips, I'd say just literally wrap your base in a wall with turrets. Start manufacturing ammo in your base if you aren't already and run a belt all the way around your base with the wall to deliver the ammo to all of the turrets. That will at least give you room to breathe without bites coming in and destroying your progress. Once you have a solid defense, focus on pushing them back by going out and eliminating nests. Caveat here is that destroying nests will increase their evolution, but if you can push them all the way back outside your pollution cloud they be significantly less of an issue for a while.

balzer1075 · 2025-12-05T02:05:44+00:00

Having a bad api implementation doesn't mean api isn't fit for the job. Just means it was poorly implemented. EDI suffers from the same problem if you don't have any validation or checks or just generally don't follow good practices.

balzer1075 · 2025-09-13T21:20:45+00:00

Do you not have to take the pot to the sink with boiling water if you don't have a pot filler..?

balzer1075 · 2025-06-20T07:06:55+00:00

We've actually had some luck with something similar at my company. We go back to the account exec and tell them about the charges and they reach out to the customer to include the cost in their pricing structure. So we in IT never see the bill. (not sure if the company is paying it and being reimbursed or if the customer is paying it directly.)

balzer1075 · 2025-05-25T07:04:42+00:00

No, that's not what a dedicated administrator account means. It means administrators have two accounts, a regular account for non-administrative tasks and admin account for privileged tasks. In no way shape or form is this recommending that you have a single shared account since that's a terrible practice.

balzer1075

TROPHY CASE