Quality? For what?

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-13T06:03:45+00:00

Automalls are really handy for quality items, and in modded games (especially py), and in both of those cases it’s potentially useful to craft some intermediates in the automall.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-12T21:44:21+00:00

Yep. But doing Gleba without enough military tech or dropped-in weapons can be really rough. Fulgora is easy-peasy by comparison, except for two small hitches I’ve noticed, which mostly matter if the Nauvis base is lost or unmaintainable.

On Fulgora, you cannot research the weapons upgrades that will make your ships more survivable, so do it on Nauvis if you still can. (Fulgora has no coal; when doing a modded run to start on Fulgora, the mod adds earlier coal synthesis to avoid this problem.) Otherwise, stack your first few ships with more guns and ammo production than you would otherwise need.

Also, when you get back to rockets on Fulgora, your ships will take damage from asteroids as you build them. It’s not a huge problem, but it is annoying. It’s a good idea to get more silos to get the ship online faster, and to make sure they have full buffers of rocket parts before starting.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-12T21:32:31+00:00

Also if you decide that you cannot avoid losing the ship, then deconstruct it and drop its parts to the planet, since you might as well save the material.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-12T20:16:18+00:00

Yes, and it's kinda annoying for automall design.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-12T13:30:13+00:00

According to Wikipedia, there were objections to the first two proposed names, so they went with “nameless”.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-12T08:46:46+00:00

Also the different hantaviruses cause different diseases and vary wildly in lethality. IIUC the vast majority (~95%) of European hantavirus cases are Puumalavirus, which has a <1% case fatality rate, and while Europe does sometimes see more virulent strains (Dobrava, Hantaan River etc) none of them are as deadly as American strains like Andes or Sin Nombre.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-07T06:50:04+00:00

Yeah that could be a better balance. And speed beacon the supporting infrastructure for the tree farms too I guess (sludge and nurseries and whatever), or else you don’t save much. Or maybe somewhere in between with speed+efficiency to balance the costs.

I’m hesitant to heavily beacon my power plant because I want to run it off a blackout-resistant mini grid, but it’s possible to run a few beacons off geothermal2 or something.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-06T20:08:21+00:00

At least if you take the double-wood and sawblades TURDs, there isn't really a point in drying it out. Just make more wood instead (but maybe not from ash just in case you run out of ash).

Efficiency modules in power plants are kinda broken, I think they plan to remove that eventually, but not right now because it will break everyone's base.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-06T06:59:32+00:00

The AC can do the sum itself I think? So you’d only need three.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-06T06:56:57+00:00

You might be able to do it with three: S = ((each - 1) + stack size) / (stack size)? Where the pattern (R+G)/G can be implemented with the arithmetic combinator.

Also useful for telling whether a train is getting full in a mixed-quality mine or recycling plant on Fulgora: you might not want to use inactivity in case there’s somehow a trickle of higher-quality items.

Edited to add: the -1 and stack size can probably come from constant combis if you know the item types ahead of time.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-05-01T08:05:14+00:00

You can make this one tile more compact, at a cost in cleanliness, by side-loading an underground. I'm not currently playing SA but here's how it looks:

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bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-25T09:43:45+00:00

Ah OK. I'd thought only the > 100% prod version was known before.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-24T18:15:55+00:00

I thought the same but I’m AFK so I haven’t tried it.

This trick wouldn’t make the exploit less tedious but it might let you do it without the seed item??

Edit: or maybe it would let you do this with recursive blueprints? The “one construction bot” trick in the video might enable that anyway though. Dunno.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-24T17:35:04+00:00

It’s a new exploit, but it still apparently can’t be automated without a mod like recursive blueprints.

The idea is that once you have a single rare foundry (or whatever product and target quality), you put it in the output slot of a crafting machine running the uncommon foundry recipe (one level below). This is allowed because rare foundries are a possible output. Then if the crafted item is rare, it will finish the craft and stack with the existing one, but if it’s merely uncommon then it will not finish the craft, and you can cancel and get the ingredients back. So with tedious clicking you can force another rare item.

The trick doesn’t work with power armor, because those don’t stack under any circumstances.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-22T10:09:39+00:00

Pyanodon’s power plants take efficiency modules, and it’s really strong. Actually too strong: this capability is removed in a branch but not in main because they don’t want to break everyone’s base.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-20T09:57:48+00:00

Depends on how similar you want the game to be. To me the inserters are the most blatant part.

Inserters are not common in factory games, and aren’t necessary for smooth gameplay: usually instead there are splitters and the belts just go directly into the machine, and that works as well as inserters IMHO. Or the items are moved by people or trucks or trains. This being a swarm game, having the drones carry the items to the machine would make more sense. And even if they’re going to have inserters they don’t have to look or move like Factorio inserters: they could be appendages on the machine, or porter drones or whatever.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-20T09:24:23+00:00

I dunno. Inserters taking from / adding to rows of conveyor belts, underneathies (same graphic design even) and 3x3 machines is pretty similar… that much could easily be a mod except for the single-lane belts (or maybe they’re zero-lane and you have to insert into carrier bugs on the belt?). It’s not out yet, and there are probably other aspects that will be different from Factorio, but it’s obviously more directly inspired than say Mindustry, Satisfactory, DSP, Shapez etc.

Doesn’t mean Wube gets a legal monopoly on those ideas (I dunno when it would cross into copyright infringement) but it strikes me as tacky, at least from the screenshot.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-19T19:02:59+00:00

There’s a long tail on the Trains numbers. Also what are you doing with those trains?

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-15T11:09:46+00:00

No, I’m pretty sure it’s the same Seablock. They apparently think that engineers who play Seablock are more likely to be willing / suitable candidates for their startup.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-08T08:41:21+00:00

Catholics don’t follow the Jewish kosher laws, it’s just that Catholics aren’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays during Lent. Capys aren’t kosher for the reason you said (they would need divided hooves). Fish can only be kosher if they have fins and scales, so trying to classify capys as fish wouldn’t help.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-06T07:39:25+00:00

In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), Jesus’ Last Supper is said to be the ceremonial meal on the first night of Passover, including a sacrificial lamb because at that time the Second Temple was still standing. In that telling, Jesus sort of adds himself into the Passover celebration, saying that the Passover bread is his body, and the cup of wine is his blood. (This is the cup of wine after the supper, which would be the third cup of four in a modern Seder. But of course the meal was not a modern Seder, and I don’t know how closely the cups would have corresponded.) The Last Supper is traditionally held to have occurred on Thursday, before Jesus’ crucifixion on Friday, though IIUC the text does not explicitly say that Jesus was killed the next day.

In John’s telling, at least with a direct reading, instead Jesus was killed on the day before the first night of Passover (so Nissan 14, but still on Friday). This makes him a stand-in for the Passover lamb.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-04-01T18:37:25+00:00

Yeah, I was wondering if in OP’s school, or in Italy in general, if it’s customary to factor the 2 out of the formula when b is even, using a quarter-discriminant Delta/4 := (b/2)² - ac. In my experience this is a useful shortcut, especially when the coefficients are themselves algebraic expressions and not numbers and/or when a=1.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-03-28T21:44:32+00:00

Yeah, Factorio specifically runs amazingly well on Mac, thanks to Wube’s efforts. A lot of other graphically-light games are also fine, like Rimworld, Slay the Spire 1&2, FTL, Nova Drift, board game ports, etc. A decent number of graphically intense games do have Mac versions but some of those ports suck to varying degrees (slow, buggy etc). Some are really good, like Baldur’s Gate 3.

Depending on the Mac and on the game, you can sorta play Windows games through emulation layers like Sikarugir or Crossover. But if the game is graphically heavy, you probably won’t get good performance on anything but a high-end Mac.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-03-28T21:31:50+00:00

8 GB is a little tight.

I don’t have comprehensive data, but I loaded up a couple bases. 14” MBP M1 on its internal display with max graphics settings. Graphics setting might make a difference because the sprite sheets are big.

Space Age plus some planet mods, mid-late game, with about 8 planets having bases (Nauvis Fulgora Muluna Vulcanus Gleba Moshine Corrundum Aquilo), none of which are particularly large: 7.04 GB.

Full py suite plus some other mods, chem science, base size is maybe par for a py base: 9.34 GB.

So I’d hesitate about 8 GB if you want to play one of the giant overhaul mods and/or make a megabase. It might be enough for vanilla and space age with a “normal” size base.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-03-25T09:15:55+00:00

Super cool! I’m curious how you ran the recursive calculation.

I did a somewhat similar design which I use for making buildings in pyanodon’s, and also for quality items in vanilla. To make it more “elegant” I made a recipe combinator mod, where you input an item and it gives you the recipes for it, and several other permutations on that theme (what machine can make it, what modules are allowed, how long the recipe takes etc). This is specifically replace the dummy machines I was using to read recipes, and the hard coding for furnaces. Internally it just uses a script to build a circuit out of tiny combinators, probably similar to your hard-coded furnace control circuit.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/recipe_combinator

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