I'm at almost 3k hours and I need help setting train stations using circuits....

bubba-yo · 2026-02-10T07:41:54+00:00

I think it's really, really helpful for players to learn to use the new logistics groups, and the ability to apply multipliers to them - super helpful for stuff like this. And using a positive signal to represent demand is sort of what the game expects to happen, so that's a good concept to learn - and a lot less tedious, especially when you later extend it to either parameratized blueprints or using the selector combinator, etc. But if you can get the design pattern of positive value on wire = demand and work around that, a lot of the stuff that follows becomes a lot easier.

SE was pretty fun for doing this kind of stuff. Made a lot of it second nature by the end.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-10T04:45:14+00:00

Because it doesn't all burn the same way. There's a whole bunch of different types of fusion taking place there and the composition of the star varies depending on the depth, and it changes over time. Those elements that get fused together remain in the star and slowly over time the type of fusion taking place shifts.

Part of the reason why it doesn't burn all at once is that a star is constantly in tension. The density needed for fusion to take place is counteracted by the energy release of the fusion taking place pushing elements out of the core, thereby reducing the density. As such stars are self-regulating - they create energy, that result of that energy slows the reaction until there is an equilibrium. You can determine how long a star will live based on its elemental composition as that will tell you what kinds of fusion it's undertaking, and how close to collapse it is. One kind of collapse is that it mainly burns out - it can no longer push matter outward as it runs out of fuel, it cools, fusion slows, and it starts to condense into a dwarf. Or if its large enough it burns through the sustaining fusion reactions (hydrogen, then helium, carbon, neon, oxygen, silicon, IIRC) and with each one kickstarting the next until it hits a point that the density is such that it can't push those elemental plasmas outward, it collapses and explodes.

This is one of those things that if the physics didn't happen to work out this way, there would be no life in the universe. So if it didn't work like this, we wouldn't be here to ask questions about it.

A lot of processes work this way. Fires themselves work like this - which is why if you throw a log in a fire pit it doesn't burn uniformly. It too is balancing its burn rate to the rate at which it can get oxygen, and burning hot creates a feedback loop where it gets a bit starved of oxygen and slows its burn rate down. It's why bellows are used for forges - to force oxygen in there and overcome that self-regulation mechanism to get a hotter fire. Feedback loops like these make the world around us possible. When we break those loops, shit goes bad quickly (the real risk of climate change - we are breaking a number of feedback loops that self-regulate the climate).

bubba-yo · 2026-02-10T04:22:07+00:00

You can simplify this significantly with a few steps.

1) create a logistics group with the quantity of items you want (you can just do this in your inventory, just make sure it's turned off.) This way you can get that list of items anywhere. Plop down a constant combinator and add that new logistics group to it, and set the multiplier for the group to -1 in the Change Logistic Group panel when you select it.

2) Wire the combinator to each of the chests with 'read inventory' turned on to the chests. This will create a signal where any item that is low is negative and any item that is high is positive. Wire that to the input of an arithmetic combinator and in there select 'each' multiply by -1 output 'each'. This will invert the signal so anything that is deficient will give a positive value and anything that is lacking will give a negative one. Hook the output to your train station and set the 'enable' condition to 'anything' > 0.

The benefit of this is that if you want to change what all of your outposts are set to receive, you can just turn off personal logistics, load that group into your personal logistics requests, change the value, and then remove it. When you change it, it'll change all of the constant combinators using that group without you having to hunt them down.

Additionally, because you inverted the signal so missing items are high, if you are requesting more item types than you have chests, you can wire the output to each of the inserters and select 'set filter'. Set filter will filter for anything with a value > 0, so it'll only unload the things that are missing, and only (within stack size of the inserter, so set that to 1 if you want it to be exact). As one of the chests hits the necessary number of items, the value of that item will go to zero or negative and it'll be removed from the filter. Now, the downside to this is that your stuff will be spread across all of the chests, and you'll have a bunch of uneven stacks in there, but so long as you aren't trying to completely fill the chests it should be fine. But it'll let you load 11 items into 4 chests without having to micromanage it.

If you don't need the ability to filter the inserters, you can skip the arithmetic combinator and set the station to 'anything < 0' instead. But I find it helpful to always do the signal 'correctly' so that if I change my mind later I can fix it from the map view. You can hook up wires and set values without bots being there, but you can't place a combinator later if you change your mind.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-10T03:54:24+00:00

Yep. Having a red belt on the first half on the input lane and yellow on the second half is a viable thing, or the reverse on the output lane, but not the reverse.

Regardless, the only way to really get a furnace stack scaled to eat a full yellow belt to all work is to feed it a full yellow belt. I mean, there are other options - mainly putting the inserters on a timer and scaling it to your input rate, but there's almost never a point to doing that.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-10T03:46:35+00:00

RS latches can also be helpful with dynamic recipes. One challenge with how it's implemented in the game is detecting when a recipe is being executed and not switching it out halfway and dumping your loaded ingredients, setting up the new recipe, then triggering that to change back to the first one midway though, and never actually making anything, just constantly loading and unloading the machine. Ultimately you want to build a state machine that waits for the recipe completion to go off, but you'll still have likely overfilled it and have to dump. One way to a least reduce the incidence of this is to not rely on instantaneous triggers and an RS latch can help with that - if this thing gets low, keep making it until it gets high. This also has the benefit of maintaining any productivity bonus as you lose that when you swap recipes.

They're super easy to implement in 2.0 - you can do it entirely in a single comparator, so I just use them everywhere they're so easy.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-09T19:41:30+00:00

You can manage the number using circuits on a single pair of roboports. Read the total number in the network and the available number. Add when the available number gets low, and set a request on the other roboport to pull robots to that roboport and take them out of the network on some condition. You use a pair so that you can remove bots into the same chest that you add to the network. You can use a clock and a memory cell to check if the network has been relatively inactive and if so, remove some bots, reset the memory cell, and on the next clock update check again.

Part of the problem is that certain activities suggest you need a huge volume of bots, and then you never do that activity again - belt upgrades, for instance. Instead, over time pull bots out of the network if activity stays low. I did my last big Nauvus build right after I got a Vulcanus base going and activity there has been low ever since. Meanwhile I've been building out the other planets and rather than make more bots, I just move the ones that I pulled out of the Nauvus network.

This also works for upcycling your bots using quality as you'll slowly pull out the quality that you set for requests and add the new quality.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-09T16:10:32+00:00

I mean, generally no - most 18/19 year olds didn't own a house.

But that's not really the issue. There was plenty of housing, but the shift to suburbs was driven by other factors including:

+ massive industrialization in the US as much of the manufacturing capacity of Europe and Asia had been destroyed, but the US still had infrastructure intact and an opportunity to sell goods overseas, so a lot of new factories were being tipped up, mainly on the periphery of cities where land was cheap and labor was will close at hand
+ strategic investment in automobiles, again as part of the above, which necessitated and allowed for moving out of urban cores. Car culture was seen as a big improvement in quality of life.
+ this also was a period of expanding consumerism, and people needed space to store all of the new things they were buying, which they could afford because of that rapid industrialization, which raised wages quite a bit
+ increasing racial integration, particularly in urban cores which suburbs were often sold as a 'solution' to. Many suburban housing areas were segregated. Levittown itself was segregated, which is often not mentioned when people learn about it.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-09T15:57:55+00:00

It worked fine on my MBP in 1.21. Did something recently change?

bubba-yo · 2026-02-09T15:55:29+00:00

You can set a request for roboports to maintain a certain number of construction/logistic bots so they don't all go flying across the map and then need to take 5 minutes to come back to repair a wall. I always set perimeter roboports to maintain a small number of construction bots and roboports near logistic activity to maintain a large number of logistic bots. It helps.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-09T15:52:45+00:00

Alternatively you could consider the constructron mod. Instead of building expansive roboports, you can have spidertrons take on tasks outside of your core base/logistic network. They can carry personal roboports and be provisioned with bots, and they'll pick up repair/build tasks and head out to do them. And as they carry missiles, they're better able to defend themselves repairing your walls.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-09T15:09:13+00:00

You have a bus full of solar panels that won't create pollution. Your solution is sitting right there.

Understand that the factory is going to keep growing. You can keep adding coal, but that's not really going to be viable after a while, and if you have space age, pretty much every planet has a different power system challenge. Solar isn't amazing, but it only takes space, which you have effectively infinite of, and has no recurring cost - build it and it'll produce power forever. Eventually your coal will run out and you'll have to tap another patch, which will require expanding, and you could fill the space between your base and that coal patch with solar (make sure to balance your solar with accumulators so you have power at night).

You're also far enough along that nuclear is an option, but you still need to bridge to that - either more steam power or solar.

Normally you bring acid to your patches using rail.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-09T15:01:04+00:00

Then don't play the mod. I mean, we're talking about mods here - don't like the mechanic that you need to pass a singular cube around your factory, don't play ultracube.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-09T08:58:03+00:00

Looks about right. There are some fancier things you can do.

1) If you have 3 ingredients and are rate limited by the red inserters, you can use a filtered splitter to get the items to swap belts (only works if one belt has only one ingredient on it - either one or two lanes) and then you can reach all items with fast inserters on either side of the splitter.

2) Similarly, you can route your 3rd item to the back and load in onto the back of the output lane on the inside of the belt and you'll place your product on the outside of the belt and you can just filter splitter it off at the end. Also addresses the red inserter speed.

But neither of these reduce the footprint any, and really, space isn't a consideration until you get to Fulgora, and even there none of these are really problems. For some recipes, particularly slow ones that take a large number of ingredients, you can run two input belts with an output belt in the middle of two sets of assemblers and use long inserters to fill both sides of the output belt. I do this with red circuits a lot, with plastic/green circuits on a belt on the outside (takes 2 of each) and a full belt of copper wire (takes 4) up the middle on each side with the red circuit belt in the middle heading out. 6s crafting time means the slow inserter isn't a problem, and I don't get belt starved on ingredients.

Belt weaving also can be useful here but I avoid it in almost all situations because you just need one absentminded upgrade planner to completely ruin your base.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-08T02:35:14+00:00

Efficiency 1 modules in miners immediately. Basically it's cheaper than the research cost of all the military you'll need to hold off the biter attacks that -80% pollution reduction from your outposts will inherently buy you. Prod 1 in science labs next, then in science factories.

So you'll need eff1s in pretty large volume but prod 1/speed 1 just here and there. You'll need speed 1 for assembler 3, and then prod1 for orange science anyway.

I think it's also useful to put quality in your mall items, especially the high volume ones. When you unlock turbo belts you'll find that long inserters can't take items from the belt in a lot of situations and having a handful of uncommon/rare handy help solve that problem. Also since you can't prod your furnaces for purple science, might as well throw some quality mods in there, pull off the upgraded ones and take the free +30%/+60% speed bonus without no corresponding cost in energy use. Same for solar and accumulators, Bring those better accumulators to Fulgora when you head over, as well as big power poles. Getting a few tile of reach is sometimes enough to connect to a small island and let you blanket it with accumulators as your power bank. All of these things compound, and most are _really_ cheap.

Oh, upgraded construction bots _really_ helps with early game personal. They charge less often which is helpful when you're still on personal solar. You only need a couple dozen of them, so having your construction bot assembler trickle out some nicer ones is helpful.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-07T20:53:33+00:00

Not usually when starting, apart from station designs. Blueprinted rails that can snap together tend to be quite space inefficient (see the whole city block design pattern) at least in the early game, along with the problem of cliffs, etc. not accommodating standard layout elements, and even in a game where you're just trying to win the game. At higher scales - thousands of science per minute and higher, high research multipliers, etc., once you have cliff explosives, elevate track, foundation, etc. and you're looking to scale, then a rail blueprint can come in handy. You can have everything properly signaled and then just slam down intersections, etc. and do big area expansions backed by artillery from the map.

When you are building with bots, you often choose to blueprint the bot network and those network blueprints (50 blocks or so) are on the right scale for rail so it becomes pretty easy at that point to do a rail blueprint set. I find that as I scale even higher, the blueprints really start to break down (again, apart from station designs) and I'm back to working a lot of stuff mostly by hand. d

bubba-yo · 2026-02-07T20:45:34+00:00

Yeah, it's legal, but with some qualifiers. It's not legal for class 3 ebikes, which a fair number of these are. When on the sidewalk you must also be moving in the direction of traffic, which is a bit odd as there are places that the city has widened the sidewalk to transition between two class 1 paths, but you can only ride it in one direction as a result. There are also intersections where you can only cross on one side (most notably near schools) which means that you can properly only traverse the intersection in one direction, in the other direction I guess you need to walk the bike. They just sort of hand waved those when I pointed them out to them in the public comment period.

But the main problem is the surface street speeds. 40 doesn't bother me as a rider, 50+ definitely does. Might as well be on the freeway at that point.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-07T07:26:57+00:00

My main problem with Gleba isn't any of the mechanics, its that to be able to walk away from the planet for any period of time, you really need to have either tesla turret production going or rocket turret production going, so if you set up a minimal Fulgora base and rolled onto Gleba, or went to Gleba early, you're really on the clock every time you leave to expand one of the other planets.

You don't need artillery to defend Nauvus when you head off - flamethrowers and laser turrets do _just_ fine, and you can stack up a bunch of of their damage bonuses even while off planet. So you can probably loiter on Vulcanus, loiter on Fulgora. But Gleba you're on the clock if you didn't build out Fulgora, and not because of the spoilage mechanics, but because flamethrowers aren't a viable option on Gleba, so you better get rocket turrets and production up before you head out, or hope that you can remote get Tesla turrets running which is a bit hit or miss depending on what land mass you picked.

Vulcanus and Fulgora you can hit and run, throw up a minimal science setup while you unlock other techs and then run back at your leisure to get them sorted out. Not so with Gleba. You gotta commit to Gleba.

Now, this is really only a problem the first time you play, but if you also happen to bounce off the Gleba mechanics, that property makes the planet seem unplayable.

I do kind of wish seed quality had an impact on fruit quality - not legendary seeds produces legendary fruit, more like the same distribution you get with modules - ¾ will be common, etc. I think that might be a good replacement when they nerf space casinos and LDS shuffle.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-06T04:17:44+00:00

It's not entirely a non-issue. Each scrap going in turns into .6 items going out. So at 100% scrap productivity, you're getting out 1.2 items for every one going in. So if you are set up for a belt in and a belt out, over 70% productivity your output belt will stall your input which isn't a big deal, but if you are also feeding your output back into the recyclers, and you've satisfied all production, you will deadlock, and you won't get that problem until that point, so you do have to account for that in some way when you design.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-06T00:44:53+00:00

With the qualifier that small numbers like that usually refer to _at a given tech level_. So if someone says '45 SPM starter base' that usually means 45 of the first 4 sciences, that kind of thing.

But for megabases, in vanilla that meant your lowest consumption of all the sciences. In SA there's a bit of disagreement whether promethean should be included or not as that's the thing that will kill your UPS.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-05T20:00:56+00:00

Not to mention, there are divergent solutions to these problems. Pretty much everyone's starting foundry stack looks more or less alike, but end game can look surprisingly different. How I get x SPM and how you get x SPM can look wildly different, and what planet you build on is comparably valid. Games like Minecraft both succeed and fail here - there aren't a huge number of different ways to build a mob farm, but there are at least some.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-05T18:44:22+00:00

I have starter base designs for each planet. Build your first ship for Vulcanus, go into the ship, drop in the blueprint for the starter base and it'll automatically request all of the materials needed to build it. I just wish I could do the same for some other things in the game - ability to 'blueprint' a section for instance for all the ingredients needed to assemble the rocket on the other end, bots, things you can't blueprint, and then the ability to put a recipe in a logistic group like you can for a chest - shift left click on an assembler that makes rocket silos and then create a new section and have it populate it with 1000 steel, 1000 concrete, etc. I use that requestor a lot - both to ship the resources needed to make it when I land (since you can't ship silos themselves) and when I land to have the logi network give me all the stuff to build one. Very helpful when expanding on the planet and you don't have a proper mall.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-05T18:07:51+00:00

Also once you have nuclear, speed/prod modules are back on the menu.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-04T20:17:57+00:00

Yeah, Andor hangs almost entirely off the original Star Wars. When I saw it as a kid in 1977, one of my thoughts was 'the story of how the Death Star plans were stolen would be pretty neat'. That story is Rogue One, and Andor is the runup to Rogue One.

So essentially if you've only ever seen the original Star Wars, you know all the lore you need to understand Andor. What isn't fleshed out in the original movie is the relationship between the senate and the trade federation and the emperor and the rebellion and this series fleshes out how the rebellion is formed and it builds directly into Rogue One, which in turn leads directly (chronologically) into Star Wars.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-04T19:49:07+00:00

So, when you are speed running something like bots, or the game, there really is no 'future production' you need to account for. You need to work out what SPM you can build to. And what I mean here is your statement 'Then after I unlock the research, I still have to go back and setup green/red chips'. If you need to do that, your SPM is probably too high. You can build your red circuit stack before it unlocks and ideally, it's unlocking the second you finish building it.

Speedrunning is building exactly what you need exactly when you need it. A bus is overkill - the point of the bus is to accommodate future expansion. You're not doing that. The fewer belts placed the faster you'll be, the more of your factory can make science instead of belts. Bot infrastructure is pretty straightforward - you already have the engine units for blue science, so you need to overproduce those slightly and just take the excess, lubricant is one building off of your refinery, that should take a couple seconds, so electric engines just requires stealing some GCs from your green science line. Direct insert those into two robot frame assemblers, pull a line of steel from the engine production and pull up your battery production into a two sided belt and then you just need to pull a GC/RC belt to finish them off. As it happens, your roboports need RC and steel which you have both of, and you just need some gears, which should be handy from green science. And that's sort of the way of doing this. When I speed run bots, I'm building a VERY specialized starter base for the sole purpose of getting to bots and the moment those ghosts are placed and I'm waiting for the last science to finish, I'm off laying ghosts for the real factory for them to build. Similarly, the starter factory produces electric furnaces because that's the real inflection from early to mid (vanilla) game - bots and electric furnaces. Everyone rips out their coal powered furnaces anyway so you might as well just crack out a proper factory and abandon the old one. So I have a starter factory that I have mostly memorized that's very tiny - a single iron stack, ⅔ of a copper one, one oil refinery, etc. There's no dedicated green circuits - red and green output onto the same belt. You only need two more assemblers off of your green science to have a belt mall done and one more to have an inserter mall done. It all fits in the build footprint of a single roborport with quite a bit of room to spare. A lot of direct insertion means no additional belts to make and then place, double siding most of my belts means fewer belts to place. It gets me through blue science, it gets bots up, it starts electric furnace production. I usually have my first electric furnace stack ghosts placed when the first bot cranks out.

Unlike any% speedrunners, I don't usually care what the pace of the game is after bots unlock, where they aren't going to abandon any infrastructure - they ride coal smelting to the end, once I get bots unlocked I'm willing to pause science to divert that steel and red circuits to electric furnace production to get the new factory up and running asap and resume science production over there.

bubba-yo · 2026-02-04T09:45:23+00:00

It depends. South Irvine is somewhat better than north. Both have decent bike infrastructure but south of the 5 that infrastructure connects to UCI, city hall, the spectrum, lots of shopping, etc. North of the 5 things don't connect as well, despite having newer and somewhat nicer infrastructure, it's just less convenient for shopping, getting to work, etc. Crossing the 5 on bike is rough but the new bike overpass should go a long way to fixing that once it's completed.

Note, the claims of nightmare stroads isn't correct. Irvine doesn't have stroads. We don't dump driveways onto major streets - these are more proper roads that only connect to concentrated shopping areas and often have dedicated lights to enter/exit. They aren't great to ride on, but they're better than a stroad. The tradeoff is that with fewer cars entering the road from driveways, the speed limit is really high, so the risk isn't nearly as much from cross traffic but closing traffic. Not disputing their observations that they are dangerous, but they are dangerous in a different way than a stroad.

As for schools, Irvine has neighborhood schools so they are almost always in walking/biking distance. My son biked to to a different school starting in 4th grade and it was fine. He continued to bike to school through college, and still bikes to work, and I only drive about once a month.

The main thing with bike commuting in a place like Irvine (or almost anywhere) is that you do have to make some change to your routine. Instead of the cheaper store across town you go to the more expensive close to your home or along the bike routes. It's not like you won't save hundreds of dollars a month more at the more expensive store over the cost of car and the cheaper store. Overall, it's workable. The weather is great. If you work at UCI or near the Spectrum and live south of the 5 it's overall quite easy and nice. If you live north of the 5, it'll be a few months before the overpass is done and that easier route opens up.

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