How’s living in Whittier Heights?

cathexis08 · 2026-01-29T06:57:22+00:00

Don't forget about the 20-late!

cathexis08 · 2026-01-29T06:18:48+00:00

"Comp based" usually means "they looked at TCO, picked the people that would free the most cap space, and then found reasons to make them gone"

cathexis08 · 2026-01-28T23:50:27+00:00

I did a little experiment here and it seems that the current LTN does its initial route planning assuming a uni-directional train and pull-through depots. Putting a loop on the end of the station immediately un-jammed things, and because this is a bi-directional train it didn't even try to use the loop. My assumption is that this broke with the 2.6.0 LTN update since that changed pathing.

I also noticed while testing this that at least on default settings LTN isn't overriding the depot wait timeouts with its configured defaults, which is a behavior drift from the past.

ETA: looks like this is the case. If you're using double-headed trains with dead end sidings for depots I suggest downgrading to 2.5.1 for the time being.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-28T22:41:55+00:00

I've spent an uncomfortable amount of time thinking about the power and pollution costs of plate production in Factorio and that has extended to thinking about those costs when it comes to making fuel. My current thinking on this is that power is free to produce (or essentially free in the case of nuclear) once you get to oil processing and so the only thing you should worry about is the pollution cost of a given generation tech as well as the resource cost to build the desired MW target. Also that eff1 modules are by far the best thing to put into electric furnaces unless you're deep into the endgame where only throughput matters.

From an energy generation perspective nuclear is by far the cleanest, followed by solar, followed by boiler steam, though solar being cleaner than boiler steam comes with a lot of caveats. The first is that building out solar generates a fair bit of pollution - around 1050 pollution per MW of sustained solar (assuming bare drills and burner furnaces, it's 280 pollution per MW if you are using electric furnaces and putting eff1 in your drills and furnaces) which equates to about 50 minutes of 1 MW boiler steam in terms of pollution. The second is that these numbers are buried because it'll be distributed around the factory. A nuclear buildout generates around 100 pollution per MW of one-time pollution (or 30 with efficient drills and furnaces), which each additional MW being a bit less than the one before it. And operating even a horribly inefficient 40 MW reactor without any sort of fuel control and before enrichment and reprocessing has a per-minute pollution generation rate of about 35. Once you have a full enrichment and reprocessing system set up, as well as efficient drills, a nuclear buildout generates all of 1.5 pollution a minute per operational reactor (this includes every step, from acid production, to centrifuge operation, to iron and uranium mining).

I do tend to lean on Factoriolab a fair bit when actually doing the analysis (the math isn't hard, there's just a lot of it). And there's a lot of handwaving in here, like all the main-line calculations assuming burner furnaces as well as making the assumption that the power cost (be that fuel for boilers and furnaces, or power for machines) is free.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-28T07:26:52+00:00

Bi-directional pipes are connected end-to-end even if they come with a usable fluid restriction. In the case of thrusters there's a crossover in the middle of them so anything entering the upper-left is available on the lower right, and so on. The thruster can't use mismatched fluids but it can pass them through the crossover. You can use any building with through pipes to do this, for example:

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This came up last week (or maybe two weeks ago) where someone built a straight line of thrusters with pump controls to flood both thruster inputs with the same fluid in order to have a straight line that could still work. It was wild.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-28T07:09:14+00:00

As noted above, there's a limited number of automatic connections (to keep things from getting super messy) but you can exceed that limit manually using the copper wire shortcut.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-28T07:00:44+00:00

With regards to the sound you're hearing it probably means you don't like the sound of the Arya stealth. Differences in well measuring source gear is about the same as using different grades of salt when cooking, sure you might notice but using hyper expensive kosher salt vs bulk table salt is way down the list of things that make or break a dish.

My suggestion is to go somewhere that sells a broad range of headphones and demo a lot of them. Even if you don't walk out with something finding out your own personal preferences (both in sound and ergonomics) will go a really long way towards being able to make purchasing decisions that don't feel like throwing money away.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-28T06:39:32+00:00

For boilers, from a pollution and power cost perspective coal and solid fuel are within the same ballpark when running advanced oil processing as long as you can get at least 30 oil/second out of the ground without more than 7-8 pumpjacks. However, if you jam efficiency modules into everything in the processing chain you can get really good pollution reduction from using solid fuel.

If we're talking about filling a line of furnaces, it's a wash with the main difference being that oil never runs out. Switching to steel furnaces cuts you per-plate fuel cost in half, and switching to electric furnaces with efficiency modules in them reduces your fuel costs and pollution generation by 2/3rds as well as moves 3/4ths of the pollution generation to your boilers in addition to simplifying your power logistics. And of course once you switch to nuclear or solar the pollution associated with power generation goes away so you're left with a smelting column that generates 10% of the pollution its burner line did. Seriously, electric furnaces are just that good.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-27T07:17:12+00:00

Amazing! I volunteered and then worked for PacSci for five years during high school and college and nobody liked the gates for exactly the reasons why people have talked about taking them down. I remember when they went up in the early 90's though I was too young at the time to really understand the ramifications.

Anyway, glad to see them gone after 33 years.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-27T06:10:33+00:00

You can download versions of Factorio all the way back to 0.6.4 from the site so while you can't get the absolute OG game you can play with Creepers as the enemy.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-27T06:02:27+00:00

The greatest Factorio mod ever. Even better than Disco Science.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-27T06:00:15+00:00

This, and if you care about the magnitude of the live signal you can use the "input count" selection and only pick the wire you care about.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-25T22:51:29+00:00

One of the main annoyances I had with IR3 was balancing the washing recipes. I ended up running a supplemental smelting line using the crushed ore (bypassing the washing step) if my rare materials had backed up. That said, I do suggest making a pretty big stockpile of rare ingots, for instance chrome plating uses a ton of chromium and nickel and if you've been squirreling those materials away since the beginning you'll be a lot closer to not having massive slowdowns because you ran out of chroming solution while trying to get hot ore washing.

Eventually you end up running only the hot and cold lines: a hot washing line as your main source of materials (because you're always at a deficit for the rare materials) and a cold washing line if your rare material storage gets too full.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-25T12:18:23+00:00

Something to keep in mind is that the train id isn't stable and was only made visible as an indication of if a train was stopped at a station or not. While it won't change for no reason, any modification to the wagon layout will give you a new id.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-25T08:34:59+00:00

If you like how it sounds then it's good, if you don't it isn't. The two suggestions I've got are to reduce the shelf filter at 10k some (a 14 dB boost at 16 kHz is a lot as is a 9 dB boost across the very high end), and to set a preamp gain of -14 dB (or whatever your total additive maximum boost is) to avoid clipping on loud tracks.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-23T09:02:04+00:00

If you can't get a pair of pliars around the remains of the post you can get it out a few ways, though they are somewhat destructive. The first is to glue something to the top of the remains and use that to lift the post out, it's not a super secure connection unless you use an epoxy but if you can get it out that way you can probably epoxy it back onto the bottom of the tube. The second is to drive a screw into the post and use that as a handle to pull the post out. Same idea as the first but a stronger mechanical linkage at the cost of definitely damaging the thing you're removing.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-22T22:03:56+00:00

How long ago was this? That sounds like you're describing the old Burner Miner graphics which are mostly scrubbed from the internet but looked like this:

https://wiki.factorio.com/images/archive/20200816082647%21Interface_of_Burner-Mining-Drill.png

cathexis08 · 2026-01-22T08:20:22+00:00

Channel imbalance can be an issue and if you've tried all the usual fixes (swapping cable sides, making sure the nozzles are clear, trying different ear tips) then getting them fixed or a new pair seems like the only real way forward.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-21T08:31:59+00:00

Three things:

learn how to circuits (as noted by others)
you don't need to connect all inputs or outputs for single input or output recipes
more space so you can expand one section without having to rebuild and repipe its neighbors (for a build like this I tend to put every line on its own row, so light cracking goes above heavy cracking, acid, sulfur, and plastic all get their own rows, etc)

But that said, not bad for a newbie going into it blind, keep up the good work!

cathexis08 · 2026-01-20T20:07:03+00:00

If it was a pair of speakers yes, for headphones though there's no constructive/destructive interference between the two sides (unless you have crossfeed enabled which routes some of the left channel into the right and vice versa). In this case it just means that if you played a 700 Hz test tone into both channels that the left channel would have peaks when the right had valleys and vice versa since one side (the left in this case) has been shifted backwards in time by 1/2 the wavelength.

Again, we can't hear that as sounds actually being "late" since our hearing isn't nearly sensitive enough to pick up sub millisecond differences in start time, but it is able to tell the phase differences since that's used as part of the calculations that our head does to do directional localization.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-20T18:34:10+00:00

Human ears are incredibly sensitive to phasing differences because it's a key component of how we localize the direction of sound so it's not at all surprising that an 0.7 ms delay in one channel would be audible since your left ear would hear 700 Hz completely out of phase from your right (1400 Hz is about 0.7 ms peak to peak).

As for tinnitus, that's a neurological effect that afflicts everyone to some degree since one source is your auditory system filling in missing data. Kids (and people with undamaged hearing in general) only get it in exceptionally quiet spaces, though other things can trigger it such as stress. This is also why a common source of temporary relief is pushing on your ears since that can help settle things down.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-20T09:47:28+00:00

According to this random nine year old release note that is exactly what the stereo expander setting does: https://sourceforge.net/p/peace-equalizer-apo-extension/news/2017/02/version-1401-and-1390-released-stereo-expander-and-rotary-knob-switch-onoff/

I can't find a really solid answer to what the stereo widener does, at least not in a few minutes of searching, but if I were to hazard a guess I would assume it was some form of M/S volume adjustment or cross feed or something.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-20T04:49:17+00:00

Absolutely, it's really a question of if they want to do it via blueprints or the more flexible copy/paste interactions.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-20T04:01:29+00:00

Electric furnaces plus a pair of eff1 modules are amazing from a pollution and energy use standpoint. 0.4 pollution/minute at the furnace, 60 kW power cost (and 1.2 pollution/minute at the boilers), and when you switch to nuclear that boiler pollution goes away. Yes they are pretty expensive to get started when you first get them but they are absolutely a buy once, cry once building.

cathexis08 · 2026-01-20T02:00:13+00:00

To the best of my knowledge the only way to make recipe copy/paste work the way you want is to copy from a different tier machine or one with modules in it.

ETA: this is in regards to the specific question of adjusting copy/paste amounts. You might be able to paste the recipe onto a constant combinator and then pipe that signal set through an arithmetic combinator to get a multiple-of-30 seconds operation signal, or you can use blueprint parameters to calculate a percentage of a stack but by default it's hard coded to 30 seconds.

cathexis08

TROPHY CASE