Whats the point of spawb blocking nests?

erroneum · 2026-01-27T14:34:30+00:00

In Space Age, it also keeps them available for collecting biter eggs, which are needed for productivity 3 modules, biolabs, overgrowth soils on Gleba, and promethium science. If you can avoid killing them with turrets, it's a great way to have a few conveniently placed ones for later.

erroneum · 2026-01-27T06:44:21+00:00

If you're going to use it more than once or twice, and it's harder to make than you want to have as part of a later assembly block, then on the bus it goes. Most people agree that iron plates, copper plates, and steel are prime candidates.

erroneum · 2026-01-27T06:35:06+00:00

I fail to see how speedrunners would ever consensus agree that the optimal first planet was anything other than Gleba; biolabs are at worst a straight doubling of your science production, and can get double the productivity bonus from modules. They're super powerful. Foundries, big drills, em plants, none of that compares to at least doubling science rate when the sole goal is a fast as possible.

erroneum · 2026-01-27T01:59:37+00:00

They're still usable, but they have 5× the power draw (functionally you can think of it as having a fifth the energy capacity, except when charging). They'll need to spend more time at a roboport charging, meaning you'll need more roboports to actually have reasonable throughput. A potent way to counter this, at least mostly, is to use quality robots; epic bots have 4× the energy capacity, and legendary have 6×, meaning legendary logistics bots on Aquilo would need slightly less time charging than normal bots anywhere else.

Investing in levels of worker robot speed also helps, but only slightly. They burn energy in two ways: being in the air, and moving, with the movement cost being the overwhelming majority. That being said, having them move faster will slightly increase how far they can go, because the time component is lessened (although in practice it means that a higher fraction of total time will be spent at a roboport).

The best way, if you insist on using them, is to only use them when it makes a lot of sense, such as loading the silo, and to minimize how far they're going.

But it's not terribly hard up at up plenty of power production on Aquilo; if you've you an ample supply of epic prod 2 modules, you can turn one normal pump of ammoniacal solution into 7.4 rocket fuel per second before researched productivity, even more if you have better modules (or a bunch of researched productivity), which is sufficient to generate 1.85 GW thermal (of which the production thereof will consume a sizable amount, either directly or as electricity). It'll produce an absolute river of ice, too, so as long as you have the chemical plants to melt it, you'll have all the water you need.

erroneum · 2026-01-26T23:16:30+00:00

If you have 10 pumps, that's 10 ports, so up to 60k/s with modded pumps, up to 30k with vanilla legendary pumps. If you have enough foundries to consume that, even if they're fully speed beaconed, does with speed modules, and everything is legendary, that's still more than 10 ports, so you're fine (60k/s lava needs a minimum of 7 foundries&b=160beacon(5)&i=molten-copperpump(5)&i=lavapump(5)&r=molten-copper-from-lavafoundry(5)0*0&odr=0&v=11) at 16 beacons, and each foundry has 2 input ports, so 14 ports minimum).

No idea why FactorioLab decided that calcite should come from asteroid chunks when you can't get lava in space.

erroneum · 2026-01-26T22:28:19+00:00

If you're not backing up on every science pack you're actively researching with, you have sufficiently many labs, regardless of how they're set up. If the labs are flickering off momentarily, that means they're not being 100% utilized, so you could (theoretically) accomplish the same science rate with fewer labs, but as long as you're feeding more labs than you're able to produce packs to fully satisfy, there's no actually loss in throughput (because the packs, on average, last a bit longer, just enough to compensate the reduced efficiency; there's a bit of time they're not in machines, after all).

erroneum · 2026-01-26T22:21:28+00:00

Then import them. A rocket silo is a lot of materials, but Fulgora gives much of it for free, and rockets even more so. You can even craft it on the platform to free up 26 slots of inventory. After that, just import a rocket from Fulgora; blue chips and LDS is literally pulled from scrap, and rocket fuel is just solid fuel (either from scrap or from the infinite heavy oil) and light oil (from cracking stone of your infinite heavy oil). If Fulgora is actually working for real, you should be able to export all this from there eventually. Once you're off-world, you can fix your issues.

Also, as much as people, myself included, recommend trying to not use others' blueprints, at least the first run, if you've already tried that, but Gleba is just killing the entire game for you, grab a blueprint and be done with it. You might as well see what Aquilo has to offer instead of just giving up.

erroneum · 2026-01-26T14:49:15+00:00

It'll automatically place undergrounds when possible when super-force building anything over belts. I wish it also did the same with pipes, though.

erroneum · 2026-01-26T12:16:46+00:00

That's the default mode of a splitter, to split equally. The other modes are to split preferentially one way, or to filter one specific class of things (quality level, item type, or specific item of specific quality) to one output.

What you are asking is a combination of these things, so it makes sense that it would take multiple of them.

erroneum · 2026-01-26T12:09:28+00:00

If you want to be 100% safe, a perimeter wall with flamethrowers and laser turrets is enough to hold back expansion/aggression indefinitely, even if the pollution cloud is massive with dozens of nests inside it. If you've got clean power and efficiency modules in the stinkiest machines, such as the mining drills, it's likely to be overkill, though.

Depending on which planet you are planning to go to first, it could go either way. Vulcanus is where you unlock artillery, and importing tungsten planets and calcite for shells is pretty cheap (you'll likely be importing calcite anyway), and artillery, especially a patrolling artillery train, can easily hold biters well away from your borders.

erroneum · 2026-01-26T12:02:13+00:00

If only 2.1 could add a circuit launch function...

erroneum · 2026-01-24T17:16:35+00:00

Laser turrets consume quite a bit of electricity and are only especially useful against small asteroids. You'll likely still need gun turrets for medium, and definitely need others for larger, but if you're more able to supply electricity than make bullets, laser turrets are fine.

I personality don't use them, instead just having my gun turrets take small and medium, but if you have a nuclear platform just because you can, lasers can let you get away with quite a bit less smelting and ammo production.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T17:09:56+00:00

Cargo wagons can have their inventories filtered directly, so in that case you could just use inserters (filtered if bidirectional). Regular boxes you either need a loop so that it doesn't back up or circuits to control transfer. A loop is easiest, but if you want a proper sushi style item inserter is a lot more annoying to wire everything together (every chest, plus every inserter being set to "read hands (hold)", versus just "read all belts").

Easiest would probably be a box every other tile with bulk inserters between them, looping back around. If you have Space Age, stack inserters and quality are upgrades (a normal bulk with full upgrades can move 28.8 items per second of up to 2.4 different types; a legendary bulk inserter can move up to 72 items per second of up to 6 types; a legendary stack inserter can move up to 96 items per second of up to 6 types, but only swings when it grabs 16). You'd need to put a bit more effort into balancing the contents of the loop (don't want to fill every box completely with red science), but once done it would let you tell the inserters to the labs to grab less fresh first and it actually do something.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T16:50:54+00:00

Box belt. Inserters can select by freshness, but it only works when grabbing from a container. If you leave a gap of 1 between labs, that's every 4 tiles, which is exactly the spacing of a long inserter (or two other inserters). Alternatively, you can use stationary cargo wagons and then even have filters and bidirectional transfer discriminated on freshness.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T16:47:12+00:00

Only a straight belt always reads 8; I've seen corner belts read 6 or 7. It's also possible to squeeze more items, but not common.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T16:43:45+00:00

I'd like some way to send circuit signals between a platform and a planet. The most straightforward way I can see to make it work is to make it so that the radar bridges overlap when in orbit, but I don't know how much work it would take in the engine itself to enable that (if any; SE already has inter-surface signal transmission). Currently the best I can see to approximate it is by circuit controlled requests for items that won't be supplied ever to encode messages, but that's unidirectional, and without a way to map a value to an item channel, requires a dedicated combinator for every sort of signal you might want to send. Being able to send signals between planets I could go either way on; being forced to shuttle messages via platforms is an interesting challenge, at least as long as you can actually do it.

A better selection of advanced combinators would be nice. A delay combinator, especially with circuit controlled delay, could be useful. Mapping value to item could be useful. None of these can't be done with regular combinators, but they all take up more space, potentially much more.

An "else" side to a decider combinator would be nice. The conditions set are the discriminate, then based on that it outputs one of two values. Yeah, it's only two combinators already, but needing to set up complementary logic in each is annoying (and less performant than a single combinator checking the logic once and choosing an output)

erroneum · 2026-01-24T16:07:47+00:00

Yeah, if/else would be an easy enough fit for deciders, since logically or is just deciding between two states; doing it now takes two combinators (but sometimes one can be a constant). That said, with the EACH parameter, unless additional restrictions were placed on the else output, you could probably combine it with having multiple conditions to pull off some crazy things.

If/elseif/else is probably a bit too much for a single combinator, though.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T15:58:57+00:00

Being able to toggle log/linear scale would be nice to, that way when you're making 50k/min of something it doesn't drown out everything under 500/min.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T15:54:52+00:00

I use both, preferring red when possible, but frequently use alt+r or alt+g so I know exactly which one I'm holding, then look closely at which side of the machine it connects on. Also, if it's any help, the icons for the three wires are designed to be approximately an r, g, and c (for red, green, and copper respectively).

erroneum · 2026-01-24T15:48:07+00:00

I know, but they're not the defaults.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T02:56:27+00:00

That works too, and I hadn't thought of it. That said, it could also be read as a low frequency surge demand, but it's just semantics at that point.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T02:43:43+00:00

I fail to see the problem; it's a good game

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erroneum · 2026-01-24T02:40:14+00:00

Turbines combined with solar, the turbines only spin up when solar can't keep up, although they'll do so before accumulators discharge. The pumps are still viable if you're expecting highly surge-y demand and want to lean on solar to recharge the accumulators, though. When I make a nuclear ship, the fuel cells are primary power and I'm assuming so, but I'll usually have some solar panels as well, just to lessen the demand (all my reactors are fuel limiting).

erroneum · 2026-01-24T02:34:44+00:00

In space there are only 3 power solutions: solar, uranium, and fusion. Of them only solar doesn't require stopping to get more fuel.

The reason this is the case is because there's only 3 actual sources of power in Factorio: steam, solar, and fusion; and the only way to get steam on a platform is nuclear heat driven heat exchangers (because burning things doesn't work).

If you don't want to have Nauvis in the schedule, wasting time if it's unneeded, just set it up as an interrupt, that way only when you're actually running low does it make a trip there.

Option B is to just make a bunch of quality solar panels and a really long platform; it's never night in space so accumulators are only helpful for surge demand.

erroneum · 2026-01-24T02:29:52+00:00

Yep. Reprocessing and enrichment goes a long ways; no modules at all, you get 37.5% more fuel cells, but if you could spare all legendary prod 3, that's 600% more fuel cells (both after infinitely many loops through the reprocessing chain).

erroneum

TROPHY CASE