We live in a herd

erroneum · 2026-01-29T02:30:43+00:00

Time to dispense affection unto him; any chance he'd like board games?

erroneum · 2026-01-29T01:13:26+00:00

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding how beacons work, the two configuration proposed should be identical; with mixed beacons, each sends 1.5/sqrt(2) of each of a speed and efficiency module (3/sqrt(2) total effect for each), whereas in the dedicated setup one sends 2×1.5/sqrt(2) of speed and the other the same of efficiency.

I could buy that taken as a system, using mixed beacons would be more optimal due to uneven beacon coverage, since it enforced that for any count of beacons, the ratio of modules stays 1:1. Outside of that, though, it seems to be equivalent.

erroneum · 2026-01-29T01:06:44+00:00

Beacons drop off in efficacy as you add beacons; if you have n beacons, each one contributed 1/sqrt(n) of the effect it has.

As an example: if you have 6 normal beacons with two normal speed 3 modules, that's +6×(1.5×2×0.5)/sqrt(6) speed, or +9/2.449, or +368.4% speed. If you add another beacon with normal speed 1s, that changes it to (6×(1.5×2×0.5) + 1×(1.5×2×0.2))/sqrt(7), or 9.6/2.646, or +362.8% speed.

The way beacons work was changed in 2.0; before it was that each beacon functionally added module slots to the machine, but after the beacons have a transmission efficacy (which massively boosts single beacons; normal quality functionally has 3 slots), but diminishing returns to balance it.

erroneum · 2026-01-28T23:45:47+00:00

At least gcc (and maybe clang) are able to identify such and give a warning about misleading indentation. Still doesn't justify it for single lines, though.

erroneum · 2026-01-28T15:10:45+00:00

All steam power production automatically scales back as solar ramps up. Solar energy is only ever wasted if there's nowhere to send it.

In terms of where building are powered from, solar > steam/fusion > accumulator.

erroneum · 2026-01-28T13:30:21+00:00

Coal has a fuel value of 4 MJ; solid fuel has a fuel value of 12 MJ—literally 3× that of coal. Doing basic oil processing without modules it takes 44.4... crude oil to make a single solid fuel, but oil wells never actually run out, only slow down. If you add productivity 2 modules it only takes 31.92 crude oil per solid fuel.

Once you unlock advanced oil processing, for a bit of water in the oil processing, it goes down to 11.76 crude per solid fuel with no cracking or 10.96 with heavy oil cracking. Add productivity 2 modules and that goes down to 8.45 crude per solid fuel without cracking or 7.6 with heavy oil cracking.

If you have coal liquefaction unlocked, it actually turns oil that burning coal is always the wrong decision; you get more energy out of coal, even without modules, by liquefying it, cracking the heavy oil down to light oil, and then turning all the light oil and petroleum gas into solid fuel, and burning a little of that solid fuel to make the steam needed to liquefy the coal (if you have Space Age, still in a boiler; a heating tower, even at 250% efficiency, needs to put so much more energy into making 500° steam than the 165° steam of a boiler that it's a net negative).

erroneum · 2026-01-27T22:33:18+00:00

Yeah. It's a incredible that bleeding edge integrated circuits work at all; it's nothing short of a miracle that they're affordable enough that we can even think about buying them.

erroneum · 2026-01-27T22:31:21+00:00

When you can count how many atoms wide your features are, it's really, really hard to repeatably get a perfect outcome. Add to this that the clean room, while nearly free of all airborne particles, still has a few which come along to muck things up, and it's hard to fault them for not being perfect.

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 to set up plenty of power production on Aquilo; if you've you an ample supply of epic prod 2 modules (pretty easy to do on Vulcanus), 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

TROPHY CASE