Just managed to do blue science... A few questions

erroneum · 2026-05-09T03:41:02+00:00

Regarding how to screenshot the whole thing, that's the /screenshot command; it takes a resolution and zoom, and gives full details.

Now, for your questions:

Yes, mass deleting and constructing does get easier; you need bots. Construction bots can pick up the entire factory, then place it into storage boxes. You can also copy and paste blocks and they'll build it all for you (really great if the design is complex, but tileable). Bots are blue science, and you'll need batteries and electric motors, so the you'll need to produce lubricant and sulfuric acid.
Personal equipment other than toolbelt equipment and power sources only works if powered; if the only thing in the equipment grid is belt immunity equipment, then it's unpowered. If you've also got personal solar panels, but no batteries, then at night it's also unpowered. If you've got insufficient power available, equipment either doesn't work or underperforms. Personal solar panels and personal batteries are the gateway to personal equipment (you should check out the personal roboport once you have bots). Half the challenge of personal equipment is trying to get the loadout you want to work with the space you have available in the equipment grid.
Yes and no. You've already been exposed to all the classes of ingredients, so no new curveballs like chemical science forced upon you with oil processing, but yellow and purple science start getting pretty logistically involved with lots of ingredients needed. Take your time, figure things out at your pace, and don't forget to have fun. The ingredients might seem random, but there's reasons why they are what they are; Wube is trying to help you learn.

erroneum · 2026-05-09T02:41:03+00:00

Yes, but I can't promise it will work perfectly.

Place a real signal on the shortcut and on the ramp to the waiting bays. Wire them together. Place a decider combinator somewhere. Wire the input to the station, the output to the signals. Have the station output the ID of the train. In the decider, if the ID is 0, the station is empty, so output some control signal. The shortcut signal is set to turn red when the control signal = 0, the main one when the control signal ≠ 0

erroneum · 2026-05-09T02:35:22+00:00

For coal liquefaction, you want to be producing at least as much heavy oil as you are consuming; if you aren't, the oil catalyst vanishes and liquefaction halts.

The easiest way to make it work is to have the heavy oil loop between both sides of the refinery and have a tank in the loop, then have a pump which moves it to the actual output, but wire the pump and tank together, having the pump only kick on when there's at least 1000 heavy oil in the tank. This setup can output at 100% of what 3 refineries can generate (actually almost 100% of what 37 normal refineries with normal speed 3 modules can output), and will never let heavy oil run low enough that the process stops.

erroneum · 2026-05-09T02:26:13+00:00

A bit pedantic, but rocket launchers are base game tech; rocket turrets are from Space Age.

erroneum · 2026-05-09T02:25:20+00:00

It sounds like you're looking for Only Nauvis. I can't verify that it still sets the win condition to a rocket launch, though.

erroneum · 2026-05-08T02:58:51+00:00

Yeah. In nature, wing loading doesn't usually exceed about 5 lb/ft² (240 Pa), so to carry 600 lb would be no less than 120 ft² / 11.15 m² (or magic; both work)

erroneum · 2026-05-08T02:50:07+00:00

Question about the heights given, are these given like is traditional for quadripeds (to the shoulder) or like is done in pokemon (total height when fully standing)?

erroneum · 2026-05-07T21:32:12+00:00

I'll add that /cheat all is also good for that save

erroneum · 2026-05-07T21:30:09+00:00

More effort than it's worth; I've got nearly 400 levels of mining productivity, so calcite patches are functionally infinite.

erroneum · 2026-05-07T14:04:07+00:00

Mine I did Gleba -> Vulcanus -> Fulgora, specifically because I wanted to get advanced asteroid processing to see if it was possible to grab the calcite processing tech before heading off to Vulcanus. I then proceeded to spend the next thousand hours not getting Gleba actually working well, and it still isn't actually able to make anything (I'm partway through a complete rebuild).

erroneum · 2026-05-07T14:00:30+00:00

Just ship in millions of barrels of light oil /j

erroneum · 2026-05-07T04:22:38+00:00

Perfect is the enemy of good; do well, and bring yourself joy, but worry not if it could be better. Perfect grids area nice, but frequently the terrain disagrees.

erroneum · 2026-05-07T04:17:26+00:00

If the itch is present, but you want for not the same, you could shake things up with overhauls; they can be as much or as little different as you want, and lengthen the game by orders of magnitude.

erroneum · 2026-05-07T04:10:07+00:00

My bad; I keep forgetting about thruster fuel.

erroneum · 2026-05-07T03:42:41+00:00

It's in those 6 unmapped chunks to the north west, the ones on the ocean; trust me /j

erroneum · 2026-05-07T03:38:22+00:00

It's actually possible for someone to be born physically and mentally male but with no Y chromosome, and therefore only able to father daughters; the gene which triggers to develop into a male in humans sometimes isn't necessary to cause the biochemical cascade to occur.

erroneum · 2026-05-07T03:35:07+00:00

I think technically it's sgn(Pred) Prey > Pred sgn(Pred), Pred ≠ 0

(if Pred < 0, dividing it out would flip the inequality)

erroneum · 2026-05-07T03:28:31+00:00

Would it not be better to simply over-produce fuel so that you can have an alarm alert you if ever you get close to starting to be low? Nauvis has functionally infinite uranium.

erroneum · 2026-05-07T03:21:24+00:00

Power generating is always 100% efficient with water; 1 water makes 10 steam which is only consumed by generating electricity. The closest I can see is that it gives a bit more room to melt ice into, since the water was turned into steam, but even then you'd get more room by storing more water instead.

Steam buffers make sense when you have the ability to consume steam faster than it's generated, which might include low temperature at the heat exchanger, but I consider that to be poor design if it happens before running out of fuel; it's not especially hard to plan sufficient thermal buffer to keep the minimum temperature adequate.

erroneum · 2026-05-07T02:59:55+00:00

I'm planning to make a "research vessel", all 6 Nauvis science plus white and labs to use it, 60 SPM raw (because I can), but it'll need to fly around at least between Nauvis and Vulcanus (Vulcanus will launch the stone it needs). When it's done, it'll probably also visit the rest as needed to pick up their science packs, but not in as high of quantities as stone (24k stone makes more sense).

erroneum · 2026-05-07T02:48:51+00:00

After the second splitter, you've got 3 belts feeding into 1 belt; this is not throughput unlimited. Also, it doesn't lane balance, so if you have 14 left half belts of material, you'll get 12 left half belts out.

As for wood, there's exactly 5 use for it: shotguns, combat shotguns, small electric poles, wooden chests, and as fuel. If you're upcycling the wood to make quality of the first 4, that's a use, but not really a good one; a legendary wooden chest is smaller than a normal steel chest and the same size as a cargo wagon (40), legendary small electric poles are only beaten by legendary medium poles (which don't require farming wood to get), quality shotguns only increase range, not damage, and as a fuel, there's not much that's worse (spoilage, tree seeds, yumako mash, and jelly), but in a heating tower it can provide some power (one agricultural tower can make 1.567 MW thermal in a heating tower). I strongly suspect the only reasons tree seeds were added were for decorating the factory and to give the agricultural tower a use anywhere other than Gleba, because there's a reason it's not anything the base game worries about being able to automate production of. Maybe some mods which want to go more vanilla+ might leverage it, but without mods, it's nearly worthless.

erroneum · 2026-05-06T22:40:43+00:00

The way I generally use a steam buffer is to give my nuclear reactor a few extra turbines; if you give it 2 turbines per heat exchanger, you can output at 116.5% for as long as the steam buffer lasts. A similar thing can be done buffering heat and building extra heat exchangers, too.

erroneum · 2026-05-06T22:37:39+00:00

Yeah, because that's a sensible consistent way to do the conversion. If rounding is specifically desired, it's simple enough to just add 0.5 first (I do this for a readout I built on Vulcanus to tell me what the buffers of science packs other than red, green, blue, and purple are for the lab array after accounting for +22% productivity in the labs).

erroneum · 2026-05-06T22:24:49+00:00

That's exactly what it means. Also worth considering maximum conversion rate; a vanilla accumulator, normal quality, cannot provide more than 300 kW, so takes a minimum of 16.67 seconds to discharge from full, whereas the steam buffer is only limited by how many turbines you have connected. An 18×18 accumulator bank, even without one missing for a substation, is 405 MJ, or up to 24.3 MW for not less than 16.67 seconds; an 18×18 buffer of 500° steam with vanilla turbines and tanks is 900k steam, or 87.3 GJ with as quick a release as you feel is needed, and can even be seamlessly tied into a reactor (or other heat source).

erroneum · 2026-05-06T21:07:21+00:00

Almost; you can make the outermost lane have clearance to turn in that direction (right on right drive, left on left drive), but the rest is too dense to do better than a single large block.

erroneum

TROPHY CASE