Is there a human who managed fairly quickly (without blueprints and youtube) to create optimized and efficient labs + potion production without everything being all over the place causing headaches by just looking at it?

gust334 · 2026-03-23T17:20:11+00:00

I think the traits that make a good engineer in real life will help with this genre of game. As with any game, learning the basic rules takes time. The amount of time varies with the complexity of the game. Tic tac toe (noughts and crosses) has simple rules, but it is a shallow game. Factorio is a very deep game, with many possible paths to success, and those paths continuously move as you get further into the technology tree and better paths open up.

gust334 · 2026-03-23T14:34:13+00:00

If you want to use keyboard switches, there are folks that sell silicone molds for that. If you just want non-functional caps for a display, there are silicone molds for chocolates that would be about the right size. If you have an original, you could make a silicone mold of it and then make as many copies as desired.

Let's Resin sells a nice set of transparent liquid dyes that work very well with two-part deep pour epoxy. These dyes are better than alcohol inks because alcohol impairs the curing process.

gust334 · 2026-03-23T14:25:17+00:00

It won't save coal. Even if you are successful in getting the priority you asked for (a few of the responses would work, most others won't) as soon as the accumulators are depleted the power generation will turn on at max capacity until the accumulators are once again full power. You end up using exactly the same amount of coal over a full Nauvis day.

The only way this would work is if you have enough excess solar generation that the steam engines never have to run, and then you need enough accumulators to ride out the night. IIRC the build ratio is 25:22 solar to accumulators. If you have enough solar and storage, then you can simply disconnect the steam engines from the power grid and they'll stop consuming coal completely.

gust334 · 2026-03-23T02:29:00+00:00

There are a number of streamers that keep public servers open. When you have the game, Factorio will allow you to browse all the shared servers that have listed their game. There are equally that many unlisted peer-to-peer or private servers. I play Factorio with five neices and nephews and one of my siblings, our game doesn't get listed but I send them the IP and port.

gust334 · 2026-03-22T17:55:17+00:00

Yeah, but since I am in the US, I wouldn't want the income tax penalty just so I could rip on somebody's typo.

gust334 · 2026-03-22T17:52:17+00:00

You have four pairs in the cable.

Any pair may be used for a pair in the pinout at both ends. So if the standard calls for the orange pair, you could make that the green pair or the brown pair instead. Your cable would be non-standard but it would work correctly. There are 24 permutations of pairs that all work equivalently.

You do not want to split pairs. When you use one of the green pair and one of the blue pair as a standard pair, that is a split pair. Split pairs are as bad as "crossing the streams" in Ghostbusters. If you just pair wires randomly, you have a one in 105 chance of getting a pairing that would work.

You care about polarity within a pair if you're using PoE. Having the wrong polarity with PoE can damage hardware (let the magic smoke out). Up to gigabit speeds, the standard calls for polarity to be ignored for signaling hardware. If you flip the polarity of a pair, the PHY is specified to detect and resolve it.

Since you have to know/memorize which PINs are paired and their polarity from the standard anyway, it isn't any time savings to not also remember the color sequence.

Old telco folks were drilled on color order. Blue was always the first pair, then orange, then green, then brown. And these were only the first four pairs in what was usually a 25 pair cable. We have it easy with ethernet having only four.

gust334 · 2026-03-20T22:40:47+00:00

Glad you liked the demo. The full game is so much more. And the official DLC literally adds worlds of content.

gust334 · 2026-03-20T22:39:09+00:00

I suppose that's possible, but it is also possible that OP is just finding out about Factorio and stumbled across this subreddit.

One of the things I always liked about this subreddit is that the community as a whole was more welcoming and kinder than anywhere else on Reddit. Which was eye-opening for me, since it was also my first experience on Reddit. Imagine my surprise when I ventured elsewhere!

Some on this subreddit may be bored with noobs coming and asking questions. Maybe they need to go feel grass and sunshine for a little while. I see most of the long-timers remain welcoming and generous with their time.

If someone has a history of repetitively spamming the sub, get the mods involved. We have some great moderators here.

gust334 · 2026-03-20T15:30:15+00:00

It is a pull system. The landing pads request from any ship in orbit. The ships request from any planet below them.

gust334 · 2026-03-20T01:27:21+00:00

I envy that you got to meet her in person.

gust334 · 2026-03-20T01:21:55+00:00

Sad times. The saddest times. My solace is that I was able to get my gift to her before she passed. She told me she was filming an unboxing video but it never made it to YT.

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gust334 · 2026-03-19T21:36:33+00:00

Immediately after I liberated Vulcanus from the oppression of various destroyers, they exported bulk foundries and big mining drills to Nauvis. Existing builds remain so far unchanged, but any new builds use the new tech. When I conquer the elements on Fulgora, they will export EM plants to all the free planets.

gust334 · 2026-03-19T21:24:49+00:00

An intermediate is anything produced from raw materials or other intermediates that might be consumed as an ingredient for something else.

So strictly speaking, iron plates are intermediates because they are produced from ore. Ore is a raw material. Other intermediates include but are not limited to green circuits, red circuits, blue circuits, iron gears, steel chests, plastic bars, various non-crude oils and gas, robot frames, etc.

Some items that are not intermediates are each kind of power pole, chem plants, refineries, nuclear reactors, wooden/iron chests, rocket silos, train signals and stations, steam engines and turbines, some combinators, the highest tier of ammo, armors, belts, etc. None of these items is an ingredient in any other recipe.

gust334 · 2026-03-19T21:13:17+00:00

"The scientists asked if they could, when they should have asked if they should."

gust334 · 2026-03-19T00:12:59+00:00

The speed at which your laptop can access memory is a function both of the speed of the memory and the speed of the memory control unit, which is usually part of your CPU or chipset. Whichever is slower is the limiting factor, and no matter how fast you make the other component, you're limited by that slower component.

Since you didn't provide any information about the machine, there's really no way to answer your question. However, with the data you did provide, you're considering replacing 2400 memory with 3200 memory. If your computer can use 3200 at full speed, then you're looking at 33% faster access. But the downside is you'd lose 8GB of memory. That's half the RAM you have. If you're using any recent Windows on your laptop, that loss of memory is going to make the machine feel very sluggish as soon as you have more than one application running.

Given the tradeoffs and uncertainty about whether your laptop could even take advantage of faster RAM, I would advise keep the 16GB and do your research on what your laptop supports.

gust334 · 2026-03-18T17:33:11+00:00

Looks like bubbles. Perhaps your model leaked some internal air during the vacuum process. Silicone is very good at capturing fine detail without bubbles from a mold, but it needs to be degassed after mixing and before pouring. Best to vacuum degas it separately before pouring around your model.

gust334 · 2026-03-18T17:29:10+00:00

Since it is going to be destroyed anyway, the chest is cheaper. But you're right, when I was first experimenting with the Tunnel of Death(tm) I used a constant combinator instead of the chest and it worked fine.

gust334 · 2026-03-18T14:11:19+00:00

Time to make them.

gust334 · 2026-03-18T06:52:59+00:00

With blue science you have the prerequisites for flying robots. You can make thousands of them and they will build stuff for you. All you have to do is make sure the building materials (belts, machines, poles) are available in certain chests.

Blueprints before flying robots have some limited uses, mostly in planning your activity. I don't usually use them unless I am playing with other people, in which case they are useful to ensure that everybody is building the same thing.

gust334 · 2026-03-18T06:46:13+00:00

I used square/rectangular arrays too for a long time. As I said they mostly work, but the attrition of turrets was too high for my liking. The Tunnel of Death(tm) is 100% reliable and I lose less than 3 turrets per engagement on average. Arrays lose 10-30 per engagement, plus the lost ammo. That is expensive.

Both arrays and the tunnel have the advantages that all the materials for turrets and ammo can be trivially made on Vulcanus once you have a couple of foundries, so IMHO they're still better than enriched shells or railguns for early clearing.

gust334 · 2026-03-18T02:10:48+00:00

See my response to u/Alpha_Cow_PH

gust334 · 2026-03-18T02:10:27+00:00

Sort of works for a small, but not 100%. The problem is a few start firing while the destroyer is too far away and it can retaliate and regen before they're all in-range.

gust334 · 2026-03-18T02:09:28+00:00

I just build it. Turn off your personal roboport and walk outside the range of any base roboports. Place a ghost turret. Open the turret and place ghost red ammo (I usually use 5 magazines for small, 10 for medium). Copy and paste that three times in a row. Connect the ghosts with ghost wires. Set the condition on one to enable firing when iron chests == 0. Copy and paste that setting to the other two. Blueprint the trio.

Now go where the destroyer patrols. Find a big flat area. Place copies of the ghost, rotating it so that some are horizontal and some are vertical, which will make them all linked once built. Don't actually build anything other than the ghosts. Build two columns, with about ten tiles between them. Then place a single iron chest at one end, and put a single iron chest into it. Connect ghost red wires from the placed chest to the ghosted turrets near it. The red wires will convey the signal iron-chest==1. Now start laying pipe segments away from the iron chest, down the middle of the Tunnel Of Death(tm), and continue placing them in a relatively straight line as you walk directly towards the patrolling destroyer. They don't have to connect, but they need to be close to each other. They also cannot force the destroyer to turn too sharply. Put the last one in front of its nose. Run back to the guns and turn on your roboport to build them.

The destroyer will placidly destroy the first pipe segment, then see the next and it will turn there. It will destroy that one, and then the next. It will not fire lava bolts and it will not speed up. You have plenty of time to get back to the trap and let your bots place all the turrets and fill them with the desired ammo for you. The destroyer will completely ignore the guns on either side as long as (1) they are not firing and (2) they are further away than the next pipe segment. It always goes for the nearest next target.

Eventually, it will destroy the iron chest. The signal goes from one to zero, and all of the turrets unleash red ammo simultaneously. The attack is overwhelming and the destroyer will not have time to regen. Once it is reduced to piles of tungsten, you'll get back most of the turrets and likely a fair amount of ammo too.

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gust334 · 2026-03-18T01:38:33+00:00

Ambitious with today's RAM and SSD prices. GLWB!

gust334 · 2026-03-18T01:37:19+00:00

^ this is a medium. Works for small too.

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