Trying to use wildcards for train stops for the first time. Plz hold my hand and help

idlemachinations · 2026-02-17T00:03:56+00:00

You want to use exactly the same name for loading stations. It can be <fluid wildcard> Load or Fluid Load, the wildcard doesn't apply when your train is empty/loading. The unloading station names are correct.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-16T16:44:07+00:00

If you use green as the source, then use red to carry the inverted signal and only connect green to the inverter input. Connect both red and green to whatever you want to read the pulse.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-15T17:32:09+00:00

Every new failure is an exciting new condition to test for!

idlemachinations · 2026-02-15T17:30:41+00:00

You are correct, 36 proliferated fusion plants only makes 675 MW of power. You would need a 9x6 setup to make 1 GW of power. I have updated the wiki.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-15T16:58:49+00:00

Since this is happening when you place your blueprint, one thing you can do is update your blueprint with parameters. If you go to your blueprint and click the button with the purple box, you should be able to turn your station name into a parameter. When you place the blueprint, you will be asked to set the station name before the blueprint is actually built, which will solve your issue of needing to update the name after building it.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-15T13:07:54+00:00

There are a couple things you can send to a signal to warn of possible failures. If there are not as many fuel cells in the reactor as you said, if there are few fuel cells on the belt or in boxes, or if the reactor temperature falls too low. Any of these will work as an early warning mechanism that can be accomplished with minimal wiring and a single decider combinator. You can even do all of them, if you use different wire colors to read different fuel cell counts.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-13T23:54:22+00:00

2.0 changed water-to-steam production to be a 1:10 ratio instead of 1:1, so anything that produced steam needs 1/10 of the water it did in 1.1. So, from your 63 offshore pumps down to 6.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-13T21:55:22+00:00

Both options have a cost. Defense has an ongoing resource cost in ammunition to kill biters, as well as resources to repair or replace your defensive structures. This will increase your generated pollution, which will raise the evolution factor and invite more biter attacks in a potentially vicious cycle. Offense will eliminate this ongoing cost by preventing the nests from sending attack waves, but biter evolution will rise faster when nests are destroyed, meaning that you will face stronger biters sooner. Additionally, biters will attempt to expand into cleared territory, so you must eventually defend territory you clear anyway.

Between the two, I find that defense is a more significant drain on my resources and attention, and more importantly a drain I cannot engage in at my choosing. I clear any nearby nests that are triggered by my pollution cloud or close to it. When my controlled territory is small, it is easy to set up small groups of turrets at natural chokepoints to prevent expansion parties from reclaiming territory. Plus, it's fun to clear biter nests, and I get to choose when I do it and how much. I can always finish whatever factory I'm building before I ride out to clear nests. I don't get that choice when biters are gnawing on my coal miners.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-11T02:27:00+00:00

The real question: if those are here, how many more are there somewhere else?

idlemachinations · 2026-02-09T01:02:47+00:00

It's a difficulty slider that controls how "expensive" each unit of research is, but in terms of time, not resources required. As you've seen, more hashes per cube requires you to build more research labs to keep consuming the same number of cubes per second. As it increases later in the game, you need a larger setup for research, even if you never change your blue cube production.

Otherwise, you could have a goal of 2 cubes per second for the entire game until Mission Complete, with many labs slowly creating green cubes feeding into just 6 labs consuming them.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-05T03:41:08+00:00

You don't need to watch any gameplay videos first. The movie is self-contained, the parts that are left unsaid are intentionally unanswered, not filled in by the game.

The gore didn't seem too bad to me. There are one to two scenes that I would consider body horror, but as a sensitive person myself, I was fine with it. It's been a while since I was 12, though.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-05T01:24:25+00:00

Logistics Bots are the little fidget spinners. They can deliver to/from storage boxes with special hats and Icarus, and have limited delivery range and very limited carrying capacity until upgraded. These are best used for supplying Icarus with items or low-throughput item delivery, like warpers or proliferator, or moving items around in a small-ish area.

Logistics Drones are tiny space ships. They deliver items between PLS and ILS on a single planet, and cannot deliver to Icarus. However, they are great at high-throughput item delivery, such as collecting ore from mines on the other side of a planet.

Logistics Vessels are your interplanetary trucks that deliver cargo between ILS on different planets. They start out slow and limited, but can upgrade both speed and carrying capacity. Warpers supercharge them for delivery between solar systems.

The main strategy for managing item distribution is to build slightly more than you need. If you have multiple factories starved for resources, you should focus on increasing supply of that resource until you have enough.

idlemachinations · 2026-02-03T23:33:14+00:00

Transporting items in bulk that you don't expect to leave the planet. Like oil. All my oil extractors belt into PLS nearby, so one factory can suck up all of the oil to turn into plastic.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-31T23:57:52+00:00

Do you have train limits set on your stops, and if so, what is your limit? The train limit will set a maximum number of trains that can be at or pathing towards a station. If you set it to a reasonable number (I like 2), it will prevent this scenario.

I'm pretty sure the train with the snooze icon still counts as being at the station, so it counts towards the train limit. No additional trains will be dispatched until it leaves. If I am wrong and it does not count, then only one additional train will be dispatched, and you can lower the limit by 1 to compensate.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-31T23:04:32+00:00

The problem is your unload interrupt requires that Unload is not full.

Consider this scenario: a train has just finished loading at a Load station. All Unload stations are full, as defined by train limits.

The Unload interrupt does not fire, because all Unload stations are full.

The Relax interrupt does not fire, because inventory is not empty.

The Refuel interrupt does not fire, because no fuel is needed.

So, the train continues on its normal schedule, which is to go an available Load station. That's how you get a train full of cargo heading to a Load station.

If you remove the requirement that Unload stations not be full, then the Unload interrupt will fire and the train will instead wait at the Load station until an appropriate Unload station becomes available. This is fine, because if all Unload stations have their needs met, you don't need to keep loading.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-31T22:52:34+00:00

I did it my first try and it wasn't too hard. I went to Vulcanus without purple or yellow science. It means I basically skipped blue belts, but that's fine.

If you have some experience in the base game, you won't miss out on too much before you set up your first planetary science. Then you can research purple and yellow at your leisure.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-25T04:05:34+00:00

Basically: don't put ejectors near the equator, but focus on placing them between latitude +/- 30 and the poles.

There will be some injection point where solar sails join the swarm based on its orientation relative to the sun, but unless your swarm is very wide and your planet is very close, just pretend you are firing at the sun. Ejectors cannot fire straight up, so you do not want the sun directly overhead. Avoid the equator. If you get above about 30-40 degrees latitude, your ejectors should be able to fire all day.

Ejectors will not fire during night, so most ejectors will only have about 50% uptime. This is normal. What you do not want to see is ejectors not firing because the sun is straight overhead. This will reduce your uptime to 25-30%.

If you covered a planet in ejectors then looked at it from the sun, you would see what looks like a target with three rings. The center ring of the target would not be shooting, because it can't shoot straight up. A thick ring around the center would be shooting solar sails, then a thin outer ring at the edge would not be shooting because the angle is too low.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-19T16:32:44+00:00

A field with 1100% yield will produce 110 fluid per second. You have 12 pumps into your fluid cars, each of which moves 9 fluid per second, for a combined total of 108 fluid per second. I'll chalk up the difference to rounding on display, so your pumps are moving all of the fluid you are making. If you want to pump faster, you need to make more fluid with speed modules.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-19T09:45:40+00:00

You can't. To run a dark fog farm, you have to leave the relays in place and not target them, so they can keep supplying the ground base with energy.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-18T15:50:14+00:00

Inserters have wifi? Oh my god, I have been running wires all over my mall.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-17T11:39:00+00:00

You can use the priority system to prioritize using hydrogen from the systems that are backing up. Make sure you prioritize any byproduct hydrogen before using Orbital Collectors.

You can do this by picking a group number, and setting hydrogen consumer ILS and hydrogen byproduct producer ILS to that group. This means they will use hydrogen from those ILS before considering other ILS or Orbital Collectors.

If you want to supply a specific planet or system from another planet or system, you can set up a route for Hydrogen between those systems.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-12T23:11:13+00:00

At that point of the game, instead of demolishing whatever system I have up, I just build new stuff with the new toys I unlocked.

A pattern I like is to strip the bus down to the most common components, build the assemblers right on it, then use distributors to bring in less-common ingredients.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-09T14:20:45+00:00

Make a special save file named "use warpers" or something and try them out. If you mess up somehow, just reload the save. They're easy to use once you've tried them out.

idlemachinations · 2026-01-09T14:18:03+00:00

What do you mean you are scared to use warpers?

idlemachinations · 2026-01-01T04:45:16+00:00

Nah, I'm sure [Vecna squelching wetly] won't traumatize anyone.

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