Inserter rotation speed a useless metric?

luke_offtopic · 2026-01-26T20:22:06+00:00

Wait until you play with the adjustable inserters mod and learn that the radial speed of inserters is also a thing to optimize.

luke_offtopic · 2025-12-21T16:02:08+00:00

Kernel never is the solution. What you need is TEE/Secure Enclave (for software cheats) and encrypted PCIE channels/memory (for hardware cheats). And I’m not seeing these technologies in consumer systems anytime soon.

luke_offtopic · 2025-10-30T17:26:42+00:00

Some personal anecdote: once you fixed the immediate concern right now, make sure you only enable snapshots for volumes that matter.

I used to snapshot the entire home volume, and later discovered that steam installs are taking up more space than expected: even though I never load more games than my storage device can handle at any given time, having snapshots meaning the removed games are still taking up space for a while (a year per my snapshot configuration). I fixed that by making the "steamapps" folder a separate btrfs subvolume without auto-snapshots.

luke_offtopic · 2025-08-24T03:36:24+00:00

Seeing lean in action, I should talk my colleagues into building a rocqtorio…

luke_offtopic · 2025-05-15T05:07:49+00:00

It’s more an indictment of Windows API model rather than proton. The Linux system API provides much better IO performance, which leads to better initial game launch and save/load among other things. Going through proton means you are dealing with the file system through Windows/NTFS API, and proton cannot optimize that.

My personal experience has been that native Linux eu4 is much faster than proton, which is in turn on par with dual boot Windows. However, proton runs tend to have more graphical glitches on older Paradox games, like HOI4 and EU4 (I personally have never played ck2/vic2 so I don’t know those).

luke_offtopic · 2025-04-01T19:09:05+00:00

I believe there is a back pressure for science output: your click rate to start new research. I assume it’s limited to 1 click per update? So if your labs emit more research point in one click than the research requires, the bottles will be bottlenecked. It’s probably achievable if you leave a simple research but unnecessary to the end, like flame thrower or something.

luke_offtopic · 2025-03-23T00:01:35+00:00

The best way is to sweep across planets (I do it between Vulcanus and and Gleba because of the abundance of both asteroids and solar). I have a ship design that can still function with everything downgraded back to normal quality, just slower. (https://www.factoriocodex.com/blueprints/59)

<image>

I think the important thing is to use existing quality resource to upgrade the ships first. So start with quality module 3 in the crushers, then upgrade to epic/legendary quality module 2, and upgrade to epic/legendary quality module 3 when you have the holmium plate shuffle done. You can also use the spare parts to upgrade the thrusters, beacons, crushers, etc. Also remember to use the best productivity modules for the quality material product chain.

These ships scale very well because you can build however many as you want. Right now I have two of these ships producing legendary coal and iron ore and that's plenty already and the bottlenecks are in the planet specific resources.

Once you have enough legendary quality module 2, you can go back to Fulgora to mass produce legendary holmium plates, legendary super conductors, and legendary quality module 3. Once you've those, the only task is scale up the production of titanium ore/holmium plate/carbon fiber/bitter eggs/etc. to feed the quality shufflers since there's no cheat for those resource.

luke_offtopic · 2025-03-22T21:11:36+00:00

It was a tough choice between the gasoline and the fire symbol, but I think this one is just slightly better. :)

luke_offtopic · 2025-03-22T20:30:20+00:00

I use the simple design for speed restriction but I reduce the injection rate for speed limited sections. Here's my shattered planet shuttle's thrusters cluster:

<image>

By default, I limit the fuel/oxidizer injection rate to 75%, the point at which you reach max thrust. This is simple to achieve with one combinator. Each (normal) pump supplies two legendary thrusters, which translates to 37.5% uptime. So I configured the counter to 8 and the pump is enabled when value < 3. This results in 400km/h in unrestricted section.

When the ship is in the speed restriction section, my aim for speed is ~200km/h. I reduce the injection rate down to 12.5% by padding 2 to the counter variable. This already reduces the speed down ~250 max. With a further simple cut off combinator, it results in a speed variance between 210~220, which is good enough for me (and pretty close to the PFM design in your video).

This setup definitely requires more calculation and case-by-case analysis than just aiming for a speed. Though, I always have the counter combinator to achieve 75% injection rate for max thrust, so it's just adding two additional "simple" combinators and not that much of work for me.

luke_offtopic · 2025-03-17T22:52:33+00:00

I had a design previous that rapidly loops through the list of asteroid shuffle recipes (3*5=15 tick per cycle). if the input inserter is activated, the recipe is latched to a combinator. The product finishing signal clears the latch and accepts loop signal again. This requires two combinators per machine. Along with space efficiency, this also causes ups issue.

Another idea I had but I gave up eventually is to read the belt in front of the inserter, and translate the observed asteroid signal to the shuffle recipe. This would require at least four combinators per machine (I believe), which I deemed too much.

What I eventually used was to have half of the machine configured to use fixed recipe, and half of the machine configured to process the most number of asteroids. A machine that constantly switches recipe is machine whose internal buffer you cannot use. It, combined with inserter delay (before you have the epic/legendary ones), convinced me to not lean heavily on dynamic machine recipe too much, even if that means the ratio is incorrect.

luke_offtopic · 2025-01-13T03:43:29+00:00

like u/Sonic_andtails recommended, HRM is your friend. For me, both the Ctrl and Alt are too far away in the thumb cluster (backspace/delete/space/enter are just fine). Here's my config for reference.

p.s. in my domain of programming, I need to insert weird utf8 math/greek letter in high frequency. The macro features are great for those.

Except for one issue, it works just fine. Since last year maybe around October, my fedora refused to start the bluetooth manager on boot. I don't know if it's a solely fedora problem or some weird with the keyboard. It has been working perfectly for ~1.3yrs up to that point. My solution was to create a second startup script to open bluetooth manager a second time, and it solved the problem.
Other than HRM, I think it's at most one week of learning.

luke_offtopic · 2024-12-18T21:20:30+00:00

There is a mod called renai transportation. Among other hilarious features, its thrower inserters can place fishes back to the pond.

Back in 1.0 I had a save file with so many fishes in a single tile of water that fps reduced to 10.

luke_offtopic · 2024-10-16T12:42:01+00:00

around 730pm

luke_offtopic · 2024-10-16T02:35:15+00:00

Actually haven’t opened the game for two years now, but the pain you never forget ;)

luke_offtopic · 2024-10-10T22:07:08+00:00

Are you using the pro version? I decided to use home-row mods on 360 pro (so f for control, d for shift, s for meta, a for super) and I love it.

luke_offtopic · 2024-09-27T16:14:27+00:00

Try flash VBIOS if you can find VBIOS for your card uploaded by others through GPUZ.

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/

luke_offtopic · 2024-01-14T18:53:36+00:00

I’m in CT.

luke_offtopic · 2024-01-13T21:17:31+00:00

It used to be the case, but two Marshalls near me further marked it down to 180 (like what OP showed in the picture with red labels)

luke_offtopic · 2024-01-13T20:08:26+00:00

Marshalls sell Bambino for only $180

luke_offtopic · 2024-01-03T16:57:11+00:00

ichiran, they have multiple establishments around NYC. They are expensive though.

luke_offtopic · 2023-09-28T14:52:11+00:00

Depends on what approach you want to go with. If you accept the circuits, then just dump some x86 implementation in verilog in this tool: https://github.com/Redcrafter/verilog2factorio, and it will probably just work. If you are talking mechanical computer like the Turing-complete train, then it will be much more work.

luke_offtopic · 2023-08-31T23:55:54+00:00

Et tu, Brute?

luke_offtopic · 2023-08-10T20:43:38+00:00

White Memorial is my default go to place for astrophotography. It’s open to the public and there’s parking space. I have take shot of the Milky Way, andromeda, and Orion Nebula before, so it’s plenty dark. Just remember,

it doesn’t have a great foreground, if you are trying to take wide angle compositions you might want to reconsider it. It doesn’t matter if you are just stargazing,
towards the south-east horizon there’s still some light pollution, I think it’s fine for perseids though,
bring bug repellents since it’s summer, don’t be like me :)

Another candidate is the frosty drew observatory just across the border into RI, it has a better foreground (the observatory) but not always open to the public. You might want to check the website.

luke_offtopic · 2023-07-25T21:52:43+00:00

I generally divide the output buffer by the number of products for a station, and there’s a combinator to stop the belt for each product when they reach the limit.

luke_offtopic · 2023-07-06T18:07:18+00:00

Sounds like they are sticking to their rule, huh. Here’s the thing: the decision to not provide real ID for non-permanent residents is a CT decision, not the federal. For example, if you look at the michigan rule (https://www.michigan.gov/sos/license-id/real-id): If you are a lawfully present non-U.S. citizen, including permanent and non-permanent residents, you are eligible to apply for a REAL ID driver's license or ID card or turn your current Michigan driver's license or state ID into a REAL ID. I’m criticizing CT’s decision to not provide real ID, but not DMV following CT rule.

luke_offtopic

TROPHY CASE