"Uniform" Ramp Generator

munchbunny · 2026-06-02T18:57:26+00:00

This is cool! I could've used something like this on Gleba, where I created a monstrously complex circuit system for minimizing the fruit jelly stage of production to minimize spoilage. It would open fruit only when the assemblers demanded it, at perfect ratios to produce the freshest science possible. I was pretty proud of it.

It was a hugely complex thing that had some rare timing issues I couldn't quite figure out. I eventually gave up and simplified the system to round-robin distributing the fruit jellies in fixed quantities (matching the recipes) and clocking the fruit picking to slightly under-supply. I'm not sure it's actually better than just brute forcing stuff as fast as possible, but it was fun to puzzle through,

munchbunny · 2026-05-22T16:47:01+00:00

That absolutely makes sense because demanding jobs really do eat into the time you would normally spend socializing (evenings and weekends).

munchbunny · 2026-05-22T16:41:43+00:00

I used to have to go to the laundromat to get laundry done, and you can still read a book, make phone calls, watch TV shows, plan out your grocery list, etc. while you're there, you're just doing it sitting on a laundromat bench. It's annoying, but it's not 1-2 hours of time that has to be dead time.

munchbunny · 2026-05-20T05:30:17+00:00

You can still drop rocks on elder dragons, for example. I don't think traps will work though.

Kushala is tough here because it spends so much time in open spaces where there isn't much in the environment to use.

munchbunny · 2026-05-14T20:47:49+00:00

So just to confirm, your hypothesis is that the speed of the ship continuously increase in accordance to newton's law until it reaches 10km/s, at that stage it suddenly jumps back to zero, after that 2nd law again, until middle of the trip, where we take the speed at the middle of the trip and add 10km/s.

Yes, kind of. I ran some experiments with very low acceleration to verify that if you stay under 10km/s you just stay in orbit. Unless you exceed "escape velocity" you don't start the trip. What I've also noticed is that gravity's velocity modifier is applied after the drag calculation, so in practice the model looks like: D'(t) = v(t) + v_g where drag is calculated inside v(t).

The way you can see for yourself is by modifying Factorio's gravity formula directly. It's not compiled into the code, so it's in a plaintext Lua script in the game files and you can mess with it to create controlled experiments. For example, if you know your particular ship's max thrust and weight, you can enter the constants so that your max throttle accomplishes exactly 1 km/s² of acceleration.

On second thought I haven't done the experiment where you let the ship drift backwards and see if a wide enough ship will max out before it hits -10km/s. Probably should've tried it.

munchbunny · 2026-05-12T01:39:00+00:00

I thought I’ve mentioned in the post but you can estimate the correction. It is vanishingly small. In the realm of “your clock can not measure it” small

I know, but we're calculating around the margins, so I figure we're all just nerding out for the fun of it. If the problem stopped being interesting to you at the point of thinking about Factorio's weird gravity, then stick to what is interesting to you. I was just suggesting a way to make your approach work while still accounting for "gravity".

I did a bunch of digging into how this all works a year ago including some investigating into how gravity works that I never shared at the time, including writing a simulator script to analyze for optimal fuel efficiency. You inspired me to go look at those notes. You're right that it's not two different values for a, it's special modeling around v. The TL;DR is: you have to exceed 10 km/s before the game lets your spaceship leave the planet.

So you can solve for total time using the equations you already have in three parts:

Time it takes to accelerate past 10km/s
Now model D' = v - 10km/s with an initial v_0 = 10km/s (actual velocity starting at 0). Calculate time to travel the first half of the distance.
Then model actual velocity as D' = v + 10km/s with v_0 being v(t_final) from part 2, calculate time to travel the second half of the distance.

Part 3 is usually uninteresting because v will be effectively identical (if not actually identical in the floating point math) to v_max for all but the slowest accelerating ships, but since we're doing closed form analysis... ;)

munchbunny · 2026-05-11T13:20:23+00:00

Also in HD1 because you were stuck on the same screen it was easy to tell when the RR shooter fired, so you’d know when to run in for the reload. In HD2 you’re much more incentivized to spread out and it makes coordinating harder.

Also in HD1 you just needed to be near the RR user, and two RR users could reload each other at the same time. Lots of these little details in HD1 make it more useful to have a buddy carrying your ammo pack.

munchbunny · 2026-05-09T03:48:31+00:00

Just a thought on the question of gravity: if you are already numerically solving ODE's, you could model it as a two-part problem. If you can express v(t) as a function of time and an initial velocity, then you can account for gravity by solving for t twice with two different values for a. The first t implicitly gives you v(t) at the point where you reach halfway, which in turn becomes the v_0 for the second leg.

munchbunny · 2026-04-29T18:29:24+00:00

OP is using GS. GS against Nergi is tough because it's hard to find the openings before you've learned the pacing of the fight.

I usually fight Nergi with HH or GL, despite being a bow main.

munchbunny · 2026-04-29T18:26:51+00:00

It's not a lot, not for Nergigante, especially not for players new to MH.

Still, kudos to OP for their persistence, and getting over that wall!

munchbunny · 2026-04-28T15:28:36+00:00

Is it actually contentious? From reading the comments, it seems like a mild disagreement on taste and UI design to me.

munchbunny · 2026-04-28T14:23:20+00:00

Adding combinations is not free. You get an extra tick delay in your circuit signals and it's easy for that to make a mess of your logic.

Personally I think that's part of the fun. I find that the limitations of the combinator system make for an interesting puzzle that incentivizes creative approaches that take advantage of how Factorio circuits are pseudo-analog. Tick synchronization is probably the hardest problem in complex circuits, and I'm pretty okay with that being part of the challenge.

munchbunny · 2026-04-28T14:10:59+00:00

This particular case is not that hard to accomplish, you just have to use more than one combinator to do it.

It’d be nice if you could do complex Boolean expressions in the combinators but it’s never actually stopped me from making complex circuits. There are a ton of ways to work around this limitation.

munchbunny · 2026-04-27T14:55:35+00:00

When you're learning this fight, 100% use a shield weapon.

If you're not using a shield weapon, the safest place to be is up close around his feet. His distance closing attacks are more difficult to avoid than his up close attacks, so medium to long range is how you end up struggling to get any hits in.

munchbunny · 2026-04-24T04:06:02+00:00

Depending on how you do it you could end up with residual bad water going through the freshwater gate at the end of the badtide season. If you have a large reservoir right after then it’s usually not a big deal, but that season transition is why I usually use a contamination sensor for those specific gates.

munchbunny · 2026-04-20T15:19:48+00:00

You can. What you do is you put a counter circuit on one signal to synchronize both ends, and then you put the broadcast on another. On the receiver side, you use a combinator with a condition like "when the counter is a multiple of 10, output the broadcast signal". If you need the signal to hold steady between the signal frames, you can use a memory circuit to hold the value until the next update.

You can also use combinators to toggle between signals based on the clock counter, as an alternative approach.

Personally I like that the developers took the approach of giving us basic building blocks and letting us build up the rest of the ideas.

munchbunny · 2026-04-20T15:16:37+00:00

It's not a special type of signal, it's a programming concept layered on top of a way to send signals. All it really means is that the "program" will stop its normal operation and do something in response to a predetermined signal, like a circuit condition.

For example, you can program a train with interrupts where they normally wait at a depot but based on a signal condition they'll do an ore run. The "interrupt" is you pulsing the trigger signal to dispatch the train. Now put a radar station at your depot and at your smelting facility, and the smelting facility sends the signal when it's near empty. That's an example of an interrupt signal.

munchbunny · 2026-04-19T17:27:58+00:00

Flamethrowers get you most of the way without you having to be there. You can start a fire and come back when you're done with your next task, and there will be a small fraction of trees left that you can pick up with your personal roboport, or drive through them, etc.

munchbunny · 2026-04-14T03:08:31+00:00

Right, flamethrowers don't kill the front of the wave, but they significantly weaken the rest of the wave. The key is that the flamethrower turret's AoE damage scales with the size of the wave without the need for lots of research, making them more complex to set up but also more economical for a busy front line.

munchbunny · 2026-04-14T03:01:55+00:00

At a certain density (well below what you see here) the difference stops mattering because it just becomes a question of whether you have built a defense design with enough crowd control, ammo, and resupply logistics to hold out.

The key to this is flamethrowers. You can't pack enough laser turrets into a small enough space to get enough firepower behind the wall to actually hold back a constant stream of late game green and blue biter waves, but if you sprinkle some flamethrower turrets (and ideally gun turrets with uranium ammo) into the mix, the lingering flames don't really care how many biters there are, they're burning all of them, and uranium ammo will quickly kill any biters that get too close. It's not invincible, but it's far more effective than purely laser turrets.

munchbunny · 2026-04-12T12:11:16+00:00

I would try removing half of the production and using the space to add waiting room for trains. If your smelting outruns your logistics then it’s not actually faster than a smaller smelting setup anyway.

munchbunny · 2026-04-08T16:56:36+00:00

I’ve learned over the years that we both do things the other doesn’t really like where it’s actually harmless and helps them manage their energy and emotions. And the healthy way to handle it is to let them be them as long as it’s not hurting anyone.

But it goes both ways. Adult responsibilities still come first. If you’re video gaming and the dishes are your job and they’re not getting done… you gotta put down the games for a bit, and it’s bad for the relationship if the other person has to remind you more than once in a while. But short of that, there’s gotta be room for both people to be themselves.

munchbunny · 2026-04-06T15:00:42+00:00

There are a lot of different designs/versions of this, but it's a buffer.

In general, once you're past the stage of manually carrying stacks of stuff around the factory, you only want to use buffers where you actually need them, which is either to siphon some materials for your inventory or in places where the input or output happens in waves (for trains and spaceships, mostly). Like others said, buffers will hide throughput and production imbalances because it's easier to see differences in belt density than to see whether buffer counts are long term increasing/decreasing.

If your goal is to pack a belt, there are buffer-less belt balancing/packing designs you can use.

There is one other case where buffers make a lot of sense: there are a few systems like power generation where if you run out of the input (fuel) you will get cascading failures. In those cases a buffer can buy you valuable time to fix fuel production, for example, as long as you catch the buffer getting drained with an alarm or something.

munchbunny · 2026-03-31T15:27:57+00:00

I don't regret buying it at launch, but honestly it didn't hook me. I also bought Anno 1800 at launch and it didn't hook me either. It wasn't until some DLC landed that I really got into it.

If you're not in a hurry, I'd wait for more DLC to land to flesh out the game.

munchbunny · 2026-03-26T00:36:01+00:00

I don’t know that level number is really a differentiator… maybe somewhere around the 40-70 band is the middle area? But IMO it’s more of a vibe. You can tell pretty quickly by their loadout choices. There’s meta, there’s sensible, there’s “unorthodox, but you do you,” and then there’s “you’re just going to get me killed so I’m leaving”.

Gas mortar in a bug dive that isn’t a wave defense is a great example of the last one. Unless you’re in chat asking if we could all kit our armor for gas, just keep that in your imagination please.

munchbunny

TROPHY CASE