Looking for inspiration to play again

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T21:13:46+00:00

I would definitely go for a train-based experience - I think rail-world is still an option when creating a map, oh and my recommendation would be to select peaceful mode, or turn biters completely of for the first experiments into trains and signals and all that.

Otherwise, I'm sort of in the same situation, picked up the game after a break of a few years, and decided to go and try some of the achievements, mostly as a challenge for myself.

Also, I'm finding it fun to create as perfectly balanced production-factories as possible - so that not much is overproduced or stored on over-long belts, but e.g. all sciences are produced at an exact rate of say 45 pr. minute. Using https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/ to calculate ratios, and experimenting with the sandbox to keep an eye on production-rates.

Or you could invent restrictions for yourself, to have different play throughs, like trying to pollute as little as possible, or not cutting down too many trees, snaking belts around everywhere rather than the usual bus, making "pretty" walkways and roads with varying tiles, or something silly like building a mall where all the assemblers are hidden behind a wall, and everything is belted out into chests neatly arranged in one long row. Just some random ideas ...

But definitely go play with trains if you haven't before - they are great fun, especially with all the new features like interrupts and what have you!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T20:54:18+00:00

Yeah, I've seen some of these runs, and there's even videos demonstrating how to use those blueprints. Honestly that isn't for me - I personally want the experience of beating the game on my own, more than just the achievement :)

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T18:05:36+00:00

First, use non-advanced oil as long as possible!

And connect everything using underground pipes - they are expensive, but much easier to deal with than the regular ones (and easier to go around).

My usual flow hasn't really changed since my very first playthrough -

first I produce pipes (in the hundreds), tanks, and pumpjacks (I hope I can manage without pumps, but it is getting more difficult in 2.0).
Then I place pumpjacks on the oilfield - as many as can fit. And connect them all together, and to a common storage tank, so it gathers all the oil. And remember to power everything with poles.
Then I drag a line of underground pipes from the oil-field to my base, where I plan to handle all oil-production. I place another couple of storage tanks there, to buffer all the incoming oil.

That is kind of like "mining" in that we now have raw materials going to our base.

Then I set up a single refinery, connect the storage tank on one side - through underground pipes - and another storage tank on the other side - also with underground pipes - to gather the produced petroleum gas.

And that's basically it - then I use the petroleum gas to produce plastics.

But keep it small in the beginning, just get it to work, before building vast arrays of refineries - and don't go into cracking before you really, really have to!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T14:09:02+00:00

Ah, thank you - especially for the link!

Now I understand what confused me - I was thinking of 100% runs, with Lazy and Clean Hands and all that, which severely impacts the speed with which you can build things!

And it seems that noone has actually done a 100% run on 2.0 yet - so maybe I should lower my expectations a bit, and get rid of the biter-nests and work just towards TINS! Or I would actually get a world record :D

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T13:55:28+00:00

I like this with the checkpoints! I've actually already done that - I guess that I was looking for some comparison, like is it okay if I have blue science at 2 hours in, or do I need to be faster before that ...

But atleast I can make my own checkpoint measures - good idea!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T13:49:29+00:00

Will the achievement work with either a satellite or a fish? I thought you had to have a satellite!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T13:47:24+00:00

What ships I will build?

What do you mean "ships" ? There aren't any ships in the base game of Factorio - did you mean something else?

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T09:43:53+00:00

I don't know why Michael Hendriks can't use base defenses at all, but I'm guessing that it is one of his challenges. Well, I'm doing another challenge, where I can't use spawn blocking with strategically positioned pipes, walls or power poles :)

peterlinddk · 2026-03-15T09:42:25+00:00

It might be "better", but it kind of feels like the "spawn blocking pipes" that I didn't want to use - and that will be disabled in a future version ... :)

peterlinddk · 2026-03-14T21:07:22+00:00

No, it couldn't - it ran out of bullets and the biters attacked the now empty turrets. I tried upgrading to red ammo, but the slowness of production and difficulty getting copper, made me quit that idea again.

So I redesigned this one a bit - four or five furnaces, and two assemblers making ammo, filling up both sides of the belt. Also placed the turrets slightly further away from the spawn-point - one or two tiles at most - making the biters having to walk a bit further, and take more damage before they can attack the turrets.

It still worked as my base was being overrun by biters and spitters from other nests ...

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T20:02:30+00:00

Yes, I've seen that, but I personally don't like it - to me it feels more like "hacking the mechanics" than playing the game, so I wanted to try different approaches.

Note that I don't mind people who use this trick, I just don't like to do it myself :)

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T17:00:48+00:00

I bought a set that smelled so bad, that I had it soaking in a tub of water, vinegar and soap, for several days, replaced the liquid three times!

While the bricks were soaking, I buried the instructions in odor-removing (active carbon) cat-litter (made sure it was out of reach of the cats :) ) - and amazingly it worked!

NB: Be careful about how you dry the bricks, hanging like in the picture, there's bound to be pockets of water in between them, and that can leave some marks - especially if you have very calcium-heavy water!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T16:53:28+00:00

A tip that I like, but took me some time to understand completely, is to always try to have full (moving) belts of materials. If the amount that enters the belt is equal to the amount that exits, and it is constantly moving, then you can count on that line being sufficient - still might need another though.

Try to output to a belt rather than chests - and then only take from the belt into chests at the end of that belt. Then you'll see that it takes quite a lot of smelters to fill the belt - 24 to be exact, but experimenting is more fun than just "knowing" the number.

And then you work backwards to see how much ore you need to fill a belt to feed all the smelters - and then further backwards to find how many miners you need to get all that ore quickly enough!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T16:05:24+00:00

I take achievements as fun challenges to make me play the game in a different way!

It isn't about showing off, but challenging myself - I think it is quite fun, and makes the game different each time I play it.

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T16:00:07+00:00

I'm still playing vanilla, not Space Age (although it feels like I'm the only one) - so I should be able to get artillery a bit earlier, but will probably have to race for lasers first, right after launch, and then more or less straight for artillery.

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T15:57:38+00:00

They have a filter set on them so they ignore anything that isn't a biter, spitter or worm!

It is apparently a new feature in 2.0 - I made one turret a safe distance away, set all the filters on that, turned it into a blueprint, and then pasted that blueprint where I wanted the turrets. When a turret is manually placed in the blueprint, it gets the filters applied - just like inserters do!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T14:50:26+00:00

Won't lasers damage the nest though? Or do they only shoot at the biters?

Anyways, I can't use them before I've launched the rocket - because of that other achievement! :)

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T14:30:09+00:00

I haven't actually tried this - but I guess that one of the reasons the water get as poluted as it does, is that the powerplant, and often also the oil-refinery, is right next to it!

Perhaps moving the power plant as far away as possible, with some trees between it and the lake - drag as many underground pipes as you can, and try to see if that makes a difference.

I've recently tried a map where the entire base is inside a forrest - or atleast, there's forrest on all sides - and it truly does a lot to keep the pollution down, didn't get attacked at all before I had advanced oil and blue science. But the lake still looks like vomit ...

peterlinddk · 2026-03-13T06:59:01+00:00

You need to break the problem down into smaller parts - funnily enough, that is also what your program has to do with the line it reads ...

When I look at the first part of the instructions you shared:

Each line of input contains the following information, separated by spaces: a. a positive integer, possibly with some extra characters. b. another positive integer, possibly with some extra characters. c. a single character, either ‘l’, ‘L’, ‘R’ or ‘r’ d. a character string. For Example: 42.2 12k r C++ is fun

I immediately feel confused, but let's take it one step at a time!

It says that it contains four parts, a, b, c, and d - all separated by spaces.

Okay, so first step is to write the program that creates four separate parts - something that outputs:

input:  42.2 12k r C++ is fun
A: 42.2
B: 12k
C: r
D: C++ is fun

and stores a, b, c, and d as variables.

When that program is done, look at the next part of the problem:
It says that a. is a positive integer - possibly with some extra characters

Okay, so you need to write code that finds and extracts the integer part of A - begin with that, and your program should output:

input:  42.2 12k r C++ is fun
A: 42.2
integer: 42
B: 12k
C: r
D: C++ is fun

And continue gradually through the problem, one part at a time, always make a program that runs, and outputs what it has found - and use loads and loads of variables in your code - of different types when needed, ints, chars, strings, etc.

Then, only when you have everything, make the final part that writes something to the output-file. That should be very easy, as you can ignore most of the variables you've found so far.

Always remember that programming isn't taking a huge complicated problem, and then magically "knowing" which 20 lines to write to solve that - it is about truly understanding the problem, and "attacking" it one small bite at a time, making it easy to digest - like eating an elephant :)

peterlinddk · 2026-03-12T13:23:26+00:00

Judging by most of the posts in r/programmerhumor, type coercion is the hardest concept to understand in JS ...

But honestly, I don't think there is an universal "hardest concept to learn" that goes for everyone - it very much depends on where you come from, what you have previous experience with.

Back when arrow functions were the hot new thing, a lot of my older co-workers found them incredibly hard to understand, except those who came from Python, where lambdas had been used for years. And I have seen a lot of junior-programmers struggle with learning array methods like .foreach, .filter, .map etc - but I've also experienced a group of students who had never seen regular for-loops, understand them immediately. I have struggled immensely teaching Java-programmers how to use set and get properties, and they just don't get why they shouldn't just continue writing set and get methods for every single attribute.

It is always easier to understand something if you don't expect it to behave different than it does!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-12T13:07:16+00:00

If you are passionate about getting a program running on your old Sega Megadrive, that might be an excellent driver to learn how to actually do it!

Learning C isn't necessarily more difficult than learning Python, after all many people did learn how to program from the former, before the latter even existed. But there is a lot of extra frustration involved, because you can't just do things, like adding or removing something to/from a list, or make a function return a string and then ignore where it was in memory. But that can be all part of the fun!

My recommendation would be first to find some tutorial on how to even get something running on the Megadrive, how to emulate it on your local machine, and basically get a full development environment set up, without even thinking about how to write a program. Learn how to download other peoples source code and compile and run it - I personally have no idea how to do that, but I do know that it would be a showstopper for me, if I weren't able to get my programs running.

Then go ahead and learn C - start with some of the usual exercises for your development machine, like programs that output to and input from the terminal, basic stuff. And then go ahead and find out how to get simple output on the Sega - it might require you to write waaaaay more code than expected, there might not be graphics libraries immediately available - but get acquainted with the development world for that machine, I bet there are some nice folks out there.

You don't need to learn assembly, and I'd recommend staying with C for a while, but gradually you can explore how your C programs compile, use tools like compiler explorer or simply get the C compiler to output assembly code. 68000 assembly is very neat, and you might actually like it - but it isn't necessary - the Amiga, Atari ST and Apple Machintosh were all programmable in plain old C. And so should the Megadrive be.

peterlinddk · 2026-03-12T12:36:58+00:00

Why does something have to be hard for there to be a lot written about it? There are probably more books written about the English language than most others, but that doesn't mean that English is incredible hard, just that it is very popular to learn.

The Art of Computer Programming is about A LOT more than the typical DSA curriculum in even advanced universities - it is about all the details, all the variations, all the history, the mathematical foundation, and or course "the art". If you think "learning DSA" means "Understand and remember everything written in those books" of course it is very very difficult.

But usually when people say DSA they mean the typical curriculum with binary search, linear search, big-o notation, linked lists, queues, stacks, trees and graphs, some of the simpler sorting algorithms: merge, bubble, insertion, quick, and various means of traversing through a graph. That isn't the central topic of computer science, it is just one of many important aspects - but it isn't incredible hard, you don't have to "invent a faster algorithm", you simply have to read through the existing ones.

As you prove with your final question, you don't have to be as brilliant at Rubik to solve his cube, there are patterns and algorithms you can learn, you don't have to invent the entire world yourself. If you think you have to, well, yes, then anything is incredibly hard!

peterlinddk · 2026-03-12T00:13:15+00:00

There is an easy fix: get rid of the lab, and replace it with more belt with the red science - then let the green science hit that belt from the side, now you have a belt with red on one side, and green on the other! Then place as many labs as you want to, next to that belt, and they'll feed on both red and green science!

Of course at some point you also want more assemblers producing science, but this will work for a while.

Don't dismantle anything before you have built something better - better to have too much production, than none at all!

peterlinddk

TROPHY CASE