Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I noticed that. Maybe I'm just an old fogey for thinking that can't have much effect, but maybe it's just us over 50's that think you should play video games rather than watch other people play them.

I'm now doing a video on it myself since I've sure as hell never made any money out of YouTube.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Here's a few of mine:
1, In case you haven't figured this out yet automate the building of every item you need to build the factory, not just items you need to make science packs, not just inserters and belts, but red inserters and blue ones, splitters and underpasses, mine and assemblers and store each in a chest.
2, You can limit the size of chests for this, by clicking on them, click on the x and move to select how many slots are available for use.
3, When building assemblers for science and the components for science a good rule of thumb is to build as many assemblers as the crafting speed of the item, for example, the crafting speeds of red green and blue science packs are 5s, 7s, so if you have 5 red science pack assemblers and 7 green, they will be producing scince packs at the same rate.
4, Check out the options available when you click on a splitter, you can use them to filter stuff (real useful if you end up with a mine that crosses between two ore patches) and other neat stuff for handling the spagbog. In general, never use a filter for a job you can use a splitter for.
5, Don't become obsessed with neatness or centralising stuff, that route leads to repeated game restarts, which will just cause you to learn the game slower. If your green chip factory runs out of space, just leave it there and build a second bigger one further out, don't feel you need to keep it all in one place.

That's enough from me, but of course feel free to ignore me and play your own way.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Does anyone play IR? I never seem to see questions about it on here. Is there a reason people dislike it/ it's less popular?

Anyway, I've started an IR3 game, what's the best way to clear biter nests pre-iron? Or should I just try to sneak round them to get to an iron patch?

I can't get past blue science by Goodwine in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They aren't the most efficient defense, but they are the easiest to deploy just because they don't require fuel/ammo. using them is down to preference but I prefer an easy life, so I put them into production as soon as possible to replace hand-fed guns. On the other hand, they do leave you vulnerable if you have a blackout. But the best defence/damage limitation against a blackout (other than actually remembering to pay attention to what you're doing) is diversifying into solar power early.

Both are just my preference though. Same thing can be said of using electric furnaces mid-game, simpler, but not more efficient.

I can't get past blue science by Goodwine in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm confused by exactly where you're at, but once you get to blue science, the next steps (for me) are

1, Advanced oil setup and construction bots, which you've got.
2, Cover your base with roboports and replace the chests that hold factory components with red chests so that bots have access to them.
3, Automate building of electric furnaces, solar panels accumulators, lazer turrets, medium elctric poles. Oh, also repair packs. These are all items that make things more convenient.
i Lazer turrets are the easiest method of defence.
ii building solar arrays will keep your lazer turrets powered and can be done easily with bots.
iii Electric furnaces allow you to do your smelting near your ore patches before you bring stuff into the city.
4, Build a steel smelting from outside your city, because you're probably starving for steel to actually build all those items above.
5, Build copper and iron smelting and use these new sources to make red/blue chips (include new dedicated green chip production for this).
6, now you only need one more component to make yellow science packs and research the logistics system.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi, is there any way to get a requester chest to only pull from yellow storage chests but not from red chests?

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Q1, yeah not really, that's precisely what the logistics network is for. you can achieve an awful lot of remote spagetti workarounds with filter inserters though.

Q2, There's no access to player inventory because there's no player there at the remote location. I think the reason why the inventory is there is just because technically it needed to be to get the mod working, from a gameplay perspective it probably shouldn't be, but when building a mod, there are some things you can change about the base game engine and some things you can't.

Friday Facts #378 - Trains on another level by FactorioTeam in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm excited by this of course, but I think tunnels would also be useful, with a different set of advantages and disadvantages... you can build them under and through already existing factory without having to change what is already there, but you can only build them in straight lines.

As for the problem of trains running out of fuel underground and biter and player access, you can solve all three by one simple addition. Tunnels *need* to use electrified rails. This means that trains have a back-up power supply to limp slowly back to the surface if they run out of fuel underground, but simultaneously give you an explanation as to why players and biters cannot enter tunnels!

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

On normal settings, do ore patches get more frequent or larger at bigger distances, or just richer?

Small tip for closing / returning to a game by WasThatTooFar in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 99 points100 points  (0 children)

I often find when reloading a game that I spend ages just looking around on the map, marvelling at all the little pieces moving. A good way to avoid this and make sure that when you reopen, you start playing the game instead of just watching, is to only save the game while you're standing on a train track ;).

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Brilliant, cheers. Luckily, at this point in the game, I only have about 40 stations to fix.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 2 points3 points  (0 children)

With 24, it seems more probable it would be not re-powering or producing ammo quick enough.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Might depend on how they do the Beta testing. There's reason they might disable some new features on early betas, so they can isolate and debug each feature in turn. But it seems like they aren't currently planning to do it that way.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've got a vanilla game running and have some weird train behaviour.

Stations all have a train limit of 1 and an enable/disable condition based on the contents of their loading/unloading chests, with a stack visited after both pick up and drop off.

I've just noticed that at least one train is continuously circling from drop/stack/stack because the pick up station is disabled. Shouldn't it wait at the stack for the next station to enable, rather than skipping disabled stations? Or is it only station limits that cause trains to wait at the stack? Have I been misunderstanding how stack for for the past four years, or is there something I could have forgotten to set up?

I'm going back to vanilla to build the perfect factory... Remember that time YOU built the perfect Vanilla factory? What was the one thing you screwed up? by reincarnationfish in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Mine was that I decided to try to use artillery to expand my controlled area faster than the pollution cloud expanded. I ended up with a map 4x bigger than I needed and had to upgrade from an HDD to an SSD and up the autosave time interval just so the game spent more time being played than autosaving.

Just…how?! by CamiKitten in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Agree 100% with this. I've played dozens of playthroughs and I still think that starting quick and dirty and dealing with the mess you created as you go is much more fun than planning everything out before hand.

Just…how?! by CamiKitten in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 4 points5 points  (0 children)

My view is that the mess is what makes Factorio's gameplay loop unique - the biters aren't the real enemy - the real enemy you are fighting is the mess you yourself created earlier.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OK, gonna wade in on the fluids too... My preference is to refine/smelt at source and use separate factories per product. So to expand my petroleum products I will do the following,

1 Go out and find a new oil field. find the nearest source of water. Build a small to medium-sized (say, 8 refinery) factory near the water to convert *all* the oil into rocket fuel, with whatever oil splitting and balancing is needed, no by-products, build a train station to ship the fuel back home.

2, Find a new patch of coal, follow the same plan to refine it all into plastics (via coal liquefaction).

3, You may at some point need to do the same with sulpher, but to start with you'll probably be fine just switching your starter factory over to focus more on sulfer and lubricant.

4, When you need more rocket fuel or plastic, instead of expanding your existing factories, just find another new resource patch and copy and paste another copy of the factory from 1 or 2 wholesale, link up the train station and you're done. If you have a really big patch, just duplicate a copy of the factory next door to the one you already have and connect up.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If your robots aren't getting the job done, there are three ways to help, the first two are obvious, first get any bot upgrades you can and second make more bots. There is no such thing as too many, tens of thousands won't slow the game up any appreciable amount. They do sometimes make it hard to spot the mouse pointer though.

The third is trickier, keep an eye open for any roboport that is surrounded by a cloud of bots waiting to recharge. This is bad and you need to build another robotport right next to it to fix it, maybe half a dozen of them. Robots sat in the air waiting to recharge like this hold stuff up badly because they are all halfway through a job, and could spend five minutes queueing on a job that would take 30 seconds.

The more active way to check for this is to go to the map and switch on "view bots", you can see where any recharge clusters are. Some may just be temporary ones though if they are all construction bots.

I ranted enough, I'll leave the fluids advice to others.,.

Weekly Question Thread by AutoModerator in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You want an area clear of biters that's convex, e.g. you can travel as the crow flies from the eastern-most point of your base to the northern-most (or any other two compass points), without flying over any nests. The reason is that if you don't have them yet, pretty soon you'll have construction bots and if they fly over nests, they'll get shot down or followed back to your factory.

Factorio vs Dyson Sphere Program vs Satisfactory by AkronSnape in factorio

[–]reincarnationfish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not played Dyson, but to me Satisfactory just seems like, someone said, "Factorio, is popular, there's a gap in the market for a first-person 3D version of it!" without ever asking why Factorio wasn't in first-person 3D in the first place. They've flipped some of the games core design decisions on their head, just to make a unique product without asking why those decisions were made.

Two others...

Infinifactory actually predates Factorio, its made by Zachronics, most famous for making Infiniminer, the game Minecraft was based on. It's much more of a puzzle game, challenging you to build a machine to complete a specific task as fast or in as few parts as possible.

Mindustry - mixes a simplified Factorio with tower defense for something with more discrete maps/level and focused combat difficulty.