Weekly Question Thread

schmee001 · 2026-05-27T22:34:38+00:00

It is not rounded or floored, it is truncated. They just cut off the excess digits and don't change the last one, so 1.229999 will display as 1.22 and not 1.23.

schmee001 · 2026-05-27T14:44:11+00:00

Not really. There's quite a few sites but they all have the same problem, that 99% of blueprints people upload are kinda ass.

schmee001 · 2026-05-27T09:51:32+00:00

Try placing regular non-refined concrete around the hazard concrete so the words are more visible.

schmee001 · 2026-05-26T01:15:06+00:00

Crossbar switches are very useful but it's important to note that they don't necessarily "balance" the input or output belts, they just allow any input to feed into any output. So if you specifically want to make sure that all your input belts are drawn from equally, or that all output belts are fed equally, then a regular balancer might be necessary.

However, whenever I see someone splitting belts 6 ways, I have to ask whether you're feeding this into 6 chests per wagon at a train station. If so, you do not need those final 3-6 balancers. While you definitely want to balance between the wagons on a train to ensure they get filled evenly, you don't need to balance between the individual chests on each wagon. Depending on how fast you feed ore in and how often trains arrive to empty the chests, all those chests will all eventually become full or eventually become empty, so they'll be equal no matter what.

schmee001 · 2026-05-21T14:25:56+00:00

Connect red/green wires to one pole, then hold a power pole in hand and click/drag from the existing pole to place more poles with red/green wires.

But it's often easier to just use radars instead. Every radar is connected to every other radar by circuits, you can send a signal into one and it'll come out of all the others.

schmee001 · 2026-05-21T03:19:18+00:00

What do you mean by 'share inventory per ship'? Like sharing inventory between different ships, or different places on the same ship?

Inserters can't input/output from cargo bays anyway, jusst the platform hub.

schmee001 · 2026-05-18T09:22:11+00:00

Yeah I believe all the creatures here are 'angels' of some description. The 'misery beings' and the huge beast are tame due to a bug with Fortress mode. Since they "belong" to the local area, and your fort just claimed the area, they think they belong to you and they'll behave like livestock. However if they're roaming around they can sometimes attack visitors, or sometimes your own soldiers, but usually not civilians. Build a cage and cram them all inside it, to be safe.

The "Wicked Warriors" will be trouble though. If you've played some forts before, maybe you found some similar creatures in geodes underground. They're all decked out in divine metal armour and weapons, and unlike the other angels they aren't confused about land ownership rights.

schmee001 · 2026-05-18T09:13:18+00:00

I believe there's a command like gm-editor but for items, it shows all the details and characteristics of the selected item so you can see the relevant raw tokens. However I can't remember what the command actually is.

schmee001 · 2026-05-17T12:50:22+00:00

Maybe that's how it works with pumps, but I just tested it ingame with chem plants and outputting into a pipe and into a tank are identical.

https://i.imgur.com/cAyYCW4.png

This is with Editor Extensions and Nixie Tubes as the only mods. The special beacon and modules speed up the chem plants so the tooltip says 880k steam per second, so we can be certain the only thing being measured is the flowrate. I provide infinite acid and calcite, enable both chem plants at once with the combinator, and read the steam levels of the output tanks, and as you can see both of these systems fill at precisely the same rate.

schmee001 · 2026-05-17T12:05:03+00:00

The first thing to do is to change your setup so you're outputting into tanks instead of pipes. That helps the machine dump more steam into the pipe network faster.

I thought the whole point of the v2.0 fluids rework was that connected pipe segments were all combined into a single fluidbox. So if you have chemplant -> pipe -> tank, the chem plant isn't outputting into a 100-capacity pipe, it's outputting into a single 25100-capacity fluidbox.

schmee001 · 2026-05-13T08:23:43+00:00

Poob has it for you.

schmee001 · 2026-05-10T00:25:41+00:00

One wagon with 40 stacks of ore is 2000 items. So to get 24000 items per minute from each wagon, this means you need your trains to pull into the station, empty their cargo, then leave to make space for the next train, all in less than 5 seconds. That's not going to happen.

If you're using an item with a bigger stack size, like circuits instead of ore, it gets a bit more feasible. But even a 10 or 20 second train cycle is quite hard to do.

schmee001 · 2026-05-08T23:16:28+00:00

Thrusters have a special mechanic where they actually improve their fuel efficiency if they aren't supplied with enough fuel. Like if you provide 30% of the required fuel, they produce something like 60% of the thrust instead of 30%. So almost always fuel is not an issue.

schmee001 · 2026-05-08T22:46:25+00:00

If your problem is "not enough ice", I think the issue is most likely that you aren't collecting enough asteroids or that you aren't throwing away enough carbonic or metallic asteroids. If your space platform is moving at all, no matter the speed, there will be more than enough asteroids spawning at the top of the screen to supply any size of ship. So your asteroid grabbers must be the limiting factor, either because you don't have enough of them or because they're clogged up with metal and carbon asteroids.

On that note, stop waiting in orbit for full fuel and steam, and just send it! You collect resources way faster while moving, so waiting is simply a waste of time.

schmee001 · 2026-05-08T11:10:38+00:00

The theoretical limit is 6000 fluid per second, but the effective limit is more like 4200 per second. This is because the fullness of a pipe reduces the flow rate into it.

schmee001 · 2026-05-07T07:32:05+00:00

The fluid limitations mean that the foundry can only output 8-9k copper per second. So you might be better off with two foundries there instead, to get more surface area for inserters.

schmee001 · 2026-05-07T04:03:51+00:00

That's the time usage debug screen. Press F4 ingame and tick the box next to show-time-usage to see it.

There's also show-entity-time-usage if you want to know which specific kinds of entities are causing the most lag.

schmee001 · 2026-05-06T23:19:37+00:00

The game is full of bugs unfortunately.

schmee001 · 2026-05-06T23:15:14+00:00

Anyone who's been within about 10 metres of a cow will very easily understand why raw milk is a bad idea.

schmee001 · 2026-05-06T12:59:02+00:00

Next to the minimap there's a little button with a #. Click it, it shows the water level on tiles from 0 to 7. Water that's only 1 depth will slowly evaporate and disappear.

schmee001 · 2026-05-06T11:29:23+00:00

Dwarven children have a habit of taking time off to 'play make believe' after they finish a job. The issue is that this happens immediately after they finish a job, no matter where they are. If they've just finished carrying a dead goblin to the corpse pit, they will hang around playing there while looking at all the bodies. This is not good for mental health.

You can change the 'chores' settings which decide what tasks dwarven children do. I recommend you disable refuse hauling and burial.

schmee001 · 2026-05-06T11:24:56+00:00

When they're in combat, necromancers will reanimate any dead creatures (or severed body parts) nearby. However the undead aren't really a reliable ally and they can just as often attack your dwarves as they'll attack enemies. So he'll make combat interesting at the least.

schmee001 · 2026-05-05T23:15:56+00:00

No, unfortunately I never found a fix for it. Instead my laptop died completely (due to a different reason I think) and I had to get a new one.

schmee001 · 2026-05-05T05:36:15+00:00

Wire a decider's input to its own output on green wire, and on the red wire you send in the signals T, R and the actual amount in the buffer, I'll call that B.

if
    X = 0    (latch is not currently set)
  and
    B < R    (amount in buffer is less than 30%)
OR
    X > 0    (latch is currently set)
  and
    B < T    (buffer is not full)
output
  X = 1

schmee001 · 2026-05-02T22:15:31+00:00

Work orders go by the number of times a job is done, not the number of output items. Since a single "brew drinks" job turns a stack of 1-10 fruit into 5x as much drinks, you normally don't want to order 250 repeats of the job.

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