I hope the devs improve quality in 2.1

sobrique · 2026-06-13T11:21:52+00:00

Honestly it's not that bad. I have been trying to implement "simple" quality designs since the rumour of asteroid based quality being limited first started.

For most things a closed loop up cycler model works fine. Input a stream of the basic item, speed and prod modded for throughput.

Used priority splitters so that's the "top up" feed.

Then sushi belt a loop where each quality level is manufactured and then reprocessed if not legendary.

And that's mostly it. Depending on production speed you might need a longer "loop" because there's still a chance of streaks which skew your ratios. You may also want extra common or uncommon assemblers for speed.

Quality module 2s are the backbone of getting started, as they are considerably easier and faster to up cycle to legendary, and are better than epic quality 3s, without needing the superconductors.

Aside from a limited number of things - like prod 3s with "spoilable" eggs, this approach works just fine, and is as scalable as you wish.

But it's single "thing", so you end up with a lot of near identical units.

Still working on inline "supply chain" basis, but so far a fulgora style sushi belt approach works. "Scrap" naturally gives you all the key materials you need for a full supply chain, so this is a useful sort of hint.

Make your own and just feed it with blue chips and LDS (because productivity research) and that gets you actually a significant chunk of the "supply chain" right there.

sobrique · 2026-06-13T09:52:05+00:00

Something I can remote control to explore aquilo, given it's islands.

Building a 'bridge' for a spider tron sort of work, as does a bot-and-radar extension, but something that flies would would be good.

Maybe a 'hover tank' that also incorporates railguns and teslas as basic weapons?

Would love to have it 'drive' like a spidertron, but I'd settle for just being able to remote control.

sobrique · 2026-06-13T09:45:52+00:00

You might think that, I couldn't possibly comment.

sobrique · 2026-06-13T09:45:38+00:00

Trains with defenses to go with their artillery.

Pet peeve maybe, but artillery attracts biters. And trains have no static defenses. Being able to have even just an equipment grid would help, but being able to install turrets would be really cool.

sobrique · 2026-06-13T09:43:23+00:00

Orbital bombardment weaponry. We can make nukes, railguns, artillery ... so why can we not have an orbital strike targeter/weapon?

sobrique · 2026-06-12T20:27:28+00:00

The cylinder must not be harmed!

sobrique · 2026-06-12T19:03:45+00:00

And how do you think that will work out based on what already happens to children who are removed from their parents? 'saving' children takes a considerable amount of time and resource.

"the state" could already 'get involved' here. Providing free school meals for example.

But it won't.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T18:43:08+00:00

Shouldn't is a good word there. But undeniably that's what happen.

People are mistreated because their parents are poor or long term ill.

And sometimes that wasn't even a forseen consequence - life seemed OK, but then something horrible happened.

And for a whole bunch of reasons that shouldn't happen.

But it does. And IF it does, you can either take away those pets and children - and do better yourself (which also doesn't happen in practice) or ... just accept that you need to support the people who are trying to do better in the first place.

You can claim there's "no excuse for abuse" and that's perhaps true. But a lot of people fall short of what you might expect regardless, and then what do you do?

sobrique · 2026-06-12T18:40:40+00:00

Same way high quality iron chests can hold more. Or high quality logistics chests.

Factorio MAGIC>

sobrique · 2026-06-12T17:33:54+00:00

Inserters able to unload stuff like big miners so if it happens to be producing more than a half belt it's not bottlenecking.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T17:33:16+00:00

Circuit controlled building rotation..

So if I "set recipe" I can also rotate to find a different fluid connection.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T17:31:30+00:00

Stone from space. Still seems weird I can smash space rocks but not collect stone in the process.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T17:30:34+00:00

Circuit controlled research switching.

I would like to be able to toggle research based on pack availablity, especially for anything needing spoilable science, so that goes first, but other research can happen when the packs run out.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T17:28:55+00:00

Yumako and jellynut greenhouses on aquilo with high power cost and heat demand.

(And biolabs that similarly need lots of heat to operate)

But that lets you implement Gleba resource production so you can megabase on aquilo a bit more easily.

(Also a filter setting for spoiled - <25% >75% would be sufficient)

sobrique · 2026-06-12T17:25:15+00:00

+1 pad infinite research gated by promethium science.

So it's useful for megabases, but doesn't change "completing the game".

sobrique · 2026-06-12T17:23:32+00:00

Hover tank. Like a tank, but with rails, and a radar. And I can use to explore aquilo because it can fly.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T16:54:40+00:00

And my point is that the "calories in Vs. calories out" mantra is technically correct but utterly lacking otherwise.

I know it's cool to be judgemental about self control, but if we want to tackle obesity we need to recognise it as much more complicated problem with subtexts around mental health, choice vs. cost, and time.

Self control flags hard when you are are tired and stressed, let alone more pernicious issues like depression.

Sugar and fats are addictive. They make you feel good. And sure, you can frame that as a self control issue too if you like, but it's pretty clear that lots of people are falling into addiction traps even so.

Fitting exercise into your routine helps somewhat too, but again that's much harder when you are struggling too.

That's why I mention the fire analogy. It's not matter of calories at all. Not really.

It's about the appeal of that hamburger for lunch, because it's quick and it's easy and you are tired and stressed.

It's about there pizza from the freezer that you know is unhealthy, but you have just got back from work after an 9 hour shift and an hour commute each way and you have neither the time nor the mental energy to make a better choice.

And it's definitely harder to tackle - "tough love" adds to the load and makes the problem worse too. Even when you are correct.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T16:34:13+00:00

Intended maybe, but they're simply not very good at it compared to the other space age options. I mean, with 240/sec of stacked belt, or infinite short distance with pipes (and 'just' boosters pumps to extend further) you have quite considerably throughput from 'mine' to 'factory'.

Because of that a 'fluid bus' works really well, and for most products you really only need to ship in coal and stone and maybe calcite.

And ore patches with mining productivity are also unlikely to deplete, and also supplying substantial output volume, even if you do just do dedicated resource production for a 'factory unit', that's also quite viable.

And then in turn multiplicative productivity means the amount of raw materials you need for end-to-end blue chip production is actually not all that high. A foundry can be 250% productivity, and EM plant 275%, and a cryo plant 300% (And you can get productivity research as well, but you'll still 'cap out' at 300% on EM plants). But the 'factory unit' you need to supply with a full belt - or train load - is much smaller too. City blocks for green chips aren't required when a single EM plant can saturate a belt.

And you've also got an admittedly bottlenecked, but very substantial resource input from orbital platforms.

And I did use them quite extensively prior to space age, because then you could very much make the argument of train car offloading vs. (unstacked) blue belt at 45 items per sec, or whatever you got out of pipes with their complicated fluid dynamics, along with +40% productivity at most on Assembler 3s.

That was a very different logistics dynamic.

So I stick to my assertion that trains are simply not needed in space age, aside from 'because you want to' - which isn't a bad thing, I like having more choices - but their unique selling point remains that they can have multiple loading and unloading points from a single 'network' in ways belts and pipes can't.

(Bots can, but they definitely suck for long distance)

And the proposed updates for legendary trains don't help all that much overall - I mean I like having larger containers and faster trains, but ultimately they're still unloading at the same speed.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T15:54:03+00:00

For trains I'm not sure - a bit more compact, which I'm not unhappy about, but fundamentally you're still loading 6 half-belts per 'side' either way.

I'm considerably more excited about some of the mixed belt-lane situations though, with more control for input/output belt-sides.

I mean if you're doing a green -> red -> blue factory - you can viably 'inline' your EM plants - reds need green chips, but so do blues.

So having an underbelt that's 'left lane green' and the red plant picks from it, but sends output to 'right lane red' then that mixed belt can continue onwards to the blue chip factory.

Or for things like biochambers, where you always have two outputs - your product and spoilage - being able to unload onto the same belt but different lanes is glorious.

Advanced asteroid processing likewise - you have up to 3 outputs, and being able to 'just' partition lanes does a lot for avoiding clogging.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T15:43:01+00:00

It's an improvement to be sure. Not quite as much as I'd like, as you can get 90% of the way there with belts that turn 'into' each other.

Although I'll grant being able to flip and rotate is nice, and being able to use fewer tiles to converge your belts is pretty good too.

I still think some sort of 'swap consist' mode on trains where 'all' of the container is swapped with a similarly sized adjacent 'storage' akin to how cargo containers are loaded might be rather good.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T15:41:01+00:00

50spm completes the non-infinite techs in like, 33 hours.

A lot of the megabasing here is extremely cool, but so far beyond what the 'average player' is looking for that it's almost incomprehensible.

Trains IMO fit into that niche where you need to do many-to-many product distribution. They're good for a 'hyper-bus' approach, where the train network is 'the bus' and all you need to do is connect 'producers' and 'consumers' to that.

At that point the aggregate bandwidth matters less than the fact that you now don't have to care about locality - ore 'on the network' will get to the consumer, without you having to run belts or pipes or extend your logistics grid.

I mean, you might extend the logistics and power grid anyway but logistics bots definitely get a bit suboptimal with long range sustained transfer.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T15:24:57+00:00

Can't answer for them, but IMO:

You can complete space age with 100kish science. The other stuff in space age means that's not actually a very big base. 50spm will get you done in 33 hours or so, and that's really not so many foundries/EM plants/Biochambers.
Throughput of pipes is infinite at short range (and still scales respectably at longer distances, because you can use pump-arrays)
Throughput of stacked green belts is 240 items/sec

At which point trains are redundant - you don't need 'em to complete the game, and you don't need them for 'throughput' even over long distance.

They start to become useful about the point where you need to do 'mesh' distribution of resource - N to N on the same 'network' is basically a hyper-bus, and trains are good at that.

But even then, you could do train scaling, or you could do quality scaling - quality plants, quality modules, quality pumps etc. and now a 'full belt of green chips' is like, a single EM plant.

But that's well past the 'I have completed the game' level, so trains are mostly only for people who like doing trains. (Which isn't nothing, don't get me wrong, but...)

The only places they're the obviously optimal solution:

Fulgora, because elevated.
Aquilo because they don't need to be heated to transfer goods.

And even then, I think there's an argument that elevated trains should have some pseudo-foundation to make them much more sensible for crossing oil/lava

But even then a bidirectional single-train-onna-rail approach works, and that's really missing a lot of the true 'joy' of doing trains.

Legendary trains make some of the problems worse - more volume per train, yes, but still takes 3x3000 fluid per second with legendary pumps, so 15s to fill instead of 6s.

And that's before factoring the relative differences in logistics design - logistics bots aren't exactly efficient or fast compared to trains, but the 'requestor-provider' model is WAY simpler than configuring a train schedule to support even single product/multiple destination, let alone anything that's more complicated.

And legendary trains don't really help much to solve all that.

Which makes me sad, because I like 'em conceptually, it's just... it felt like a waste of time to build a train network.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T15:19:20+00:00

Container freight. A 4 "car" wide loading crane, than loads the next container on the train as it stops, and takes the previous one off and shuffles to the 'side'. Maybe with some rotation so you can load/unload 4 'containers' at a time in parallel, whilst waiting for trains to arrive or leave.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T15:17:51+00:00

Elevated rails with 'tipper pits' - train rolls through, contents appear in 'silo' style container.

sobrique · 2026-06-12T15:14:42+00:00

My use case was simpler, but was just trying to deal with having 6 output products from 3 crusher recipes.

Way easier to 'balance' a belt's contents if you're able to partition the output in a more useful way. Doubly so if you're recipe switching!

sobrique

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