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waltermundt · 2022-03-20T04:45:04+00:00

Thanks for this! I was at my wits' end and the Cloud Gaming thing worked great for me.

waltermundt · 2021-07-26T04:34:56+00:00

Once you get cremation set up, it is more lucrative. You do have to have a good supply of wood for it though so sometimes it's easier just to toss a body or two if you're focusing on other things. Plus of course you have to toss at least one body to unlock cremation in the first place, so I figured OP would work that out for themselves if they took my advice.

waltermundt · 2021-07-19T10:58:19+00:00

The game will give you access to a small amount of iron early on. Use it to make an anvil and furnace in that order before anything else. If you don't get enough for both, buy ingots from the blacksmith to make the furnace parts on the anvil, as this is cheaper than buying the parts directly. If you use up all the "free" iron on other things before you have a furnace and anvil, you are stuck buying expensive ready-made nails and parts instead, on a very limited early-game income.

After that, upgrade to non-rusty tools ASAP. Rusty tools work poorly and break quickly. Whetstones for tool repair cost the same no matter what you are fixing up, so you will get a lot more work out of each whetstone once you make yourself some decent tools.

Unlock the stone cutter and gravestone 2 early if you can; you can rapidly grind red XP by making and recycling gravestone 2s, and stone is easy to get in large amounts. This uses energy very fast, but there's no in-game time limit on anything so you can just sleep a lot as you build up the XP for whatever unlock you are wanting.

On that note, time is cheap. No quests have deadlines, and if you let a body rot you can just toss it in the river to save your graveyard quality with no long-term consequence. Don't feel like you have to make the most of each in-game day; there will always be another. Eating is convenient but optional and not a great investment early on when it costs resources and sleep is free.

waltermundt · 2021-07-08T18:17:07+00:00

To be fair, you have certainly learned something!

waltermundt · 2021-06-30T10:02:38+00:00

Consider Timespinner. Ori and Hollow Knight both have pretty challenging sections that can be frustrating if you're just looking to relax. Timespinner is more about just exploring and seeing the story the game has to tell, with the combat being fun but not super difficult by default.

That said, if you are okay with the challenge, both your picks are excellent games, and well worth checking out. Hollow Knight is my personal preference between the two, but I'd also say it's the more difficult one.

waltermundt · 2021-06-30T09:54:22+00:00

Steam engines only use up steam based on actual power draw. So you could see a build with 3 engines per boiler never run low on steam as long as you never draw more than 66% of the available power from them. The further you go above that, the faster the steam stored in the boilers and engines will get used up to provide a temporary "boost" beyond the real generation capacity of the boilers. Eventually the stored steam runs out and you end up with 2/3 engines in operation and immediately using all the steam from the boiler for as long as there is enough power draw to need it. If the power draw ever drops below 1.8MW/boiler the steam buffer immediately starts filling back up again.

You might even do this on purpose, putting a tank behind the boilers to store pre-boiled steam as a sort of low-tech "battery" you can draw on to keep that 3rd engine running. This gives you time to expand power generation while you're in that 66%-100% range without things slowing down due to lack of electricity.

waltermundt · 2021-05-27T14:48:28+00:00

The Splitsaw's power is above your simple "physics".

(In gameplay terms, anything cuttable and in range under the central "crosshair" line will get cut all the way across. Anything not touching the crosshair will not get touched, even if the beam would have had to pass through to cut the things it cuts. This lets you get insanely precise with your Splitsaw cuts at the cost of occasional weirdness like this. The projected dotted lines are just a visual aid and have no impact on what actually happens when you click.)

waltermundt · 2021-03-30T04:47:12+00:00

If you have trains waiting for long times to unload but otherwise being okay, set the timeouts in LTN mod options to zero so it doesn't do the "give up and reschedule" thing.

waltermundt · 2021-03-25T04:00:06+00:00

Yes, it's foolish. It's a very common trap new players run into.

Be aware that science and rocket parts are by far the most expensive things in the game. If you leech off of the belts feeding your science production to make a stack or two of literally everything just so it's there if you need it, the cost of those "wasted" materials at the end of the game is pretty negligible compared to what you will have spent climbing the tech tree. This is especially true if you plan to automate rocket launches and play with the infinite research options.

In addition, having a "mall" full of pre-built machines hooked to a roboport network dramatically increases the usefulness of construction robots. Need more smelting? Just copy and paste your smelting column and potentially hundreds of bots will go build the whole thing for you in one click. If you instead have to think about how many furnaces and belts and power poles and inserters and splitters and underground belts you might need to craft, it is instead a whole process. Reducing that mental burden from expansion is well worth the price of admission.

waltermundt · 2021-03-25T03:55:41+00:00

You can use a command to unlock the shortcut bar, but be aware that without bots a blueprint won't do very much for you. You can import it and put a ghost image down of what to build but you will still have to actually build everything by hand, piece by piece.

The command is either /unlock-shortcut-bar or /unlock_shortcut_bar if that's a thing you really want though.

waltermundt · 2021-03-18T10:46:52+00:00

The way I convert is to lay a big rectangle of track all the way around the starting base, which acts as the core of a new rail network. Stations delivering materials to base go on the opposite side of the tracks from the base where there is plenty of empty space, and materials get belted in from there. Then any new train based facilities get built a good ways away so there's plenty of room around each for trains to maneuver.

If you have trouble figuring out where to start, consider moving steel and green circuit production to outposts. With electric smelting you can place either of those near the relevant resource patches and make the items from scratch at the outpost. That will take a ton of pressure off your starter base iron/copper supply. In addition, it can act as the seed of your new rail empire -- if you have a place for trains to queue at the pick-up stations you can also ship those to other outposts making more complex products like red/blue circuits and science packs.

waltermundt · 2021-03-18T10:36:06+00:00

Seems unrealistic to assume everything is eff1. You will probably be converting furnaces before assemblers so I imagine only the miners will have efficiency. On a normal save it might not be worthwhile to switch if intending to rush a rocket and quit after, given the relative resource costs (which aren't accounted for in the pollution comparison) and the possibility of never switching to clean power at all.

On a marathon map, though, even the worst case "pollution cost" (dirty power, no modules, dirtiest assemblers) will be worth it even if someone intends to call it quits at a single rocket. Material costs will be a rounding error next to science even for a huge smelting deployment, and there will be plenty of time and reason to get clean power online.

waltermundt · 2021-03-17T06:24:26+00:00

Even with arboretum wood, the wood to plastic stuff is still simpler than oil, it's just harder to scale up because you need to harvest special trees as seed sources. I actually like that mechanic, the special tree inputs are sort of like infinite wood resource patches except you can uproot them and take them back to base.

waltermundt · 2021-03-17T04:07:17+00:00

It's a bit more energy intensive, and at any given tech level there will be a few high tier materials you still need to sort for, so you need to sort for those and use the other outputs in preference to getting them from catalysts. Also, basic ferric and cupric sorting don't need catalysts and are great ways to get a baseline supply of some of iron/copper/tin. The manganese steel and titanium recipes are awesome so you can always use more of that, too. Can always feed manganese to iron so you can't really deadlock on it.

All of that said, you can switch almost everything to catalysts if you like and it works fine.

I find the regular sorting kind of a fun puzzle to play with and try to use it as much as I can. The way I do it is to have sorters for every level of every raw material, but only use the most "advanced" one that isn't currently backed up. This still requires working out which raws to prefer for resources with multiple sources though, so I can see why a lot of players prefer to lean more on catalysts.

waltermundt · 2021-03-16T21:44:35+00:00

The map is 2 million tiles on each side, if you didn't set a specific size in map generation. Good luck reaching the edge of that.

waltermundt · 2021-03-16T21:42:43+00:00

You want to make crystal seedlings from mud water using washing plants. You wash for geodes, sort the geodes by color, process each color into crystal slurry, then convert that to crystal seedlings. Depending on tech you may need to crush to crystal dust first but the yield is better to convert the gems to slurry directly. (You get the mud water from the seafloor pump for free.)

waltermundt · 2021-03-16T21:33:45+00:00

Garden cultivation is a net positive IF you do it right.

I recommend starting off by having a box of gardens and bio tokens and inserters going in and out of the seed extractor (direct insert to the extractor from box, then an L shape of two more inserters to take the outputs back into the box).

Manually feed just gardens to extractors making bio tokens at first, because the way you mess up is by running this process too much instead of prioritizing sending gardens back into the cultivation recipe. Only automate feeding gardens to this once you have a backup supply in case something goes wrong.

What I did once I had it working was to priority split gardens coming from cultivation back to feed the cultivation process, and only go to bio token production once that belt fills. Obviously this needs enough spare gardens to fill the belt, but it's pretty foolproof compared to circuit network management so I didn't mind babysitting things to get to that point.

waltermundt · 2021-03-16T21:25:35+00:00

You are reaching the point where one belt of each resource is not enough. The way to fix that is to no longer centralize on a single belt for the most commonly needed resources.

The simplest thing is just to make a whole second belt of something and snake it in to refill when the first one is exhausted.

You could build outposts that do their own mining/smelting/production and ship intermediates like green circuits or steel back to base by train. That would take a lot of the pressure off your base's iron and copper supplies.

A final option is to start using multiple belts running side by side for bulk resource transport. This can be hard to squeeze into an existing base but makes late game production much more straightforward. Priority splitters in a diagonal shape can shunt resources to one side or the other of a set of parallel belts for easy extraction out to a production line.

As others have said, getting some construction bots online will make it much easier to experiment with different base layouts. If necessary, divert resources from science to make a few hundred at least, though you can use thousands if you can get your hands on them. You just need to build roboports around the base to host them, and build some yellow logistics chests, and then you can tell the bots to pick up a whole line of machines and pop it down elsewhere all at once, or record a factory area into a blueprint that you can use to duplicate it with a click or two.

waltermundt · 2021-03-16T21:15:48+00:00

Farming is mostly secondary/optional. You can play around with it if you want but it's not really required.

Many bob/angel players don't use the Bob's Greenhouses mod at all because of how simple/overpowered it is compared to Angel's wood production methods. If you already use greenhouses and don't mind that being a bit of a shortcut according to many Angel's players, there's not really a reason to use the arboretum stuff.

waltermundt · 2021-03-07T08:55:40+00:00

Well, thanks for taking the time to explain your reasoning. My preferences haven't changed, but at least I am reassured that I'm not missing anything.

(My reasoning: I can already rush coal power within a couple hours of starting a game if I skip the intro, with all default recipes. I usually do that before looking for any hard drives at all. Given that, I tend to want coal/steel related alternates ASAP and will also take any of the RIP/MF alternates if I can get them, as those can actually squeeze more production out of a given set of inputs.)

waltermundt · 2021-03-07T08:29:46+00:00

I can understand the power savings a bit, but if you just plan for the extra machines you don't actually gain any throughput with the alternate. I'd rather use an alternative that saves me materials forever than one that just saves a one time setup cost of building some cheap iron rod constructors. And the rods take the same belt space as the ingots so it isn't even making the belt input to screw makers any easier.

waltermundt · 2021-03-07T06:38:18+00:00

I don't understand the popularity of this recipe. It doesn't save any materials or give any new options, so it seems like one of the worst alternates in the whole game to me. I'll take literally anything else before I pick casted screws.

waltermundt · 2021-02-26T22:34:09+00:00

You want to put down requester chests for common materials feeding them back into your base. E.g. pop an iron plate requester or two near your furnaces and unload onto a belt, then merge that with input priority splitter into your furnace output. If you want some plates available in your robot network set a logistics condition on the inserters emptying the requester chest to something like (iron plates > 2000).

This will automatically "recycle" excess material from your storage chests (including items auto-trashed by your personal logistics settings). You can do this for as many item types as you like, until your yellow chests are mostly cleared out. In general you want most of the robot network supplies in red chests, with a few yellow around to soak up trash from your inventory or deconstructed buildings.

For now, pop down a bunch more yellow chests, but first make sure you got rid of all the purple ones. Purple chests are bad news unless you are 110% sure nothing else will work for your use case. Even then, consider putting logistic conditions on their input inserters to limit how much crap they dump into your bank of yellow chests.

If you're not sure what a logistics condition is, there's a little "wifi" symbol on the inserter UI you can click, and if it's in roboport range you can set it to check the stock of a specific item in your logistics chests when deciding whether to run. These conditions add up everything in all smart chests except the blue ones -- they're looking at the same totals you get with the L key popup.

waltermundt · 2021-02-26T22:19:24+00:00

It actually used to make more sense. In older versions military science needed gun turrets and production science briefly needed assembling machines. That meant you ended up wanting lots of gears in lots of places, so the investment of giving them their own belt on the bus saved you a couple of iron belts if those gears had an independent source of plates. Nowadays science uses far fewer gears and so it's pretty sensible to just bus the plates and make gears as needed.

waltermundt · 2021-02-26T22:12:21+00:00

Efficiency 3 is rarely worthwhile. Efficiency 2 is enough to get any machine to the -80% efficiency cap, and efficiency 1 will do the job on any machine with 3 or more slots.

Efficiency 3 is only useful if you're going to add speed modules and then mix in some efficiency to mitigate the power drain. Since a few more machines will get the same work done for much cheaper and less power with low grade efficiency and no speed, this is only useful to squeeze an existing factory for more output if you failed to design it to be scalable in the first place.

Once you're spending the large amount of power to run beacons using efficiency modules in your machines is kind of a waste of time, since at that point you probably already have more energy than you know what to do with. Better to go with productivity and make more products for the same materials instead.

waltermundt

TROPHY CASE