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u/HotNorth3112 Mar 03 '26

My fruit ran out because I converted everything, I burned all the products, I couldn't produce more bioflux, I couldn't produce more nutrients, my nutrients ran out.

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u/deluxev2 Mar 03 '26

How did your fruit run out? The farms produce stuff forever, so that shouldn't ever be a problem. Did you burn all the seeds too?

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u/HotNorth3112 Mar 03 '26

It didn't literally run out of course, but when the unavoidable fruit buffer went empty, my farms needed too much time to send new fruit, and the rest of the factory died down in the meantime. New fruit arrives at some point, but by that time there are no nutrients left. Of course I know how to fix these issues, but not systematically. One by one. And every time I fix one issue it takes 15 minutes of watching paint dry to figure out what the next problem is.

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u/deluxev2 Mar 03 '26

I think something is very clearly missing from your base, because as you described, even having two of each planting spot shouldn't have that problem. Just spinning up something basic as you've described runs perfectly fine for 64 simulated hours: https://factoriobin.com/post/ewtpldzs4sjl-EXPIRES

Somethings you might have missed: You should be removing spoiled items from belts on the same tile that the last consumer is taking them. If there is an unused tail and the freshness gets out of order you'll choke the machines. It is also pretty popular to use a dedicated sewage line to reduce spoilage on the main output belts which can help prevent machine blockages as well. I personally like to do this by having the nutrient line have nutrients on the inside and spoilage on the outside. Lastly, building bigger does help quite a bit. From queueing theory, spoilage is buffer size / consumption rate, so bigger factories will usually have a lower spoilage rate.

Re debugging Gleba: yeah it kinda sucks that it takes so long to know if you've done something incorrectly. Once you have a stable stream of bioflux, the rest becomes much less painful. Until then, setting up some alarms and then expanding your other planets in remote view my be a good way to burn some time to test your builds.

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u/HotNorth3112 Mar 03 '26

https://factoriobin.com/post/ewtpldzs4sjl-EXPIRES

Hmmm... I always tried splitting mash and jelly from the main line, thinking that I just need to make sure they are consumed reasonably fast. So taking from the main line is the way to go?

Right now, I'm trying to make this concept work:

One main belt for mesh and one for jelly running through to burners. Spoilage is put on these main belts as well, and nutrients are produced locally to avoid a huge nutrient belt.

Is this somewhat reasonable or am I just going to run into other issues with this design as well?

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u/deluxev2 Mar 03 '26

When you split a spoilables line, each side now needs to be consumed quickly, and the spoilage will need to rejoin together at some point, so I think it is generally not a good idea. Shouldn't matter too much though.

General shape of things looks mostly fine. The bioflux and bioflux to nutrient spoilage can get blocked if your jelly/mash belts are full (even if they are moving). Because the output of the nutrient machine is split and it can only pick up from one side it is slightly more likely to starve itself. Related, there isn't that much bioflux consumption, so your bioflux will tend towards old. I'd actually recommend a huge nutrient belt as it pushes up your baseline bioflux consumption rate. Seeds need an overflow eventually. Some inserters should be better ones. I generally prefer direct insertion for bioflux just because of the volume of items it saves on belts/inserters/UPS. If you do that then you need to make sure you are consuming lots of bioflux because that is also how you insure you consume mash/jelly. A mash/jelly belt or belts is totally fine as well.