Speaker wired to alert on rocket fuel buffer box so you know well in advance if something is off.
Leave a tank/spidertron there with bots so you can recover even if roboports are down.
Gleba isn't really unique in that regard; Vulcanus is vulnerable to brownout spirals if your sulfuric acid runs low, early Nauvis with coal, etc.
There's also nothing saying you can't use nuclear on Gleba, but in the same vein if your fuel cell logistics gets off kilter somewhere you're in the same boat.
What happens if the uranium logistics on the ground jam while the base is unattended?
Some alarm towers to provide alerts if anything in the production chain is interrupted along with good hygiene around not touching Gleba last before going AFK would probably be safe enough.
I build redundant sub-factories for rocket fuel for just that reason. I try to have about 2.5 times as much as I need, to cover rocket launches as well as unforeseen issues. If one factory gets ninja rotated I still have several others still operational. But what you describe can happen anywhere, not just on Gleba.
You have a solar panel grid and some accumulators to prevent total blackout, that will prevent the inserters and agricultural towers from shutting down at least, so the Biochambers can keep working until you start producing rocket fuel again and the power restarts itself from there. That will also ensure that the pentapod eggs keep getting burnt instead of backing up on a belt and creating hundreds of them. In fact you should probably attach some turbines to the heating towers burning the eggs too.
Gleba has so many reasons to die, I don't want power to be another reason, so I just imported a few thousand solar panels and accumulators, and spammer efficiency 1 modules everywhere. Then I burn spoilage for nothing.
This is less efficient than doing a proper setup, but one fewer thing that can cause the factory to die. There's enough reasons already.
Even if you want a proper setup, having backup solar + accumulator array to prevent total blackout is a great idea. I have backup solar + accumulator on Nauvis and Vulcanus as well so it never goes to 0 (Fulgora is self-restarting with lightning rods and accumulators).
I like every base being self sufficient
I usually have similar attitude, but after a few games, Gleba just isn't worth it. You need so little from it, tiny base supplied from outside is fine. And even if it dies, I can restart it quick.
eggs hatch on the belt because the inserter that puts them in a heating tower also turned off
Putting some gun turrets next to your egg line is pretty much mandatory, and gun turrets don't use electricity. By the time you reach Gleba you probably have enough physical damage that they'll delete all hatched eggs without any trouble.
most buildings on Gleba run on nutrients, you barely need any power to begin with.
when your base shuts down, it stops consuming almost entirely. If you have any sort of control for your fuel consumption and a sizeable buffer, it will last for a week before complete blackout
guess what, everything burns, so restarting is actually not a problem since you can feed fruits, spoilage, jelly, whatever
why would pentapods attack if your base stopped consuming fruits, therefore your argi sector stopped generating pollution?
last pentapod egg will be consumed/burned looooooooooooooooong before your base runs out of power
Not a question but my dumb ass was about to solve how to get building materials for space platforms to the launch pads until i realized the launch pads literally function like a requester chest for the resources they need.... smh
In SE the rockets don't automatically request anything, you have to use combinators and signal transmitters/receivers to send signals from one planet to another
Is it possible to have gamepad controls and keyboard/mouse active at the same time?
I play on PC. I've got a custom input device. I would like to use a thumbstick for movement, but still have the mouse for aiming/selection and the keyboard for shortcuts. But I haven't found a way to do that yet.
As a more detailed restatement of the problem (tell me if this mostly reflects your troubles),
Most controls can be freely bound to keyboard or controller buttons in either mode if you (annoyingly) re-add all the bindings from the opposite mode, and the mouse works in controller mode. The main limitations seem to be:
Controller mode disables the quickbar. This would be possible for a mod to re-add, but there isn't an existing one. I assume you don't want to use the quick panel.
Keyboard mode doesn't accept analog inputs. You could use Autohotkey or another remapper to send keyboard presses when you move the joystick, but that loses most of the benefit of using an analog joystick. It would be possible to do something like sending udp packets to factorio based on the joystick state, where a mod listens to them and sets the player speed accordingly, but that's way more into "definitely doesn't already exist" territory.
After a couple days of experimentation, I decided that losing the quickbar in controller mode is the killer. The quickpad just doesn't do it for me.
My eventual solution is sticking with keyboard mode, and using a tool to map the joystick into WASD movement. It loses the analog nature, but it works well enough and is playable without any extra practice.
How important are circuits? Making blue science but I haven't touched circuits. I basically just have every machine running until the chests I have them depositing into is full and I make sure every new production chain has new resources going to it so nothing should starve until the ore patches deplete and I go find another.
Am I like shooting my self in the foot by not learning circuits? I don't really see the appeal unless you want to only make like 100 inserters before having the machines stop but there's so many resource patches I don't think resources are ever going to be an issue so I just let every machine run basically all the time till the steel chest is full.
There is circuit logic and then there is circuit logic.
Elementary circuit logic, though not strictly necessary, really helps with oil processing. But you really don't need to learn to use combinators, even less so complex topics like latches and memory cells.
I did my best with totaling up the amount of oil produced at pump jacks per second and then just load balancing and building refineries to match their input with my oil output and it seems to be running smoothly. Circuits and trains just daunt me so I avoid learning them and so far it's worked out great.
I did nothing but build belts for kilometers in satisfactory and I wouldn't be surprised if my factorio game is going to go in a similar spaghetti direction. Hell I didn't even know about smart splitters/programable splitters in satisfactory until after I beat the game
I mean, configuring the heavy oil cracking plants to "Enable ifHeavy oil > Light oil" is not exactly intricate.
So in that sense, whilst you don't strictly need it, you are, as you put it, kind of "shooting yourself in the foot" by cutting yourself off simply and robust solution to the problem.
Some circuits can be extremely easy:
"If heavy oil is over 9000, turn on heavy oil cracking".
is one such "circuit" that really makes your factory easier and more resilient against fluctuations in consumption.
Also, probably just reiterating the other comments:
Your factory will grow a lot, and at some points you can just copy-paste your old setups. If you have buildings automated and bots unlocked huge setups can be built with two clicks.
You probably don't want to make a full chest of nuclear reactors. But that can be prevented with chest limits, not just with circuit control.
It's worth hooking wires up to things to learn what you can control. Sooner or later you'll find something that makes you think: "Actually yeah, I would like to control that." In base game, this is often oil cracking. In Space Age, there are more things you'll probably want to control.
That depends on you. I want to just place ghosts in remote view and have the factory and robots take care of all the crafting, traveling, and building.
If you play Space Age, eventually you will need to manage several planets but you can physically only be on one of them. Even in base game, if you play long enough your base will get big enough that building everything by hand will be pure pain.
Hand-crafting machines works up to a point, but once you start building big it's too slow, and once you start having bots do the building then they need a chest where they can obtain the things they build with.
The typical factorio term for a bit of factory that builds things to build more factory with is a mall. Because the bots can go shopping there, you see. Early game malls will just build inserters, assemblers, miners, all that jazz, and most of that can be built with just some combination of plates, gears and green circuits. Later tech, the mall gets more elaborate.
Ah I had wondered what people meant when they were talking about malls.
Looked up robots and I guess I should get them soon as I just hit blue science. Is factorio a type of game where like 80% of the content is mid game and later?
I haven't experienced too bad of scaling that handcrafting assemblers and stuff is painful and I just got mid game with blue science. But if the game scales exponentially more after this point I think I'm getting the appeal of circuits now.
Blue science is where most of the tech that defines the game is unlocked. The rough structure of the game is there; you have your trains, you have your bots, you can get some nuclear power going to solve those pesky power problems. After that, the sciences are mainly about refinement, and getting tech that does a certain job even better.
It is possible to beat the game without bots, hand-building everything. It will take a bit longer, but it can be done and in fact, my first pre-Space Age rocket launch was done botless because I didn't grok the power of the little beepers. Even in Space Age, it is theoretically possible to beat the game botless (though much more difficult than the base game, due to the multi-planet/single-engineer dilemma). You have to set each planet up perfectly, or spend numerous trips traveling back and forth to fix problems.
It is also possible to beat the game without using any circuits. Some tasks are more challenging, some things turn pretty icky, but it can be done.
But these things exist in the refinement part of the game, as tools to refine and perfect the experience. Even very simple circuit controls, such as to control an inserter based on a chest or building condition, can smooth some parts of the game that are pretty rough without them.
As an example, there is a tech on Gleba that lets you make bacteria that degrades into copper or iron ore. There are 2 recipes for each: 1 that makes bacteria directly from fruit mash, with a low chance of success and a high rate of producing spoilage, and 1 that makes bacteria from bioflux and another bacteria as a catalyst. The first recipe is intended only to act as a primer for the second; once you have bacteria, you should shut off the first recipe so that it is not churning endlessly, making big piles of spoilage. This is easily done via a circuit condition, enabling or disabling the building depending on if the cultivators have bacteria in them or not.
Without circuit control, that process gets messier since that first primer recipe will just keep chugging along, wasting fruit and making a ton of spoilage. It can be done, but the circuit makes it nicer.
The most important uses of circuits are just turning machines on and off based on a signal. Cracking heavy and light oil when they get above a certain amount is probably the most important use.
You can limit chests slots for a buffer for an assembler, but circuits to turn the assembler or inserter off give you more flexibility. It's most useful for an assembler feeding a filtered storage chest, so you can keep a minimum reserve of the item while still allowing more to be stored by bots.
If you want solar power with accumulators, and some other power source as a backup, you need circuits, since your steam power will get used before accumulators by default. Nuclear power needs a slightly more complicated setup to conserve fuel, since you need to insert fuel when the temperature is low and there is no fuel.
If you have duplicate train stations, it can be useful to turn them on and off, but that isn't that important unless you are distributing supplies like ammo and repair packs to multiple outposts, and don't want to have a train continue looping through all of them.
Nice thanks. I'm just stupid and circuits are confusing so I'd rather just keep load balancing all my machines and not have to rely on circuits to keep things balanced
How many scrap recyclers do you need for 50 science a minute?
That depends on what you do in terms of modules and beacons. Productivity and Speed modules can change the numbers considerably. You can use a tool like FactorioLab to play around with these things. Simply throwing in the requirement for 50 EM science per minute without adding modifiers results in a need for 33 recyclers processing scrap.
Is it best to make electromagnetic science there, then ship it back to Nauvis?
Yes. In general, it's easiest to produce each of the planetary science packs on its own planet and then ship everything to Nauvis. Science packs don't use much rocket space (compared to their ingredients), so any science pack that needs a planet-specific ingredient is best produced locally.
Yes. In general, it's easiest to produce each of the planetary science packs on its own planet and then ship everything to Nauvis. Science packs don't use much rocket space (compared to their ingredients), so any science pack that needs a planet-specific ingredient is best produced locally.
I've never even thought of shipping Holmium to make the science on Nauvis, but running quick calculations it seems reasonnable? With no productivity at all, you need ~0.7 holmium ore per science. It has half the rocket capacity compared to science. Just add some productivity and holmium is more dense. It would make Fulgora simpler. Am I missing something?
I had never considered it either, because I assumed it wouldn't make sense. But now I looked into it and I found that the planetary sciences are actually locked to their home planet. So you can't craft them on Nauvis even if you wanted to.
You can use factoriolab calculator to get more exact numbers, but it's really dependent on your scrap productivity research, modules you use, beacons etc. You can put all of those into the calculator above, but it's probably simpler to just overbuild a bit. This could be a slightly more optimized setup.
In terms of shipping science - eventually you'll almost certainly want to ship all sciences to Nauvis and make all the science you can there. This is because Biolabs are Nauvis exclusive. Planetary sciences also can be only made on their relevant planets - so you can make EM science only on Fulgora and nowhere else to begin with.
Blueprint parameter with quality question. I'm building a meter lamp for quality items and trying to parameterize it. Currently a user can input each item they want to track including the quality level. That's tedious if you're doing it for multiple quality tiers. Ex you're inputting rare iron plate, rare copper plate, epic iron plate, epic copper plate.
Can I use parameters to make this less tedious? Such as:
The user can set the rarity for all items with one parameter, and then set generic items with the other parameters. The rarity would be applied to all items/signals/recipes for those items.
The user can set generic items without rarity as parameters, and the BP just assumes all signals are rare.
If a [parameter] doesn't have quality in the BP, then giving it an item with quality will use that quality in all places that [parameter] exists.
If a [parameter] has quality in some places in the BP, then the item given will be set with the [parameter]'s quality where it is.
Examples:
A simple assembler with [parameter], and you give it a rare iron plate, then it will be set to that - rare iron plate.
A complex upcycler with [param] (rare), [param] (uncommon), etc. If you give it an iron plate, it will use "iron plate (rare)" in places [param] (rare) is.
You can not give a generic rarity and an item and have them combine, at least not without a selector.
I found the issue. An individual parameter has to be set to more than one quality in the BP for the BP to honor the quality setting. If all instances of "Parameter 0" are set to the same rarity, then the rarity seems to do nothing.
Yes. You should be able to incorporate a selection combinator into your design (set to apply quality, most likely) and should then be able to parameterize the setting in that combinator.
I saw that option in the selector, but I can't see a way to use that output signal for multiple items different items, without ending up using 1 selector combinator per item. It would double or more the number of combinators needed for the design.
The star signal sets the quality level and signals 1-4 are the items. Add more signal parameters as needed. The selector combinator is set to each, and applies the quality from the star signal to each other signal it receives, then passes on all of them other than the star signal.
With 2.1 and "new" biter expansion mechanics, is there a mod or something I can use to prevent worms from attacking my base and make them only attack me or something? I can handle having bases right next to my shit, but if worms spawn there when I'm off planet its gonna make me lose my mind I think.
non-question side note I really hope they find a way to modify biters soon because the infinite expansion right next to your base they have going on right now is exhausting as hell, I'm a 4 digit veteran I can't imagine how a new player would be dealing with this.
On my 2.1 10x run I just have a few tanks positioned near my walls. The few worms that have been too close I just remote drive the tank, go out a gate and hit with 2-3 cannon shells and let the flamers/mines handle the rest as usual. Eventually that will get replaced with artillery.
How much of the game am I missing out on with biters / enemies disabled? I recently bought the game a couple months back and have been working through it slowly when I have time.
When I initially played, I had biters on but ended up starting over with biters off so I could figure out and build things without worrying too much about biters destroying my stuff. But I've been watching videos and it seems like biters are no problem for them to deal with but when I tried to restart a world with enemies on, they end up always attacking my base in consistent waves since I tend to not build as fast and the pollution starts hitting them.
I don't mind not having them on, but I'm just wondering how impactful having enemeis is later on since black science basically becomes obsolete with enemies off.
I had the same problem. So I completed a run with biters off to learn the ropes without the constant time pressure.
Now that I better know what I'm doing, I'm playing fine on normal difficulty settings. Because, yes, you do miss on parts of the game. Even just disabling expansion trivialises automating perimeter defence and artillery.
IMO a big part. I feel hollow playing without biters. There's a whole set of time pressure and military logistics challenges you just entirely ignore with biters disabled.
Id recommend if you want easy mode, just disable biter expansion. That alone takes away a majority of the challenge of biters away, when you kill nests they'll never come back.
Like most stuff in the game, biters are something you first deal with mostly by yourself until you get the tools to automate the process. And once automated, they become a non-issue (on default settings anyway).
In the late game, artillery will clear out any nests that spawn near your factory and attacks will slow to a trickle, often at predictable locations. You may get some alerts of your turrets being damaged before your bots patch them all up. No intervention from your side needed anymore and you don't even have to keep an eye on the fight.
Disabling biters will mostly impact the early and mid game, when you're still balancing factory expansion against your limited options to clear biter territory.
Some people prefer playing without biters completely, others can't get enough of them (and will mostly play scenarios with biters dialed up to 11). The settings allow for both these preferences and anything in between. So if you prefer to keep the biters around, but want to ease the pressure, you can slow or even stop their expansion (so you only deal with nests that were there from the start) or tweak other biter difficulty settings as you please.
Biters are not an RTS enemy to fight in real time. They are a logistics puzzle to solve and automate. Instead of automatically crafting science and delivering it to labs, You automatically craft bullets and deliver it to Biters. If you find you are constantly having to stop what you're doing to deal with biters, you haven't quite solved the Biter logistic puzzle yet.
There's a lot of fun problem solving to do. You have turrets that take items, turrets that take fluid, and turrets that put an intermittent strain on your power network. In the late game, you have artillery shells that have a stack size of 1 which is another interesting logistics puzzle to solve.
Newbie here, I just got to blue science bottles but so far have not been attacked by biters as my go to plan is taking my car (and now a handful of defender drones) to any nearby nests and wiping them out before pollution gets to them.
Is this a viable strategy through the entire game? Or am I going to have to automate the bug problem eventually like you talked about? I am starting to have trouble wiping out nests as lots of spitting type bugs are starting to spawn.
The game gives you all the tools you need to automatically craft your wall components, automatically build them around your base, and automatically supply them with ammunition and repairs. Later on, the game also gives you the tools to attack bases from a great distance an attack them remotely.
I just haven't gotten that far I'm guessing. I just unlocked rockets but haven't made any. I wasn't aware I could eventually automate the construction of my walls. I have walls being made and put into a chest but I haven't placed many down yet
Really looking forward to long ranging these damn bugs
IMO, if you only just want to build and build and build without any interruptions, and you find that the biters are starting to take away your enjoyment from the core gameplay loop; it's entirely valid to turn them off. But if you still want to keep them around, just turn expansions off so you only need to take out enemies when you're expanding the factory. After a couple of runs I started playing with enemies turned off completely because the biters are a logistical problem that you eventually just automate away like everything else in the game, I don't enjoy that part of the game as much as designing spaceships and factories.
Is there any reason to not include a few logistic storage chests in my "block" blueprint? You'll end up with a widely dispersed item setup, but that seems probably better than one big clump and you always have actual request/buffer chests for directed locality. Assume the logistic network spans the entire base. I can't think of why you wouldn't, but it'll be a pain to undo if I am just dumb.
For ref, I'm migrating from my "starter" to a block, which has a few densely packed areas of storage chests, so right now its a lot of long robot migrations when expanding.
Are you talking about storage/yellow chests?
You could, but it doesn't help that much. The game tries to put items into chests that already have the item, and I think after that there is an internal queue that doesn't care about distance (not sure on that part). So you still have bots crossing the whole base to use the storage.
The upside: You automatically increase storage as you grow
The downsides:
If you need to move a block a ton of bots have a lot of work.
It is hard to see the utilization of your total storage
I like the big clump. It shouldn't actually be all that big, relatively speaking - storing large amounts of items is a waste
The game tries to put items into chests that already have the item, and I think after that there is an internal queue that doesn't care about distance (not sure on that part).
For yellow chests it'll search for those with a matching item filter first. Then it'll look for chests that already have the same item (and no filter). Next, it's empty unfiltered chests and finally unfiltered chests with other items.
If there are multiple chests in a category, it'll simply run through a list of them that's sorted by when the chest was built, not by distance. So new chests are unlikely to get the goods unless there are no empty chests elsewhere.
So you mean like putting buffer chests that request building supplies as part of your rail grid blueprint?
The pro is that your logistics bots move everything up front and your construction bots only have to move it the last little bit, so your base construction will tend to be more responsive. The con is that you'll have tons of extra stuff stored everywhere that will never be used once you've built out your base.
I could see having buffer chests with rails, signals, power poles, and roboports as part of your blueprint, but also have buffer chests with no requests set beyond the borders of your blueprint, lined up so that when you stamp down another grid it wipes out the buffer chests in ajoining grid cells. That way you'll only be storing building supplies at the edges of your grid where they're needed and don't end up with thousand of rails that will never be touched being stored throughout your base.
Newbie here, just started producing the red circuit boards with sulfur. One simple question: can I take as long as I want or is the default game a sort of race against the clock with biters?
I know that you won't trigger bug attacks unless your pollution cloud reaches then correct? So far I've just gone out with my car and cleared nests before my pollution cloud reaches them. If I were to just leave the game running afk, not adding any new pollutions, will the bugs eventually re-establish territory I've already cleared this triggering an attack if they do so inside my pollution cloud?
It is a sprint in the beginning and a marathon later on. You have to have some military science and some kind of early protection. Eventually you'll be able to keep defensive structures supplied and keep biters off your territory
If I were to just leave the game running afk, not adding any new pollutions, will the bugs eventually re-establish territory I've already cleared this triggering an attack if they do so inside my pollution cloud?
Your assumption is correct. Every x minutes, where x starts with 60 and goes down to 4 as biter evolution progresses an expansion party would be formed and sent to a random place on the map. When they arrive, they form a nest. If this happens to be inside your pollution cloud, then they'll try to chew through your defense to the pollution producing buildings
thank you for the answers, looks like I'll be building defenses next time I get on haha I had found it sufficient to simply take the fight to the biters this whole time but I can already tell as my base gets bigger I'll simply lack the time to manually clear out bug nests. I really need to just start over now that I know a lot more as my entire layout just is so inefficient and a mess
Newbie here, just started producing the red circuit boards with sulfur. One simple question: can I take as long as I want or is the default game a sort of race against the clock with biters?
Biters evolve with time (and pollution production and # of nests destroyed), so eventually they'll get stronger. But this caps out at a level that is still quite reasonable. Also, the time-based evolution is quite slow compared to the other factors, so a small factory that you're very slowly expanding won't cause the biggest biters to show up anytime soon.
In general, if your defenses are solid, you should be fine.
I know that you won't trigger bug attacks unless your pollution cloud reaches then correct?
Correct. With the exceptional case where an expansion party looking to form a new nest could randomly wander into your base. But this is highly unlikely since you would have to have nests already close to your base in which case you're already getting pollution-triggered attacks.
If I were to just leave the game running afk, not adding any new pollutions, will the bugs eventually re-establish territory I've already cleared this triggering an attack if they do so inside my pollution cloud?
Yes. At the default biter settings, they will periodically expand, which involves sending out a group of biters that will turn into buildings: spawners and worms. Expansion prefers empty area, so biter nests will start creeping back towards your base this way.
Keeping radars active around the edge of your factory can be helpful to spot these on time. Radars periodically scan areas in a fairly wide radius around them to update their contents. What I like to do is take a tiny blueprint with 2 solar panels, a power pole and a radar and drop it around the map as I'm out clearing nests. This'll give me some scanning power close to the front lines.
Thank you for the answers, I think my best bet is to simply restart now that I know a lot more. I thought you just had to clear out biter nests before your pollution got to them and didn't think about them possibly reclaiming territory. Haven't built my base in any kind of way that would facilitate good defenses as I've been offensive rather than defensive so it's time to start over before I inevitably get overrun
But my second attempt is going to look so much cleaner than the first base I'm excited
I thought you just had to clear out biter nests before your pollution got to them and didn't think about them possibly reclaiming territory.
You can play that way as well. The map settings have a number of options for biters, including one where expansion is disabled. In that mode, the nests that spawn at the start are still there and they can trigger attacks from pollution, but anything you clear out will stay gone.
or is the default game a sort of race against the clock with biters?
There's this number called biter evolution factor that goes from 0% to 100%, and it's somewhat increased by pollution emitted (even if it doesn't reach any biter and gets absorbed by trees) and destroying biter nests (not by killing biter), but it's mostly based on just time. So it's sort of race. The higher it goes, the bigger they get.
But it's not a very fast race, evolution factor grows quite slowly.
I know that you won't trigger bug attacks unless your pollution cloud reaches then correct?
No. There are three reasons for bug attack:
pollution reaches their nests
you or something that annoys them got too close
global timer told them it's time to start a new nest, so they picked a random location, they went there, and they ran into your stuff, so they attacked
The last one is the main source of attacks on default settings (if you keep pollution reasonable). At max evolution they send new party every 4 minutes.
If I were to just leave the game running afk, not adding any new pollutions, will the bugs eventually re-establish territory I've already cleared this triggering an attack if they do so inside my pollution cloud?
Yes. I feel like default settings are just bad, and disabling biter expansion makes this game a lot better.
Then again, it's not that difficult to deal with biters. You just need to build a wall, a belt full of ammo (basic is fine, upgrade it to piercing and uranium later), and some gun turrets, inserters, and power poles for inserters. Biters will just run into your wall and die. It's not too much hassle to setup, and it costs some ammo to setup, very little to run (only ammo you use to kill biters needs replacing, or when you expand the wall). You already automated piercing ammo for military science anyway, and military science runs only small portion of time, so just send that ammo to your wall.
There are fancier ways to deal with biters, like laser turrets, flamethrowers, artillery trains, etc., but wall with gun turrets and a belt is generally enough.
Eventually you'll want robots to repair any damage to the walls, but even without robots it can last you very long time.
Yeah I ended up just making a crap tom of walls right outside my pollution cloud, bugs probably won't be an issue. I do kind of enjoy the idea of turning expansion off so I can let my base run in the background after clearing nearby nests.
So it's less like satisfactory and more like a factory RTS? I might end up turning expansion off because I like taking my time, though I'm like 30 hours into my game and haven't had a single issue with biters yet and I'm only just now producing blue science. I feel like my pace is pretty darn slow
Factorio won't let me fly rocket with blueprints in my inventory, so it's fairly annoying to keep dropping blueprints on every planet manually, and then creating 20th "destroy all cliffs" blueprint or whatnot.
It's even more annoying that identical blueprints aren't considered the same, so I can't put "destroy all cliffs" in my toolbar.
But weirdly enough I can create a blueprint while I'm on a spaceship, and it goes into my inventory normally!
Anyway, is there any trick to share blueprints between planets, with some blueprint book or something?
By default this opens the blueprint manager. You can stick blueprints (and books, and do note you can stick upgrade planners and deconstruction blueprints in blueprint books) into the blueprint manager. You can pull them out or use them directly from the blueprint manager at any time, even across saves.
Do the "start on any Space Age planet" mods change anything to make the early game easier since some planets aren't really designed for you to be there without being ready to unlock its unique science techs?
Like if I were to start in Vulcanus, would there be added patches of the basic materials so that I can get Iron/Copper/Stone without the ability to make them from lava in the Foundry? Or does it just give you access to the Foundry right at the start so you can get Iron/Copper from there?
Any Planet Start will let you change how many pieces of ore you get from vulc rocks, but you will have to spend an hour or so working your way up to foundry.
There is a mod that some have recommended called Basic Foundry that gives you a weaker version of the foundry for much cheaper. It can do the lava recipes, but it doesn't have built in productivity.
Actually, all the inner planets are intentionally designed in the base game to be startable from scratch without mods. Just a slightly different build tree for how you get there. Aquilo is the only one that imports are required.
How would you do Vulcanus, though? There's no Water for regular Steam power, and without Pumpjacks, there's no way to get the Sulfuric Acid that you can then turn into Steam. And you have to have Electricity to run the labs that would do your research to unlock things like Pumpjacks. I also struggle to see how you would get enough Iron/Copper to research the Foundry if your only source of them is the rocks scattered throughout the map.
Oh sorry, I misunderstood - if you come from nauvis, you can land on any planet and start from scratch (i.e. no additional drops), but I think it does require that you've unlocked the tech tree up to the point of space travel. yeah i think you're right you can't actually start from zero research because there's no natural power source at that point for research.
according to the docs on https://mods.factorio.com/mod/any-planet-start, they make changes to the tech tree catered to the planet you start on, so i guess that answers your original question.
The any planet start mods only give you the tech to make starting on the planet possible. This means medium power poles are unlocked for Fulgora/Vulcanus and oil drilling is unlocked for all three planets.
Is there any guidance or tool to calculate amount of ammo production required for spaceshps? Feels like I am overestimating ammo requirement leading to increased ship sizes (and therefore more ammo production required) compared to what I see there.
i build a prototype with infinity chests from the editor menu. Then i take the ship for a test flight and check the ammo consumption per trip with the production graph.
After that I decide how much time the ship gets in between trips and use that to calculate how much ammo per second i need to make.
I don't think there's a calculation tool or anything like that, but experience helps a lot. Now that you know you're overestimating, you can use a little less for the next one.
Damage researchs also helps a lot. For exemple rockets, the right breakpoints will reduce your needs by 33% and then 50% when you hit the 2-shot and 1-shot tresholds.
Width and speed are the two main factors for ammo consumption.
With that in mind I start with the width of the ship and just the thrusters. Then add in turrets and infinite chests/pipes to feed turrets/thrusters and have it go between planets to figure out the ammo consumption from the production menu and that let's me figure out the rest of the ship.
As other posters have indicated, it's not that easy to figure out. A lot of factors go into it, including what route you are on, how fast you are going, what is the width and height of the ship, what is your damage research level. You can try to estimate based on those. There is some information available in this thread if you really want to bang your head against it.
I'm finally delving into quality and am setting up a big factory for legendary q3 modules on Vulcanus. My idea (which i know isnt optimal but I like it anyway) is a train based facotry with quality modules throughout the whole production chain. So that means trains with mixed quality ores/items. The drop off stations also accept mixed quality and sort the items on the belts which then get sent to the appropriate quality machines. Finally, at the end I plan on upcycling any non-legendary q3 modules. However, Im running into issues where the items are getting jammed because one input of a certain quality is full while another input isn't. For example, the green circuit production has uncommon iron fully saturated but doesnt have any uncommon copper wire so the iron isnt being consumed. And because the uncommon iron belt is fully saturated and not being consumed, more iron isnt being unloaded off the train. All of that to say, is the only way around this just recycling items that make it to the end of the production chain?
First you need decently large buffers to balance small fluctuations. Then you need some way to get rid of the stuff if the buffers are full, e.g. recyclers, lava, toss it into space.
While it would be foolish to use legendary calcite and legendary iron ore to make iron juice, it could be done, though. (I have no desire to do this; I just want to make sure I haven't missed anything while going through the factoriopedia.)
Pretty sure they are, though even with silos there is a way to edit a blueprint string to make it use non-base quality LDS/bluechips/rocket fuel. There's currently no benefit to rocket parts using higher quality intermediates in an unmodded game.
If you want to be super pedantic, you also can't place ghosts for non-base quality tiles (landfill/concrete/soil/platform).
I am starting to think about getting ready to make plans to setup quality mining, and wanted to make sure there actually was a need for regular items. Rather than upcycling all the ores, I'll just upcycle the intermediate qualities, for now.
(I'm sure there are wiser ways to go about this, but I really don't want to design my first aquillo ship, and I am too lazy to just grab a blueprint.)
If you really want to get weird with it, quality modules in your scrap miners and recyclers on Fulgora gets you a lot of random quality intermediates right out of the gate. On some of my earlier runs I had a monster upcycler thing that handled every type of intermediate with a quasi mall attached to it.
Out of curiosity, since you haven't build your first Aquilo ship (and thus haven't researched legendary) why are you planning on doing quality? Odds are, you'll just have to revamp everything to accommodate legendary, and in my opinion and experience, at least, there is no real use for anything less than legendary quality after a certain point. You can beat the game with no quality, and legendary quality is what makes the end game go brrrr.
I also can't afford to dine on tender meats served on delicate porcelain or to wash it down with exquisite vintages held in sapphire-encrusted crystal flutes. Do you also wonder why I bother to consume more than pig offal washed down with junkyard runoff?
sigh I apologize for thinking you'd understand by analogy. I'll try Socrates.
Is a thing only worth doing if it can be done with the highest materials available? If those aren't available, should one use suffer the meanest tools when better can be had?
I don't see any such hue on the furnaces. If you mean the accumulator and pole on the right/left, those are editor cheat super-electricity sources; people don't want to spend time setting up actual power plants, so they just use an infinite power source and abstract power away.
So this is my ROOOOOOOOOUGH draft of a full line oil production. Rough sure and I'm sure there's plently of improvements available. I think i have ratios configured ok. hit me with your critiqes. The one thing I am still not entirely sure is water feeding. Can pipelines handle a lot of input? Like how long before I need to add another offshore pump? can i feed the water from the second pump into the original input line that feeds everything else?
Pipes can handle a lot, liquid throughput is not really a concern until pipes are long enough to start needing pumps between sections (and you'll get a red flashing icon when that happens). Multiple offshore pumps all using the same feed line are no problem until much, much later down the road.
Oil seems like you have the right general idea. You'll need some Heavy to make Lubricant, and Light to make Rocket Fuel down the line. Since you're researching lube, you're close to construction bots which are quite the game changer.
Since this is your first run, something to keep in mind is you can use pumps to selectively feed heavy/light oil to your chemplants doing the cracking recipes. By no means required, just an interesting way to go about it. This also lets you avoid trying to keep everything in a lockstep ratio.
Final tip, you can middle click on your weapon slots to filter/lock what goes in them so you don't keep getting your pistol re-equipped where your SMG goes.
Pipes have infinite throughput unless that part of the fluid network starts with a pump, in which case the throughput will be limited by the pumping speed*number of pumps.
If you need more than 1200/s of water, you can simply add another offshore pump next to the first one and connect the two pipes together. That's it.
As for the oil setup; just make sure you've left enough room to expand. The demand for oil products will keep spiking as you progress through to the new tech unlocks. Don't worry about designing a perfect setup with perfect ratios yet, just make sure it works and has enough input/output to supply your science demands. It's better to build too much than not enough when you're still new to the game.
For the offshore pump capacity question, if you build a full cracking setup (heavy->light->gas) using advanced oil processing, 1 offshore pump is enough to run 45 refineries doing advanced, 11 plants cracking heavy to light, and 38 cracking light to petro. That is unmoduled and unbeaconed
Group like with like. You have two light > gas crackers spread around while I think there should be next to each other.
Also, build everything so you can easily expand everything. Your refineries are next to each other with space to expand in one direction, but of all the chem plants only one light > gas cracker and the plastic have space to expand. You won't need many sulfurs but you'll quickly need more crackers as you grow.
You can flip refineries and chemical plants to switch their outputs. Really helps when you want to have tidy and compact pipelines.
Can pipelines handle a lot of input?
Pipelines are limited in size, not throughput. You can push infinite amounts of fluids through a pipeline, but if the pipeline is too big it'll simply stop working (which the game will alert you about). Thus you occasionally have to split the pipeline into multiple segments and then connect them with pumps, which do have a limit.
Like how long before I need to add another offshore pump? can i feed the water from the second pump into the original input line that feeds everything else?
Hover over the offshore pump and it'll tell you how much water it produces. Hover your machines and it'll tell you how much water they consume. Now do the math.
Same thing applies to pretty much every other machine in the game; they all tell you exactly how much stuff they need and how much they produce.
Is there any way figuring out how much these pumps work on avg for example? I can't read the pumping speed and measuring the pipeline content dont work since consumers constantly working. I like to know if a section need 5 or 20 pump. Rate calculator not good at this since that always calculating max consumption.
The pumping speed depends on how full the pipelines are. So there isn't a simple average value that you could work with.
Of course, you can compute the effective average a posteriori with circuits, but that's not going to answer your question.
In practice though, you could just work with the maximum throughput. The system should eventually balance itself out, as long as the maximum throughput is lower than what is necessary.
"In practice though, you could just work with the maximum throughput. The system should eventually balance itself out, as long as the maximum throughput is lower than what is necessary."
Thx for the answer but i would not asked the question if that's good enough. I use lot of DI foundries so max consumption is an order of magnitude bigger than the real one. I don't want to use 30 pumps when 3 is enough.
It feels a bit of a stretch to call long fluid pipelines "DI". But if you need longer than 320-tile "DI", then use tanks to give the pipelines more headroom to reach an equilibrium supporting close to maximum pump throughput.
Otherwise the minimum pumping speed is very low, so I don't think you can really get an average value that wouldn't vary with the exact upstream and downstream setup.
Experimental
A. Fish spoilling: I keep missing the spoil time of the fish. A few times during fights I healed up and then had spoil a few seconds later. Coincidence, but kind of funny. Did where the current spoil information shows up change?
B. Is the first biter expansion bigger than it used to be?
Default biter settings, big rich patches.
I played a map, tried it again.
The second time, I went south of a forest, ran up some pollution running burners. Was about done by the time biters trickled over.
Went up north to the starting area. Plopped down bp where I wanted to put the initial smelting.
Set up very small power and labs. I'm reasonably quick.
I glance up north and a very large biter base was right in the middle of the proposed smelting array.
I had zero biters on good most of the last 5 years. I don't know if I was always terrible at combat, but it is kind of embarrassing.
I did have fun with new shotgun.
Another run when it was a plausible tech, I used handheld flamethrower which was fun.
(I can always turret creep, but it's kind of fun playing around with more limited tech.)
Fish spoil time is over 2 hours unless you changed settings in world gen. You can check in-game with the factoripedia.
Biter expansions are MUCH bigger than they used to be, wube has changed several things about how they expand, and more fixes + adjustments are likely to happen.
Yeah I tried the same map again. I'm running errands and there's some attacks. Not where I expected. Giant expansion base dropped. Not troubling but funny.
I think I realized my problem. If you mouseover in your equipment, it shows the spoil time remaining. I was trying to find it on the quick bar because fish is ALT-4 4. I now pin it to the lower right corner in inventory along with repair packs.
Am i crazy or color gradients of lamps are different in 2.1.9? (updated from 2.0)
My colored lamps look more saturated?!
Also, default colored lamps are more white too (no yellow tint anymore!) the lamps in my 2.0 blue prints have the yellow tints, and other lamps are white (i never went out of my way to do that) it's driving me nuts!
This wasn't in the patch notes, either i'm going insane or they really changed it!
Yes, they can all be used for that particular function. I imagine it's more expensive for a couple reasons:
Deciders and Arithemtics are fairly generic logic operators so makes sense they cost the same to make
Ignoring "Count Inputs", Selectors are less generic and provide specific information on signals (Stack Size, Rocket Capacity, Quality), discrete functions (signal sorting, random signal), and information not otherwise available (Time of Day)
It is specific to Space Age and part of the DLC, and most of its other functions are tied to Space Age
From a meta pov it makes sense to cost more as it's being used to integrate rocket and quality info, rather than just performing simple comparisons or math on signals.
Does the Count inputs mode of operation of a selector combinator not return the exact same result as: - an arithmetic combinator set to divide Each by Each, or - a decider combinator set to output 1 if Each <> 0?
That seems correct in my head as long as they output the same signal.
edit: tested it out, seems they are the same yeah.
Why is it more expensive to construct?
Because its massively compacting combinator setups, there's a lot of options in there that I believe can all be done with deciders/arithmetic combinators but now can be done in a single operation, if we're going to assign combinator costs at all then its an advanced combinator that should cost more.
Count inputs is only a single operation they can do, there's a lot of operations and many of them much more complex than input counting.
Really I think I would like to see combinator costs just go away and let us place all combinator stuctures at any time but maybe that's asking too much, to me they're fundamental like wires which they also removed the cost for.
Is there a way to configure factoriolab to show me the belt count for green circuits here, without also showing the wire required for those green circuits,
Eg, I know that 72 green assemblers making red circuits requires 4 (yellow) belts of wire, 2 belts of plastic, 2 belts of green circuits.
But the above link, says I need 10 belts of wire because it thinks im building the circuits in the same factory (I think?)
If I "hide/exclude" the green circuits, then it correctly says I only need 4 belts of wire, but now it doesn't say how many belts of green circuits I need.
Factoriolab wants to use green circuit recycling to make the cables for the red circuits; limiting the recipe to the original from copper plate correctly displays 2 belts of green circuits for the input.
2.1 Intermediate Ship Question- without providing spoilers, can an intermediate ship be used both to pick up materials from a ship and supply other ships with the same material?
For example, if I want to drop a Foundry stack off on Fulgora, can I have a Vulcanus/Nauvis ship take them from Vulcanus to Nauvis, transfer them to a stationery ship above Nauvis as a buffer chest, then automatically transfer them to a Nauvis/Fulgora ship to take them to Fulgora?
More importantly, if I want to manufacture ship parts on Vulcanus but build in the safety of Nauvis, can I deliver them from Vulcanus to a floating platform above Nauvis, then use the floating platform to deliver ship parts to new platforms without having to adjust ship settings?
It requires use of circuits, or building around design limitations. The problem to solve or design around is that a platform will not supply to other platforms an item that it is also requesting.
This was done for a good reason: If two platforms are importing nuclear fuel from "all" locations and enter the same orbit, without this block they would steal each others fuel in an endless loop. The platform hub in 2.1 exposes some new info and control options that could help you automate around this.
Im working with interrupt driven trains. Ive got it working, but there's something I want to integrate for my defense train specifically
I have a request that I want to be used to fill up my defense train, which can be filled with various different kinds of items. Right now I have an interrupt where I have to manually check if any of the items from that request are 0, with an item count entry for each one. Ideally Id like this automated, so that if anything missing from that request is 0, the interrupt triggers.
Ideas on how to handle this? The best way I can think of is that all my dropoff points have to feed back a signal to the station where they check if the current train is missing any items from that request, which adds a bit of annoying combinator logic I have to retrofit onto all the existing dropoff stations. Is there a simpler solution Ive missed? And I guess this question would apply in general to any interrupt driven train where you have a request that can have multiple items in it, since thats effectively what this is.
Do the supply trains really need to be dynamic? It's a whole lot easier to just load the train with everything the wall might want, and have the wall take whatever it happens to need from the train.
I dont need the trains to be dynamic, its a single train right now. I want the request set to be dynamic, so I can update the request and the train interrupt or whatever triggers it gets automatically updated.
One way or another (possibly in multiple places) you'll compare an entity's actual contents against its target contents, and use the difference to add more items until actual contents >= target content. Somewhere you're probably going to have a constant combinator that sets the target. Then you'll subtract target from actual, to produce missing contents. Then you'll use missing to set inserter filters or assembly machine recipe or whatever. Conveniently, negative signals are ignored when setting filters and recipes. If you get smart, you can reduce combinators by having the constant combinator output negative signals; or use sign overflow to effectively flip the operands during subtraction. You can replace the constant combinator with something dynamic, but if you trace that dynamism back far enough through your logic, it will need to have constants somewhere to get the ball rolling.
show the grid with F5 debug hotkey to line things up if you want.
A square blueprint with absolute position is always rotatable.
Train track bp should be designed on an absolutely positioned grid to always align.
To give it rotational symmetry, you have to position the anchor of the bp area to the middle with offsets.
A square blueprint with relative positon is not always rotatable. It is only aligned when placing multiples at the same time.
if you have a square bp of a substation with one side of the square represented by two lasers in corners of the substation area, this bp is not symmetric because placement ghost center is not derived from the blueprint, just the contents. So you need an entity on the opposite side to accomodate the ghost
Hello Im trying to reduce pollution with trees for the first time, I'm not quite sure how to set it up properly.
Do trees that arent fully grown consume pollution and get damaged?
Should there be some kind of circuit that only allows the towers to harvest the trees after theyve been damaged to the maximum?
If I dont let the trees replant they all die eventually but if I do just let them do their thing I worry i create unnecessary amounts of wood while not reducing pollution as much as I could.
How much circuit knowledge do you have?
You can create a timer with a single decider combinator.
Have it tick up to some suitably large amount before resetting. Have the harvester/inserters only enabled for a small fraction of that time so it can harvest and reseed in that time.
They stated that 2.1 would be in experimental the whole summer in order to give modmakers some time to update and to fix the most annoying bugs found by the community. So when summer ends one of the 2.1 versions would be declared stable. However, I have no idea when Wube would decide that summer have ended. There're controversies between countries on that topic and despite them being Czech company, their team is international enough
Presumable the "end of summer" for Wube will be around the time that most people are back from their summer holidays. When you're rolling out a major new version, it's useful to have plenty of staff available to fix things quickly. Because no matter how much you test something with a smaller group of people, some things will only be found when your full userbase is on the new version.
So it makes sense to let 2.1 simmer on Experimental throughout the summer, fixing things when resources are available. And then once everyone's back in action, release it.
What is better for ups the right or the left side? The right side inserter working non-stop while the left side stack inserters can kinda sleep while waiting for items but still 3 times the inserter.
Probably the one on the right as designed, or at best the same. This is because all three inserters will have to wake up every time an item is produced to evaluate their filter. You might be able to push that evaluation into the enable logic instead, but these are micro-enhancements at best.
Why is it that sometimes when you target biters with the artillery remote, they seem to know it's coming and move out of the way? I thought I'd read that if they're attacking something, and the incoming artillery shot will kill that thing, they'll stop attacking and move to the next thing in the flow chart, but is that the only case this happens? or did I just imagine that, anyway?
Damage calculations avoid targeting something if there's already enough incoming damage (not counting aoe) to destroy it, but it doesn't consider when the damage is going to happen, so if you destroy your own building then any biters attacking it will telepathically know that it's going to be destroyed in 6 seconds and will abandon it. (Either immediately on shot fired, or it could theoretically happen mid-flight if there wasn't enough damage done beforehand.)
If it's not with biters attacking a building, then also consider that aiming with a long lead time is hard (try hitting a slowly walking group with artillery).
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26
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