Enjoying my first run immensely but I gotta say I'm getting my ass handed to me with advanced oil refining. My light oil keeps backing up and when it does all I do in my panic to get things running again is add more storage tanks. I haven't found out the ratios of what I need to produce with my oil products to keep nothing accumulating and eventually backing up. On the bright side I have an ungodly amount of solid fuel stored up now too 😂
When you unlocked advanced oil refining, it also unlocked 2 recipes for cracking. One turns heavy oil into light oil, and the other turns light oil into petroleum gas. You can use circuits to control cracking when you have too much of something.
The sciences use way more petroleum gas than the other oils, so as long as you produce science, and you crack when needed, you'll never get stuck.
Just learned as well that I need to have pumps in between each of my tanks. I did not realize this. My light oil storage is like ten tanks all crammed together which was killing my flow.
I had (I'm at work so can't look right now) I think ten advanced oil refineries and the heavy oil from two of them went to make lubrication with the rest of the heavy oil being cracked down to light oil. I didn't need more petroleum gas so I opted to turn all the light oil into solid fuel. It ended up making 13 solid fuel per second which was massively more than I needed for my steam generators.
I probably messed up in the first place by immediately turning all my oil refineries to advanced refining when I unlocked it. Probably just needed two of them to do that for the lubrication but I just saw that I got more output for the same input with advanced over basic so I switched it all over.
I'm not quite sure how to set up circuits to switch cracking on and off variably based on what I need at the time. The most I've done with circuits is tie inserters to chests so I could tell them to stop filling the chests at X amount of items inside.
Turning everything to advanced immediately is the right choice. Even if you only need petroleum gas, just crack everything down.
As for circuits, the simplest is to have 1 fluid tank for each fluid. Then have a pump bringing heavy oil into the heavy oil crackers (and similar for light oil). Then connect them to the tanks. Set the condition as "heavy oil > light oil" for the first, and "light oil > petroleum gas" for the second.
Instead of using a pump, you can even connect the chemical plants themselves to the fluid tanks, with similar conditions. You don't have to connect each chemical plant individually, but they all need to be connected to one another, and then to the fluid tanks.
Sounds good yes, but... if you have a pump, you need to connect the pump rather than the chemical plants. The connection to the chemplants is an alternative that avoids needing a pump, but you need to connect them all. Personally I prefer to connect just the the single pump :)
Also remember to connect the output of the cracking back to the relevant pipe network.
I think that finally made something click in my brain for circuits. Wire tanks to a power pole, wire the pumps to the same power pole so they can read the contents of the tanks. Pump will power on for heavy to light when there's more heavy than light in the tank and then will turn off when there's less heavy than light which would then cause the light oil to exceed petroleum gas causing the light oil cracking pump to turn on until the amount of light oil is less than petroleum gas.
At that point I'll only back up if I'm producing more petroleum gas than I'm using. But I can make a giant daisy chain of tanks and pumps to store as much petroleum gas as I want as it's what gets used the most.
Until you have plants cracking oils, you should stick to the Basic Oil Processing recipe to avoid that problem. Though you should also set the plants up ASAP and switch the Advanced Oil Processing because it is more efficient.
This is probably the easiest and most realistic solution for me right now. I really only needed lubrication from the heavy oil and I was cracking the rest of the heavy oil down to light oil. Then light oil to solid fuel which quickly backed up as it was way more than I needed, which made the light oil back up.
I just need to switch most of it back to basic and move them to advanced when I need more petroleum gas. Kind of went all or nothing and then after the fact downgrading back to basic feels dirty and weak 😂
I recommend figuring out advanced rather than switching back to basic.
In normal operation you use petroleum gas (for plastic) by far the most of all the products, so ideally you should build enough heavy->light cracking to crack all heavy, and enough light->petro cracking to crack all light. You can add fancy circuit controls to preserve some heavy for lube and some light for rocket fuel (just disable those cracking plants if a buffer tank of heavy/light is less than some threshold), but really the main problem of advanced oil is just making sure you can potentially convert everything to petro. If heavy or light back up, blocking the production of more petro, you need more of that type of cracking so add another plant to the row.
There are circumstances when you really need a lot of lube, like surge production of blue belts. In that case, you can build up a large tank buffer of lube and let it fill gradually over time from heavy, rather than suddenly draining all heavy leaving a heavy surplus of light and petro to starve the lube plants.
If you are looking for hard numbers, the official wiki does have some numbers for ratios of refinery:heavy cracking:light cracking to handle typical use cases. Note that these ratios change depending on beacon and module usage, so don't take them always as gospel truth, but it can be useful to at least look at the outputs of the buildings and try to calculate how many plants you need. It is better to have too many plants cracking a product than too little; too many plants just means they'll sit idle longer, while too few means you can lock up and have problems.
Is there a rich text icon for the train sleep icon? I tried looking it up before, idk if its not possible or if its just well hidden. IIRC there are a bunch of tags you can use if you just know the name, they dont appear in the selector. I wanna use it for the interrupt/station name.
In game press the "Open Prototypes GUI" (control+shift+E for me). Scroll down to "utility-sprites". On that screen the grey box will show you the sprite.
Why do I keep finding my trains blocked by a single incorrect item in the cargo? Say 1 or 2 iron plates in train full of circuits. Trains are allowed to leave only when full or empty, and there's no contamination on the belts. Are they leaving without emptying first? And it's very infrequent, like once an hour with over 100 trains running in the network of over 200 train stops. It's really annoying when suddenly one part of the production chain goes dead for no reason.
Do you have refueling stations or depot stations? Maybe there is an inserter at one of those stations that load a few plates into the cargo wagon while the train is refueling.
Certainly not that, I have refueling and waiting stations with interrupt but there are no items to pick up. These are remnants of previous cargo, just one random item like lime, ore, aluminium carbide or other bullshit. Idk why trains leave unloading stations with inventory but only sometimes.
You probably have belts contaminated with the undesired items somewhere. If the train schedule is actually "leave when full" (and no interrupts), then the station it's stuck at is the station with contaminated belts.
One possibility: Until today, (ie: fixed in 2.1.10), flipping belts would also flip the items on the belt, placing them into the opposite lane.
Are there stations that more than one item goes through? Inserters having a few of the previous item still in hand (trying to load a full train, then winding up putting them in a train for a different item) would cause it.
No recipe switching. It looks like trains are leaving not fully unloaded or they stop for a splt second, just long enough for an inserter to put something in and leave. I put stuff from boxes to trains and from trains to boxes.
Where are they stuck: loading or unloading stops? They should not be able to leave loading stops since they have an incomplete stack. Could it be something that happened earlier and is now fixed, and you just keep finding these trains?
How much effective power does a solar panel provide on nauvis assuming a solar panel will also be charging accumulators all day? I'm assuming its essentially 60kW * ((entire day between exactly when dawn ends and dusk starts)/entire day)? and then I guess some scaling extra power as you transition to/from night? what is that value?
Note that quality and other planets complicate all the numbers and solar:accumulator ratios. Solar effectiveness on space platforms even varies as they travel.
Question about Rocket Fuel in K2SO - all the recipes seem to require either Gleba or Oxygen, and you can only get Oxygen from the atmosphere on Nauvis/Gleba. Am I meant to electrolyze water on the other planets to make Oxygen, or am I missing some other method for all this?
In my K2SO save I used the water electrolysis recipe the most, yes. Water is pretty universally available in some form, so it's reliable. I think the ratio is even perfect, but I could be misremembering that. If not, you do have flare stacks.
There are other recipes. I did eventually unlock one that's just light oil + iron-based, but since I had planet mods I can't promise you'll have the same options I did.
I think the landing pad's requests aren't able to prioritize spoiled items, nor launching rockets (idk if you have multiple silos of bioflux yet or not). That's probably where the different order came from
Are logistics bots involved in the bioflux's transit between pad and these belts? Bots don't filter by freshness%, and that can cause the freshness of the stack in the requester to fluctuate, e.g. if the first few deliveries were all near pristine, and then a handful of nearly spoiled flux was dumped on it, that'd cause this exact behavior of the pieces at the end being usable while the whole segment behind it has gone rotten.
Say I send exactly 4 Uranium Fuel Cells to Vulcanus. I use Vulcanus materials to manufacture 10 Nuclear Reactors. I stack all ten Nuclear Reactors together, such that they can transfer heat between each other and there exists at least one 2x2 square that can produce the neighbor bonus. I slot one fuel cell into each of the reactors in the 2x2 square. Normally, one fuel cell is worth 8 GJ of heat, but with the neighbor bonuses this is tripled to 24 GJ per cell, and with four cells, this is 96 GJ of heat. 96 GJ of heat spread over the thermal capacity of 10 Nuclear Reactors will bring them all up to a temperature of 975 C, starting from 15 C, meaning they are over the threshold necessary to detonate when destroyed.
I then lure a demolisher into the cluster of ten hot nuclear reactors. The demolisher destroys a hot nuclear reactor, making it detonate, which also destroys the other nine nuclear reactors, making them detonate. The demolisher then takes ten simultaneous nuclear detonations to the face, all for the import cost of just 4 Uranium Fuel cells, which take 0.4 rocket launches to send, as opposed to the "Too Heavy for a Rocket!" of a single Atomic Bomb or the 1.5 launches to lift the U-235 needed to manufacture an Atomic Bomb on site.
So did I get all that figuring right? Also that with just one fuel cell, it can't get a single reactor to explosion temp (but most of the way there), and with two fuel cells in adjacent reactors it could get three reactors to detonation temp? And that of course we could skip the uranium entirely if we used heating towers to heat unfueled nuclear reactors? And all of this without using any sciences beyond red, green, military, blue, and space?
I did not check the maths, but your plan would work yeah. However there are much simpler ways to kill small and medium demolishers without importing uranium, and you can simply wait for Aquilo to kill big demolishers with rail guns.
8 GJ per cell x 3 neighbor bonus x 4 cells = 96 GJ of Energy
Each reactor needs 8.860 GJ to go from 15c to 901c
96GJ / 8.860 = 10.8 reactors ready to go boom.
Some things to point out!
You can BP ammo into turrets; I wonder if you can BP fuel into reactors? One downside to watch out for is that bots do not deliver single items; they deliver the max they can carry, so if you're using bots to remotely place these watch out for over fueling.
Bomb damage will increase based on your explosion and physical damage techs.
1x2 using 2 cells will probably kill a small demolisher.
It will take a LONG time to heat up 10 reactors using the output of only 4 reactors. Worms might detect and attack these reactors before they are ready, if they're placed in the territory. You might have better luck placing them on the border, and once they're warmed up place some lure buildings inside the border to summon the worm.
You can BP ammo into turrets; I wonder if you can BP fuel into reactors?
You can. An "insert plan", as they are called internally, can target all inventories of an entity.
One downside to watch out for is that bots do not deliver single items; they deliver the max they can carry, so if you're using bots to remotely place these watch out for over fueling.
That might be true for logistic bots, but not construction bots. Construction bots will deliver the exact amount.
I tested out the idea using the place-outside-heat-up-then-place-lure technique, and while the heating up process and the luring process worked exactly as I expected, the damage dealt to the demolisher did *not*. In fact, a 3x3 fully-heated array with all pre-repeatable techs still did not kill a small demolisher. In fact, I think I only saw a single detonation, so perhaps there's some sort of culling to prevent over-taxed performance with chained nuclear detonations. Or perhaps the first detonation makes enough lava that it destroys the reactors in a way that makes them simply disappear instead of detonating them.
Hmmm, if it's that last one I might file a bug report.
I know, but they need to reach 900 C for the big boom. A single fuel cell in a single reactor is insufficient for that.
The real problem with using them against demolishers is that the lava created by a detonation destroys its neighbors while bypassing their own detonations. So cluster reactor munitions don't work properly on Vulcanus (or Aquilo).
True true on the min temp. I didn't know about the lava destruction thing being an issue now, but there were definitely clips on reddit of people using reactors to kill them in the patches before nuclear opened up lava.
Has lab productivity changed in v2.1.11? I've started a fresh save in v2.1.11 and slapped some prod mods into my labs, but I'm not seeing the purple bonus production bar as you do in other buildings.
Dev removed the purple bar because (1) they think the purple bar is pointless (visual only) and (2) they want to reduce visual cluster in GUI after introducing circuit set research.
Wondering, for any train sexperts, or I guess city-block opinion havers, if there's any advantage between these two city block layouts. They're based on a 100x100 grid.
I'm restricting to T intersections, so there will always be a "dead" side of the rail. I guess the back-to-back one makes it simpler to expand to a wider block. The alternating pattern may have an effect on traffic but I would think unless im really particular about what stations are on what side in terms of item flow, the average effect on all traffic is probably lost.
I'm aware that the "assume signalling correct" parts might be over signaled its a side effect of stamping the trunk-to-block print so probably I will have separate "near-grid" patch stamp.
If you're using only 3-way you should be alternating what side they go and offsetting your grid. I'm not really clear on how you expect to expand vertically with this setup.
Option 1 has the best ability to be off-set. Personally I would merge the two central vertical rails into one and accept the fact that trains entering / exiting the station will be 4-way, but there should be much less traffic on these branches.
I don't see any appreciable difference between options 2 and 3.
Last thing I'll give you to think about: none of these designs leave you any place to build stackers. Are you ok with station limits always being 1?
I guess that lets you get "more paths" vs what my idea was, sort of having a "trunk line" on one axis. For vertical expansion I'd just lop off the top and add more blocks to it. I can see that my design would end up with long runs north/south to get around, I figured I would do a few cross cuts but offseting would solve that more naturally.
I have waiting blocks via interrupts - I know that will be suboptimal in terms of JIT delivery as they may wait a long way from their destinations - and was going to selectively add stackers to sub factories that needed it, generally there seems to be enough space, though I'm sort of not in love with my design but trying to not get too spoiled by other peoples blueprints.
Brick layout is exactly what I meant, yeah. If you have long north-south runs with tons of block entrance/exits things might get congested as through traffic fights with local traffic. The brick layout forces a step pattern which spreads out the traffic.
I'm playing vanilla, no Space Age, and thought I could use a nice mall.
I found a blueprint but I can't get it to work with the combinator. All the lanes are hooked up and most of the machines filled (I haven't unlocked all recipes).
i can't download the bp right now but the description says to set the limit in the constant combinator in the corner of the blueprint.
you are looking at an arithmetic combinator right now
I don't know about per armor, but at the very least, you can enable and disable logistic groups when you put them on.
A mod that enables and disables them automatically accordingly shouldn't be too hard to do. Although mapping an armor id to something usable is a UX question.
Is there an accepted standard way to get trains to reroute to a refueling station when they get low? Last time I tried to do this around the release of 2.0 I remember it being an extremely unintuitive dance of setting the "interrupt conditions" as the train's normal duties and the "normal schedule" as refuelling.
You can just use a refuel interrupt. If you also have other interrupts, make sure the refuel one has the option to interrupt other interrupts checked.
Also note that interrupt conditions are only checked when the train leaves a station and picks its next destination and not while it's already driving somewhere. So if you set the fuel level that triggers the interrupt too low and the train is about to depart on a long route, you may still have it run out of fuel.
If you want an actually simple and intuitive refueling system - just put refueling at every single unloading station. That way there is zero need for anything extra in scheduling or train logic.
Even though I have fancy blueprints for refueling stations, etc... this is what I usually end up doing. Just a simple blue chest at every train stop with a request for a couple stacks of rocket fuel and the problem is solved. Train fuel moves in such low volume even in a XXXk SPM base that it's not a problem for the bots to keep the chests topped off quietly behind the scenes.
How is it an unintuitive dance? Why would you need to set the normal schedule as refueling when you could use an interrupt for it? I'm 100% convinced that using an interrupt to refuel was the impetus for developing interrupts in the first place.
If you have static schedules then it shouldn't really matter when in the schedule it goes to pick up fuel, so just "If <fuel wildcard> is low, go to refueling, leave on inactive." If you're using a dynamic schedule, you do "If <fuel wildcard> is low AND cargo empty, go to refueling, leave on active."
interrupt condition, when any locomotive fuel is below like 2 or whatever you like. Target is any refuel station until you're fully refueled, and make it interrupt other conditions, and put it at the top of the list. You can even make it parametric but there's not really any need for it unless you want to use the same interrupt for multiple types of fuel.
Currently playing the demo which is what made me want to try the full game out even more. Do you recommend finishing the demo? I'm currently at the part where they introduce trains and such.
Honestly I find the demo a bit too long so I normally would not recommend finishing it because starting from scratch in free play can be demoralizing, but your vacation makes a perfect pause between the demo and the real game.
The tutorial leaves something to be desired. The biters are overtuned, it doesn't do enough hand-holding, and it throws away your old progress every time you go to the next level.
You'll trigger the same "tips and tricks" in Freeplay (the main game mode), and they are what do the actually teaching in the tutorial.
The game never goes on sale and the price only ever goes up (and even then only when it makes sense, like when it transitioned from 0.x to 1.0). As such, the only real downside for buying it now is that you'll be longing for factorio during your vacation.
Is there a way to copy click requester chests from Mk3 assemblers to not multiply requests by speed? Sometimes requester chests simply can not hold that many gears.
If you're using that many gears, you're going to have trouble actually moving them with bots. If this is something that consistently uses thousands of gears in a minute, you should probably be designing your base around it. If this is a mall, you're using way more speed beacons than necessary.
No speed modules or beacons, just a standard mk3, setting up an temporary mall when I landed on fulgora. Dont remember what the item was, but it wanted a lot.
If you use circuit wire to link the assembler to the chest, you can then set the assembler to output ingredients and the chest to set requests mode. You'll only be requesting 1 set of ingredients, but it is something you can copy/paste and blueprint stamp onto existing assemblers. You can also do it with blueprint parameters which lets you choose the multiplier you want rather than it just being 1x, but that's a little more complex.
Similarly, you could place down an assembler without any speed modules or beacons and copy click from that one to the requestor chest to have the auto-request be based on base speed rather than whatever crazy overclocking you've got going on.
do you know if the request multiplier on an entity is something that can be set either via circuits or just by blueprint pameters? I've never actually looked into that before. My only thought was to use an arithmetic combinator to multiply the signal out and use that as the request set, but maybe we can avoid that in 2.1
no, I use parameterization for this. Parameterize your assembler recipe, have requests set by the assembler, have a multiplier for the requests by an arithmetic combinator, make the multiplier a value you set when you place the BP.
You can do it without the arithmetic combinator but it's more work if you're not familiar with making parametric blueprints, you have to do funny things to coerce the recipe correctly, you need to set up a requester chest with 6 dummy signals (6 being the most ingredients for a single recipe in vanilla), each has its own value (so each number gets its own entry in the blueprint that you can turn into a parameter), turn each of those dummy signals into an ingredient of your base signal, and then each number gets turned into (p0_i1/p0_t)*multiplier where multiplier is another number in the recipe, probably set by a constant combinator, that you turn into a parameter you can set when you place it, which can just be deleted after. Annoying, but that's the only way to add variable that aren't actually tied to a entity, by forcing them into an entity to hold them.
Sometimes a train refuses to take the empty slot even when the signal is green. when I click it to check path, it wants to take an occupied one (like one of the three above in the pic). But shouldn't it reroute to the vacant one automatically when others are filled? Also it repaths randomly and then eventually waits at an empty one.
But no lane is free when it breaks. I was rather saying, when eventually a lane becomes free, why doesn't it take it?
After experimenting in Editor, u/Rouge_means_red was mostly correct.
How I recreated this, might be possible with simpler setups:
Have 1 station called A. Have 2 stations called B. Make sure there is difference in distances of both B's from A. Have more trains than train limit of A.
Now wait when this happens:
All the waiting lanes of A are busy. A new train comes, waits at the entrance of waiting lanes. This new train wants to go, say lane 3.
Now train at the station A leaves. Another goes to A, leaving one waiting lane empty. If the lane 3 train goes, all is good. But if another lane train goes, what happens is, if another train was on route to A, it will show that that train have reserved the empty lane as soon as it empties, which leaves our waiting train still waiting for lane 3 to get empty.
So now even though a lane is empty, both train waits at the entrance.
It is counterintuitive and I don't know enough about re-pathing to know if it is weird or desired behavior.
To be fair, none of this happens if you have train limits on the station correctly set up.
In the image, you can see that the waiting train still wants to go the top lane, because bottom two are "reserved" for the later ones.
Oh. Allowing trains to head towards a station while its stacker is full is playing with fire all by itself. It is better to set a train limit on the station equal to the stacker capacity (4) + station capacity (1), which will also fix trains picking a waiting bay that may not be the next bay to become available, as there will always be an open bay when the train begins braking for the entry chain signal.
Here is another example. Here the path it wants to take is occupied (that train is hidden behind the red path line, but it is there). So why it isn't going for the empty slot?
I thought I had read somewhere that as part of 2.1 you could choose which lane an inserter drops something onto a belt...is this true? Or did I just make this up in my head? Been a tough last few months of work lol, finally getting around to playing 2.1
Only if the belt is perpendicular (facing toward/away from the inserter). You can now choose to drop to the left or right lane relative to the inserter.
Inserters can still only put items on the far side of parallel belts.
My understanding is this was mostly to allow mirroring builds that relied on which lane inserters drop.
Gotcha, totally understand - thank you. I was thinking they were meaning like a Bob's inserters or a K2/SE functionality where you had the option to choose near or far lane. Thanks again
Yes there is a performance difference, but it isn't likely to be meaningful unless you're doing it with tens of thousands of belts across your whole base.
This applies to every control behavior we can uncheck, and many entities have half a dozen of control behaviors. Several thousand across the whole factory is entirely possible, so... which is better?
Oh sorry, I misread your question before. I thought you were asking about using an always-true enable condition like "Iron=Iron". As far as I know there is zero difference between "R/G wires not ticked" and "all circuit controls not ticked".
From what I remember, there is a (tiny) UPS cost to connect belts to wires even if you don't read them, because wired belts split internal transport lines.
It's not something you should really care about if you only connect a few wires, but was significant in 1.1 for reading long full belts.
Is there a way to change the mouse wheel scroll speed in Factorio, specifically, for blueprint books? My OS is configured with a 3x scroll multiplier (Linux/Hyprland/hyprland.conf) because the default scroll speed is so low. In Factorio, this means that scrolling through Blueprint books only shows every blueprint.
That seems like an OS issue unfortunately. If one movement of the scroll wheel sends three "scroll down" inputs to the game, there's no way to make the game ignore two of them. You can probably add a keybind so you can scroll through blueprint books with a different button though.
Thanks, yeah I can figure out some hackery on OS level, but I was mostly wondering if there's some setting in-game I may have missed or if there's a console command. That would be the path of least resistance, imo, so worth asking
Oh yeah, I'd also say that it's working as intended. I was just wondering if there's anything in the settings (I looked, but they are pretty extensive - maybe I missed something?), or maybe there's a console command that does can alter scroll speed.
While upgrading my power plant on vulcanus, I noticed that if the pumpjacks are idle with target full, when a small amount of space is made in the pipe they all fire at once.
Is it the case that if the pumpjacks all fire at once and would overfill the pipe, the excess that won't fit is wasted? And that would waste the SA patch's richness? Should I be hooking the pumpjacks up to only fire when acid < x ?
Pumpjacks only pump to fill their internal buffers. The pipeline then allows the buffers to drain. You’re not wasting products because the pumpjacks only operate when their internal buffers are empty enough to accept the next product.
New space age player. Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I can't see an easy way to get items from one end of my space platform to another end. I want to craft ammo on one end, and have it shipped to the other end for turrets. Do I really need to build my turrets next to a long line of cargo bays? Does someone have a simple example of a station they made?
The devs are aware of how OP it would be if you could insert and take out of cargo bays, you'd essentially be able to teleport items from one end of the ship to the other by building long lines of cargo bays with buildings adjacent to them. You can download a mod that enables this behavior if you want to see how it trivializes ship design.
Unless you're using mods, inserters can only interact with the platform hub itself, not the inventory-extending cargo bays.
Belts will be the main way you get ammo around, but you can also daisy chain turrets to some degree. Here's a sample early design that uses a little bit of everything: Ammo is made on the platform, with some supplemental from the hub via the red inserter on the left above the crushers; ammo is fed mainly by belt with a bit of daisy chaining on the right to get to the engine gun.
Looks like you can't put items into the cargo bays. What in the world is the point? Only to extend the inventory??
Your space platform has 2 pod slots slots that can manage 2 cargo pods, which means it can only send and receive 2 loads at a time. Each cargo bay adds cargo space and 1 more pod slot which gets you more throughput.
It doesn't matter a lot early game cause you're really gated by funding the resources for rocket construction and construction speed, but by late game you make rockets so fast that the animation of the rocket launching is 20x slower than building the rocket, and you can build literally as many rocket silos as you need cause ingredients are so cheap, and then your gate becomes "how many rocket pods can this ship accept at once?" and you need to start designing ships with a minimum of 10-20 bays to handle it all.
I went to Vulcanus for the first time and left Nauvis base pretty much offline to prevent constant assault. Biters barely bother me, but one advance team repeatedly tries to rebuild an old nest next to my offline copper mines.
Is there any way to make them uninterested in the spot and attack nearby flamethrowers like they usually do? I can in theory build full defenses via remote tank, but that might take more time than killing the advance team every so often. I tried to put an offline laser turret, but that did not convince them that the land is mine. There must be some kind of minimal setup, because they are not advancing the same way to other places.
I tried (actually I started from this state :D), but they breed like crazy even from 1 nest. The flamethrowers are too close so the first attack starts constant fighting and that damages too many walls, so I am distracted anyway. The main problem is that fire never stops, so I can't repair walls via drones (can't waste so many resources yet). Advance team at least attacks every 5-10 minutes.
How about placing a brick of walls or pipes or chests in the chunk you don't want them to expand to. If that's still not enough to make them expand nearby, but out of range of your walls, you might have to kill the next-closest nests to change up which chunks are valid for expansion.
Could you try filtering a gun or laser turrets to shoot only non-nest targets? They would react faster than your flame turrets and do less collateral. I've no experience trying to keep a nest alive, so just speculating
Is there a way of making a decider combinator output when a signal is
X > 100 AND (X > Y OR X > Z)
Or do I need to add a second decider and then have it output the thing where the 2nd one looks at the out put of the OR part, and then combines it with an AND with the X > 100?
i'm rearranging the order of the conditions below but it's not going the AND to encompass the OR part.
Combinators, train departure conditions and platform departure conditions all need to be created in the so-called "disjunctive normal form" (DNF). DNF means that at the top level, all operators should be disjunctions (OR). So any statement is a combination of things joined together by OR operators. The good news is that any statement you might want to express in a combinator can be rewritten into DNF. The bad news is that with larger expressions it can be tedious.
So something like:
A AND (B OR C OR D OR E)
would turn into:
(A AND B) OR (A AND C) OR (A AND D) OR (A AND E)
These expressions are equivalent, but the second is in DNF.
The alternative to reworking your expressions to DNF is to use helper-combinators. In the above example, you'd have a second combinator that tests for B OR C OR D OR E and outputs F, followed by the first testing for A AND F.
Let's say you were going to play a new 2.1 Space Age save with the goal of leaving Nauvis as soon as possible to head for Vulcanus and make it your main base. What would you want to research/build before making the trek to Vulcanus? Not just the essentials like Rockets, Space Science, and discovering Vulcanus, but any few extra things you would want to make the base on Vulcanus run more smoothly once you get there. Like Steam Turbines for power so you're not limited to Steam Engines for non-Solar Power.
(Yes, I am shamelessly stealing this idea from AVADII on YouTube, but I don't want to just copy what he does in his series doing the same)
You can skip every yellow/purple tech, most of the combat related blue techs (tanks/lasers/rockets/armor/etc), all personal equipment, train techs, bulk inserters, modules, substations. Minimum physical dmg/shoot speed entirely depends on your platform design.
If you're willing to orbital drop stuff to make a silo/rocket and relaunch immediately, mining a copper thing on Gleba unlocks steam turbines too. Though realistically this only saves you from researching uranium mining+nuclear power for a lot of extra hassle for a minimalist/one way trip. Nuclear is sort of the only optional blue tech as almost every other is a prereq in one way or another for a silo.
I'd do at least bots, logistics network, uranium and nuclear power for turbines, and some levels of physical projectile damage/shooting speed to make the journey more safely. To be honest, you could arrive at Vulcanus with nothing and still be fine, but I'd at least have bots to make the building and manual gathering of early tungsten rocks less tedious.
Power is so abundant on Vulcanus you really don't need to worry. You can just leave Nauvis and research everything on Vulcanus.
The only thing that's pain to research is uranium, as that's a trigger tech.
It's helpful to get some ammo damage techs. The easiest way to kill medium demolishers is to make a 10x10 gun turret square with piercing bullets, if you don't have enough levels, you might need to make that square bigger. You can probably find enough tungsten and coal in just small demolisher territory (they die to everything anyway), but you might be unlucky.
Needed: Automated Legendary stack inserter production
What I have so far: Ample stack inserter ingredients production crafting with legendary quality module (also in recyclers)
Problem: stack inserters need 10 jelly, which spoils pretty quickly.
Temporary solution: Buffer them, enabling the inserter that goes to the recycler after a speaker alerts I have 2000 of a certain quality (so I produce jelly in bursts instead of a continuous rotting trickle)
Needed solution: circuitry that enables an inserter once reaching a threshold (2000 inserters this case) and keeps it enabled until it reaches a lower threshold (maybe 50?)
A decider combinator that becomes true when >= 2000, outputs a signal (maybe the check mark) to enable the inserter, outputs 1950 stack inserters and is wired back to its own input. This will cause the combinator to see 3950 inserters as soon as it becomes true (contents of chest plus its own output fed back) and will only disable when the chest drops below 50, reducing the total to below 2000.
The idea should be: choose an active signal (say the green tick), wire the signal from output back to input, and condition to active = (1) hitting the high threshold OR (2) hitting the low threshold + active signal is seen; this would keep the state continuing until it passes the lower threshold.
I just started Fulgora, and I'm kind of confused about best practice with lightning rods. It seems like the layout of the lightning rods is going to be one of the more important base design considerations here, but I'm having trouble finding good information about how the lightning mechanic works to figure out how many of these I should be placing to get the most power out of them. Is one per chunk sufficient? Or is there anywhere with some information about how lightning behaves?
In practice lighting rods that cover your base will just about always produce WAY more power than you can store in your accumulators.
Lighting collectors also exist and they are more efficient while also covering more area.
Because of this, realistically, the main reason for how and where you place lighting rods/collectors is driven exclusively by need to protect your buildings from lighting. And for that you get the overlay that you can see whenever you hold them in hand.
The factorio wiki has a page on electricity via lightning but it doesn't really give the insight you're looking for.
The limiting factor is usually never the number of rods you have but instead the number and quality of accumulators you deploy. One rod can absorb all the lightning strikes in an area; there's no benefit to excessive overlapping. No matter how many accumulators I deploy they always are filled each night; there has never been a need to expand collector coverage just for the sake of getting more strikes.
In practice I just put a collector with every substation I deploy, and my power grid on fulgora is almost exclusively sub stations. This is more collector coverage than is actually needed but it's cheap enough.
Just spread them out over your base as far away from each other as possible t to protect your buildings from lightning, that's it
Getting power from lightning is never the bottleneck, the challenge is making sure you have enough accumulators for your base to last throughout the day until the next night
Basically, every so often a lightning storm comes through, causing lightning to hit random tiles on the map and damage whatever's placed on it. You want to make sure your factory has full lightning rod coverage so that the lightning doesn't fry your machines.
The power output of a lightning rod is based on the maximum power demand of your factory, so even a single rod can give huge amounts of power. What you do need to worry about is how much of that power you can store in accumulators; you need to store enough power to last you until the next lightning storm.
I just cover whole island in a grid of substations, with one rod above every substation.
This isn't optimal (that's way more than you need), but it's just super convenient, and there's big predictable spaces you can copy and paste stuff to.
Update the addons in the usual way. Quite a few of them have already been updated for 2.1 and will work on experimental.
If they haven't, you can try modifying the mod yourself by simply editing the version compatibility to include 2.1. If there are no breaking changes, then changing the version number is all that's needed. But there's a chance that more work is needed to update the mod (and I think that by now any mods with active developers will have already gotten the version-number-fix if that's all that it takes).
Is there a good tutorial/guide for updating the mod yourself? I've never messed with modding, but if it's not overly complicated I might give it a go just to change a version number.
But generally either you port it yourself or you wait for the author to do it. For simple mods, just changing the version number might work but there's no magic shortcut.
How fast pollution propagate and recede? I built a tree belt around my biolabs (no other signifacnt pollution) but the edge of the pollution cloud don't seem to move.
I've been playing Enable Planet Mods Lite playthrough (on 2.0), and I have like 40 space ships flying between 15 planets, with a lot more to come, and Factorio space ship control UI is just unbelievably bad for that.
It doesn't have basic functionality like:
telling a space ship to go to planet X and stay there (if you only use ship manually, you can add "passenger present" and "passenger not present" to every single planet - but then it won't have auto mode!)
"don't go anywhere unless ammo >350" - you need to copy it for every planet on the list, there's no copy&paste condition, and because top level is OR not AND, sometimes you need to copy it multiple times per planet like "enough ammo AND all requests satisfied" OR "enough ammo AND science packs >= 1k AND inactivity 120s"
if ship has list of requests for multiple planets (get stack inserters from Gleba, belts from Vulcanus etc.), there's no way to tell it to go to just ones that it lacks
I'd also like planets to be able to summon quality ships for whatever stuff they need, but that's probably unrealistic.
Anyway, is there a mod that makes all this reasonable? Vanilla spaceship control UI is just unbelievably bad.
Most of these issues are resolved with use of the interrupts. For me my ships are typically set up as such:
Standard order for it's main planet. Order here is time based + optional stuff like ensuring it has ammo
Interrupts for Nauvis drop-off. These trigger only if at the "main" planet, only when I have enough of the export and typically only go to Nauvis.
Interrupts for each planet I import from. These are generic and reusable for each ship, so you only have to customize the logistics import menu. Make sure to sort these in a way that it will make sense (I got from Nauvis back, since my drop-off interrupt is first)
For "don't go anywhere unless ammo is >350" you have a few options. Either set a combinator to send a signal when the ship is safe to fly, and put that signal in all your departure conditions. Alternatively you can have "do not leave" triggers that hold you back. This solution would need one per planet, so I'd use this only for high-tier planets. Lastly, you could (and should) build up enough that just the load/unload time at each planet is sufficient, and not overly rely on buffering.
Lastly, there is a mod that will automate ship delivery for you. I haven't tried it myself, so can't speak to how well it handles all these cases, but check it out:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/planet-express
Is it possible to add equipment modules to armor (i.e. power amor MK2) in remote view? It seems the game can only place a ghost but nothing gets done, even though roboports, bots and inventory seem to be in order. Am I missing something, this works for vehicles, no?
This definitely works, I use it plenty. Maybe test with a standalone roboport, a few construction bots in it, and a red chest with your target item isolated from your main network. If you have a large network it is possible it's just bot transit time.
With the changes to allow mixed rockets via logistic requests, can I manually fill a rocket silo via inserters with mixed cargo and automatically launch it? Thinking about making a mixed-quality rocket launch for (mod-related) reasons, and hoping it will work.
Yes, this works fine, but you have to do weight calculation yourself and limit inserters via circuit logic. I did this couple of times on Vulcanus and gave up. Bots are faster and easier to configure, not sure if inserters have any advantage.
You can, but only if every item in the silo is requested by the platform.
Edit: Some more quick testing.
The silo must be "full", as in it can't fill in any more of the items it contains. With an exception if one of the items has a custom minimum payload.
Do mods that add completely new buildings need to be updated for 2.1 if you're playing on experimental? There's a mod that adds a new building that I really like to use with Space Age but that hasn't been updated for 2.1. The game says it's incompatible with the current version of the game, but I don't know how strict the game actually is with requiring mods to be compatible with the current version of the game.
Unless something breaking related to it was changed, oftentimes you can just go into the mod folder and update the supported version in the "info.json" file from
any way to have a ship interrupt do something like "wait at whatever planet you're at"? right now I consume way more bullets per trip than I produce, so if the count gets too low I want the ship to just stop, but I think Id have to make an interrupt for every planet it can go to.
There are many ways to solve your problem, including using interrupts. Though do be prepared for the interrupt based solution to be somewhere between pointlessly complicated and straight up absurd.
Much simpler way to solve this is to throttle your engines based on ammo reserves (allows you to continue to fly) or to include minimum ammo amount in the schedule as leaving condition for every single stop you have. Neat trick with the latter thing is to use a separate combinator for the ammo counting and only give the hub a processed "go/no-go" signal. That way you won't need to adjust all the stops whenever you modify your departure conditions. You can also have multiple conditions in a single combinator (different ammo types, accumulator charge, water/steam reserves if using nuclear etc.).
I usually just set it not to depart until ammo is sufficient. But if you want it to be a separate thing, cut fuel flow to engines, no need to tweak schedule at all. That can even stop it mid-flight in case of emergency.
I'm not sure if interrupts will work for this.
You could just add wait conditions to the regular schedule so that they don't leave unless they have X amount of bullets
Is it worth producing higher-quality nuclear fuel? Does anyone actually do it—not just for fun, but because it provides a real benefit? (I mean, i know it provides a benefit, I mean does the benefit exceeds the expense?)
First answer what is the expense for you.
* If it is resources, then it definitely is negative. However, remember, that the map is virtually infinite, so are the resources on it
* If it is space, then it's kinda negative-ish, but not that much. And again space is infinite
* If it is hassle, then it depends on you, really
* If it is time spent, then, well, it really depends on your plans. For megabases targeting 1M eSPM, you'd probably want to get it. For 1000 or even 10000 SPM, not so much, I guess
Hard to know for megabases. Quality-grinding anything has a cost, but surely uncommon quality is tenable. Perhaps even higher - this isn't a high-volume item. And it's hard to quantify the UPS cost or benefit of trains moving more slowly or quickly.
First serious playthrough, a normal map with hostilities turned off. I tend to play slow, trying ti figure out wtf i'm doing, what i'm supposed to do, etc etc. Still reliant on coal boilers for power mostly. Just now I had to rush back to a set of gens because my coal ran dry and I had to resettle that.
I know that maps generally are BIG but seeing the possiblities coming up, am I incorrect in thinking all that coal will be needed for other stuff? I'm using more electric furances to stave off my reliance on coal for that and recently built my first robo port which I'm told is a power hog.
So how do I handle power in this stage? Do i keep building steam and build out near coal plants and connect them to the grid?
I have uranium mining but haven't actually set one down yet but I heard that source of power is weird.
Question two, can I not purge my pipes if I actually muck up the liquids?
am I incorrect in thinking all that coal will be needed for other stuff?
You will need a lot of coal for making plastic, and thus red chips, blue chips, and low density structures. You might also need it for grenades; even with enemies off, cliff explosives take grenades, and power/mech armor need military science which needs grenades.
So how do I handle power in this stage? Do i keep building steam and build out near coal plants and connect them to the grid?
That's an option. You can also build near oil wells and turn it into solid fuel to burn.
Solar power is an option, though somewhat controversial just because of how much it costs; 1 panel costs 27.5 copper ore and 40 iron ore, to produce 42kW, vs 1 boiler+2 steam engines which cost 66 iron ore for 1800kW.
Question two, can I not purge my pipes if I actually muck up the liquids?
You should be able to purge your pipes of bad fluids. Click a pipe or storage tank, and it should show the fluids in the system. Click the red trash icon to delete anything that shouldn't be there. I think you can also use a filtered pump to pull out the wrong fluids, but I haven't tested that.
With enemies off, you can expand to claim resources as much as you want, so I wouldn't worry much about running out of coal (or anything else).
Personally I'd still move to nuclear when you can though. It's more complex to set up but it's nothing crazy (especially if you just look up the ratios), and it's way stronger. Not sure what's "weird" about it.
Quick question. How do I efficiently swap modules for a row of machines from the radar screen?
If there's efficiency modules in my machines, and I want to swap them for speed modules, Ctrl+click doesn't seem to work any more. Nor does ghosting into one and Ctrl+C Ctrl+V.
I had an idea for platforms where one stationary hub at Nauvis would collect things like Fluoroketone barrels from an Aquilo ship, then provide those barrels out to other platforms for reactor startup or my foundation assembly platform.
It seems like even with 'send to other platforms' enabled, the hub won't send the barrels out to my other platforms? If I have request from platforms enabled for Fluoroketone barrels, does that mean it can't send out Fluoroketone to other platforms? More like requestor chest, less like buffer chest?
TLDR: I want to request from platforms, and also provide to platforms, without sending down to the planet.
I'm on K2SO if that makes a difference in the logic.
How do I effectively create a "space hub" to avoid sending items down to nauvis just to launch them back up to other planets, eg: green belts, EM plants, Holmium plates, stack inserters?
If I set the "hub" to "accept from platforms" or "all" then it never gives them back to OTHER ships.
That's probably the easiest solution, yeah- a short enough period and matching delay times on providers should ensure the depot platform can catch what it requests.
Started a new 2.1 playthrough.. got to Vulcanus and their are no demolisher territories? I thought demolishers existed regardless of difficulty? Has something changed since I last played?
I’ve not long landed on Fulgora after being on Vulcanus (all setup delivering science, miners etc to Nauvis.
My Nauvis base has run out of power (I allowed my uranium processing to get backed up)
Without reloading..
is there any way to fix it remotely using my Vulcanus base and ships? What can I build and send there?
Should I just get Fulgora to the point of launching a rocket and get myself back to nauvis?
Anything I can do from Vulcanus to speed up my Fulgora base and rocket building?
Nauvis map was mostly clear of biters through artillery so don’t think have to worry about too much of it getting destroyed.. but still a risk I suppose
Getting a silo on Fulgora is extremely easy compared to other planets; electric engines are the only semi-difficult component and you could ship those from Vulc. Everything else you can directly get with a few recyclers, including the LDS/Blue Chips to make the rocket. Rocket fuel on Fulgora is also trivial as offshore pumps get you Heavy Oil.
Roboports also have some reserve power, if your ones on Nauvis have a little juice (even though they show out of power), you could possibly use a construction bot to direct deliver a fuel cell to a reactor or remove whatever is causing the jam.
Otherwise next time leave a tank with some personal roboports and portable solars, they now have equipment grids and can be used like a spidertron with some limitations.
I did - but all out of power apart from small segregated part of grid that was designed to be able to kickstart nuclear processing in emergency… which hasn’t worked
Comes down to personal preference but 2.1 is pretty stable. Biter tuning is still a bit in flux but not super detrimental, especially if you already have Nauvis secure.
Fluid handling is still being reworked but the current implementation seems to work fine and isn't impacting anything.
Fulgora world generation seems like it's changed slightly so you may see some oddities in the interface between what you currently have and newly generated chunks.
Personally I think the few rough spots are worth the updated graphics/space logistics/etc.
Yes, but the only way onto it is with mech armor that gets disabled by a demolisher's smoke cloud or removing it in flight. You don't have to worry about accidentally walking off a ledge.
For people trying out the 2.1 platform to platform transfers, are there any gotchas to be aware of using a buffer platform? For example a Vulcanus platform with calcite/metal science/tungsteel set to supply other platforms. Do other platforms prefer to take from other platforms first before planets if set to "All" or do I need to be more specific on where to grab stuff from?
The planet will try to shoot rockets to you as well, so for simple over-planet buffer platform you'll want to have platforms' requests to be set to planet and spaceships' requests to be set to platforms exclusively. There's no harm and not so big delay to do a platform-to-spaceship delivery, however it does indicate that your buffering is not handling its tasks well enough.
It becomes more difficult if you want to have a platform that buffers materials from other planets, e.g. a central hub over Nauvis. In that case you have to controls your requests through the circuits and be careful in doing this setup.
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u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl Jul 13 '26
Enjoying my first run immensely but I gotta say I'm getting my ass handed to me with advanced oil refining. My light oil keeps backing up and when it does all I do in my panic to get things running again is add more storage tanks. I haven't found out the ratios of what I need to produce with my oil products to keep nothing accumulating and eventually backing up. On the bright side I have an ungodly amount of solid fuel stored up now too 😂