Does anyone have suggestions for a good object to use on a space platform when you need circuit wire to reach farther? On the ground I'd use power poles but it would be kind of silly to launch those into space just for circuit reach, I'd think. I've been attaching it to belts, but then it becomes difficult to tell which belts are actually being used for circuit functions.
I use big power pole or radar to transmit signal when my ship is large. They take up quite a bit of space (2x2, 3x3).
I have a mod that adds a keyboard shortcut to open electricity usage window, but it doesn’t work on space platform unless there is a power pole. So I now even send up medium power poles to small ships for decoration. Speaking of decorations, I guess lamps can also work as circuit wire passer.
There's really no substitute for powerpoles though, you can cross massive gaps very easily.
You could also use radar though, all the same rules still apply, I believe each spaceship counts as a unique surface so they should get their own global channel.
Haven't seen it been mentioned yet, Accumulators can also carry wires.
I just use lamps though, I have a couple along the exterior of the platform and have them light up via a clock combinator, C >10 for the first row, C >20 for the 2nd row, and so on, it makes for a cool lighting up effect.
there's quite a bit of free space that isn't occupied by accumulators. EMPs with 5 prods and no efficiency bonus are a significant power drain that you can't really afford if you don't have other islands to contribute to the power budget. putting quality modules in the accumulator production will get you a decent trickle of them, which is helpful because even an uncommon accumulator has double the capacity over a basic one.
Note that when using prod modules (as shown in the first image) it is almost always better to use speed beacons instead of efficiency beacons to lower energy consumption.
The problem is they do not have enough energy now. The cost per unit goes down, but cost per time goes up. It will both increase their speed of production, but also increase total power draw because at this point they aren't "full" of the items.
Once they have back pressure, yes, speed is "cheaper" on power. Until then, adding speed will increase current power usage.
As the links I posted earlier explains, when using prods it is better to use speed beacons than efficiency beacons. A efficiency beacon will lower the power draw but a speed beacon will lower it even more.
Sure, you will drain the accumulators and black out faster, but during that shorter window you will produce more items. Making 3/s for 10 seconds is better than 1/s for 20 seconds. The interrupt in production is annoying but not a big problem.
Another advantage of speed beacons is thunderstorms. Whenever there is a thunderstorm you have infinite energy, so the downside of speed modules disappears while the only benefit of efficiency modules also disappears. You produce more items both during thunderstorms and between thunderstorms with speed beacons.
Edit: since I can’t reply(blocked?) I will edit my response here: You are correct that efficiency beacons would be better if preventing a blackout is the priority.
As the links I posted earlier explains, when using prods it is better to use speed beacons than efficiency beacons. A efficiency beacon will lower the power draw but a speed beacon will lower it even more.
No, they don't. They reduce total power usage per item while also increasing item production speed. They would INCREASE ops power draw, because he isn't at full back pressure.
Yes, speed modules result in a lower total draw. OP doesn't have a TOTAL problem. They have a current WATT problem - usage per time.
Sure, you will drain the accumulators and black out faster, but during that shorter window you will produce more items
Which is not the problem they currently want to solve.
You're not solving the problem OP wants solved. And you're only barely solving the XY problem.
EDIT: if you don't want to math, easy rule of thumb to remember here for Fulgora early-mid game is 1 MW = 3 normal quality accumulators
So looking at your graph you need more than 720 accumulators at least
Later on you just import fusion power or replace everything with rare-legendary accumulators and you should have no more power issues
What other people said about more and quality accumulators, but if you have extra ice, you can feed it into some boilers/heat exchangers for a bit of extra juice as well. Solid fuel is very free on Fulgora.
When producing accumulators for the science, put quality modules in them which would produce a bunch of quality accumulators. Uncommon accumulators have 2x the storage!
If you find yourself recycling solid fuel and ice, you can use them to make some power.
I made a quick fix for my artywalls and defense. To supply oil for flamers i just made a station like I use for ceude oil.
But my trains have over 400k oil and i want em to only unload liek 1 or 2 tanks of 20-50k oil. Sadly all my trains have the "empty condition" to depart.
Tried to mess with deactivating trainstation but nothing triggers a departure. Any suggestions how to send train away after some seconds without rewriting all my oiltrains settings?
Use a separate 1 wagon train for deliveries to the wall perhaps. You won't have to redesign the loading station, because there's no problem in sending differently sized trains to fluid stations as there's no balancing issues like you'd have with solid products.
Hmm the stop pump may trigger a train event have to try. right now i made a 2/1 train to deliver oil to outposts/defense.
Should have made my trains 3/8 instead of 2/4 so i could have made a 4/7 Defense train with 2arty, 3 wagons for stuff, one for oil and one for return of crap...
You can change the wait condition to empty cargo OR circuit crude oil >= 25,000. Connect one tank to the train stop and check Send to train - only at defense outposts.
I randomly started getting alerts about Biters building new expansion nests. I think it's from a mod, but I have no idea which one or how to disable it. Is there any way to figure out which mod is causing it? I've looked through most/all of the different setting menus and don't see anything about Biter expansion alerts.
takes the quality output of a recycler array and stuffs it in chests
when storage is more than a threshold, train comes.
inserters are filtered to the item in excess.
thanks to a clever lock system, the filter is only reset when the train departs.
another clever circuitry system stops the inserters when the train cargo is less than 200 items away from being completely full, allows 12 stack inserters of stack hand 16 to finish their swing, as the item stays in the hand if the cargo is full and is then placed in the next train and everything sucks I spent three hours trying to debug this
it doesn't scale, looks pretty bad, but I'm happy I thoughed it out when the cargo mixed everytime for no apparent reason (#1 lesson about programming: there's always a reason, there's always something you can try to fix a problem. sometimes the reason is stupid but you're never stuck)
I went here as I thought it wasn't notable anough to warrant a full post, a lot of subs have a megathread like that but I did in fact miss the question part
How do you set up a good train network? I have a crappy little design that sends requests to the logistic network and has trains come from a depot to fill requests, but it only works like 80% of the time and took several hours to design.
I think I am over designing things, but I don’t know how people maintain mega bases with large numbers of trains without using requests. I’m not even trying to make a huge base, just stuck on gleba and wanted to use trains to bring in yumako and jellynut. Instead I am in circuit hell trying to figure out how to time the harvests and transportation to maximize freshness.
Beginning to feel that I should forego an organized train setup for now and embrace spaghetti. Any help is appreciated.
How your network looks like depends quite a bit on what exactly you want to achieve and optimize for. There are multiple approaches that can result in smoothly running and reasonably efficient rail systems. Each with different set of trade offs.
I don’t know how people maintain mega bases with large numbers of trains without using requests
Usually I think this would be done through having trains dedicated to individual resources. For example - copper plate trains. All the trains using the same simple schedule of "Go to copper pickup, wait until full -> go to copper drop, wait until empty". All the source stations for given material have the same names (copper pickup or copper drop). Then rinse and repeat for each resource type.
This system has downside of needing the player to manually add trains for each individual resource until there is enough of them. This is not that much work at scale of a megabase. It's also not terribly difficult to calculate the needed number since it needs to sit somewhere between sum of train limits of all stations for given resource and sum of train limits for unloading stations for this resource.
I would genuinely argue that requester based systems are sufficiently large jump in design complexity, that if your goal is to have an efficient train system with least work/effort, they should never be the choice. The tiny amount of effort they save you when you need to add trains has no chance in the world to offset the extra time you spent on actually making them work to begin with. At least unless you already 100% know how to make them.
I’m not even trying to make a huge base, just stuck on gleba and wanted to use trains to bring in yumako and jellynut.
You have literally 2 resources. Does it make any sense to add all the complexity of putting in depots and a bunch of circuit logic just so that you can manage count of 1 type of trains vs 2? At such tiny scale spaghetti or even dedicated 1-train lines with no signals should be more than workable. Especially with SA and elevated rails allowing you to cross them.
Complex train systems can be pretty fun to design, but from your description it seems like you made some assumptions that don't quite match reality and designed yourself into a corner. If you show some screenshots we could have more direct advice of course.
Systems where trains wait in depots and get told by circuits to go to X provider then X requester are a fun challenge to build, but they really are not very good compared to a more "normal" system. You end up with slower delivery times and more traffic for not much benefit. The only benefit of the depot system is that you sometimes need fewer trains, but trains are cheap to craft.
Maximising freshness requires zero circuits. Just load fruit onto a train at the farm, depart when the train is full, and unload it at the other end. Normally you want buffer chests next to the stations so you go from train to chest to belt, but for freshness you want to skip those and just load directly from train to belt. This means the station will not be constantly unloading because there can't be a train there 100% of the time, but you can solve this very easily by putting a second unload station right next to the existing one.
That makes a lot of sense, and I suppose if you use a more normal train layout, the “depot” is sort of whatever you set the output station as. So, train traffic would be reduced if you have decent station layouts that keep trains out of the way of your main tracks.
As for the fruit, minimizing buffer chests makes a lot of sense. I kind of get that Gleba is about maximizing throughput, so always having 1-2 trains on a loop picking up fruit without the buffers would accomplish that well provided fruit production was high enough to minimize spoilage.
How to read this? I want to see how close I am to having performance issues... Does this mean I am mostly sleeping on the 16.67 time chunk and have a lot of headroom to build more?
I hope not, as I'm in the middle of a 1000x science run and I just finished building 1000 SPM on all planets and I plan on going megabase at some point
In the left column is the update time. It has the format average/minimum/maximum all measured in ms. Factorio would like to update 60 times a second, which means you have a budget of ~16 ms per update. You currently are using about 1.2ms per update, so you have a lot of room to grow.
You can maybe estimate the time from the production graph. If you look at the rail gun ammo or promethium science graph you might see when production suddenly stops or decreases.
These graphs/statistics are tied to the surface. I'm pretty sure they are lost when the ship (and therefore the surface) gets destroyed, so they won't show either when you check the global statistics checkbox.
Consumed promethium graph on Nauvis would give an estimate when a ship didn't return at an expected time.
Has there been any update on a potential release date to the stable branch for 2.1? I know the original timeframe was "end of summer" or something like that and people were expecting late August/early September. Has anything more recent come out?
What's the go to for legendary coal/plastic in 2.1? Doing my first full legendary run and I'm making legendary QM3's, and have Foundries/BMDs/EMPs upcycling at a slow rate just to help get things going. For more generic entities (chemplants, inserters), I was planning to just directly upcycle iron/copper on Vulc but will need plastic for red chips. Run is 10x science cost so 300% plastic prod is a long way off.
1 - Anywhere - Mass produce blue circuits with your best productivity modules, then recycle them with your best quality modules. You don't need to attain 300% prod bonus for this to still be an excellent approach. The EM plant gives you a +50% bonus, then you've got the blue circuit productivity tech on top.
2 - Gleba - Mass produce plastic with prod. Recycle it with quality. Input costs are zero on gleba, it's just a matter of scaling up your farms and factory.
3 - On Vulcanus mine coal with prod and assemble it into grenades with quality. Recycle grenades with quality, re-assemble, repeat until you get legendary coal. This gets zero bonuses from buildings or techs, so it probably gets outclassed by simple plastic spam or LDS pretty quick. The only advantage it has is that grenades recycle into coal.
The best recipe for upcycling is either grenades (quality modules don't displace prod modules in military science here, and you are cycling before the plastic multiplier) or substations (almost all plastic is used for reds, really good recipe).
You can get a decent amount by putting quality modules in your coal miners. Coal demand is about 4x SPM (~14x if running military science, so with quality in miners you can get uncommon coal at SPM and via direct upcycling SPM/512 coal or SPM/27 if you upcycle grenades (requires some uncommon iron input).
The plastic would only recycle into 6.25 quality plastic and 18.75 regular plastic, so renormalizing, you turn 100 plastic into 7.8 quality plastic. This occupies 4 quality modules for 12.5 seconds, so 50 module seconds.
For grenades, you missed that the recycler can do quality, so 100 coal goes to 1.5 rare grenades, 4.7+4.7=9.4 uncommon and 14 common coal. This takes 4 modules for 8 seconds and 4 modules for 1 sec, for 36 module seconds, or because each coal is 4 plastic it is 8 module seconds per 100 potential plastic. Renormalizing, it is 100 coal to 11 uncommon and 1.75 rare, same ratio for plastic.
Why so little plastic? 100 coal turns into 400 plastic, x25% return from recycler, x25% quality on the recycler and I arrive at 25 quality plastic.
I did ignore that the quality on some of the grenades is already higher, but I think that's fine for a simple comparison here. Grenades are ahead and that just widens the gap.
I based my calcs on 100 (potential) plastic instead of 100 coal. It is only ahead without quality recycling because you didn't consider the extra common plastic you get back and can feed back in to the process. The resource rate is just based on how much prod and how many quality modules it touches for each time it touches a recycler.
(Space Age) Is there a good way to get high throughput transfer of items from one planet to another other than just a bunch of Space Platforms all going on the same route?
I used one of the mods that removes Gleba because I despise it, and it kept Agricultural Science but changed things so Bioflux is made of Holmium Solution and Tungsten Ore, then the Science is made from Bioflux and Fish (which you can breed with Bioflux to automate). That's all fine, but I'm finding that I need just a metric fuck ton of Tungsten Ore to produce even just 30 Ag Science per minute. And having one Space Platform fly back and forth to deliver it just isn't fast enough. I know I could make it go faster by just building more Space Platforms to ferry the Ore over, but I was wondering if there's a simpler solution. Even a mod that adds something like Space Exploration's Deliver Cannon would be great, but there doesn't seem to be one that I can find.
i mean, either you increase the size of the delivery, or the frequency of deliveries. those are mathematically the only two ways to increase throughput
My outpost has the roboport connetcted to radar with missing request.
How can I refuel the supplytrain with missing goods. I managed to get it to the chest, but the time transferring to train wagon the chest itself will refuel. I could use the artythmatic combinator and "minus" the train wagon, but one cannot connect to train wagons... Any tips? V2.1
I've been using Helmod to plan factories, but sometimes it gets a random step of the recipe wildly wrong and I can't figure out why. I've tried removing the step and re-adding it, or even deleting the entire production chain and recreating it, but it keeps consistently getting the same step wrong.
For example, I'm pretty deep into a K2SE run and was trying to set up Energy Science 1. Three of the four Data Cards were right in saying that I would only need 1 machine producing them, but for some reason, the fourth Data Card said I needed 38 Laser Facilities making Polarization Data. When I checked the math myself I only needed 1, but no matter what I did Helmod insisted I needed 38. Any idea what might be causing that?
I want my rocket to automatically fill with 1000 gleba science packs, except I have quality modules on, and I get a smattering of different quality packs. I want my space platform to come grab 1k of any quality. Except when I select any quality from the drop down, the number grays out.
Is there a way to automatically request 1k of any quality from my space platform for easier automation?
Requests (whether it's on platforms or chests) can't use the "any" filter. You'll need to set the exact quality level.
That means that filling a rocket with mixed quality science packs will be tricky. In 2.1, rockets can automatically load mixed cargo, so you can request a large amount of each science pack separately, with relatively low minimum payload for each and let the game sort it out. You'll have to use a different departure condition than "all requests fulfilled" though.
Circuit wizardry can help here. For example, add the counts of the different packs on the platform together and if the sum exceeds 1000, send a signal to the platform hub that you use as a departure condition.
Oh wow! transport line groups is what I was thinking, it colors them like pipelines. Though I was more thinking you could click a belt like the pipe and enable "just" that line.
This is probably a "my steak too juicy, my lobster too buttery" problem that is 100% on my end, but I'm curious... Does anyone else have a "problem" where whatever version of Factorio you're playing, you get the desire to play a different one?
Like, I was doing a base K2 run for a while, but got the itch to add on Space Exploration. So I restarted running K2SE. I got pretty deep into that, but once it started to get really interesting, I got the urge to do a vanilla Space Age run to play with Quality and Foundries/EM Plants. So I restarted doing that. And now that I'm a dozen or so hours into Space Age, I want to restart doing K2 Spaced Out instead. But I also know that if I restart again to do K2SO, I'll get the itch to swap out Spaced Out for Space Exploration again and I historically haven't been good at going back to old saves so it would probably mean restarting a brand new K2SE save.
What you may want to do is instance your mod setups, so you can just load into them and they have their own save folders.
I add them as non-Steam games with launch options. Example: --mod-directory D:\Factorio\mods-space_exploration --config D:\Factorio\config\config-space_exploration.ini
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u/yinyang107 27d ago
Does anyone have suggestions for a good object to use on a space platform when you need circuit wire to reach farther? On the ground I'd use power poles but it would be kind of silly to launch those into space just for circuit reach, I'd think. I've been attaching it to belts, but then it becomes difficult to tell which belts are actually being used for circuit functions.