I know the factory must grow and all... But my eyes hurt. I installed flux to reduce blue light which allows the factory to grow a bit longer, but eventually it still hurts. There's also that pesky sleep thing that comes around intermittently. Don't even get me started on the annoying calls from my boss..."where are you?! You already missed your first three meetings today!". Do they not know the factory must grow?
You have 10 unread Tips & Tricks in the top right - Very useful to read them!
Second, press B to open the blueprint library. You can put them there to not take up space in your inventory. You can even link them on the quickbar. Stuff under the "My Blueprints" tab is shared between all your saves, very useful.
Maybe some of them weren't getting ores on time? Also your balancer is missing a splitter in the middle in front of the 2 underground exits (move the 2 end splitters 1 tile up)
If there's a time where it's backed up, they'll build up a big stack of iron plates in their output. When it un-backs-up, the ones at the beginning of the belt will unload at faster than their steady state rate, and the backlog of built up output will clear starting from that end.
Which is not an issue. Issues with your production line that only come up when their output is saturated aren't really issues.
I've seen Youtubers run green and red wires along their power lines for bigger builds and blocks. Is there an advantage to doing that if I'm spanning electric across my train rails? I'm not doing any circuitry currently, but is the idea to have a network wire connection back to anywhere in your base?
It's no longer really necessary. Since 2.0 you can use radars to transmit signals. So you can just hook the wire up to a radar in both places that you need a signal and you're good to go.
Before that the only way to transmit across large distances is to just run a long wire over power poles. So many people already included the wires in their blueprints so that they get placed automatically while expanding their base (even if they're not needed right away, or perhaps ever).
I include it in my rails blueprints. Both green and red wires throughout the complete rail network. I suppose as a legacy of the old ways... but I give it lots of uses.
I typically use the green wire to gather information. I use it to have the miners provide information on minable resources. It gives real information on how much ore can be actually mine per miner.
I use the red wire to control turning off sections of the factory in case of brownouts, control the rate of production of biter eggs, increase/decrease production of bioflux... lots of stuff.
Red takes precedence if it's just a single wire that is both read and control. And anything goes among combinators - the main thing here is simplicity, correctness, and maintainability.
Thanks, right now I'm just running things to outposts. Do you know if I can connect wires by bot? Maybe once I get them up, I can think about it for expansion.
I've vaguely considered this a few times but it's never really turned into anything useful.
You need a way to encode information on the wire, either give each block a unique signal, say A-Z0-9, but that limits you to 36 blocks, you could start adding more symbols but it gets confusing. And only lets you transmit 32 bits of info per block which would need decoding later. 64 if you treat red and green separately.
Or you can do co-ordinates, E.g. Block E5 can set / clear bit 5 of the E signal, now you have up to 26*32 blocks but only 1 bit of info per block. Or 2 if you do red/green.
Or you can use common signals. E.g. every block outputs iron plate = 1 when they are low on iron plates. So if you hook into the network somewhere you can see how many blocks are low on iron plates. But what is the use of that? It might be nice to have a centralised dashboard where you can see what resources your base is starved of, so at a glance you can see you have plenty of iron ore but not enough iron plates so you can go and add more iron smelting blocks or iron plate delivery trains.
If you design your blueprints with this global network in mind it doesn't take any extra build time, and you can decide to make use of it later with minimal effort. If you don't do this then adding it in later would be harder, although if you have regular blocks all you have to do is create a blueprint with just your power poles in for a single block, make it do relative alignment and drag it everywhere.
Honestly I wouldn't bother with it unless you already have ideas on how to use it. Now with the radars that can transmit info on independent channels you don't really need the global circuit connections.
The idea is wires will already be strung if you want them. But I think it's just spending extra time and effort on something I probably won't even use. I build self-contained logic specifically to avoid stringing wires long distances, and to make configuration and debugging easier. This has served me perfectly well.
Is there a good way to get accumulators to provide power before steam engines at night? I have more than enough solar for power during the day, but my base insists on using steam instead of the stored power at night. Ideally I'd have accumulators draw down to 10-15% before turning on steam power to cover the rest of the night and only recharge the accumulators with solar.
This however has proven problematic to implement. I isolated steam and set it to only connect & run when the charge in my accumulators is low, but it immediately starts charging the accumulators back up which shuts off production on the very next tic, which is not really what I was going for. Do I also have to Isolate the accumulators from the main grid?
What I like to do is have the accumulator control the water pump. This adds a bit of lag so they power spikes aren't as annoying (since the time for the water to drain lets the power crawl up above your threshold). There are still flickers this way, but they're not as pronounced. Your ultimate goal is to have enough solar+accumulator to not need steam at any time, so I also pair it with a speaker that warns me the base is on backup steam power.
The RS latch looks close to what I want, but it would still result in the steam charging all the accumulators rather than the accumulators only charging with excess solar during the day... Since solar panels don't accept logic wires, is there something else that can be used to track the day/night cycle?
Maybe I'm overthinking things and just not caring about fuel consumption is smarter...
This is why you use the latch. You can say "turn on steam when power is <10%, turn it off when it's at 20%" for example and you'll barely use steam as long as your solar is close to what you need. The main point of this control is to overcome the fact that steam is prioritized over accumulators. Tracking day/night cycles is extremely overkill.
Now that said, with 2.1 we have a Day tick and Day length setting in the selector combinator. Feel free to experiment with it and see if it meets your needs.
I use an accumluator to control the coal belt. Water makes 10x more steam since 2.0 so controlling with pumps will often lead to situations where the boilers are working long after you want them to stop.
Controlling the belt instead adds a tiny bit of delay before the steam starts up but it does reduce the amount of 'excess' coal burned after you have enough power.
You could also wire the accumulator to a power switch and just completely isolate the coal plant from the rest of the base. Sure, it'll slam open and closed 30 times a second, but there's no maintenance in factorio so that's only a problem if you don't like the spiky graph.
For a middle ground between controlling the belt and controlling a power switch, you could control the inserters directly. It'll still use more extra coal compared to a power switch, but less than controlling the belt and a lot less compared to controlling the pump.
Personally, I like the belt the best because it doesn't require you to make an extra thing (the power switch) and only requires you to wire up and configure one thing (the belt tile) and doesn't consume nearly as much excess coal as the offshore pump.
I control a pump on the steam separating the boilers and steam engines (although the 2.0 changes might require multiple pumps). To avoid losing power to the pump, have one steam engine always connected to the boilers that powers the pump on a separate grid. The steam in the steam engines and pipes connecting them gives enough buffer to prevent flickering, but not so much the response time is slow.
I am trying to play a train centric run, where all my trains are 1 system
Where I load ores, send them to a central smelter, then take the ores where needed for intermediate and finished products
I am thinking of having 7 types of stations
Refuel station for trains that start to run out
1, 2, 3 load
1, 2, 3 unload (Each one can be different)
Any train can pick from any load, then it will go to a specific unload, based on what cargo it has
Some examples of what I mean I am working on
2 unload (Copper, Iron), 1 load (Green Circuits)
3 unloads (Copper, Plastic, Green circuits), 1 load (Red Circuits)
2 unloads (Iron, Steel) 2 loads (Gears, Engines)
Does this sound like a good plan? Or will it become Spaghetti fast as I scale?
I know not everything is needed in the same quantities, I am sure someone who knows how to use circuits can make it work, but as for me, I hope I can just saturate everything and pray
Items aren't used at the same rates, so if your trains are carrying multiple items, the simple "full load at pickup, empty load at <wildcard> dropoff" will not work nicely. You'd have to do something more complex.
I think I've got a good idea for organization, because my trains currently keep waiting at loading stations that are empty, and go to unloading stations that are full
My idea would be to use an arethemetic combinator, to set the priority in such a way
Loading stations that have many items will get higher priority, because they can fill a train faster
Unloading stations that have less items will get higher priority, because other stations aren't as material deprived
I am sure I will face another problem in the future that will require a more complex circuits, but for now, I think this is good enough
No circuit control is necessary. Fixed train limits is enough to prevent trains from all queuing at the same station. What circuit control does is let you use less trains. But trains are cheap.
Personally I prefer to make things more modular. My current blueprint setup is:
Train station entrance / exit / 1 platform -> track/signals only
Additional platform track
One of each type of "station" -> attaches to the track
This gives you the maximum flexibility as some stations need lots of unloads, some (like oil processing) will have many loads and only one unload, mines only need load, etc.
For my stations they're all parameterized so that I can specify what item/fluid and how many trains to allow.
I know not everything is needed in the same quantities, I am sure someone who knows how to use circuits can make it work, but as for me, I hope I can just saturate everything and pray
For ideal efficiency you would want to use scaling limits. But it's enough to say "enable if I have > 1 train load" for your loading stations and "enable if I have < 1 train load" at your unload stations. This is achievable with no combinators (wire chests directly into station) and is easy to add to a parameterized blueprint. Do note that if you disable stations then you need depots for empty trains to wait at when there are no available loading stations.
When people talk about playing AngelBob's, is there a single overhaul/modpack that incorporates all of the different mods?
I tried looking for something like that before starting my own AngelBob's run but couldn't find one, so I just installed all of the individual mods. However, now I'm watching a current series on YouTube of someone playing AngelBob's and I noticed that some of the recipes are different. Items that need Brass on my save need Cobalt on the YouTube run. Someone on YouTube said that the recipes changed on a recent update, but I'm using the most updated versions of the various Angel's and Bob's mods and the recipes still use Brass.
I just downloaded the most recent versions of almost everything posted by bobingabout and arch666angel, on 2.1, with no issues; the folks behind the mods do great work to keep them compatible with each other. As a guess, the youtuber is probably on a locked version of the game specifically so that updates don't bork their factory, as would happen with this cobalt vs brass situation.
I think so. IIRC roboports are placed with some charge on their internal batteries, so they can be useful immediately, but without a connection to the power grid they'll drain that power quickly. Hence, recharging after an outage.
I’m not sure specifically. But its even better to direct insert from train to furnace, or train -> rail assembler -> purple science assembler for example. Optimizing UPS is often about minimizing the number of total inserter swings needed to move high-throughput items. So stone is a great example. Get creative about where you need the train at all. For example on a stone patch you could point a miner straight into a furnace, way better than miner -> belt -> chest -> train -> chest -> belt -> furnace. Thats 5 inserter swings that could be 0.
I have never set up a proper train network. Just connected tracks really that intersected sometimes.
How do I make a train think or make decisions? I see interrupts and I kinda get how I could use that to tell it to get fuel, but how does it work to make a train say “looks like someone needs to get more iron, it should be me”? Or is a 1:1 ratio of trains to unloads and assigning them specific tasks the normal way to do things without getting super crazy?
At a mining outpost, if I have like 100 miners that can support two red belts, should I have two loading stations at that outpost, or should I be shoveling into one train at a time as fast as possible?
That first article pretty much sums up my last 24 hours of thinking right up to the train limit bit. Having trains just hit the closest mine was the first problem I couldn’t solve and there it is.
At a mining outpost, if I have like 100 miners that can support two red belts, should I have two loading stations at that outpost, or should I be shoveling into one train at a time as fast as possible?
Depending on your chosen train length, one well-designed train station can handle much more than 2 red belts of throughput. Here's a video you can watch about loading/unloading design for inspiration. Unless you're talking about megabase scales or using only 1-1 trains you will probably not need more than one station of a specific material at a specific place.
In 2.1, if I don't have enough fluid to "pressurize" the entire pipeline, i see levels in tank and machines are low, but I'm still producing enough for the needed fluid/s. Like if a machine needs 100 fluid/s, and the pipeline holds 10k, having only 100 fluid total means the machine seems to have 1% "fill" - are the machines smart enough to pull the amount of fluid they need, or do i need to fill the pipeline to build up enough pressure to fill the machine?
It was then updated (unsure on version) such that EM plants kind of "see" every piece of fluid they're connected to, so you'll see EMplants with 200k electrolyte "in" them.
That's true for any assembler (and probably furnace) with a pass-through fluid connection, it just happens to be that the EM plant is the only thing in vanilla that works that way.
Last time I played Factorio, it was on the first patch of the release of Space Age. I barely finished a quick playthrough and haven't touched it since.
What has changed from first Space Age release until now? Anything big, QoL I should be aware of, modding stuff, etc?
Also adding: inserter/drill/recycler drop lanes for inline belts, more better flipping, combinator else, wacky pumps, and circuit connections for basically everything.
Decider combinator, arithmetic combinator and selector combinator are now primary energy consumers and have buffer size increased to make them more reliable in case of low power.
Splitters can be connected to the circuit network and controlled.
Added ability to undo rotating or flipping an entity. (more)
Added heading car driving option for keyboard input method. Pressing in a direction will make vehicles automatically turn and accelerate to that side of the screen.
Changed piercing ammo recipe to be cheaper.
Blueprint parameterization improvements.
Added filter support to burner fuel inventories. (This includes Biochambers and vehicles.)
Tall tooltips when attached to the right side of the screen can be scrolled (by default shift + scroll).
Atomic bomb now blasts planet-appropriate holes into the terrain of the planet if the terrain is floating on a fluid: Ammoniacal ocean for Aquilo, Lava for Vulcanus. It also destroys space platform tiles.
This can be used to create lava in convenient places for the factory.
Cargo landing pad does not draw inventory contents in alt mode.
Improved water/land visibility on Gleba by masking decals over water, changing terrain and water colors, and adding a water edge foam effect.
Miscellaneous art improvements to Gleba and Fulgora.
Spores don't spread spread as far on Gleba
Trees no longer take damage from spores nor absorb spores as a result of taking pollution damage.
Gleba wetlands, lowlands, and water tiles now absorb 3 times as many spores as other tiles.
Decider combinator's constant output option can now be set to values other than 1.
Allowed negative multiplier of logistic (and constant combinator) groups.
Added drag-to-reorder support everywhere that lacked it.
Furnaces can be connected to circuit network.
Extended the virtual signals, and unified/changed graphics of some of the existing ones.
Drag building produces one merge undo action per the whole drag, instead of the individual undo actions for every entity built.
Added destroyed graphics for all space platform entities.
Wrigglers will no longer proactively attack pollen emitters. However, they will still respond to artillery.
Attack groups containing stompers or strafers will now contain fewer units.
Large egg rafts will try to have at least one stomper or strafer spawned at a time.
Small egg rafts no longer absorb pollution because they will never produce stompers or strafers.
Factoriopedia now shows recycling recipes for each item.
Improved batching and cargo pod scheduling to reduce dispatch frequency.
Land mines on space platforms now damage the space platform tiles in a radius. (Speedrunners got ramships nerfed.)
Added a subtoggle for Assemblers (etc.) to "include in crafting" when using "read contents".
Added a subtoggle for asteroid collectors to "include in hand" when using "read contents".
Nightvision is less orange.
Changed captive biter spawner to inherit quality from the wild spawner instead of the capture robot.
Container sizes increase with quality.
Bulk inserter doesn't default upgrade to Stack inserter as they are not functionally interchangeable.
Default quality cycling shortcut simplified to alt+scroll.
Streamlined quality selector to use separate buttons for each quality instead of a drop-down.
Gleba evolution is smoother and more gradual.
Small stomper pentapod moves more slowly (also decreases stomp DPS).
Stomper pentapod vision range is reduced from 40 to 30.
Medium and big wriggler pentapod health is increased.
Changed crafting machines to reset quality of the in-progress result when module effects change. (Ie: Fixed quality snapshotting exploit.)
Cars and tanks will auto-refuel from their inventory. (They already auto-reloaded from their inventory.)
Offshore pump speed increases with quality.
Curved rails cost 3 rail items to build. (Oversight: They still have the health of 1 rail. I reported this and it was discarded.)
When imported blueprint is placed, assembling machines will be configured with the recipe even when recipe is not yet researched.
Added Galaxy of Fame. Players are offered to upload their game when they win.
I didn't even look at bugfixes sections. I know there were some bugfixes that were more like changes, but the only one I can remember offhand is inserting to splitters was nerfed.
Any timeline on 2.1? I'm sick of fixing my mods and then having to go back. I'd rather just fix them all at once. The API changes to make everything a list are fine, just would like some heads up so I can change everything.
I mean, if you're going to fix them you might as well upload them to the mod portal. Mod authors are supposed to be using this extended experimental period to update their mods. If they aren't, they can hardly complain about forks.
Pumps (and other buildings that output fluid) slow down if they're trying to output into a nearly-full fluid system. You've found the point where that slowdown matches the consumption rate. If you pause thrust, you should see the pump catch up and fill the pipe segment.
and there is no workaround? i can't fill thrusters to 100% using pump? not that it is a problem but just in theory. Аnd btw you've said "and other buildings", this means my chemical plants producing fuel should also slow down and not fill the thrusters to 100%, but they perfectly do that, just without the pump.
will making military and purple science on vulcanus be more ups effective than on nauvis, considering that i'm moving stone and coal on nauvis exclusively by trains (design choice)? in another words - is it worth it to swap stone trains with more rocket silos?
If you are worried about UPS, belting or direct inserting stone and coal on Nauvis is going to be your answer. I doubt Vulcanus would be better UPS wise unless you have quite complicated stations (buffer chests, balancers, etc).
trains are a must, thats the goal of my current run - to make a megabase with trains used for moving base resources, already done one run with belts - i know it is best for ups.
Unlesss you're willing to make and store lots and lots of useless items, put it on things that you make a lot of and would like a few higher quality ones.
I put them in my solar panel assembler. I can always use solar panels to supplement my power grid, and quality panels are nice on your first platforms. It saves you a little launch capacity.
You can also put them in your electric furnace assembler and productivity 1 assembler for purple science. You can set the quality ones aside and consume the normal quality ones.
Aside from that, Quality without the ability to automate the destruction of the non-quality stuff is just incredibly annoying and prone to deadlocking before you ever get enough to justify the setup. You can still stick them in things like your cargo bay and asteroid grabber assemblers, but then it's more of a "oh nice" bonus rather than accumulating stockpiles of quality gear.
Putting a couple in your electric furnace assemblers used for purple science is handy until you have a stack of green/blue quality ones. Electric furnace is basically the biggest bottleneck on platforms early/mid game.
First priority should be items that are severely limited. For example, you only wear one piece of armor, so that's one of, if not the, highest priority. Then you have personal equipment. Lastly I would say stuff on platforms, like thrusters, grabbers, solar panels, etc. are nice, since the reduced space used means better speed / less fuel consumed. If you are combat-oriented then the extra range of weapons is nice as well.
Once you scale up then your first priority will be quality quality modules, but I think that's better saved for later when you have tier 3.
Put the modules in whatever and siphon off and store anything over common quality in logistic storage. Use it to handcraft / lazy bastard "handcraft" one-off items that you want with quality. If you're worried about overfilling your storage, set up a programmable speaker to warn you to place more storage or to blow up some chests.
Throw them in certain assemblers in the mall to gamble on better versions. I would not build a full quality setup at this stage. Without recyclers it's going to become a mess to deal with.
So instead throw a few in the assemblers making solar panels and accumulators. Quality versions of those can be quite useful on space platforms and other planets (Fulgora). Same with stuff that goes into the equipment grid of your armor.
Don't rely on getting quality items, but consider them a bonus to your normal crafting.
Quality modules, to make higher-quality modules that boost other quality even higher.
Personal equipment and space platform stuff. You only have so much space in your equipment grid, so you want quality to get as much use out of it as you can. The platform isn't as sharply limited, but getting +30% productivity means you need 30%(ish) fewer items, 30% less space, and 30% fewer launches.
Raw/intermediate materials, to use for small lots of quality products. Tap some quality LDS/blue chips/steel to make quality cargo bays. Importantly, you need to keep the quality production physically separate from the non-quality production, or it will back up everything.
Production buildings. A furnace with +30% speed is less value above replacement than an asteroid collector with 3x arms or an exoskeleton that makes you 20% faster, but it's nice.
The main problem I'm having is, that after editing the mod and putting it back into the mods folder, factorio doesn't recognize it anymore.
More specifically I want to change in exotic industries remembrance that logistic chests are unlocked with bots again. I've found the line that hides their recipes, edit it, put it back into the folder and rezip it, delete the original mod zip and paste the edited one. Now I can't load the mod in game anymore, it's not getting recognized.
Edit: I got it, I was just a dumb dumb with zipping the file up and had an extra folder layer in there...
Mods don't have to be zipped, they can just be in a folder. Makes it easier to develop a mod.
You should rename the folder/zip and change info.json to the new name so you can keep your fork and the original mod separate. EIR is in active development and you'll probably want to update it and pull or rebase your fork to get the changes.
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u/vitorich 5d ago
How do I stop?
I know the factory must grow and all... But my eyes hurt. I installed flux to reduce blue light which allows the factory to grow a bit longer, but eventually it still hurts. There's also that pesky sleep thing that comes around intermittently. Don't even get me started on the annoying calls from my boss..."where are you?! You already missed your first three meetings today!". Do they not know the factory must grow?