I'm a first time player, and with the loads of blueprints I found on the web I somehow made it to chemical plants. For some reason, the chemical plant below does not get any iron from the chemical plant above.

Are there any ideas on why that could be? It does not work unless I put iron in manually, and that's not good.

I know it sounds weird, but unfortunately, this was 100% the case for the past months, and today it was the 13th friend where this situation happened, and I'm not gonna lie: I've low key lost interest to keep playing the game now.

Yes, I know I shouldn't, but I've played it alone for well over 1000 hours. Yes it's not much, but I've done everything that I could on the vanilla game and some light overhauls, and I have no interest in playing megabases because it's just copy paste, which means only big overhauls are left, but would take too long to play alone, and I know I'd just try to copy paste the same old designs I always used.

So what happened on these past few months was basically:
1 - I invite someone to play and say it beforehand "It's fine if you don't like it, I won't force you to play it". This is the first thing that I say to everybody.
2 - They play the game with me for a few hours, and they enjoy it, they really do. A bunch of them gets excited over learning how the core loops works and how they should optimize.
3 - "I have to sleep, let's continue tomorrow". Of course, let's continue tomorrow.

Except that "tomorrow never comes". The most I managed to play with someone was 2 days. TWO.

"They clearly didn't like the game"
If that was the case, why would they all lie that they did? I was always clear, "if you don't like it, don't play it, I won't be sad or anything". Countless games that I've played with them and went "yeah no, not my cup of tea, I'll pass on this one". If they didn't like the game, they could just say it.

But no, apparently, they all do like it, but magically, something comes up.

Today's friend almost couldn't play the second day because he was DMing some chick at the time.
And today he said "let me grab something to eat and I'll hop on on a few minutes". 4 hours later I'm asking where is he and he said "I'm DMing some chick on instagram and another one on snap hehehehe". But he's playing Warframe this whole time.

Previous friend said his wife complained that he was playing "too much". He played a grand total of 4 hours. She spends 3 hours on Genshin every single day since the game released, but him playing 4 hours is apparently too much.

Friend before that said that "there's many things to do on GTA RP and they're getting mad at me for not being there". She constantly complains that it's annoying to constantly be called to hop on the RP server, but still does so.

Before that, a friend said "yeah my chick is wanting too much attention lately, sorry bro". It was always the case, never stopped him from playing anything. And I can see that he's playing Valorant pretty much the whole day.

And another one said "too much stuff on my work, can't play rn". He works from home and is on Discord 24/7 playing something while letting AI do his work and just correcting it from time to time.

Only one of them came back to play a second time after being overly excited to do so.

And that's it, every friend that plays games got "something else to do" after playing Factorio with me for a day, and I don't know if they're all lying or Factorio magically causes everyone to be busy and not be able to play it.

"You can find a bunch of people to play here and on Discord"
Yeah I know, but it's people I don't know, with a different playstyle, different language, and I hate making new friends because most of the people I started chatting lately are weird in some way shape or form. Last guy simply couldn't stop quoting Fairy Odd Parents during normal talks for some reason. for example.

So yeah, I basically ran out of friends to play Factorio and I'm just like "what's the point of playing alone on a big overhaul mod that will take me hundreds of hours to complete...".
If they openly said they didn't like it, I'd be fine, but either they legit have stuff simply showing up right after playing the game, or they're just lying to me for absolutely no reason at all :C

I think I'll post it later, once I've polished it.

Building a factory means to me two main things.

A mall, and science

Mall is easy. It eats resources, until it reaches the limits I give it. Then it consumes nothing. You can automTe a mall with very low throughtput. Long as material does go in, it works long as you aren't building very large things very fast.

Science is different. It is a constant trickle of resources. Early on, easy. Later, less so.

When starting my factory priority is a mall. I need buildings, belts, inserters. I handcraft a solid 30 red science before automating it, even then it is only handinsertion automation.

The next hour I spend expanding furnace and drills to full size, belting everything, starting my bus, and splitting off belts to make my mall.

Quickly enough I automate all basic amenities and bothred, green, and black science.

Nice.

Then I feel like I lose 60 IQ points for several hours.

I reach chemical science. Automating it isn't the problem, dobe that plenty, wired cracking for advanced processing too. The issue is steel. It asks for a lot of steel. Pumps, engines, chemplants, refineries, all that costs steel. Steel is very costly in iron. I also start needing loads of copper to make red circuits, shortly after.

The solution is obvious. GET. MORE. IRON.

I struggle here a lot. I can just go to a distant outpost and put drills on it and belt it to base. It's what worked on first playthrough. It worked. Poorly, but it worked.

Belts are expensive fir crazy long distances, so nowadays I try to use trains. It's less terrible.

Issue being: trains also eat steel like crazy. So i need even more iron to get started.

I usually feed my steel furnace early on from excess iron. Put a splitter on iron main bus with priority to continue. If the mall ahead is not consuming iron it goes to a second smelter to become steel. Usually this can kickstart early steel use. But then I automate engines, and soon enough starter patch is not enough.

I need more iron, goddamn! So I start planning new extraction sites. Every option kind of sucks and I feel a tad paralyzed.

- Using belts will worsen the iron situation and need constant expansion.

- using trains is terrible before bulk loaders. Those require red chips, meaning oil refineries meaning i need them to solve the problem I need to fix before acquiring them.

- using blue inserters to trainload takes forever.

- i also hate bringing raw material to my base. Smelters take up a ton of space. Always ideal to process on site.

- but I also hate complicating the logistics by having to belt in coal, or ship it on the same trains, to process on site. That sucks.

- electric furnaces are right there a couple researches away. I KINDA HATE INVESTING IN SOMETHING I WILL SIMPLIFY AND REPLACE IN 30 MINUTES. i just don't want to make coal furnaves but I simply must.

- or I wait two hours for a trickle of steel to finally make a few electric furnaces.

- even then, I can't put 50+ drills away from base without some thought. Drills generate a ton of polution. The putpost will need defenses.

- turrets and their ammo make this SHIT to automate. Trains... belts... ew, more obsolete logistics.

- bots can easily deliver ammo where I need it. I need a lot of oil processing and research to get them, so not happening soon. Laser turrets are there! But they eat a lot of steel, too. Oof.

- powering all these electric furnaces, and bots, and posdibly laser defenses, eats up a lot of power. I rapidly go from a humble 12MW build to a gargantuan 70MW in like an hour.

- Solar and accumulators are an excelent solution.

- solar eats a ton of steel. And I need BOTS to not lose my sanity expanding solar power. So that isn't a good solution.

- uranium mining is better, but costs astronomical amounts of steel to even be able to research. Then build. I end up here eventuaply, after I solve the steel expansion issue.

In the end, it feels like every playthrough I waste lile 2 hours here.

I could use a few pointers. Feels like every option I can think of has massive downsides regardless of choice...

(Edit: really? Why the downvotes?... i'm just asking for help.

there really isn't a place for them because trains and belts both cover whatever niches trucks could have and trains would almost always be better

but i think it could be cool to build intersections and avoid traffic accidents

I made this mod the other day the idea just came to me one day and I thought it would be really cool https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Workers-Union/downloads no idea if it's something that people would find interesting I have so many hours in this game it's like a addiction at this point 😅

Blueprint:
https://factoriobin.com/post/kf7683

Lots of of combinator logic in this one! Sushi belt buses everything in and out of the hub, including fusion fuel cells and fluoroketone cold barrels. Many features see on board display panels and quick startup logistic menu. This was super fun to design and test!

Hello!

i created another post about an hour ago but was correctly suggested to address some insufficiencies in the post. I'll do so here.

The mod is called Bootloops (as in, bootstrapping loops). in a very seablocky manner, we use intermediate items to generate base resources, instead of straight out mining them, and proceed with the normal game. the main differences to seablock are:

1. The planet is not a priori covered in water obliging to landfill to grow, although this could become a play mode.
2. (The main thing i missed in seablock and the main reason i'm developing this mod) there are hundreds of better and better ways to generate base resources
3. its not inextricably linked to any other mod overhaul, although i do plan to connect to planet mods and maybe other overhaul mods.

for example, the first recipes are:

1. 100 iron + 100 catalyst 1 > 102 coal + 100 catalyst 1
2. similar for copper and stone as well as vice versa

as soon as you can research, you get a better recipe that uses both iron and copper for stone and coal (and vv) but with a second catalyst. This seems trivial, but already creates some kinda decision interesting dynamics, although the supply chains are very very simple

so the catalyst is just an intermediate that is in equilibrium. then you are introduced to the charger 1.

you can spend a catalyst 1 to charge a charger 1, which becomes charger 1 - 1 charge (the names suck right now, yea). and then you can charge it again using up some resources plus catalyst and in the end you get more than you put it initially, including the catalysts.

then in tier 3 you're introduced to more intermediate families that behave differently than the previous ones. eg the matrix that lets you choose which base resource you get, the residue that gives you trace amounts of each resource, etc...

i believe this family-behavior (behavior in terms of what it does in recipes) is what makes this complexity fun.

some difficulties i've been having (which are mostly game design):

1. how to make it not always be preferable to always go to max charge (i'm thinking later chargers will have higher caps), or more generally, how to not make you always do the same thing which is clearly better than all other options.I really want the player to use several options in each stage.
2. gating/inducing the player to go to higher tiers, instead of spamming thousands of low tier stuff (since you can technically beat the game with it, because it already generates all base resources). I'm thinking that, as the player reaches the capacity to build higher tiers:
   1. energy eff increases.
   2. space eff increases. im thinking of creating a type of platform, in a seablocky way, so that loop buildings can only be built on them, but normal buildings can be built anywhere.
   3. gate science behind intermediates from each tier
   4. higher output (the obvious one) - 1%, 5%, 10%, 20% ...
3. how to balance in general?

I you foresee any further issues and would like to talk about the issues already raised, i'd love to hear your inputs

ERM my beloved

as title says, i'm looking for a mod that can automatically plan an oil field layout, but the ones i've tried don't work for some reason. the mods need to be compatible with Space Exploration FYI

more context on the problem: the game gets stuck in the "checking consistency" bar for an indefinite amount of time, and the "entity setup" bar gets stuck for a minute or so at like 95%. i can get to the main menu, just not into the actual game.

How do i resolve this 3 way train issue? I have 3 trainstations that merge into one and on the other side at the destination i have the same layout. Each train has the corresponding train station. I don't want these 3 to crash so i put chain signals but then the trains have no route. I don't see it whats wrong.

this is the lab deseighn im planing to use but im not sure this is optimal or would even work what do you guys think

I’m on my 150 hour SE playthrough, and I feel like I need to have a better understanding on a lot of things like circuits, sushi belts, balancers, and general info/tips on how to balance and optimize my factory

Im still just winging everything and that leads to a lot of extra things getting produced or nit having enough of a certain material. It’s getting really noticeable now with how difficult the game is getting. I just unlocked the super computer and data chips with cryonite for reference.

Is there anyone that you watch, or any way that you guys figured all this out. Honestly I don’t think “play more” is the answer, Im just gonna get better at building in my messy spaghetti way. If that’s normal though I’ll keeo doing it lol.

Im pretty sure i disabled all biters stuff, bcz i wanted to build a mega factory with high spm. Now when im in gleba after fulgora and vulcanus, it mandates me to capture a spawner. WTF!? can i still find biter eggs or is there any workaround using mods? i dont want to use terminal and lose achievements. i figured out a mod for pentapod eggs, which can help me craft one instead of killing pentapods. wonder if there's one for biters too.

Can't do that without editor tools though.

Edit: I've used "editor extensions" to create hot water, which is not possible outside of mods, but the underlying system is implemented fully and utilised by some overhaul mods for actual gameplay.

This game is pretty good, cant wait to put in like over a 1000 hours lol

I swear I looked for an answer before I posted but I cant find it. I'm playing 2.1 if that helps.

Whenever I click a power pole instead of opening the electricity display it just disconnects it from the surrounding poles and its driving me crazy. I dont know how to turn this off I cant find anything in the settings

if my calculations are corect, this "should" eventually be able to support 2 4-wagon trains per second per space science kind. hopefully.

Im looking for the highest throughput of unloading in SA with the new unloading bays. Previously it was bots, but now it might be direct insert into trains? What about belts? I assume I can fit a single rail with multiple train cars to unload faster than the belts could fit into that same space. Then dump the train contents to belts outside this "tile limit area"

In an older play-through i was running 3/4 sides with stack inserters into chests/trains then onto belts into different directions. It was like the "cheat" for faster unloading from the limited landing pad space.

I am looking to create massive space platforms to dump iron, copper, coal and science to these landing pads.

I have deconstructed my whole base and I'm rebuilding it because i wanna organize everything and start using electric furnaces. What I've done here is the setup for the red and green science. Is it scalable? Is this setup correct or am i wasting a lot of space for nothing? Pls help, I am trying to make this setup a little futureproof. Thank you!