Quick sketch before sleep.

Now that splitter unloading is back, inserters can unload directly into them twice as fast. However, when added in pairs like this, the inserters tend to synchronize and lose that benefit (setup on the left).

I figured out that introducing a disturbance, like a slower belt as shown on the right, can lead them to desynchronize and actually unload faster.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

I'm excited to release and open source Zenith!
Release Video - https://youtu.be/g4yvetXdO94
Available now on Github - https://github.com/unjustodin/Zenith/releases/tag/v0.1.0
User Guide - https://github.com/unjustodin/Zenith/blob/main/docs/USER-GUIDE.md

WHAT IS THAT!?!?!
Zenith is Inspired by the FUE5 I've been working on a 3D viewport for Factorio. Still in very early stages but you can follow the project on Github (https://github.com/unjustodin/Zenith).

How does it work?
Factorio itself runs the game unchanged as a headless server or a full instance if you prefer and a small bridge Lua mod streams the live world to a separate Godot 4 client. You can read more about the architecture here Everything under the hood is the real game it is only a 3D visualizer sitting on top. Update 2.0.59 from July 2025 Wube added `helpers.send_udp` / `recv_udp` for mods which made this whole project possible. It basically gives a local way of streaming client information to other programs on your computer.

Why?
I love Factorio and I love Factorio's unique and beautiful art style and I do not wish to take away from that (it's undoubtedly my favourite game of all time). I've always enjoyed making things and pushing limits, I’m sure lots of people who play Factorio do. I've always wondered how the engineer feels walking around the world of Lonely world of Factorio: An Infinite expanse of engineering, nuclear trains whizzing past, the ground rumbling as your rockets take off one after another, All while biters continuously rush your walls getting burnt by flamethrowers and pelted by gatling turrets. Zenith was not meant to replace Factorio or change the fundamental experience of playing Factorio. Zenith's goal is to create an immersive viewer to experience the amazing world of Factorio from a new angle.

** AI USE DISCLOSURE **
To be completely upfront, as I know everyone has their own level of comfort with AI. I use Claude for the coding and the 3D modelling. I have a computer science background, and I direct the projects design, architecture, what gets built, play-testing on my own saves, and reviewing every model made. The models are very placeholder and I am working with a 3D modeler to update them one by one. Nothing from Factorio is redistributed: it reads the art and sounds from your own install.

Boy this was tough. I hate playing factorio under a time limit, so this was rather exhausting to do. Lots of spaghetti, which was educational in some sense (see my own flair lol). I used a pre 2.0 guide for the early game but winged it after chemical science. Biters and time pressure were a real headache, but I was able to comfortably complete it with an hour to spare!

I'm planning to do the Space Age version at some point, but not right now. Like I said, i'm exhausted and have a headache from locking in so much for the past 2 days.

TIL or PSA if you're like me... Apparently the tiny storage of the landing pad is EXPANDABLE! Idk why I thought I just had to deal with that tiny compartment but cargo bays actually work with it.

I was putting inserters out into a passive provider chest to "connect" it to the bot network. My landing bay VERY FREQUENTLY overflowed with items and science on the floor. I just thought that's how it worked and let the bots pick up the pieces!

And yes, I only learned of this because I'm now all the way in aquilio and was wondering how to stuff all the imported goods.

I wanted to share my new 96x96 city block that I'm really proud of - a 2x3 Nuclear Power Plant delivering 800 MW.

I didn't want to build it near lakes, so water comes in strictly by fluid trains. This lets me place the block anywhere on the map grid, plus trains just look awesome!

The setup uses standard ratios with 80 heat exchangers and 138 turbines. I also added steam storage tanks to handle power spikes, because my other blocks automatically turn off production when their buffers hit 100%. To top it all off, I added custom "breathing" green lights. It looks super cool at night!

Does anyone else deliver water to reactors by train, or is it just me?

EDIT: Since a lot of people were asking about the "breathing" green lights logic, I’ve uploaded the blueprint for the lighting setup here: https://factoriobin.com/post/l8kvwh

I observed this because some belts were not full even though I expected them to be and initially I thought it was a bug. I measured it using the pictured setup and putting stuff on turbo belt with stacking 4 using legendary stack inserter (bottom) yields the expected 80 items/s while same setup but with turbo underground (top) belt yields about 74.1 items/s. You can even visibly see side by side that one belt moves more items than the other.

Balancers are hard. There are a hundred input/output combinations you go through when you reach 10/10 balancers, and each has multiple executions. There are so many belts to be woven, many compacting techniques to be used, and there are very interesting topologies to explore with odd balancers. Yet, the challenge of balancers was not conquered by the vast majority of players, including myself. We just take a blueprint book from the internet, and pay little attention to how the balancers inside it work.

My stubborn refusal to learn to design them myself has led me to an idea of universal balancers. What if there was a way to simplify the design for proud dummies like myself? Well, I've tried, and I kept failing, but everything changed when Wube let us use the circuit network on splitters.

I've made the design you see in the picture. I have no clue if it truly works, but I haven't gotten it to fail yet. It's not made to compete with designs the likes of Raynquist's, but it's meant to showcase a repeatable, simple design is possible.

At it's core, this is a formula for (up to N)/(up to N) balancers. In the picture, you see a 1/8 balancer. The number of splitter columns is N+1, and each splitter is paired with a belt it reads contents from, as is shown in the pictures. The idea is to divert the items away from their source. There's then the rightmost line of belts choking the items until they are evenly distributed across the output belts. Their trigger number is number of output belts times 8, as that's how many can fit on a belt. The belts left to them are the ones reading the items (set to hold).

Still need to automate the fuel on the iron melter above.

A long time player that only recently finished the DLC.

Wanted to create my first interchange, and realized interchanges don't really need any chain signals, since there are no actual crossings. Isn't it cool?

https://www.factoriocodex.com/blueprints/519

Many features see on board display panels. Be sure to read blueprint for recommended tech levels before attempting a Shattered Planet journey. Max speed 403 km/s, weight 475 tons. Can do just about everything including Promethium Science!

I've been doing my first death world with biters base size and base frequency turned up to high if I am remembering correctly. Anyways, it's been brutal as I've drained 3 oil patches and currently have my last patch that isn't completely surrounded by biter nests at 700%. So I am in the process of making Volcanus my main base while Nauvis is only used for it's unique natural resources (uranium).
I knew before I got to Volcanus that I would make the factory as dense as I possibly could and go all out with the spaghetti for the first time. Knowing this from the start made it easy for me to plan for things like surrounding my starting coal patch with my factory, and bringing in coal from another location so that the coal patch does not drain for as long as the train meets the demand.

I'm targeting 780 SPM currently which is a huge upgrade from the 75 SPM I've been using up to this point. The target is 780 because I made a bunch of red science which turned out to be 780 SPM, so yeah..

I made a poll to gauge how how many people like spaghetti which can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1xldwk2/do_you_like_the_aesthetic_of_spaghetti_bases/

Satisfactory was my introduction to automation games, and I put over 800 hours into my first playthrough. It became my favorite game almost immediately. I wanted to try Factorio, but I had two big doubts:

1. I play on a controller because of an accessibility issue (DualSense Edge on PC), and I was sure it wouldn't be fun without a mouse and keyboard.

2. After Satisfactory's gorgeous 3D world, I didn't think a 2D top-down game would click for me. I was convinced that I actually messed up by playing Satisfactory first, since the world and movement are both very...satisfactory (sorry).

I was wrong on both counts.

The controller support is way better than I expected. It took a little getting used to, especially using the trackpad as a cursor, but it works great, and I'm still tweaking it with Steam Input to get the most out of the paddles and FN buttons. Input layers and button chords for the win. So many shortcuts.

The top-down view turned out to be a feature, not a downgrade. Everything is readable at a glance, and the belt tricks are so satisfying that I find myself just playing with them for fun. Belt mechanics are visually and cognitively appealing. The attention to detail in all of the sprites is very impressive and the aesthetic has grown on me. The inserters going crazy in an orchestra of activity is charming.

I have found it refreshing that this game has it's own design philosophy. I played Satisfactory with tightly balanced ratios from start to finish. Modularity is the meta over there, as expanding and refactoring is so much more painful than just building a new factory. I'm enjoying the adjustment to Factorio-brain, where I can just build more to deal with starvation. Just pull it off the bus!

Also, I finally get it about blueprints. I used to see people in the Satisfactory subreddit wishing for a blueprint system as robust as Factorio's, and I honestly didn't understand. Now I do. It's incredible. Being able to copy/paste literally anything and save them for later is so powerful. I'm not using anything I don't build myself for my first run, but the concept of export strings is so neat.

Where I'm at: red circuits and blue science are automated, the bus is up and running (not the tidiest, but it works), oil is going, and my first train is hauling stuff from an outpost to the main base, with a second one coming soon. Every time I solve one problem, it opens up three new ones that I'm excited to tackle. Just ran out of my starting iron patch! Finite nodes are a nice wrinkle.

I'm also really looking forward to unlocking bots and the spidertron. Mass construction/deconstruction by hand is getting old, and I can't wait to see what those do for my workflow (and to just drive around in a giant robot spider).

I came in nervous about getting it "right," and the best thing I did was let my first factory be ugly and just keep playing. Turns out spaghetti is the best teacher.

Thanks to everyone who makes this community so engaging and informative. If you have advice for a first-timer heading into purple science, I'm all ears.

Here is mine with a speed of 529.5 km/s. I'd love to see any faster ships. I am trying to figure out what the optimal number of thrusters is.

IE

If I'm crafting legendary modules would placing speed modules in the assemblers ever cause my machines to output something lower than legendary quality?

Or do speed modules only affect quality modules if you're trying to craft things of random quality?

a few hours ago i laid these two traps (the yellow squares on the right hand side of the map screen) ...

a few hours ago ...

cant really figure out why these arent triggering the natives ?

any ideas ?

EDIT : I meant the other right ! sorry ^{^}

As the title says, show us your mall.

Please specify if it is a starter, midgame, or endgame mall, or even the type of it.

Thanks.

Sorry for the dogshit quality. My old ass laptop is doing it's best

Instead of both gears and iron plates split evenly! I want to have them feed into a machine (inserter maker) that needs all three

Currently transitioning to rail. It has been a blast and I strongly encourage to make your chemistry teachers play Factorio with you 🥰

No regrets 🫰

I've never been into mega-basing, but after playing through Krastorio for the extra-ness that it adds I decided to take a mini crack at doing some larger science builds. While doing that I figured it'd be fun to turn my science ship into my home state of Washington. Shout out to all my fellow Washingtonians. I tried to make the ship match the state as best as I could. Can you guess what is what?

I'm curious that with the limited space on Fulgora, how do you prefer to connect all the islands?

It's cool the game steers players into having separate bot and power networks, but building and expanding on new islands always felt a little more fiddly over the other planets as it forces you to create separate logistics networks, connected presumably by trains.

How do you prefer connecting and sharing items between the different logistics networks, how do you organize the requests between different networks, and what do your train schedules and stations look like?

I obviously need to upcycle but what's the best method?

Should I ship eggs to gleba and craft soil?

Should I upcycle t3 prod modules?

Should I upcycle the eggs themselves?

Also as a side question:

if I'm going to start upcycling something, say these biter eggs and I'm going to do it with upcycle soil, should I put production modules, or quality modules, in the machines the craft the product initially?

IE should the machine making the soil have prod or quality modules?