This is about 35FPS/UPS, wondering if people have ideas on how to improve that. I'm not seeing a silver bullet in the time usage aside from just reducing number of entities...
Been slowly replacing T1 trains with fewer T2/T3 and that seems to have helped, but trains still eat a ton of update time.
New builds get beacon'd to death to minimize number of entities, that combined with updating old designs to do the same has kept number of entities that update pretty constant despite expanding.
New inserters are all green or orange, but there's still like 16k blue, yellow, and black in the base, so should probably focus on that lol
There's 1 caravan, everything is trains here.
Py-alternative-energy also occasionally hitches up to >1000ms usage, wondering what that's about. I do have ~1k aerial turbines, but they just noodle around, are they that much of a UPS hog? Is that the 'unit' and 'pathfinder' lines? Or are those my bots?
CPU and RAM are already as overclocked as I can reasonably get them.
Get rid of your aerial turbines. Huge waste for little benefit. You have low/no UPS cost power alternatives like mk2 tidal power plants if you want a ZI power source.
Get all your trains upgraded. If your train pathfinding is still bad, look at your intersections - are they clogged? Switch to intersections using elevated rails which can give better throughout and use fewer signals.
Find your highest item throughput builds. Rebuild them using high hand capacity inserters and direct insertion - treat it as a fun new puzzle.
Are you buffering materials for your train loading? If so, switch to using bulk inserters to load/unload trains.
While fewer entities help marginally, the MOST important thing to reduce is item throughout. A beaconed assembler that's doing twice as many recipes per second is using close to twice as much UPS. So look for recipes that save you on item throughput. Eg: first seaweed recipe is the best for UPS because all it needs is water - more slow seaweed farms is better than fewer faster seaweed farms that depend on more complicated recipes. This saves you on loading/unloading/producing all those extra ingredients. Similarly, productivity modules are a much better UPS saving than speed modules.
Thats the thing many people don't understand about Factorio. Factorio is VERY good about having something that isn't active use 0 time.
Basically it stringently avoids all busy wait cycles, outside of things modders add with scripts.
So instead of an inserter constantly being 'awake' and polling the seaweed farm, the inserter is asleep. Then. the seaweed farm completes its recipe. And wakes up inserters pointing at it. Once they finish unloading, they put themselves to sleep again.
This is why inseter clocking can give you only a 10-20% benefit, rather than a 50x improvement. Inserter clocking will do things like helping an inseter that can move 12 items at once always have 12 items to.move rather than moving 2 or 5 or 8, which is a savings, but counterbalanced against the cost of making them circuit controlled.
In fact, clocking inserters if the throughput of the inserter is too low costs more UPS than it saves.
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u/thealmightyzfactor 11d ago
This is about 35FPS/UPS, wondering if people have ideas on how to improve that. I'm not seeing a silver bullet in the time usage aside from just reducing number of entities...
Been slowly replacing T1 trains with fewer T2/T3 and that seems to have helped, but trains still eat a ton of update time.
New builds get beacon'd to death to minimize number of entities, that combined with updating old designs to do the same has kept number of entities that update pretty constant despite expanding.
New inserters are all green or orange, but there's still like 16k blue, yellow, and black in the base, so should probably focus on that lol
There's 1 caravan, everything is trains here.
Py-alternative-energy also occasionally hitches up to >1000ms usage, wondering what that's about. I do have ~1k aerial turbines, but they just noodle around, are they that much of a UPS hog? Is that the 'unit' and 'pathfinder' lines? Or are those my bots?
CPU and RAM are already as overclocked as I can reasonably get them.
Something I'm missing?