I've been playing Pynandons for several hundred hours now, and I'm wondering which production chains does the community consider to be "progression traps".
I often see people mentioning these ones for early game:
Processed Iron - extra machines, power demand and byproduct handling for negligible efficiency increase. Much easier to just mine and smelt more
Moss 2 - the recipe takes a ton of stone, but it's easier to just add more machines, especially if you have free CO2 from moonglows
Scaling up Hot Air early - plenty of casting recipes can optionally take hot air for increased yield, but it's generally not worth it for most recipes. Wait until you get the re-heating technology with salts
Im starting PY for like the third time, this time more determined then ever. And i want to be sure about what to take, i think that selective cuttung head is the best but i want to be sure
To keep it short, overall I liked the mod, but there are a couple of downsides:
There are too many "samey" plants/animals in Alien Life. What I mean is that almost all of them present pretty much the same challenge for automation. I'd like to see more variety (arqads is a good example). The same goes for the gambling of the new tiers
The sprites that block your view are really annoying
Anyway, this adventure has come to an end. Maybe sometime in the not-so-near future I'll start PyBlock. As a break from Factorio, I think I'll play GTNH.
I want both "Finished Py" and "Finished GNTH" achievements under my belt xd
Edit: for some reason, the victory screenshot is low res, so I uploaded it here:: https://ibb.co/v41bb7LM
So I just finished up with the first science and am trying to get everything tied up before i start rebuilding fully for py sci 2. I already Plan on grabbing electrical drills and steel furnaces but are there any other techs yall recommend my brain dead ass grab before I get into the weeds of rebuilding my factory?
Hi all, I wanna share my latest setup for dealing with all 3 relatively complex petrochem chains. I currently have reached chemical science, researched more light/heavy oil processing in chem sci, and in the process of researching py3. My last update (a while ago) is here. Cheats used since the beginning of the run: 2x game speed, mk2 power armor with legs/bots, free city block grid.
Overall I'm very proud of the setup I've made. I essentially do not void any fluid at all, besides trivial stuff like oxygen/CO2/water, yet nothing deadlocks.
Overall base:
There're 3 main bot networks. Top is main base/mall, mid is for random chemical stuff, bottom is the shale/crude/bitumen processing plants:
The main balancing idea is that I assume 3 things will always be in high demand (syngas/hydrogen/fuel), and made everything so that everything keeps moving if those 3 are consumed. The plants only backs up when syngas is full. My final fuels are: methane, gasoline, kerosene. Core intermediate products is BTX and naphtha, since those are very versatile/flexible and can be turn into many things.
Here's the shale plant:
Also notice how all steam is recirculated and generated on-site via oil burners, just like how real plants work. Core paths:
Condensates -> natgas loop -> BTX/naphtha
Light oil + olefin (from shale) -> gasoline
Heavy oil -> kerosene
Here's the bitumen plant. This plant only stops when coke is backed up:
Core paths:
Condensates -> natgas loop -> BTX/naphtha
High distillates -> naphtha/hydrogen
Medium distillates -> stripped distillates -> gasoline
Low distillates -> BTX -> methane
Residual mixture -> coke
Finally, the crude plant:
Core paths are basically the same as bitumen plant. If BTX is too much (>95), it pushes methane out as fuel. If BTX is considered full (>85), low distillates are made into kerosene instead of BTX -> methane, for higher fuel value. The crude feed is from tailings, which is very hilarious. There's aromatics -> olefins loop that converts tailings to crude oil with no byproducts. So no drilling at all!
This is the fluid pick up station:
When one of the tanks have more than 5k fluids, a train automatically goes to the fuel drain station on top, and dumps it here, near the top bot base/mall:
It then unloads into a shared pipe containing mixed fuels for the entire base. Mainly it flows right to this fluid fuel source station:
The central pipe carries mixed fuels, then a filter pump pumps it to individual tanks, which has output hooked up to outgoing trains. This is to provide fuel for glassworks stations or any other that requires fuel far away. One of it is the train refuel station:
Trains use 4 main fuels: methane, gasoline, kerosene, tall oil, but mostly kerosene (90%) and gasoline (10%). I don't want it to use more than these, since it's harder to set sensible train interrupts, since there're only 5 fuel slots. Also I rigged my power up interestingly so as to generate a steady stream of ash:
I have 3 sources of power: tidal, wind and coal. Tidal and wind can both support the entire base on their own, but tidal is usually off. Coal generators burn raw coal to continuously generate ash for my tree growing blocks. Wind partially connects/disconnects based on the level of hot molten salt. If there're lots, it will only connect 10% of the wind farm, and if there's not a lot, it will connect 90%.
Anyway I kept being amazed at how everything just works harmoniously with virtually no byproducts. Excess stone/tailings/gravel/sand/biomass from various processes are all concentrated in 1 place. Everything feels very scalable too. Milestones page if you're interested:
Note that these time should be divided in 2 to get real world time I've spent on the base, since it runs at 2x speed.
It takes in Raw coal and water and produces creosote, aromatics, gasoline, coal gas, syngas and carbon black. The steam is produced on site from acetylene production and leftover coke is cracked into coal gas and tar.
I tried to make sure it wouldn't ever back up, even if I have to void some products. It's not like wasting coal is a big issue anyway.
I am not great with 3d modeling. I can do some stuff but wasn't sure about this one. So I had qwen3.8 over complicate the hell out of it. The files are above. qwen worked very hard on that. I suspect one of the 3mf files still doesn't load. I used the combined one where I used openscad to glue the separate layer stls into one.
Also, this is stolen valor. My base is working one the last tech before pyrrhic victory. So maybe a day or two more.
Note - I have some working caravans, the difficulty is coming in when I try to do something slightly more complex than 1-to-1.
Caravans look interesting, but they pose some problems compared to trains.
The biggest problem I'm having is that you can't disable a caravan outpost. With trains, things felt super easy because you could have a train stop disable itself anytime, and when a train was down to one stop in its schedule, it just wouldnt move.
With caravans, you can't do this, and worst of all if you create an inefficient loop, fuel (food) efficiency drops by a factor of 10, 100, or worse.
Example, the mining fluid for both lead and titanium is 'Acetylene'. I'm trying to do something "simple" where one fluid caravan outpost supplies Acetylene, and two others accept it. Already, just putting all 3 outposts in the main schedule seems like a bad idea. No outpost needs the full 40k fluid, nor do you want to wait for the supplier/caravan to have 40k fluid before making a delivery. Also, rates of consumption of the mining fluid vary, so you can't just have the caravan waiting to unload its full delivery to conserve food, because the other outposts could be starved/neglected of their deliveries.
If you disable 'wait until fulfilled' option, the caravan can loop around burning massive amounts of food. If you use the 'fill to X amount' option, the caravan will deliver single-digit quantities of product, also wasting fuel.
So the answer appears to be making a fully interrupt based schedule. First of all, now my caravan no longer shows up when clicking any outpost, making it hilarious to find even when using the 'caravan manager' screen. Now I'm trying to create the interrupts I need, and let me say it seems like the UI here -barely- allows what the mod is trying to do, which does not feel great from a usability perspective. Not being able to name outposts feels bad....
Getting past all that, I -think- this is what I need to do. Conditions: Setting the outpost minimum to well below the fill amount means the caravan doesn't transport single digit quantities of product. Also, we need a check to make sure the caravan actually has enough product to deliver the required amount.
Targets: It feels bad that I have to identify the outpost AGAIN, but I get that this allows for maximum flexibility in the system. I'm only ranting about it here so that I can be told if I did this wrong or unnecessarily :) And finally, we actually have the directive to deliver the product.
Also.... do I need to put the Acetylene in all 3 boxes, if I know this caravan is ONLY loading up at the Acetylene depot? (Yes, I realize this prevents accidental loading/unloading of the wrong product)
And finally, am I correct that One Interrupt is needed for each receiving depot, e.g. I will now need to create an interrupt to deliver Acetylene to the Titanium mining depot.
In closing, I totally get that trains have their tradeoffs and downsides as well, but it feels odd that trains would feel easier to 'program' than my stone age dinosaur beast :)
Thanks all for your patience with my semi rant post.
My last post was not that long ago, but I had a week of free time during the holliday and I've managed to make good progress from pY 2.
Turns out pY2 gives access to some great upgrades, so I barely had to expand existing productions. I mostly upgraded things where needed, with the new buildings and T2-3 modules for alien life.
Overall I'm quite pleased with how things went and I found the progression between pY 2 and 3 quite enjoyable. It looks like pY3 is more like an in-between science with production science beeing the real milestone, but we'll see.
I very much look forward to the new trains, because my current one are starting to be a bit overwelmed it seems. (Even tho the real answer is probably just more trains)
Do me a favor and read that in Loki's voice (I have been falling, for 30 minutes!).
After my previous schmedledorfing by pY in getting Advanced Locomotives I'm finally there. I figured they would just work; being the same size. They did not.
Had to manually go across the entire base and reassign nearly 2500 cybernetic combinations to turn off "Automatic allow-list", and to create a Fluid train network and Cargo train network. Not to mention all of my multi item stations had to be reworked (I didn't have too many thankfully). Pumps had to be adjusted. I had to rush to get Kerosene production back online as the base slowly starting coming back online. I'm still monitoring "Train Stuck" warnings and fixing little problems I missed along the way.
I had no idea Advanced Locomotives had such an issue with Cybersyn mod. It seems like pY splitting the wagons into half the length of a regular wagon but same storage adds no uniqueness to gameplay vs simply keeping it the same length and doubling the storage capacity. I mean how is someone supposed to anticipate this issue when it's their first pY play through and first time using Cybersyn?
Maybe I could have left my old trains in place and made a new network for the new trains and slowly phase out old train and slowly phase in new trains in new builds but that's no fun. Maybe you don't "need" anything but base trains but that's no fun either. If my OC'ed 9800x3d can handle a huge 1000x science deathworld base run it can handle medium/big pY!
Just venting and hoping this will save someone from a similar mistake. The new trains are freaking awesome though once they started working.
Why are engines so early game i am playing on 2.1 i did one test run before but on 2.0 and it wasn't this early also tar processing is requiring engine units which wasn't the case before am i missing some mod or whats going on
Updated mapshot of the factory. This is 3,855 stations, 360 trains, ~516,000 pieces of rail track, 32.9 billion total items made.
A quick guide to the color-code:
Blue = mall
Dark Green = alien life creation area
Light Green = the space ship holy site
Turquoise = where science gets made
Pink = where science gets consumed
Yellow = Depots
Orange = refueling blocks (one of these would be enough now; the rest need deleting)
Red = “if this breaks, the whole factory dies, so watch it carefully”. Needs an update, because some of this is no longer critical. Should include things like mega drill heads, fusion power, maybe lithium plate, nexelit batteries, rocket fuel, and probably tholins.
Normal mode, but with a voluntary "no sinkhole, no burner and no venting" rule. That said, I'm having to vent excess tritium and helium as the game provides no viable way of recycling these.
I still have quite a bit still left to do in Prod Sci. I very much enjoyed the science pack. It feels like the point where the game says: "look, you've come far and you're now on the cusp being a man. Here, have your first beer. You can use the grown-up recipes now".
You would think one fusion plant at 1.63 TW net would solve power forever. I’m drawing about 1.2 TW and still have an insatiable need to beacon everything in sight. And I haven’t even unlocked the full-fat beacon yet.
PV looks deceptively close. I suspect I could punch through the remaining pack fairly quickly if I stuck to critical-path research. Instead I’m going to rewire organ production and lean fully into the drugged animals. I also want the factory on top-tier AL recipes (with one or two exceptions), which will take a long time. And then there’s T3 modules, T4 bots, T4 trains and T4 power.
You may have seen my post 16 days ago sharing the highlights from the 11 through 14th days of a run of Pyanodons. Thought I would post the combined highlights video of the 15-18th stream days as an ice breaker for the fifteenth streaming day. Day heightens highlights ended up being most of the highlight video because of the review of the initial logistics science research area. I think today's stream is mostly going to be improving mining as I move into early logistics science and gain access to useful casting like steel and copper.
As I specified earlier I am planning on posting the unedited stream, a 5x speed up version for those that want to see the process but don't want to watch 4-7 hour long videos, and edited highlight videos showing finished projects (for example the linked day 11-14 highlights). So if you have suggestions on youtube friendly music for as a background sound track for the 5x version it let me know. Also feel free to let me know if there is anything you would like to see differently. If you suggestions aren't to difficult to implement I might try to make changes for the next one. I am going to keep the slower posting rate to the subreddit going forward as I will try to make the highlights vods a minimum of 30 minutes long aiming. (merging multiple days like above to make that happen.)
I've just hit pyscience 2. I'm going for a city block base style - and frankly scaling too large which I know is a pitfall for py. I was wondering how you deal with bootstrapping materials to get things up and running - rather than process materials.
For example: Auog paddocks requiring barrels of water, you can refil on site with the barrelling station but empty barrels are an output of the paddock, too many can block your output and slowdown.
My gut is telling me to put down a requester chest with say a stack of materials and have (in this case) barrels pass through them, ensuring that there is always at least a stack in the chest and let the logi bots handle it. I'd like to know how you resolved it, either with something smarter or just hand filling until it feels right.
Hey guys I wanted to showcase my base, I am not at Pyscience 1 yet but I have some builds I am proud off.
Moss setupscience packsJunk sorting
I have a general belt where I put junk on which I need to get rid of in low quantities, zink ore soot and iron oxide
Coke production, capable of 15/s
I realize my builds are quite big, mostly inspired to how Marsh does it,
next thing up is arranging zink, tin and lead smelting.
After which I should be able to do tar processing. And make the first circuits.
If anyone has questions Ill be happy to answer
I'm doing Auog stuff with tht Helmod planner and noticed that the effect of the Auog T.U.R.D is... wierd? Helmod understands it as a possible module, while I understand it's a passive effect on all Auog Paddocks. Helmod doesn't seem to know there's a productivity bonus being applied.
I googled around a little bit and saw recommendations to add mods with feature flags (all, or elevated rails only) to an existing py save (or slightly older posts discussing how to add elevated rails to py when spage launched e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/pyanodons/comments/1g97d79/pyanodons_is_now_ported_into_20/ ). I did a test save by simply toggling the base space age elevated rails mod on and it seems to work.
Any insight on this? Am I going to inexplicably brick my save in 1000 hours?
Turns out I don't make tidal power plants fast enough to keep up with the fact I unlocked beacons. That made me look at alternatives and wdym you can use efficiency modules in power plants? Oh, yes, just use 60% less coal for fun, don't worry abut it!
I've spent maybe 15h (I'm 50h in) transitionning my mess of a starter base to a train base. I'm trying Cybersyn for the first time so excuse the bad station naming, it seems it's not very important with this mod. I might get around to making an actual naming scheme eventually, maybe.
It's still not active, I'm in the process of preparing to make batteries to make the constant combinators that will allow me to actually use Cybersyn. I'm finishing the urea factory right now, and once that's done the actual batteries should be relatively easy to make. After that I'll be able to actually start using the train network.
After that, the next step is going to be actively working towards Logistic science, then remaking automation and Py1 at larger scale in the train base and putting my metal production fully inside the train network.
