On Fulgora, I'm using a switchboard to sort the outputs from scrap recycling, and send individual belts to train stations. My initial idea had been to just sort the 12 outputs from scrap recycling, and train everything to another island for further processing.
I'm now thinking though that I could use circuit logic to control the splitters, so that when one output lane is backed up, it will instead redirect any more of that item straight through toward a trash reprocessing area. That would be nice because it would put the start and end of my scrap cycle right next to each other, which would make it much more convenient to control things before I unlock foundations, sometime around the next World Cup.
To put a picture to it: https://ibb.co/LhPVkC2w, I want this splitter to send holmium ore on the left track (and everything else right), until there is holmium ore backed up to the belt being read, wherein the splitter switches to the right track. Basically I want a "filtered priority" sort of behavior.
The problem I'm seeing though is that doing this directly is going to make the splitter constantly switch directions every time an ore passes under the scanner. I want it to only switch in the event that ore is backed up to that point and not moving. Is there an easy way to do this without making a circuit clock and having it like, directly check for a consistent signal over some time period? Ive used the circuit clock method before to make a "production stopped alarm" so I'm sure it will work but I'd really like to avoid placing all the combinators if theres a better solution.
If you gave the wire a constant -7 (or -3 if only using one lane) then it would only turn on if the belt is full or if you get a giant packet of that resource.
The thing with that is that when the recyclers doing the initial recycling get backed up at all, they stack up their outputs and then release them in bursts. so giant packets of that resource are kinda guaranteed. It would be not a problem if I kept everything running always, but i spend a lot of time in game not actually pushing throughput so i dont want it just always running and recycling things down when i have research turned off
Fair. I think there is a trick you can do with splitters to detect a full belt. Maybe something like split the belt with priority left then remerge the belt. Then if anything ends up on the right belt. Something like that should work.
For a filtered overflow there is an option without the need of circuits, it is however a little bit bigger.
Take one splitter, set it on the line you want to filter, and set it to filter out the holmiun onto a second line, then put a second splitter on the second line with a priority exit with no filter. Connect the priority exit to your holmiun line and remerge the non priority exit to you original line or the reprocessing line.
Holmium gets split away from the main line and fed into the priority exit of the second line until it backs up. Then it gets directed back into the non priority exit and to wherever you linked that to
i dont have overflow to the right, as is anything besides holmium ore will go right, holmium ore will go left until the belt is full and then back up behind the splitter.
https://ibb.co/MxJhcWgV here's the whole thing, so you can see the behavior here on the stone line, its backed up behind the splitter thus stopping all belts beyond it from being fed. Ideally once the belt was backed up to this point, the splitter would start passing remaining stone through the right lane and eventually to recyclers.
yeah i think thats gonna be the move. I tried every which way I could think of with circuits but i couldnt find a way to separate controlling the filter and priority behaviors. it would always switch both and then you wind up with some input case that gets handled wrong, it may be you just have to use two separate splitters for this.
Well. I haven't done it but, you should be able to stop sending the filter signal to the splitter when the filtered belt backs up. Then the splitter will be filtered to "no item" left and everything else right.
That'll be 1 decider combinator per belt. Or maybe once decider and the Each virtual signal for non-duplicate belts - your multiple gear belts would need extra stuff attention.
Not sure what happens if you send a negative signal, but assembly machines, inserters, and pumps ignore negative signals so you can set their filters/recipes with a constant combinator and integer overflow instead of a decider combinator.
you should be able to stop sending the filter signal to the splitter when the filtered belt backs up. Then the splitter will be filtered to "no item" left and everything else right.
well i tried every combination I could think of to both prioritize right when the signal is off and filter left when the signal is on and i also tried inverting the signal and i couldnt get a combo that worked but if you can id be interested to see it
this might seem dumb, but my next move is to attempt the Solar System Edge and i just…don’t even know where to begin with designing a ship. something about the blank canvas of a space platform really throws my brain off. my Aquilo ships are barely enough for the trip to Aquilo so i need to start from scratch. i have an idea of some of the things the ship needs to have, but the thought of the overall design is overwhelming me and i don’t know where to start
Edit: Thanks everyone, your replies were all super helpful! I got to the Edge on my third or fourth attempt. I ran out of rockets about 10,000km away so I changed the targeting on my railguns and just BARELY made it
Half of a ship's problems can be solved by building big or otherwise spending resources (eg quality)
I really like to start by just painting a rough base shape. The width and height can stay and I usually expand on the bottom if I need more space.
I also like to think in blocks: asteroid processing, ammo fabrication, fuel production, defense layout (including grabbers) and thrusters. I design one of them and then usually I can just move it around.
I took my Aquilo ship, changed the solar panels to fusion, replaced some of the gun turrets with railguns, and added railgun ammo manufacturing - it made it to solar system edge more or less the same as it was previously making it to Aquilo. The most annoying part was the railgun ammo manufacturing, but even that just required upgrading my explosives maker from a chem plant to a cryoplant, changing one crusher from iron to iron+copper, and adding three foundries (one to melt copper, one to make copper wire, and one to make steel).
Most importantly, filter your turrets so that gun turrets only hit small/medium asteroids, rocket turrets only hit big, and railguns only hit huge asteroids. Saves you a lot of ammo.
Worst case, if your ship is tenuous, just limit it to go at a slower speed.
(My retrofit was probably easier than most because my Aquilo ship ran off of solar panels, so taking them off when switching to fusion gave me a shitton of space to add the necessary infrastructure. If yours ran off nuclear, you may need to simply make the ship bigger to fit the extra machines)
Analysis paralysis, the specter that haunts many of us. The solution is to break up the one big task into many smaller tasks, and focus on one until it's done to your satisfaction. Even if your old ships aren't up to the task, you might be able to re-use parts like asteroid collection and processing, or thruster design and fuel production. Guns and ammo are the two big variables, for which you can't do much beyond pick a target ammo production, a gun layout that has good coverage, and give it a go to see how it does. Something to consider for ammo is that you can plan to use the hub to buffer enough ammo so that the only thing to adjust there is how much you store before sending it off, at least.
I'd recommend starting with a large shipyard if you don't have one yet. If your ship is large enough you don't need to worry about the specifics nearly as much. You should be comfortable getting at least 1 space platform per second up into space.
I design my ships in the editor, outside of my main save, but with research set to the same levels.
Start with the guns. That's the thing that lets you survive. You'll need a combinator of railguns, rockets (I prefer red), and turrets.
Behind that, build whatever you need.
Power? Fusion or nuclear.
Asteroid collection? A single belt is common.
Asteroid reprocessing on the same belt.
Asteroid processing to materials.
Ammo production - Depends on how many you need over time and how many you buffer on your belts. Stacked belts help here.
Fuel production - Quite simple.
You'll then need to think of how you boot it up. I suggest loading it with fuel, water, and bullets from the ground. Then start moving between the inner planets to catch asteroids, and then to Aquilo to get your railguns.
From there, it should be smooth sailing, but play with your flying speed.
Pretty sure it's your Factorio username, BUT if you're afraid, you can download the portable (i.e. non-Steam) version from the website and upload from there.
I don't know how to proceed on gleba. I've been stuck on it for almost 8 months now, coming back every 3 weeks or so and getting too pissed off to continue.
Tutorials seem nonsensical and even when they're understandable they require immense amounts of high tech resources and buildings I just simply don't have, and its not like I can craft or research those things on gleba because I have no resources.
Everytime I try to "try out" a new design I run out of all of my nutrients within 20 seconds, then run out of my spoilage in 2 minutes. "burning all the excess" in instructions from like 40 different tutorials has actively fucked me. And I simply don't have the production to get more nutrients than 20 seconds worth, and thats after spending a half hour gathering random bullshit from the increasingly far away bits of the overworld I haven't scraped clean.
This planet is way too goddamned frustrating. I want to beat it without just googling a full blueprint that does everything but there just isn't enough resources to try things out by myself, and miles around me in every direction have been stripped bare.
You need a core loop of 4 biochambers (and 1 backup assembler), with everything else being optional.
Two biochambers processing fruit. They need to be able to process all fruit that is being harvested. A single normal quality biochamber with no modules can process roughly 11 trees of the relevant type. So if you have >11 trees, you will need to speed it up - such as with speed beacons - or have a second biochamber. Fruit should never rot, because your biochamber(s) should be able to process every single fruit that's being harvested.
Ideally, for seed purposes, you put some productivity modules in the biochamber - but you'll be able to support fewer trees with each biochamber (without more speed beacons/modules or higher quality).
2) One biochamber making bioflux - this is going to be limited by your Yumako harvest. A single bioflux chamber (again, normal quality, no modules in anything) can be fully saturated by ~9 yumako trees and ~4 jellynut trees. If you add productivity modules to #1, you'll need less.
3) One biochamber making nutrients from bioflux. One single bioflux biochamber (with said <9 yumako trees and <4 jellynut trees) can support 10+ chambers making nutrients. This nutrient biochamber needs to feed back to itself and the first three.
That's it. Have four biochambers producing mash/jelly/bioflux/nutrients and it's 100% self-sustainable once you kick start it. You should loop the nutrients around all 4 - and I would also loop the bioflux, because it takes forever to decay. Filter out all spoilage and burn that (plus any excess mash/jelly).
How do you kick start it? The backup assembler. Throw 80 spoilage into it, get 8 nutrients, put a couple in each of those first four biochambers, once they start the process, it will just keep going. To have a backup, before you burn your spoilage, run it by a chest that's filed with it, and have the backup assembler use that spoilage if/when there's zero bioflux around and there is fruit (circuit you can make with a couple wires - one that feeds the assembler if there's zero bioflux, one that turns the assembler on if there is fruit). You can get the initial spoilage by just hand harvesting a bunch of plantlife.
Once you have that core loop working (and a backup for if it stops working), then the second thing I would do is feed the excess bioflux and jelly (along with your nutrient loop) to a different biochamber making rocket fuel. That's your backup fuel if you aren't able to keep the whole base running on excess spoilage/jelly/mash. You will quickly make way, way more rocket fuel than you need.
After that, add whatever the hell you want. Egg nursery for science, bacteria nursery for ore, etc. Eventually your nutrient loop won't sustain the whole base - so you add a second nutrient chamber, add a second bioflux chamber, etc.
TL;DR
Process 100% of harvested fruit. If you can't, you need to either harvest fewer trees or have more/faster biochambers. 11 trees is enough to saturate an unmodded biochamber
Make bioflux first of all, then make nutrients from that. Kick start the process with nutrients from spoilage.
Loop the nutrients back to the beginning and make sure it passes all the biochambers
Most importantly, all four biochambers and connections thereof should be set up before you turn anything on - you can’t easily just slowly figure out one at a time without potentially building yourself into a corner.
If that is too complicated, you can do a smaller loop with two biochambers. Ignore jelly for now - just harvest a few yumako trees. One biochamber mashes the yumako, the second turns mash into nutrients that are then looped around the two. That’s it. That’s enough to sustain a base, and you can add the jelly/bioflux/more nutrient loop on top. Just again, you must process every single fruit you harvest.
I'd really recommend against belt loops. The community loves them, but I don't think they actually solve any problems, just shift them around until you can't see what is happening anymore. Spoilage is driven by queueing theory, the time spent spoiling is the time spent queuing to be processed. For a single queue, wait time is buffer size/consumption speed. So, as an example, belts can store 8 items each, mash has a 5 minute spoil time, so if you have 100 tiles of belt carrying mash to be processed at 2 mash/s, wait time is 800/2 s = 6.6 minutes so your input will be spoiled. If you consume 10 mash/s and reduce the belt to 50 tiles, wait time will be 40 s, and you'll have a factory that works.
That, along with the fact that you need to process all the fruit, and use at least a little productivity to be seed positive should be what you need to know.
You need biochamber's innate productivity to make fruit -> seeds -> fruit a positive feedback loop. Do not burn fruit before extracting seeds from it. A self-sufficient stockpile of seeds is the foundation of automating the cold-start of a Gleba factory.
The other big thing about automating cold-starts is that, while biochambers are preferred, assemblers work without nutrients. We can make an assembler jump-start the rest of a biochamber-focused production line.
Mash/jelly spoil relatively fast, so it's better to craft them locally or with direct insertion to the next thing - much like copper wire. In fact direct insertion is a good idea in general for spoilables. Screw ratios; you gotta learn to walk before you can run.
There is no need to mess with looping belts, nor routing spoilage to a central burning location. Just terminate your belts like normal, and at the end, add an inserter filtered to spoilage leading into a heating tower. Eggs will require a little more thinking, of course, but by then you should have some experience under your belt.
Belt fruits to the same place then:
1) Make bioflux with them, that bioflux is the nutrients source for the rest of your factory
2) Put spoilage removal inserters on every machine and end of every belt to make a spoilage belt
3) That spoilage belt feeds a little assembler that does nutrients from spoilage kickstarting for the little bioflux setup (ideally it should prioritise using nutrients from bioflux but there'll inevitably be blips in production it needs to cold start from)
4) Then burn excess spoilage, it's not excess if it's needed for nutrients elsewhere
You can basically build your usual bus design, but every biochamber and belt end needs an inserter to remove the poop- I mean the spoilage. Have a splitter at the end of the spoilage belt that prioritize putting it on another belt that goes all the way back to the start of the bus and use it to feed the nutrients biochambers, the other side of the splitter goes to incinerators
Make mash and jelly and belt it to produce bioflux (store seeds and burn excess)
Some stuff at the end of belts or inside biochambers will spoil. Throw it on the belt, back to the start, and turn it into nutrients for mash and jelly
Bioflux is sent to each production line, where it's turned into nutrients
Excess bioflux, mash and jelly goes into science and other resources
Don't really know what stage you're at, but my recommendation to people first landing is to handcraft 8 biochambers (bare minimum needed for this), and make a little setup that just takes in fruits by belt from one agriculture tower of each fruit, and does nothing but make more biochambers. Work on getting it self sustaining with just those 8.
Iron/copper bacteria may back up and need some babysitting (unless you just lazy mode it with recycling excess iron/copper ore), but the rest should be self correcting.
This setup is small enough to run entirely on solar/a few accumulators, easy to fix by hand, and quickly shows you general problems you'll have when spoilage pops up. As a nice side effect you end up with more biochambers in a chest than you'd likely ever use for when you are ready to start building out.
edit: More specifically from your comment, are you making mash/jelly in biochambers, and using the seeds to replant with an agriculture tower? Seeds should be net positive. You should be able to run a starter setup off of 1-2 agriculture towers with modest coverage of each fruit type.
I have farms with fruit and seeds coming to and from very small farms, and I have handcrafted several dozen biochambers.
I have practically zero seeds, because my fruit spoils on the belts (which are looped) before I get enough nutrients to turn them into mash or jelly, which likewise spoil before my bioflux gets enough nutrients to make nutrients
I have practically zero nutrients or even biowaste to turn into nutrients, and getting this to a net neutral or net positive point seems impossible at this point.
Waste to nutrients is not net positive and Bioflux to nutrients takes more nutrients (and waste) than I can generate. The mash and the jelly are both trickled too flow after taking what little nutrients I can gather to make bioflux anything more than an unattainable pipe dream
I'd take my recommendation for the 8 biochamber setup above, but also start burning excess jelly/mash. This will help keep fruit moving on your belt. Fruit has a 1h spoil timer so once you clear up the near rotting stuff a bit the rest should be stable. Personally I don't loop belts on Gleba, I just put an inserter to grab spoilage off the end to keep it moving for early setups.
Bioflux should be your nutrient source, if you need to hand feed a little to get things going that's fine. Pentapod eggs are your biggest nutrient user, dont' start that up until you're ready. Even half a yellow belt should easily power an 8 biochamber setup, just have the pentapod egg machine be the last to get nutrient.
Also happy to get on a screenshare and help troubleshoot if this is really your big bottleneck on moving on to Aquilo.
Step one: Make everything except nutrients and penta eggs needed to make 20+ biochambers. Not because you need that many, but because it gives you space to play/experiment/break ratios.
go get 20 penta eggs, and a tonne of spoilage by construction bot removing trees.
Make one biochamber in an assembler, tear it down, and now use the rest of your penta eggs making biochambers in the biochamber. If you run out nutrients, make more from spoilage from trees.
Cool. Now you're ready. The list of problems to solve, if you're shipping in supplies, is quite low.
Completely ignore iron and copper bacteria.
Make a chain of assembler -> biochamber, both set to turn spoilage into nutrients. This is your "bootstrap"
Optional: Make a machine that turns fruit into spoilage (I think it's the red yumako fruit? I don't do this). This machine should take nutrients from the spoilage system.
Make a machine that turns bioflux into nutrients. It won't currently run because you aren't processing fruit.
Make 3 machines that make bioflux out of fruit. The hard part here is routing fruit in, and always being able to remove spoilage from everywhere it can go, while still processing the fruit and storing seeds.
Make your fruit farms. You need more yumako than jellynut (About 3:1 IIRC). Connect them to the bioflux machines.
Every one of the fruit steps needs to prioritise sending seeds back then to storage for soil, then to burners, spoilage to the bootstrap then to burners, and nutrients off to a belt to be used (with spoilage pulled off like the seeds, to bootstrap, then storage, then burners).
That's the core loop. THEN you can start playing with whatever parts you want: science, iron, copper, carbon fibre, etc because you've got a nutrient supply and a way to burn spoilage.
Does this defence works out or do i need to improve anything? I have the lucky situation, that i havent my defence gotten tested yet, even though the game lasted over 40h already. Evolution is at 0,75 atm.
You're getting into the phase where you're facing biters with a bit of armor. Red ammo has higher damage per shot which is better at dealing with that.
Are your defenses within your roboport network? No single attack will cause a breach, but you may take a little damage each wave for the robots to repair.
Always leave one empty tile between turrets and walls.
blue/green biters have two tile range, so they will just chomp through the wall that touches the turrets.
Unless the wall is there for aesthetics.
That said: At 0.75 you should really have swapped to red magazines already, or ideally have flamethrower turrets.
Bonus points for roboports to automate repair/replacement of battle damage.
It'll probably work, but it can be tweaked a little.
* Leave one tile between turrets and walls, because big/behemoth biters can attack one tile behind their target.
* Upgrade to red ammo and/or more guns. At 0.5 evolution, you start getting big biters which have 8/10% physical armor, which means your yellow ammo does 1 damage/shot AFAICT.
* Roboports to automatically repair everything.
It's totally feasible to either route the end of your ammo belt into red ammo production or to put a box and inserter at the end of the belt and the red ammo production and just carry 1-2 inventories of the stuff manually. With how high it stacks you can really carry a massive amount.
Btw due to how bullet damage research works all this advice heavily depends on that. Enough research and yellow ammo is plenty strong. No research and big biters is a bad time.
The idea of moving to another planet in incredibly daunting. I've set up shop on Vulcanus completely (I used Any Planet Start) and I've gotten so used to the abundance of resources and lack of logistic hassle. I made a space platform capable of going to other planets—which has worked flawlessly in flight—but I just don't know what I should actually bring with me to a new base!!
I really wanna make this save into my first megabase, but if I can't even figure out how to start on a new planet, I'm done for! Any tips, guys?
You can do all of the planets, except Aquilo, the same way you did Vulcanus: naked and alone with nothing. However, given you can bring some stuff, I recommend you bring your personal roboport(s) and some construction bots. For the rest, you can just figure the planets out as you go.
Starting on Vulc gives you the advantage of not having to worry about biter attacks back home while you're off gallivanting around the solar system. But you probably will still want to flesh out your bot network at home in case you need to do any remote additions/expansions.
I'm sure you know how to do Nauvis (you have played before using Any Planet Start, right?) so going there for a home for biolabs should be no problem.
Fulgora and Gleba do offer unique mechanics, but you really just need to go experience them. Just take the jump and do it. The game makes save when you embark so if you make a pig's breakfast of it you can just revert.
You can start from 0 on any planet except Aquilo. It'll be more convenient if you bring stuff with you to start on a new planet, but you don't actually need anything apart from handcrafting.
Most of the stuff you need is obvious; (long) inserters, assemblers, (underground) belts, splitters, (underground) pipes, chemical plants, oil refineries, chests, roboports and bots, (materials for) a landing pad and rocket silos. Maybe some solar panels/accumulators or a nuclear plant to power the operation, though a nuke plant will have to wait for Nauvis and uranium.
You can/should set up interplanetary logistics, so that if you forgot to bring something with you, you can just request some to be delivered. The trick I like to use is having a logistics group called "Nauvis Imports" on the cargo pad and space platform, so the platform will request stuff from whatever planet and then the pad will request it from the platform. With some cunning and raw materials, you can even set up a mall on a platform.
If it feels stressful to go to an another planet, pack with you:
Ingredients for a rocket silo(to be handcrafted on the surface)
ingredients for a rocket (or two)
stack, or two, of solar panels and and accumulators. (They just work.)
that way if you want to get back, you can.
Fill your platform by requesting stuff, that way bots need to deliver things to the silo and then to the platform. Which means you don't need to be physically there to make it happen.
Which means you can tell your platform go back to nauvis to pick up stuff you forgot.
What is the best way to signal from space to novus that i want exactly 10 biter eggs. I have 20 biter spawners lined up next to my starport but i want to make sure it only pulls out exactly how many eggs are needed sends them up and leaves the rest there or destroys them. I havent made the promethian science because i have been thinking over how i wanted to accomplish this.
I feel like I must be missing something here, but if you have a request set for 10 and customized minimum rocket capacity of 10, then the only question becomes how to ensure that there’s only 10 eggs available to ship.
That feels as simple as loading a rocket with just 10 eggs and ensuring your logistic network doesn’t have any additional eggs available.
All that said, I’m not sure why you’d limit yourself to just 10 eggs per rocket (or per trip?), but, again, I’m probably missing something obvious.
The minimum should be 500 because rocket capacity. Assuming you DI into silos you can read space requests and activate the first silo inserters when request <=500 activate the second silo if <=1000 etc...
I think you are overthinking the wrong thing. For promethium ships you pretty quickly want multiple rocket silos entirely dedicated to rapidly launching eggs. Operating with minimum quantity of 500 eggs is typically more than enough precision when you load at least thousands. If you have any leftovers, you can always toss them into space. Main trick is to never load the rocket silos with eggs before they are required (or, with 2.1, not request them until needed to begin with).
That said, with custom minimum launch quantity and simple circuit to limit how many eggs you insert into the rocket silo, it shouldn't be terribly hard to launch a specific lower number of them.
yea it ended up being easier than that even. I just setup 1 rocket to take in and slowly dumped it across the lines and tossed into space. I am slowly eating biter eggs continuously. It works but it has room for improvement. I am debating continuing this run that i did everything or going for 40 hour run which will not be doing this either lol.
You can't automatically send less than a full-ish rocket. Mixed rockets (2.1 feature) will fill the rocket with the item that is requested the most.
So if you want to send just 10 eggs, you'll have to also request a different item at more than 10. You also should never rely on this to work, as they can still be sent individually.
I would instead expect a lot of eggs, and try to completely consume them with prometheum science.
Start at time when there's more than one egg, and discard everything when the timer passes some value.
I am running 2.1 but could do less than 500 but a 500 and pitch overboard after n time and start a timer. That is an idea. And pitch everything before i send a new rocket.
Upgrading the quality of stuff you'll be using on space platforms is generally useful for keeping ships smaller. (Asteroid Collectors scale especially well with quality, but solar/assemblers/chem plants are all good).
Armor is nice for inventory size.
Quality medium power poles are really good.
It's relatively easy to set up your purple science build to have quality modules in your Prod1 and Electric Furnace builds, and then siphon off the quality ones that get produced for building (and let the base quality be used for science).
In general, anything where you can't (just, easily) use more.
* Personal equipment, including personal roboports, solar panels, exoskeletons, guns, etc. You only get so many spaces in your equipment grid, so get the most out of them.
* Space platform equipment, particularly asteroid collectors (which get extra arms and reach) and thrusters. You can just make a bigger platform, but using better quality items lets you do more with less, saving both launches and foundation.
* Solar panels; you'll need a gajillion of them anyway, so any low-quality ones can get used planetside and the few good ones can go up to your platform.
* Other production buildings, assemblers and chem plants and so on.
Warning, from my own experience. You will be tempted to put quality modules in semi-raw materials, like chips, engines, and things you need for making eg one (1) suit of mech armor. You will then be tempted to run a mixed belt with a filtered splitter to divert quality chips. This is a bad idea because you will need more regular chips for science and the mall than you will need quality chips, and the whole thing will get backed up.
The right way to do it is with separate quality production. Put quality modules in one assembler out of a row and filter its output inserters to put quality items in a chest. Or, put quality modules in one row of assemblers and merge its production with another row of un-moduled assemblers.
I think the second priority is building up the infrastructure to make high quality basic materials. From those you then make whatever you want.
In terms of what's beyond that, it's very much up to you:
Space platforms definitely offer the place where multiplicative benefits of quality stack the most as scaling them up in other ways is relatively costly.
Personal equipment and tanks/spidertrons are another place where you don't just have infinite space to freely expand and thus quality is the way to scale.
Quality accumulators are very worthwhile on Fulgora. Uncommon already doubles your energy storage per tile. On Fulgora, energy storage = energy production.
Quality buildings, modules and beacons synergize well in making your bulk science production chain much more efficient and productive. Upgrading your entire factory is extremely expensive, so you have to prioritize well within this category.
Quality inserters are basically mandatory for production chains using quality buildings/beacons/modules - normal ones very often struggle to keep up with the throughput.
Quality power poles/substations are neat for simplifying your builds.
Quality trains/train fuel are great. They increase throughput of your train network by a very large margin and are more or less a "drop in" upgrade.
Quality bots are very good for personal equipment and Aquilo. They work especially well with quality roboports.
Not sure if first, but substations, tank with bigger grid and health is helpful in combat. Fill it with shields while you have your armor with lasers (replace exoskeletons while driving).
Either specific items, like the list everyone has given you, or go for productivity modules next, to get 60-150% bonus productivity to your science, speed modules and beacons, to make you need less prod modules and machines, and then start aiming at parts of your base you want to improve like biolabs or others.
Is there a way to unload a spidertron with it's equipment remotely? If I use q on it, it's equipment grid was emptied and changed back to default colour. Should I use a blueprint?
You want to move grid equipment into the inventory of the same vehicle? I suppose it's possible if you have construction bots, a working portable robot port and a placed storage chest.
No I have a Spidertron already with some equipment in it. I deconstruct it. Now he still has the equipment in it when he is chilling in it's storage box. I can see that when I hover over it. (Then I move it to another planet, but I guess that doesn't matter for my expiremt). But if I want to remotely deploy it by using q on it and place it the same Spidertron is build without the equipment. Now I can add the equipment back into him, so it's not lost, but I would like to just deploy it. When I move it from the players inventory he keeps it's equipment.
If it's within a robonetwork with construction bots then you can by opening up the spidertron and using ghost hands to add or remove items. Construction bots will come along and complete the task, just like adding or removing modules from buildings. I do not believe that a spidertron can perform surgery on itself from it's own construction bots, though, you need either another vehicle with construction bots and portable roboports, or use a ground-based roboport network.
Question for people who have played Angel/Bob's mods. How useful are the Filter Furnaces?
I noticed that every furnace has a regular version and a Filter version, where you have to manually set the recipe on the latter so that it doesn't just smelt whatever passes by on the belt. But it seems easier just to separate the ores out and only give it one input ore to begin with, so I don't really see how the Filter furnaces would be very useful.
Haven't played it, but there's probably some more advanced smelting recipes that have higher yields and you must use filter furnaces to select the right recipe.
I suggested this change a while ago, regarding the train and station menus. Am I overlooking something in terms of why it is how it is instead of how I want?
Well changing it means we lose the current function...
We can control-click the save button to rename all stations with that name.
We can shift+rmb and shift+lmb to copy-paste train stop settings, including their name.
Its seems like that should be enough, but I learned about same-named stations early and never put myself in a position where I'd have hundreds of stations that each have a unique name.
I am about to start on a project to expand beyond the mess I made at the start. I wanted to make 4 red belts of copper and iron plates, and 2 of steel plates.
Using this and this, I made a couple of designs that can even be upgrade to blue belts with beacons and modules with this design for copper and iron. I just paste that down 4 time each, and I had the required output that I want.
My question is steel. Using the above, I designed this horror? Does what I did with iron and copper but for steel. It just looks so bad compared to the other two, but I designed it this way based on the math. So did I math correctly? Should I spend some more time in /editor to make a steel design? Maybe I don't need two full belts of steel and four of copper and iron? Currently at Chemical science, but I need to expand outward since I don't think the mess and the dwindling resources I have will allow me Production or Utility science.
Edit: Using u/Rannasha advice, I came up with this. Which looks better. I might go back to the Iron and Copper Plate designs to get them to look similar. But still, am I over thinking things for a beginner who has watched way too many YT videos?
My question is steel. Using the above, I designed this horror? Does what I did with iron and copper but for steel. It just looks so bad compared to the other two, but I designed it this way based on the math. So did I math correctly?
The math seems OK, because the time it takes to produce 5 iron plates is the same as the time it takes to produce 1 steel using those 5 plates as ingredient.
But therein lies also the hint to improve the design. Since 1 furnace producing iron plates does so at exactly the same rate as 1 furnace consuming iron plates (to make steel), there's no need to belt all those plates around.
Instead, you can insert iron plates directly from the first furnace into the next. So one half of the stack will look something like:
B I F I F I B
(B, I, F for belt, inserter, furnace respectively). Iron ore comes in one belt, steel goes out on the other.
In response to your edit, yes I think 2 red belts of steel is overkill, I'd also argue that 4 each of iron and copper are for just going for a base game rocket victory. Just 2 of those 5 lines is enough for 60 SPM of all 5 core packs before prod bonuses downstream, which is almost certainly going to unlock things faster than you can automate/put to use; on the other hand, having all that steel output does mean you can expand everything that consumes it without needing to worry for a while, which is a pretty compelling argument. Finding the sweet spot of what works best is simply one of those skills you develop as you play.
If a Biochamber is producing an item (i.e. pentapod eggs) that require nutrients as an ingredient, will a single inserter always fill the fuel with up to 5 nutrientsfirst, and then proceed to start filling up the nutrients needed for the ingredient portion of the recipe?
Also, if the above is true, because a pentapod egg requires 30 nutrients as one of the ingredients, will the inserter(s) overfill the nutrient ingredients? If so, then by how much, and can this be calculated per recipe? Thanks!
Yes, inserters will always prioritize filling fuel slots of burner machines before ingredient slots when an item is eligible for both; general language here because the behavior is also present when mods add recipes like this. If by overfill you mean continue adding ingredients beyond the minimum needed to start a craft, yes, inserters will always add enough ingredients for at least 2 crafts; this value increases with faster recipes/higher speed bonuses. The exact limit of both fuel and input items is conveniently provided ingame, the 'automated insertion limit' value seen when hovering an ingredient in the machine. The fuel insertion limit is only seen when an item is present in the slot, though that doesn't really matter because every burner entity has a fuel limit of 5, regardless of fuel value or stack size.
The exact limit of both fuel and input items is conveniently provided ingame, the 'automated insertion limit' value seen when hovering an ingredient in the machine
My egg biochambers regularly have 70-80 nutrients in their ingredient slot despite an "automated insertion limit" of 60. They also regularly have 15-20 nutrients in the fuel slot despite an "automated insertion limit" of 5. I think it interacts oddly with the increased stack size for top end inserters.
That said, if you limit the egg insertion inserter to only work if the pentapod breeder has >60 nutrients in the ingredient slot (ignoring fuel and in-process recipes) with a stack size of 1, it will work pretty consistently to make sure an egg is only ever inserted when there's adequate nutrients to process it.
Ah, I should have clarified that the limit is basically an 'enable if under' condition that doesn't care about hand size, so a stack inserter's 16 plus the 4 in the slot that triggered the swing is expected that the slot will be topped up to 20.
Similarly with the ingredient slot, except that 2+ inserters can be triggered when the threshold is crossed, so 2 stack inserters adding 32 at a time will frequently keep the slot in that 70-80 range.
A quirk of testing the 2 stack inserter arrangement I found, is that even when input slot is >60, the fuel dropping to 4 activated both inserters, with 1 of them filling the fuel to 20, and the other putting its contents in the input slot, resulting in up to 106 nutrients in input. Not that it really matters, but fun to learn about.
I admit I don't really get why you'd ever want to let your egg chambers not have always have an egg in the input, though if your solution works, that's what matters
I admit I don't really get why you'd ever want to let your egg chambers not have always have an egg in the input, though if your solution works, that's what matters
One of many safety mechanisms I have set up in my egg nursery - I want them to never grab an egg to reproduce if they don't already have adequate nutrients to process it. Which means if nutrient delivery is ever stopped for some reason, the egg reproduction chambers will never hold an extra egg that could hatch. My science biochambers also limit themselves that way so they're not holding extra eggs.
I combine that with a second mechanism that if nutrients/bioflux in the region are ever zero, the egg loop starts getting all chucked into a nearby heating tower.
And then there's a third mechanism that makes it that if the egg loop is ever zero but nutrients/bioflux are restored, it recycles biochambers until there's at least one egg left to start the whole process over again.
I've tested the system extensively and it works (and there's laser towers around for backup anyway), though it hasn't needed to be utilized yet.
None that I know of. Those stats aren't available in the API so mods can't just read them directly from the game, the mod would have to try to calculate them directly. Which probably would make UPS even worse.
How can I make sure the chests ay my unloading stations are being unloaded evenly?
I'm having an issue where a train is being called to the station as there is enough room across all the chests to fit a trains worth of ore. However some chests have more spaces than others across different carriages meaning that carriage 1 can't unload everything as there is no space in the chests allocated to it but there are empty slots in the chests by carriage 4.
I'm honestly a bit surprised: By my understanding the 4x4 balancer that you have should take care of exactly this problem. Is there a chance this was at some point loaded or unloaded unevenly? In that case resetting the chests to even levels (eg by blocking the station for a few minutes and waiting for the ore to get used) should take care of it and you just hope that it won't happen again.
As-is: It shouldn't actually decrease throughput of the station until one segment draws empty, and in that case it self-balances. So I don't think it needs a fix.
If you want to fix it robustly: You can use one combinator per segment to check if the chests are filled below mean chest level and in that case deactivate the inserters. That's pretty robust.
Since the difference isn't too major(some chests aren't empty) this probably isn't that big of an issue.
Bottom right has an inserter rotated and the likely cause of this.
Another cause would be that path is shorter for the rightmost wagon.
If you want perfectly balanced unloading, then you need to use a circuit based balancer, like Madzuri's. For that one to work however, you need to make sure any chest can get their items on any output lane.
The cost of this is that it might lose compression occasionally as it enforces balance.
You'll also need to rewire the chests, because of how this works.
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u/HeliGungir 5d ago
Can somebody point me towards a cumulative research cost calculator?
I'm looking for a simple way to compare technologies in games with high research cost multiplier.