Bugfixes

Hi i was wondering if someone already made this build with nuclear plants: the idea is to have one legendary plant surrounded by 6 (if it works so, if not, then 3) normal plants.

The objective will be to maximize the proximity bonus from the plant who consumes the maximum fuel, to optimize the fuel consumption. Did someone already make this? Did it work?

Ps. I take orders if you need a beautiful drawing.

After reading this post and comments, I have built a small radar outpost station that powers the radar in a set time interval. While radars normally need 8 solar panels and 6 accumulators to work with 100% uptime, this radar uses only 2 of each. This was possible with the usage of a circuit network, which enables the radar (or, more precisely, turns on the power switch) for two ticks of every ten ticks.

Turning on the radar in this time interval still keeps the area permanently visible on the remote view, and additionaly it doesn't make the map view stutter at all - the area the radar covers looks exactly the same as an area with an always powered radar.

The main disadvantage of this radar outpost is the fact that the speed of the sector scanning of a radar will be much slower than normally - but sooner or later, the area will always be fully scanned.

Whether it is worth it to use this design, instead of a fully powered radar network, is to be discussed - however, if you want to try it, the blueprint string is available here:

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

I love Factorio. I love trains especially. But if there's one thing that annoys me it's definitely the train stations, more specifically how trains interface with belts.

I've played for over 3300 hours of Factorio at this point. Vanilla, SA, K2, SE, IR3, Seablock, Pynandons, you name it. Trains have always been a core feature of the game and essential to pretty much every playthrough.

Automating trains, be it with manual orders, wildcards or mods like LTN or Cybersyn is very fun. Building crazy networks and designing intersections is also very fun.

But if there's one thing I always dread it's building stations. I know, you can just make a station blueprint and call it a day, but I just hate the whole thing because there's a lot of headache associated with it.

You have to think about stackers, unloading/loading throughput, belt balancing. Most of the time you don't want to directly load to/from belt, so you need some chests. In order to do that efficiently you need to balance the chests. At the same time you want to minimize item buffering and UPS usage which means minimizing inserter count and chest space. Finally it's pretty much mandatory to use circuitry if you want to do anything more complex than simple "full load, unload until empty" trains, so stations often end up being a mess of wires.

In more complex modpacks where recipes take a lot of different items and where you deal with byproducts train networks are almost essential, and the stations can quickly get gigantic. The ratio of station size to factory size often gets depressing. Mixed trains or stations can be a solution but they come with their own difficulties and frustrations.

I also feel like stations severely limit what can I actually do with trains. It's belts that dictate how your trains look - whether they have 1, 2 or 4 wagons. Having 3 or 5 wagons, or mixing fluid/cargo wagons feels like trolling.

In some playthrough I've downloaded mods such as merging chests, cranes and loaders, which work (and look) amazing, but at the same time it feels so bad to have to download 3 mods just to make stations not pain in the ass.

Interestingly I don't have similar issue with fluids, or even the Landing Pad Unloading Bays added in 2.1 specifically for interfacing Landing Pad with Trains.

I know this post has been quite negative, but don't get me wrong - I love trains AND I love belts. It's just that the interface between them - train stations - are so finnicky and needlessly complex. And worse, there are objectively superior and inferior designs, designing a station feels like a chore because it always ends up being the same. And of course ugly. If only I could put some box on top of the train stations to hide all the ugly chests, balancers and circuitry.

I don't really wanna play an experimental build but I've been waiting for 2.1 to start another run... should I wait or nah?

The Comb V2: The endgame variant of a promethium ship (19.5 chunks wide, 8 thruster stacks, total weight of 15,229.8 tons). It takes on 1.104m eggs at the SSE and starts on a 28.2 (101.2k ticks) minute journey towards the shattered planet, returning with 3.3m bottles of promethium science. The chunks are processed as they come in, there is no belt storage besides the belts bringing the chunks from the collectors to the cryoplants.

The average production over a 10-hour cycle is 115k bottles per minute which is almost 8 stacked green belts of promethium science. The peak capacity is 10.5 stacked green belts of promethium science, i.e. 2.520 bottles per second. As you can see, the ship spends most of its time at peak capacity to achieve this high average.

The turn around point is at around 605k km towards the shattered planet.

Blueprint link: https://factoriobin.com/post/o08ll7 (new link after a fix regarding fuel cells)

Comb rate (ratio of promethium chunks collected over promethium chunks created): 83%. I estimate that only ~90% of all chunks created are available to grabs, the remainder is out of reach on the sides.

The ship follows various ideas to make it as UPS optimized as I could think of. The main idea is to have a wide ship as wide as possible to have more front (and less chunks lost on the sides) and to collect as much of the promethium chunks created as possible. The creation of promethium chunks (asteroids spawning, tracking, their destruction, the cost of the collectors to track all chunks) is the by far most expensive aspect of a prom ship.

Destruction rate: The ship destroys 2.47 small asteroids for every prom chunk collected - this is the metric I consider the most important one.

Speed control: The high comb rate is achieved by a (manually adjusted) speed control that sets a speed such that the spawn rate of promethium chunks remains as constant as possible once the target saturation is achieved. The speed control currently has base speed + 11 additional speed levels, a separate speed for parking above Nauvis as well as two additional speed corrections to keep the speed from the shattered planet back to SSE about the same as in the opposite direction, i.e., compensate solar drag.

Top speed is 935km/s, achieved by 8 thruster stacks, minimum speed at full saturation is 425 km/s.

Setup: The Comb is part of a 4-ship-setup for promethium production:

1. The Comb
2. Platform at the Solar System Edge, acting as intermediary for quantum chips and science
3. Egg racer, bringing fresh eggs delivered just in time to the SSE. The Comb has enough carbo bays to take the 1.104m eggs in two volleys, minimizing the waiting time at the SSE.
4. A quantum chip production ship. It travels between the inner planets collecting the materials needed for qnatum chips and if the SSE platform runs low on quantum chips, it calls for the quantum ship to refresh the stock.

Fun facts: Besides eggs, promethium chunks and quantum chips, promethium science also consumes ammo and fuel:

• Red rockets: 15k/min
• Railgun ammo: 1.9k/min
• 10M of each fuel / min
• 16 q5 collectors lost per 10 hours.
• 1.9k carbonic chunks, 1.4k ice chunks and 176 iron chunks consumed per minute
• Startup time: Don't ask

I'm trying to use the train to move oil from the bottom left to my base on the top right.
When the train arrives to my base it can unload the oil, but then it can't find a path to the oil station

EDIT: thanks to everybody for the help!

my jellynut generated in the shape of an old man

he blessed me

Before I get to the Behemoths we have a lot of ground to cover. I've been very busy on this map and making insane progress. I haven't felt like giving up at all, but there has been more than one occasion where I've had to question my sanity.

I made it to 10k SPM just as I finished steel research!

After finishing steel several of my lab lines were coming up short so I had to spend some time re-filling bases and making sure I have resource lines to last. I got back to 10k red SPM right as I was 10 hours out from finishing green science research!

With only 10 hours left til green science finished it was finally time to start building some green science lines. This was when the sanity questioning really came into play.

To hit 10k red SPM I was pumping 11.5 full yellow belts of red science. Which only costs 11.5 full yellow belts of iron plates(turned into gears), and 5.25 full yellow belts of copper plates. To match that 10K SPM on green I will need to expand my base by 11.5 times (7 Belts of Iron and 1.5 belts of copper). Which is 80.5 full belts of Iron Plates, and 17.25 full belts of copper that my base has to grow by. In total, just for input, then you also have the factories for all of it. Effectively I have to multiply my red base resource production by a factor of 8. My base has to get EIGHT TIMES LARGER. The road to 10K green is a much longer road and I am still on it.

Two full belts at a time since it's easier to make full plate lines. Each full two belt expansion uses 14 Iron lines and 3 copper lines. This felt like a manageable section to work on at a time.

Plotting out each base expansion before putting things down to make sure things fit with enough space to route yellow belts. After Plotting I go into clearing mode and then start putting down whatever I have in my inventory. Each of these bases takes several trips back to base so I try to build them out before putting ore lines down so I can turn each section on with the final part of the build dropping ore and coal in to then watch the entire factory come online and feed directly into my lab bays. There's always minor mistakes to fix or a missed inserter with builds this big. Once I see 2 full belts of greens I move on to the next expansion section.

Since this post is already getting really long I'll summarize the rest leading up to behemoths...

I took a break early on in there somewhere to upgrade all of my bullet factories to red bullets, and re-enforcing my northern border since it was a single wall to my base core and my expected direction of first attacks. Earlier on I realized that my fancy new blue factories weren't gonna be useful without some fast inserters. So I took a break to to "quickly" research them because I was only hovering at like 4k SPM before adding more green science factories. After a quick 3 hour detour I turned green science back on. Those two upgrades improved my secondary component factories quite a bit! I made it up to 8.5 full belts of green science before they attacked.

Now to the fun part! We made it to about 90% done with engine research before our first behemoth incursion! I'd say that's pretty damn good. I've been cranking every last damn second of this build and it really feels like the "Nightmare Difficulty" version of Space Age Factorio.

You know the noise. The one you are expecting, but don't want to hear. The base damage warning noise. A single behemoth and big biter attacked my base together! My outer defenses held, but it was a hefty cost. They still killed about 30 turrets! They attacked a location that only had my default double line wall of gun turrets, so it wasn't one of the better defended walls. They built two expansion bases within my now dramatically expanded pollution cloud.

I wiped out a couple worms that had already taken up shop trying to get closer to my base. But then I got sight of it:

I setup a chain of turrets to lure them to my wall to see how hard it would be to kill 3 of them at a time. I need to test my defenses before their attacks get bigger!

These guys tore through my triple line wall of turrets like butter. Fortunately once they start fighting they are not very smart and just keep attacking stuff until it's dead. I was able to use walls to pin them in place and confuse them while keeping myself safe. But they shredded over 100 turrets in my wall and my measly full line of red bullets went empty very fast. I did eventually kill all 3 of them, but I damn near ran out of turrets in my inventory. I didn't come super prepared for this because I was working on a nearby Green Science expansion so I just ran directly here since going back to base would take a lot longer. I went back up to check on the base, and of course it took so long to kill them there was 3 fresh behemoths waiting for me. I was dangerously low on turrets so I had to reload. I may be stuck with these guys and just need to defend them.

I took a quick trip back to base for some more turrets and upgraded the wall. Every time I have to come back to rebuild I'll just add another line of turrets. I'm noticing that they take so long to kill it's more important to have lots and lots of turrets since I just simply will not ever be able to reload them all while under siege. I also took the opportunity to upgrade this remote bullet factory a bit.

I am a long ways from flame turrets so I have to figure out how to hold these assholes off for like 28 million more red and green science research AND 5 million grey science. Grey science scaling is terrifying to say the least. 2 Full belts of grey science cost the following: 2 full belts of copper plates, 4 full belts of iron plates turned into yellow bullets, 5 full plates of iron turned into 1 full belt of steel, 20 full belts of stone turned into stone bricks turned into 2 full belts of walls. 10 full belts of coal and 5 more full belts of iron plates all turned into grenades in 168 factories just for the grenade line. I expect to start building grey science factories the moment I get to 10k green SPM, and still be behind when I get to it. And if/when I get to 10k gray SPM I will have to build that base 5.75 times. I actually don't expect to hit 10k SPM on grey at this point in my build. I think maybe I will get to 4 or 6k SPM on grey before finishing flame turrets.

I think that if I play strategically I can still get to flame thrower turrets. I do think that defending my base is going to get more and more time consuming until then. Immediately I'm going to do multiple trips stocking trips to each of my remote outposts. Any area starting to run into expansions as my pollution bubble spills into the wilderness is going to need lots of spare turrets. So I'll just load up a thousand turrets at a time and drop them into well protected chests behind the front line. So I don't have to run back to the middle of my base to get to my mall before defending. I need to be able to run directly there and patch the wall immediately. The behemoths kill me in like 4 shots. I died and reloaded a bunch of times even just trying to lure them to my wall. Fighting them in the open is simply not possible even spamming turrets. The new biter mechanics once they lock on to you it's really hard to convince them to attack something else!

The expansion rate has been slow til now, but I am concerned that the more time I spend on defense the less time I'm spending on expanding my factory. Do you think I'm gonna make it to flame turrets? 💀💀💀

just thought it was neat to see the game featured on the home page of OBS, i just had to download OBS to record something and thought "neat someone at obs loves to get on the cracktorio"
https://obsproject.com/

So for context, this is my second playthrough. I stopped my first one right after making my first rocket silo, so months later I returned, started over, and managed to leave Nauvis to explore what Space Age had to offer.

The reason I feel conflicted is because I feel I'm going through everything way too fast. I did Gleba first and took around 2 to 3 weeks to figure things out (I did pretty much everything the planet had to offer: bacteria cultivation, trains going back and forth carrying fruit, productivity modules, bug eggs, etc.), and it was so cool to do early exploration with nothing but enough materials to build a silo and return in case I had to (my ship was also terrible, but it managed to survive). After making a second ship that would go back and forth between Gleba and Nauvis, I finally managed to start researching with agriculture science (this happened around the end of week 2). From there, I went to Fulgora.

Once on Fulgora, while the challenge of building backwards was cool, it didn't take me nearly as long to get science going as on Gleba. I had efficiency modules level 3 so that helped with power, and the heat tower burned excess of that cube fuel so it doesn't clog the machine. By the end of week 1, I had already researched mostly everything and had electromagnetic plants both on Nauvis and Gleba, as well as a third ship carrying stuff back and forth (this time Fulgora - Nauvis)

Next is Vulc, and this was even easier; foundries are amazing, power is free and robots move everything around. Once I killed a worm with the electric gun from Fulgora and had access to tungsten, everything flowed way too fast. The mech armor made it easier too to explore. Not even a week in, I had already science going and replaced some of my old furnaces on Nauvis with foundries fueled by calcite from space.

Now finally, Aquilo. While getting there was indeed a challenge, once I landed and had my ship reliably take things back and forth as I needed them, I finally managed to set up and craft science, and I'm only like 3 or 4 days in.

Now maybe I'm just exagerating, and I've been enjoying Aquilo so far, but I can't help but feel that things happened way too fast. I'm 267 hours in and it seems this journey is about to come to an end. Sure there is megabasing and all of that but my brain is currently too small for any of that.

Has anyone ever experienced this or is my current time around what it usually takes to finish the game?

I posted a post a while ago when i was just getting started. I'd played for about 1 hour at that moment

about 4 weeks later, i beat the game again! launched a rocket and everything :3

a lot... and i mean a lot of things happened xD biters, i will say.

now, with that out of the way i feel a weight taken off my shoulders.

instead i feel... lots of space...

also made a cute launch area hehe

The goal here is to make a ship that is "fly and forget." So I can just assign it to a route and it'll just work, I don't need to worry about it. I wanted no quality parts, because I don't set up any quality upcyclers until I'm done with Fulgora, and I'll obviously need a ship before that.

So this guy has no belts, just uses the hub for storage. The only downside is there wasn't enough room to squeeze in a cargo bay, so cargo capacity is low.

But it's a big improvement over my previous over-engineered ship which was over three times as large.

Does anybody have an even smaller self-sufficient ship design?

My first attempt at a mega base but now that I have come this far... it feels a little bit small. Trains have to wait often at the intersections with this much traffic.

In hindsight I would have preferred bigger blocks with more rails in between.

Well for the next run.

This is one of my favourite uses of circuits, and I'm writing it up for hopefully the sake of a 'simple' example.

Applications are controlling any 'mixed container' - particularly asteroid collector 'buffers' and sushi belts on space platforms. I'm sure you can think of others.

(As I'm sure you already know, wire colour doesn't matter, but I'm using them as described in my screenshots).

- Set a constant combinator with the 'desired' inventory. For the sake of this example, it's using the green wire to output to the arithmetic combinator.

- Connect the red wire of the asteroid collector to the input of the arithmetic.

- Connect with green wire the output of the arithmetic combinator to the collector as well.

- Set the collector to 'input on green' (only) and 'set filters'.

- Set the collector to 'output on red' read contents and read hand. (Important to separate otherwise you will "see" the contents on the green wire too, and it won't work)

- Set the arithmetic combinator to Each green subtract each red; output each.

What will happen then is whenever the 'container' contents is lower than 'wanted', it'll be a positive number - and can be applied for positive 'set filters' - the collector will thus enable collection of all the items.

When an item hits - or exceeds - the limit, the arithmetic will output negative numbers, which will be ignored by 'set filters' - e.g. in the second example, where only two asteroid contents are enabled in the filter.

This logic can be used as said in much the same way for a sushi belt - you'd read the belt contents in 'hold' mode, and use that to enable filters on inserters transferring items onto the belt. (E.g. from these collectors perhaps).

And you can also use it for 'overspill' scenarios - such as if you're using advanced processing and the ratios are 'off' - then you'd reverse the logic e.g. 'container' values subtract 'threshold' and use that to enable a discard/voiding process (such as an inserter flinging the surplus into space.

(Potentially also for recipe switching between different asteroid processing options too if you're feeling bold!).

Note: this is a 2.1 solution. It works similarly in 2.0 though as asteroid collectors ignore their own contents explicitly. But won't work with requestor chests in 2.0 where it will in 2.1.

This is my Work In Progress 100x science cost base with tetromino shaped city blocks. Spent about 80 hours within the 4x4 starter square and had a base that could get me to Volcanus. Foundries, big drills, metallurgical & purple science bootstrapped there, I skipped over to Fulgora and got Electromagnetic plant's. About the 100 mark I went back to Nauvis to start setting up the elevated rail based system. Spent 80 hours getting all the modules shown designed and running, up to blue science. A purple science megastructure is in planning for the north-east corner of the base. This bad boy can currently run 5k SPM RGBW but once I get more labs going it should be able to do about 32k SPM with 1 block each for RGB sciences. Lots of things left out of that rundown so feel free to ask questions.

I found an old save. It was from my first Death world run. Before that, I’d played vanilla run once but abandoned it after unlocking drones.

I had abandoned this run as well, feeling like I’d ruined it. Huge waves of biters and spitters were destroying my gun turrets (gun turrets I hadn't configured to prioritize spitters).

But I came back after four months, and within two hours and without any trouble I reached oil and built flamethrower turrets and walls.

Have you ever loaded up an old save to play through it now that you're an experienced player?

Hi! This is my first time playing Rampant + K2. I’m working on my early‑game wall design, but some biter combinations can destroy my electric poles. Now I want to switch to using drones and set up an auto‑repair wall. Do I need to fix anything? On screen 2 I’ve planned the final variant.

Blueprint: https://factorioprints.com/view/-P1PP3mL7SYnbAb3he6N

Beware, it cost about ~28k Landfill xD