- Aurium
- Oct 10, 2010
I start in a wooded area. I decide to take advantage of this. Less pollution. Less biter attacks. I start between some curved lakes. I take advantage of this. A few short walls and I'm totally secure.
It has a rich supply of iron and copper right outside the trees, and many oil pools around too. There isn't any coal. Sure, to the north there's a small deposit, so I setup a couple of burner miners inserting directly into a chest, and just walk there sometimes. Oil production was easy to setup in the campaign, how hard can solid fuel be? So I think to myself, this will be nice.
This was not nice. It takes forever to start from scratch. I also did a terrible job mapping out the prerequisites, so every time I research, I think to myself, it's just one more item, right? So I'm feeding my boilers wood when I've forgotten to go get coal, and then immediately make a trip up every time the supply chest running the feeders runs short. It's only one more item away, right?
So I finally get solid fuel working. And it's great. No more fuel issues. This continues on for a while. Being between lakes has become a slight issue. It's cramped. Terrible layouts are everywhere, but I don't want to break anything. My red and green science production are horrors. I get laser turrets, and start making satellite bases linked over high tension wires. The goal is to start moving production out of the core. Of course, I'm defending them with laser turrets. That start getting attacked a ton.
All is well and good, until suddenly, I have half power. My solid fuel supply has no hope of coping with the lasering, and my power supply has collapsed. I could fix the problem, and deal with the attacking nests, but there's still a core issue at hand.
So, I make a train run to the closest coal deposit. It's north of my base. I'm surrounded by lakes, my boilers are in the south of the base. I snake backwards though my base.
It's 15 hours in, and I finally have a fully automated coal delivery system for my power plants.
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- Aurium
- Oct 10, 2010
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- Aurium
- Oct 10, 2010
ModeSix posted:
I find that the logistics and construction bots kind of ruin the challenge of the game because everything just happens and you have to do a lot less thinking to get things from point A to point B.They are handy but since discovering them I've lost a bit of interest in continuing.
I just use them to make my point A to B substantially worse.
For example, my copper line is currently:
Mine copper ore
Send it by flight to a rail depot
Send it via train to the wrong end of my base
Fly it to the input of my smelter line
(normal workflow begins here)
For each train load, there's a great swarm of bots that goes from one end of the base and back.
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- Oct 10, 2010
Joda posted:
Is it possible to set up proper logic circuits yet? I've been looking over circuits, but as far as I can tell this is not really an option. What I really wanna do is have a single bus belt that ferries down resources when a given production chain (Y)'s supply chest goes under a certain number of material X, and make sure that no grabbers along the bus take the items that are being ferried to Y. I'd also need a queue system, so that if another production line also requests X, its order isn't ignored/overwriting the order of Y. I already have a pretty decent idea of how I'd implement that if I had some basic logic gates and latches, but so far I haven't come across anything resembling this. Did I miss something? If not, does anyone know if this is a thing they might implement in the future?Also, I know there are alternatives to busses at a later point in the game, but the
in me is pretty adament about making this thing a reality. I think my greatest weakness with this game is overcomplicating things for very minor rewards 
(in this case less space used for busses)You can make a state machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je4vbVv1Uf8
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- Oct 10, 2010
Zephyrine posted:
Are explosive cannon shells any good.
I like them. They sometimes killed newly spawned biters before they engage me. But then i automated making them without bothering to ever make any of the normal rounds, so I can't compare. Then I killed a bunch of bases. Then I got my tank run over by a train (but I lived) and haven't made a replacement.
Zephyrine posted:
Has anyone else had trouble with this when using blueprints?about Every 8th burner for me fails to fuel itself before running out of energy
I experimented with them for boilers, and it seems that they sometimes prioritize filling whatever is next to them rather than filling themselves. The second string I put down completely ran out of energy before any of them self refueled.
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- Oct 10, 2010
enraged_camel posted:
This game looks interesting but experience has taught me to immediately become suspicious of any game that remains in "alpha" for more than two years. And it doesn't look like it's on Steam either, which means I can't get a refund if I don't like it.When is the final release? I'm assuming that there will also be a "beta" after this "alpha" so is it safe to say late 2016 or even 2017?
It has a free demo. It's limited of course, but it gives you the basic mechanic of belts and arms and factories.
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- Aurium
- Oct 10, 2010
Elendil004 posted:
Oh wait till you see Blue packs.Is there a quickstart mod that gives you a chest with a few hundred iron/copper plate, or some basic electric poo poo?
Blue packs are easy.
Green packs have few enough, easy enough ingredients that I feel the need to do them right. Doing it right is hard.
Blue packs though, they need inconvenient stuff that you all but need to make your factory around in order to make in convenient spots to bring them together. So instead i plonk down 2 belts, 4 inserters and 4 chests. And then pack mule them over manually, like an animal. Then a little bit of research later I have robots to do it for me. Easy.
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- Oct 10, 2010
If trains(!) doesn't sound worth while (and they are kind of busy work) then base game is good.
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- Oct 10, 2010
Ciaphas posted:
I was about to be slightly snarky and say "burner insertersNever messed with solar, though, so this seems like a good excuse to figure that out.
" then asked myself about the actual mining part of that plan and welp i'm dumbBurner miners of course. You're talking coal, so that's fine.
Sure, they're slow, but hey, if the coal deposit is huge, just cover it with more miners than you'd use otherwise.
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- Oct 10, 2010
Ciaphas posted:
Granted I haven't finished my current game yet--haven't produced a single purple pack or made a purple circuit--but I kind of want to restart with mods like RSO (and RSO Radar, natch) and FARLNot so much for extra challenge--I intend to stick to peaceful, for a start
I don't suppose there's a recommended mod list out and about somewhere, beyond what I listed?
Of you're using rso to make trains more useful, I'd get a tanker car mod as well. You can train empty barrels to your remote pumpjacks, and crude back, but it's kind of meh to balance, particularly when you have multiple oil outposts.
The typically recommended thing to do is just long chains if underground pipe, but a tanker car feels much more natural, and keeps the train thing.
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- Oct 10, 2010
Stick Insect posted:
Fiddle around a bit with the world generation settings. You can set your mineral deposits to be smaller and more spread out.
I think RSO is better than this, smaller deposits run out so fast that trains become a huge hassle, as you're constantly setting up new points.
If you make your deposits richer, it mostly means that you never really need to move off the near ones.
RSO makes further deposits much richer than closer deposits. You get enough to start going, but as you move away your far deposits are far enough away that trains are worthwhile, and rich enough that they last long enough for the trains to be meaningful.
As your factory grows you'll start needing multiple rich deposits to feed it raw materials, so you continue to expand it.
Sure, you could try to simply build your factory away from the spawn, but you'd probably need to fight though a bunch of biters.
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- Oct 10, 2010
Loopoo posted:
My original oil deposits have reached lowest yield, and aren't enough to provide sufficient petroleum production for my factory.Are my only options: a) to move my entire petroleum industry to a new oil well location or b) set up pumpjacks on an oil-well-rich area and barrel all the oil up and ship it via train to my already established petroleum facility?
I'm thinking of doing b, but it seems like it'll be a logistical bitch to do, especially when I have to repeat the process again when the oil wells dry up.
Allow me to give you 2 more options.
c. tanker rail car mod. skip the barrel unbarrel step. It works nice.
d. underground pipe it in. Just make a factory that builds them for you, and you'll have it done in no time, and it doesn't really take that many resources. Like rail, the pipes are mostly ignored by biters. Using underground pipes makes it pretty fast to lay, and barely affects aboveground movement much.
d is probably the most common choice.
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- Oct 10, 2010
Loopoo posted:
I'll download the tanker rail car mod, then. I think it's rather pointless doing the whole barrel / unbarrel step. Will make it so I can also set up outposts that process fuel down to petroleum and then transport that.
And now I'm imagining a remote outpost entirely devoted to boiling water, and then training it in for my boilers to run on.
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- Oct 10, 2010
Malf posted:
Is there a way to only run your steam engines when your accumulators are low?They power down when my solar panels take over but the accumulators just sit there fully charged over night.
Yes, there is. It's complex though.
https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?title=Power_production/Dealing_with_priorities
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Loopoo posted:
My life cycles between having too much oil, and producing enough plastic and sulfuric acid to keep my circuit + science assemblies going, to having no oil and everything grinding to a halt. It's so frustrating.I've started maybe 4 oil outposts, and they all get drained in no time and then I have to disassemble it because the biters are too big and strong for me to leave outposts around, otherwise I just lose laser turrets, pumpjacks and roboports needlessly.
I'm happy though because with my new armour I can wade through biter nests and kill them all.
Sounds like you don't have enough turrets. Also walls. All biters should be dead by the time your bots get to something that needs repaired.
ModeSix posted:
Don't forget that solar panels don't work at 100% efficiency all the time. They start low as the sun comes up and decrease production as it goes down, giving only 100% production for a percentage of the day cycle.Also:
Here's a link to some solar ratio stuff, but I'm mostly giving it because it includes math on how much power per day, including the ups and downs from dusk and dawn, and the like.
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5594
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- Oct 10, 2010
Ratzap posted:
The one and only practical use for burner inserters I've heard of and use is for putting fuel in boilers (I got this from a negative root tip). Speed is not vital for this application but if your power goes off for whatever reason, the burners will keep going (as will belts) and should fuel arrive they can put it in. It's saved me from a run back to my generators a couple of times - move miners on coal, toss a few chunks onto the belt with 'Z' and go back to what I was doing knowing the power will be on soon.
I really like this idea, but multiple times I've found my burner inserters have run out of power with a piece of coal in their hands. I just can't trust them.
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Solumin posted:
Blowing them up is unnecessary, you can just pick them up and they'll empty automatically. (Video games!) Two other options are to attach a steam engine (it'll automatically destroy any liquid you put in it -- attach a couple boilers for extra electricity. Video games!!) or use a mod like GotLag's Flare Stack, which adds a building that burns off extra liquids.
The real solution is to keep expanding your tank farm until you research cracking. Then you crack it, and enjoy the brief window in the game when you have no problems getting enough petro gas.
If it's still backing up even then, you need to build more crackers.
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