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    Home Unlabelled Factorio Here's my totally unnecessary, super expensive and overkill endgame wall... Did I go a little overboard?

    Factorio Here's my totally unnecessary, super expensive and overkill endgame wall... Did I go a little overboard?

    March 12, 2021

    Factorio Here's my totally unnecessary, super expensive and overkill endgame wall... Did I go a little overboard?

    Here's my totally unnecessary, super expensive and overkill endgame wall... Did I go a little overboard?

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 01:35 AM PST

    I've just been quarantined and I think I know how i'm going to spend my 15 days!

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 04:34 AM PST

    Experiments with heat pipes, clearing some misconceptions

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 12:26 AM PST

    TL;DR:

    • After the pre-heating, the length of heat pipes does not make a difference in reactor efficiency. There is no "heat loss" from pipes.

    • ...Unless your heat pipe is so long that the reactor hits the 1000°C limit before it could be spread to all exchangers.

    • The more wattage your reactor emits, the faster you'll reach that efficiency length limit.

    • Doubling up or having multiple pipes can help you reach longer distances before hitting the limit by splitting the wattage. If you're not hitting the limit, adding more pipes only increases the pre-heating cost without any benefit.

    • The pre-heating is a one-time cost and arguably negligible. If in doubt, just double up all your pipes.

    • How many reactor outputs are connected to your pipe makes little to no difference.

    Experiments:

    I wanted to test the difference between various heat pipe configurations:

    • Length: short (13 tiles), medium (100 tiles), long (230 tiles)
    • Width: single or double
    • Using more reactor outputs: all 12 (reactor surrounded by pipes) or just 1

    I set up 12 reactor setups in the editor:

    Pictures of setups 1-4

    Pictures of setups 5-12 (same but with longer pipes)

    Length Width Surrounded
    1 short single no
    2 short double no
    3 short single yes
    4 short double yes
    5 medium single no
    6 medium double no
    7 medium single yes
    8 medium double yes
    9 long single no
    10 long double no
    11 long single yes
    12 long double yes

    Experiment 1: Including pre-heating

    I just put 50 fuel cells in the reactors simultaneously, waited at x64 speed, then recorded how much steam had been generated.

    In theory, a fuel cell generates 40MW for 200s, which the exchangers will convert into 103*4 steam for 200 seconds, which is 82,400 steam.

    So 50 fuel cell should give us 4,120,000 steam.

    Results:

    Cells used before steam started Stable temperature Steam generated (million)
    1 1 534.93 4.0
    2 2 526.55 3.9
    3 3 534.93 3.9
    4 4 526.37 3.8
    5 8 853.93 3.3
    6 15 729.54 2.8
    7 10 853.93 3.1
    8 17 729.54 2.6
    9 21 999.97 1.0
    10 38 999.94 0.56
    11 24 999.94 0.95
    12 40 999.94 0.40

    • As expected, the more heat pipes you have, the longer the pre-heating takes.

    • All reactors with a long pipe ended up reaching the temperature limit. It took more than 50 cells before setup #12 reached it.

    • Even the short setups did not reach the theoretical 4.12 million steam. That is because some of the heat from those 50 cells ended up staying in the heat pipes and the reactor itself.

    Experiment 2: Already pre-heated

    This time I let the reactors run on infinite cells until their temperature stabilized, then paused time, deleted all steam from the tanks, and gave all reactors 50 cells.

    Steam generated (million)
    1 4.1
    2 4.1
    3 4.1
    4 4.1
    5 4.1
    6 4.1
    7 4.1
    8 4.1
    9 1.9
    10 3.7
    11 1.9
    12 3.7

    This is the result not everybody might expect.

    • All reactors generated the theoretically maximum amount of steam, except those that reached 1000°C.
    • Among those, the double pipes did better.

    So for each setup, there is a maximum length of pipe under which reactors are 100% efficient once pre-heated. As long as you're under that limit, the amount of pipes only affects pre-heating cost, which is a one-time cost and negligible unless you're in the habit of regularly dismantling your reactors.

    Experiment 3: Finding the limit

    I created a bunch of setups that looked like this, fed them infinite cells, then I found the maximum length of pipe which had all heat exchangers running at 103/103 steam generation.

    1 reactor (40MW): 139 tiles

    1 reactor (40MW) with double width pipes: 215 tiles

    2 reactors (160MW): 53 tiles

    2 reactors (160MW) with double width pipes: 87 tiles

    2 reactors (160MW) with 4 single pipes: 139 tiles

    2 reactors (160MW) with 2 double width pipes: 139 tiles

    With these last two, we can see the reason why double width pipes can increase the length limit: They are equivalent to 2 single width pipes, and split the wattage in two.

    Thanks to this fact and more experiments, I was able to do this table:

    Wattage going through the pipe (MW) Maximum pipe length before efficiency loss
    20 215
    40 139
    80 87
    100 76
    120 70
    160 53
    200 47
    240 45
    400 0 (can't fit enough exchangers on a single pipe before hitting the limit)

    How to use this info?

    If you are pre-planning a reactor design, calculate how much wattage it's going to produce and divide that by how many pipes are coming out of your reactor (doubled up pipes count as 2, etc.). You will know the maximum length of your pipes.

    If you're just winging it, don't stress about pipe length until you actually have your reactors running at 1000°C. Once you do, add more pipes or double up your pipes. But until you do, there is no need to try and optimize for having the fewest possible heat pipes. It will not give you any advantage.

    submitted by /u/Wiwiweb
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    The first Cursed intersection™ : Unpredictable, strange train signals. Every 13th train vanishes without a trace.

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 05:06 AM PST

    people heted my last post so here is a LHD/RHD intersection no matter what you do it works

    Posted: 11 Mar 2021 09:26 AM PST

    MOD Release: Fluidic Power. Making power/electricity more realistic by simulating it as a fluid - utilizing the game engine's fluid system

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 07:01 AM PST

    MOD Release: Fluidic Power. Making power/electricity more realistic by simulating it as a fluid - utilizing the game engine's fluid system

    Mod: Fluidic Power

    https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FluidicPower

    As the title says, I wrote a mod that overhauls the vanilla power system to simulate power as a fluid. This means power doesn't instantly teleport through power poles to where you need it like in vanilla Factorio. Rather, it moves through the poles as a fluid and loses pressure over distance, which means you cannot power your entire factory through a single small power pole. It achieves this by using Factorio's very optimized fluid system, instead of doing all the calculations myself, meaning there are no on-tick power calculations. This makes it's very UPS efficient.

    ​

    Example of a steam turbine powering a radar through transformers.

    Why and how?

    For years people have been asking to make power more realistic so that you cannot pass your factory's total power draw through one single pole. For example by introducing a kind of voltage drop and the need for transformers. There have even been mods to simulate this, such as Flow Network and High Voltage. However, they were highly inefficient. As Rseding said here: "Your UPS will TANK once you build more than a few of anything if you used such a mod :P" However, the problem was that it was never modded correctly. They did electrical calculations themselves in Lua, which is very slow. Factorio has a built-in Fluid System that would work perfectly for simulating electricity, and which is super optimized to work on large factories.

    So I essentially changed all power poles to be internally handled as pipes that transport a fluid with a unit of Joules. And it works! The interaction between the poles and machines is still sort of the same. All machines and inserters etc. remain unchanged. From the outside, it feels almost like vanilla. Except your accumulators now act like storage tanks and you need very nostalgic looking transformers to transfer power over large distances.

    What about UPS?

    I wrote more extensively about UPS in my FAQ, but it's not at all so bad as you might expect. I have a 90SPM benchmarking base running at over 220 UPS on a 7-year-old CPU. And the extra load of the new fluid updates are negligible! The bottleneck rather becomes the electric network update, since each power pole now has a unique electric network. Normally Factorio expects a handful of large electric networks, but now it has hundreds or thousands of small ones. So, as you might expect, the more power poles you have the harder the UPS hit. The UPS of your base will depend a lot on how you build and especially your hardware, but you will definitely be able to finish the game at a smooth 60 UPS. Likely reach a constant 100 SPM, and if built correctly with the right hardware, possibly even a few hundred SPM (or a large base with perimeter wall).

    As an example, here is some timing info from the 90SPM steam-powered base using a main bus:

    Update: 4.38 / 3.02 / 8.81 Game update: 4.29 / 2.86 / 8.73 Transport Lines: 0.65 / 0.34 / 1.06 Fluid Manager: 0.02 / 0.01 / 0.09 Entity Update: 1.32 / 0.66 / 2.69 Electric Network: 2.21 / 1.47 / 6.55 Script Update: 0.04 / 0.01 / 0.08 mod-FluidicPower: 0.04 / 0.01 / 0.08

    Notice that the transport belts in my normal main bus took more than 10 times as much processing as all the fluid calculations. And how the main culprit is the Electric Network.

    In conclusion, it's totally feasible to simulate power as a fluid and still build a reasonably sized base.

    Fun Stuff

    The main reason I implemented this mod is for the new challenges it creates. For example, you have transformers to step your voltages, which essentially increases the concentration of the power fluid from 10kJ to 1MJ. However, my favourite is the accumulators which are now storage tanks. This means a few things:

    • They now have little displays showing how full they are!
    • They link-up to each other without the need for more power poles.
    • They're not smart to charge or discharge at the correct times like in vanilla. You need circuits to manage this yourself!

    So here I will give a quick example of my solar power benchmark base. Because of the large solar fields, it required many more poles, which decreased the maximum UPS to around 140+, which is still way more than enough. But I digress. I built the solar farm and battery bank separately, added some smart circuits, and created this very familiar power production/consumption graph.

    Power production vs. power consumption graph of the entire factory. It shows the familiar production spike when charging of accumulators, drop off when the accumulators are full and stable consumption.

    You might wonder where this graph is from since there is no global power network. Well, this graph is from the Fluids Tab! You can even calculate the total power production and consumption of your base. For example, the unit of the fluid here is 10kJ which means my base is consuming:

    1.7M units/minute * 10 kJ/unit / 60sec/min = 283 MW

    And here are the pictures of my battery banks, and battery controller.

    Example of one of the battery banks consisting if different cells. It charges and discharges on command. It stores in low voltage, and input/outputs directly to higher voltages. These cells went out of balance at times, might need a Madzuri battery cell balancer.

    The battery controller keeping the power at reasonable levels. Notice the little Energy Sensor on the left, which also has a visual fluid indication. Also, in the middle left is a very-nostalgic-looking transformer so that I can power the combinators.

    Conclusion

    I'm very glad how this mod came out, and that it actually works! I don't think vanilla needs to change the way power works at all, but this mod does indeed create new and interesting challenges that a lot of Factorio players will enjoy. So I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!

    https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FluidicPower

    Disclaimer: The mod is still in alpha, and it's my first big mod, so there might be little bugs here and there, but nothing should be game-breaking. Also, it's written to work in multiplayer, but I haven't tested it yet. Please let me know if you find any bugs!

    submitted by /u/stringweasel
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    30M ore patch. 173 miners. More than 150 miners are active. 16 blue belts of ore

    Posted: 11 Mar 2021 06:32 PM PST

    Alt-F4 #27 - Designing the Unnecessary

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 06:02 AM PST

    Just launched my first rocket. Now what?

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 02:43 AM PST

    Attacking biter bases in a nutshell

    Posted: 11 Mar 2021 02:53 PM PST

    All my blueprints all gone when I updated my factorio...someone knows where they went?

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 12:49 AM PST

    Hello everyone,

    I didnt play factorio for a year and had tons of useful blueprints I use all the time. But after I updated they all went missing ??

    Is this a known issue, and if yes, what can I do to retrieve them ?

    Thanks :)

    submitted by /u/Skrillerman
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    I gave red circuits a go. I can't help but think it's more expensive then it needs to be.

    Posted: 11 Mar 2021 11:00 PM PST

    The amazing feeling when you unspaghetti your base by removing useless factories, and now have so much free space that you were struggling to find

    Posted: 11 Mar 2021 02:05 PM PST

    Scaling up

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 05:39 AM PST

    Scaling up

    So to give you an idea of scale, this is the blueprint for my new steel array which produces 18K/min compared to the remains of my original bus which launched my first rocket

    https://preview.redd.it/z3q54q7rolm61.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=889d21b865916c69536f3fc1270fd6a9cb3fb2d7

    submitted by /u/Bibbitybob91
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    So this is my shed, where I come to tinker. Shout if you recognise any of those

    Posted: 11 Mar 2021 02:34 PM PST

    This can't be good

    Posted: 11 Mar 2021 11:02 AM PST

    Can't start a game, access denied

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 04:12 AM PST

    First ever Rocket

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 04:08 AM PST

    First ever Rocket

    After 50h aprox, i launched my first rocket... Wanna start again, but i want to plan kind of a "megabase" as this one is hard to improve... spagetti things.

    Any tips to avoid bottlenecks in terms of factory growth?

    https://preview.redd.it/uxhx1ycu8lm61.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=37e3df921cdfdeaba0875f86e3fcfe0a052fafaf

    submitted by /u/T1P3X
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    Does enabling "rich mode + no enemy expansion" disable achievements?

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 07:41 AM PST

    I know you cant get the finish game achievements but can I still earn achievements relating to mass production?

    submitted by /u/Mithos91
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    What is the purpose of the circuit network

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 02:47 AM PST

    I've been playing factorio for a while now and still can't understand the purpose(and how to use) of the circuit network.

    submitted by /u/Silver_Fox561
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    What had changed since 2016?

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 06:18 AM PST

    Hello! I played this game only a little bit back in 2016 near release. Back then the game was too complicated for me since I was rather new to PC gaming and far younger. Recently, I've been returning to the factory genre with Satisfactory and DSP and have been loving it. Could I ask what has changed/been added in the past 5 years? I'm aware that the question is pretty huge, but I'm just curious to know!

    submitted by /u/Iconix_RL
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    What's wrong with this part of my base?

    Posted: 12 Mar 2021 05:53 AM PST

    What's wrong with this part of my base?

    Hi, I'm trying to troubleshoot this issue.
    On the left you'll see that two belts are not fully loaded, but on the right, the belts are backed up and limiting production. I have a blueprint 3->5 balancer, but it doesn't resolve this issue?

    https://preview.redd.it/01ba2bjgrlm61.png?width=1012&format=png&auto=webp&s=7b7f7a9ae0d48e4b7644141ea5b747624caccf07

    submitted by /u/matski_89
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