Factorio Weekly Question Thread |
- Weekly Question Thread
- Is this sushi enough? I made a sushi block base with the 30 More Science Packs mod
- 165 hours and 9 save files later, finally launched a rocket!
- 1.1 Menu Easter Egg
- This is the latest addition to my Spidertron Enhancements mod: a pathfinder that automatically navigates around water!
- First ship in Space Exploration
- My first Factorio playthrough, 42 hours later, I launched a rocket. Never felt so satisfied with myself. Base was designed around a main bus, but moved on to bots mid-game.
- When you look at the map and it kinda looks like an elephant :)
- How spidertron avoids trains (Part 2)
- Would this balance evenly? I couldn't find a 10 to 5 balancer so i combined a 5 to 2 and a 5 to 3 balancer and balanced the output with a 5 to 5 balancer but im not sure if this actually works...
- "Cheating" doesn't even feel like cheating in this game
- The Last Reactor, or more generally, How to Design a Reactor That Works Always Instead Of Usually Sometimes Mostly
- I made a condition calculator for smart train stops because I was lazy to calculate it myself and its actually sometimes useful. :D
- this is fine :)
- Factorio PVP Mod
- Good and easily upgradable early to end game wall defence! Plus Laser - Mine defence!
- Steam Achievements disabled after installing Mod
- My 465MW Nuclear Plant
- Help to place blueprints, it's using absolute, even though it is set to relative
- I give up.
- Is the green circuit copper wire ratio really 3:2?
- Using blueprints as a list for a request/buffer chest
| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 10:00 PM PDT Ask any questions you might have. Post your bug reports on the Official Forums Previous Threads
Discord server (and IRC) Find more in the sidebar [link] [comments] | ||
| Is this sushi enough? I made a sushi block base with the 30 More Science Packs mod Posted: 21 Mar 2021 09:31 PM PDT
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| 165 hours and 9 save files later, finally launched a rocket! Posted: 21 Mar 2021 04:08 PM PDT
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| Posted: 22 Mar 2021 01:14 AM PDT
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| Posted: 22 Mar 2021 06:25 AM PDT
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| First ship in Space Exploration Posted: 21 Mar 2021 10:08 PM PDT
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| Posted: 22 Mar 2021 02:25 AM PDT
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| When you look at the map and it kinda looks like an elephant :) Posted: 21 Mar 2021 11:41 AM PDT
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| How spidertron avoids trains (Part 2) Posted: 21 Mar 2021 11:13 AM PDT
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| Posted: 22 Mar 2021 04:05 AM PDT
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| "Cheating" doesn't even feel like cheating in this game Posted: 21 Mar 2021 10:26 PM PDT So my last base wasn't planned well and getting pretty unwieldy because I was just going through Space Exploration for the first and focused more on learning the new mod than planning my base well. But I stopped playing for awhile because I just couldn't keep working on the same base, and building a new one seemed like torture. So I decided to make a compromise, I can start over and turn cheat mode on (allows you to craft anything buy hand for free) except I can only left-click single craft (vs right click and craft 5 at a time)... and I just have to say this doesn't even feel like cheating. There is so much to this game that even being able to just make science packs one at a time per click seems slow and laborious. So I build assemblers. And I can build a ton of labs for free, but now I need a lot more power. I can build a reactor for free, but I need a consistent supply of uranium because lord knows I'm not going to stand around feeding fuel in manually.... Factorio is a fractal of complexity. If you automate anything and zoom out to get a wider view, it's still just as complex just now at a wider view. [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 06:09 PM PDT I'm a reactor design addict. I can't resist iterating on designs a little bit every time I build them. Most of my in-service reactors in my own worlds are often chimera monsters that incorporate a bunch of different revisions of reactor designs all stacked together. And, I know I've said this to myself a bunch of times, but just this once, maybe I've actually designed something sturdy enough to stick to it, making it the last one I ever design. TL;DR Made a nuclear reactor; figured I'd share it, the story of how and why I made it, and all of the technical details and decisions involved. Spark notes:- pumpless- zero waste- slam start- cold start, after it's built- uninterruptible power for control logic- uneven-fueling prevention- fast fueling- 2xN infinite tiling- flexible water- self building Details Time: I've build a lot of reactors, but they never come out quite perfect. So, I decided to sit down and figure out exactly what things tended to go badly about previous builds, experiment, iterate, and come up with something that solved those problems properly instead of just looking good on paper. The list of talking points above basically comes 1 to 1 with a mirror list of things that sucked about the others. They had a ton of pumps. They would take forever to reach full capacity. They'd buffer unevenly. They'd fuel unevenly. Low power conditions would scramble their fueling logic and they'd go haywire. i had to build them in stages and use a ton of temporary roboports. Sometimes they were just plain too small. One of the most frustrating things about reactors to me is how many designs which look good on paper turn out to perform terribly because of the very limited speed that heat moves. I can't tell you how many times I've built the One Reactor To Rule Them All only to find that it takes 15 minutes for the heat exchangers on the ends to come up to temperature, or worse, that they can't maintain temperature at all at full load. So, the one and only trade-off that I made in this build, in exchange for all of the other good things about it, is that it doesn't follow the perfect ratios between reactors, HEs, and turbines. I overbuilt reactor capacity by 14% (nominally there would be 32 HEs per reactor, and I build 27.5). This was a very deliberate decision, but it's one which seemed intrinsically wrong at first, so I will explain why I made it before the rest. First of all, taking into account the failings of previous designs, I wanted a reactor that heats up fast, all along its hot area. No chilly fingers. I did some experiments and found that if you use a single row of heat pipe with a double row of HEs on both sides of it, it takes MUCH longer for heat to travel down it, and the temperature difference between the reactors and the ends, is MUCH greater, than if you use a double row, so that was the obvious choice, even though the extra thickness would decrease energy density. Additional experimentation showed that time it takes for the end of your HEs to warm up increases roughly exponentially at load with linear increases in length. This makes some sense, as it's how heat works in real life, but it's not how other factorio flow mechanics work. Throws you for a bit of a loop if you don't expect it. Second of all, I wanted this design to be self building. I want to just plop it down on the map and have robots build it for me, while I worry about other things. So, clearly it has to have built in roboports. The question is, where to put them? If you try to build a perfectly ratio'd reactor, you only really have one option, between the HEs and the reactors. If you try to put them between the HEs and the turbines, they're too far away from the reactors and can't build them or the landfill under them, and you have to babysit the construction for it to finish. Scooching the HEs 4 blocks farther away from the reactors to squeeze in a roboport there adds literally minutes to the warm-up time at full load, and we can't have that. Clearly, both non-starters... the solution, painful as it might be at first to accept, is to intentionally overbuild reactors, compared to HEs. This gives you shorter banks, and it's easy to squeeze a roboport in at the end in between the HEs and the turbines, and maintain construction coverage over the whole reactor area. So in the end, I chose to go with banks of 11 heat exchangers. I was originally going to go with 12, but then I wouldn't quite be able to get steam out of a bank without either pumps, or complicated weaves of pipes. I didn't like either option because I don't want to give up cold starting and I wanted the reactor to be as UPS friendly as possible, as I'm already only averaging about 45fps on my world (mostly due to goddamn bug pathing as they come from all corners of the universe to hate on me for my giant pollution cloud, but pumps are also using a surprising chunk of update time) so I decided, to hell with it, 11 HEs in a bank. one bank consists of the HEs themselves, one row of steam pipes, and one row of heat pipes. It's 4 tiles wide, and has a capacity of 110MW, which is 27.5MW per tile of width. This is 85.9% of the theoretical maximum necessary processing density to handle infinitely tiled reactors, which is 32MW per tile. I'll settle for that. Reactors are the easy part. Neighbor bonus requirements constrain them to a double row. Since they are hottest, and heat movement is a pain point, each one is connected to 2 heat pipes, to give that heat as much opportunity as possible to escape to the HEs. Fueling inserters comprise a strip of stuff, 4 tiles wide, alongside each reactor. I'd had some annoyances with previous builds which would cause terrible problems if they tried to fuel themselves with a non-full belt of input. The fuel inserters would only activate for a split second, and any inserter which didn't happen to have a fuel cell right in front of it was, well, shit out of luck. Patchy, uneven fueling destroys your neighborhood. Failing to fuel a single reactor in a 2xN grid will cost you not only the output of that reactor, but also the neighbor bonus of every adjacent reactor (280MW total), so if you have a patchy belt and you're close to your power limits, you are in trouble. To deal with this, I moved the fuel belt a little further out, and added a second layer of inserters. Filter inserters pull one fuel cell from the main belt, place it in a loading area, and then wait. Another inserter will then put it into the reactor, once each loading area has a fuel cell waiting on it. This is all automatic, the plant knows how many reactors and loading zones it has, you don't have to configure it. It Just Works. Spent fuel unloading just uses a long inserter to drop spent fuel back onto the far side of the main belt, and they get filtered off at the controller. Already covered the heat exchanger layout. 11 HEs to a bank means I can pipe the steam from each bank directly to an appropriate bank of turbines without pumping it or needlessly intersecting it. I decided to use 18 turbines per bank, which gives about 105MW of electrical capacity. That extra 5MW comes in the form of a slow but steady ~51 or so steam per second, and it's convenient to have just a little bit of extra steam coming out so that even at full whack, the steam buffer doesn't empty out. This helps make the setup tolerant of unexpected swings in power consumption, which could otherwise cause brownouts on one hand, or waste fuel on the other. Its control logic features a "fueling checklist" with four items, each of which must be true in order to add fuel to the reactor. First, there is a manual control switch combinator that must be turned on for fueling to proceed. Second, the reactor can't have fuel in it already. Fuel insertion and removal inserters keep track of how much they put in and take out. The reactor expects that if you put in 10 fuel cells, it will get 10 spent cells out. It will wait to add more fuel until it's taken out the last batch. Most obviously, this prevents the reactor from over-fueling. Less obviously but still very importantly, it prevents uneven fueling if the waste handling system is somehow clogged and reactors are unable to exhaust spent cells. It's a handy safeguard against accidentally self sabotaging your reactor in a subtle yet terrible way by e.g. ham handing the fuel belt. Third, each loading zone needs to have a fuel cell waiting. I already talked about it, but in large part, it's helpful for the same reason as the previous safeguard. Fourth, the reactor should actually NEED to be fueled. All of my previous reactors simply used a steam buffer, and a threshold, below which fueling would happen, but I tended to notice that as your power usage approached (or exceeded) the maximum supply, the steam buffer might drain out completely and cause a brownout as the HEs warmed up. Sure, you could fix this by just building a bigger buffer, but having lots of tanks hurts UPS performance and you should generally want your buffers to be as small as possible. The solution: using a combinator delay, compare the buffer steam level to its level from the previous tick. This will give you an indication of whether the buffer is filling, or emptying. If it's emptying, refuel immediately. This is what I call fast fueling. It only takes a few seconds for the controller to realize that some HEs have cooled off. Small variations can and should be ignored because they can arise from pressure differences caused by load fluctuations under light loads, but if the thing is really cranking, it absolutely makes a huge difference to refuel as soon as it notices the steam level plummet, compared to waiting for the buffer to fall tens of thousands of units of steam back to its arbitrary level, and by that point your entire bank of HEs is stone cold. The control logic has an uninterruptible power supply. Some people use solar panels and accumulators for this purpose, but frankly I don't know why they bother. You'd need a ton of them to have the same amount of energy storage as a tank of steam, and you really have no excuse not to use one since there's a nuclear reactor right there. So, the logic area has a dedicated turbine and heat exchanger, connected directly to the end of the 2xN grid. I've experimented before with using bare accumulators for this purpose and logic to disconnect them from the power grid if it becomes overloaded, but honestly, I hated how that turned out. Accumulators just don't store enough energy for this to be practical, and with no backup power source, if an outage lasts longer than a few minutes, all your control logic dies, and takes your main reactor array down with it. Not ideal. One tank of steam will run your control logic for 10 hours completely without power, and since the dedicated HE is right there attached to the reactor, it gets first dibs on all the yummy warmth, so it's basically impossible to stall it, no matter how badly you abuse your electrical grid. The controller includes a power switch which bridges the control power grid with the main one. Use this when building the reactor for the first time. It will immediately alarm when you turn it on due to low fuel and low power, but once you fuel it and warm it up, it will stop. After it's built and powered on once, it becomes cold start capable and able to tolerate extended periods of time with no fuel or outside power (many hours). It also includes alarms, and will complain if its input fuel is low, its waste output is backed up, or if the control steam power supply is low. Slam-start is a term i threw in because, after building and testing it, it heats up SUPER fast. I am quite impressed with it. It will go from 500 degrees, no fuel, and an empty buffer, to constant 100% load in 1 fuel cycle, or from idle to 100% load immediately, with no brownouts. Can't state enough how annoyed I am with most of my previous reactors and their sluggish responsiveness. Building this thing and having it work feels like sipping from the holy grail. Flexible water is fairly self explanatory, and it's another perk of using 11-long banks of HEs. A single offshore pump can provide enough water for an entire bank of them, so accepting a water input on both ends is kind of a formality. It's nice for when you are landfilling over a lake and it's got a stupid little island in the middle that you just can't quite work around. On the other hand, having the redundant fill point between the reactors and the HEs technically wastes some space... I could probably squeeze a little more performance out of it if I removed it, but right now I've kept it just because my more-or-less default settings no-mods world doesn't really have a lot of well-shaped lakes so flexibility is more important to me than the 20 seconds I'd shave off of its response time. If there is anything bad about this design, it is that, an artist I am not. The controller is a bit of a mess. It works, but it's wire spaghetti. The power poles from separate networks have a habit of connecting to each other if you look at them funny. It's all closed into a closet at the back of the control room. Don't go in there, and avoid building power poles too close to the control room or they might bridge the grids by accident. The substations in there and the medium power poles around the reactors are off limits. It's not a single structure, more a composable collection of modules, and here is a blueprint book with all of them, instructions included. https://factorioprints.com/view/-MWLpCe4yfW-XE0cz336 Same blueprint, different website (built by one of you guys): https://factorioblueprints.tech/user/blueprint/8e538252-528f-4f1e-88d0-84496fb5d222 Here's a picture of the control room. If there's any one thing about this design that's not great, it's this. I am a lot better at making things work than making them pretty. It's not too bad, if you pretend the combinator cthulhu in the closet isn't there. Don't place power poles near here. This is where the main power grid and the control grid coexist, and they have separation anxiety. You can't even look at them funny without them connecting to each other somehow. Control Room And Wire Medusa Closet Hooked up and running normally, if you can call that one requestor chest \"hooked up\" hooked up and running, steam buffer completely full, otherwise all normal It has a drive thru between the heat exchangers and the turbines, because this is america More stats for nerds: Costs, for one unit: so: Energy buffering capacity calculations: total usable heat energy storage: 511GJ In other words, if it was at full idle and the buffer was empty, you could give it a whack and it wouldn't waste any power. Heat transfer characteristics: test reactor selfie, banana for scale edit: removed extra zero from steam energy calcs [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 22 Mar 2021 03:36 AM PDT
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| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 11:09 PM PDT | ||
| Posted: 22 Mar 2021 02:57 AM PDT Hey Guys, my friend and i currently want to get back to this game after having almost 200H in it. We missed many updates and are hyped to see what changed. The problem is we dont want to work together. I just wondered if there a any PVP mods that allow 2 or more starting positions for each person and like creates a safe zone where the creatures bases are like the starting zone (small in the starting area and getting bigger the further you go from each individual playerbase). [link] [comments] | ||
| Good and easily upgradable early to end game wall defence! Plus Laser - Mine defence! Posted: 22 Mar 2021 06:52 AM PDT In this video i tried to make a wall defence that is effective from early on to end game with very few and easy upgrade steps while being manageable cost-wise (lots of walls are needed though). In the blueprint book i use you can scroll through them by pressing shift + mouse wheel down and easily upgrade your previous wall without deconstruction! Also i include an expensive and power hungry yet extremely effective laser - mine defence for late game +++ at the end, hope you guys like it! The early game defences were tested without any research upgrade at all and regular magazines against among others a combo of medium bitters and medium spitters! While the late game without any space research at all against hordes of enemies that i doubt you will ever face ingame (laser mine case). Blueprint early to late game defence: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lfSnUqCc40J7l8jpp2dbcE7peP2lL1N\_XX3JFfMaDK0/edit?usp=sharing Blueprint laser - mine defence: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g1sxN-j5wEONIkoM-uvVyYbr1xLatlvqr\_xg4k0QCqQ/edit?usp=sharing [link] [comments] | ||
| Steam Achievements disabled after installing Mod Posted: 22 Mar 2021 06:30 AM PDT So I installed 1 mod, which is Max Rate Calculator, so I can more easily optimize my factory. However after doing this I noticed I wasnt getting any Steam achievementes anymore. Does this mean I have to start over after uninstalling all Mods to earn Steam achievements again? Or is there another way? [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 06:16 PM PDT
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| Help to place blueprints, it's using absolute, even though it is set to relative Posted: 22 Mar 2021 12:02 AM PDT I've been playing just fine for hundreds of hours, I was placing my defense wall blueprint, shifted in my seat, and accidentally pressed a button, it placed the blueprint, in the wrong place, not a big deal, except that now any blueprint that I have with snap to grid enabled now is using absolute rather than relative, I've exited the game, and am still having this problem, I don't now how to fix it, and can't seem to find any info on this, thanks for the help. [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 04:51 PM PDT I swear, I keep trying to get into this game, but I always get to the research vial things and after the green one it all just gets beyond my thinking abilities. How are you supposed to automate all this stuff? I'm playing with enemies off and I still can't manage it. Think I'm just to dumb for this. [link] [comments] | ||
| Is the green circuit copper wire ratio really 3:2? Posted: 21 Mar 2021 11:08 PM PDT I have been digging around on the internet to improve my factory and I keep reading that the green circuit to copper ratio is 3:2 as shown in this video. The problem I am having is that my green circuit assemblers are spending a lot of time waiting due to an ingredient shortage of copper wire. If wire is produced at 2 per 0.5 seconds I should be getting 6 per half-second. What I don't seem to understand is how that satisfies a green circuit build with requires 8 copper wire in the same 0.5 second interval. This explains why I am not saturating a yellow belt with the same setup but how did most of these tutorials get it working? Did something change in the ratios between versions or am I messing something up? [link] [comments] | ||
| Using blueprints as a list for a request/buffer chest Posted: 21 Mar 2021 07:25 PM PDT Is that possible? I've tried many different things to do it but don't seem to work. Maybe using a signal generator with a blueprint inside would also be a good idea to solve this... you'd get the blueprint part list as signal coming out of the generator. [link] [comments] |
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