Factorio - a factory building game - now with Space Age expansion

[Average Manatee]

Got my rocket up on Vulcanus and a strong science pack production, time to go home.

Thoughts:

Spoiler

Was really surprised by how it felt very unique. I've played factorio a lot and I've played mods, I thought new planets would feel somewhere in that range. Instead it involved some quite different setups (granted not entirely unique, mods have the molten iron/copper stuff as well). The fact that you don't have to do all of your research over also helps a lot, so you're building from scratch but you're still skipping like 70% of the work and all of the research waiting.

I'm also pleasantly surprised they had the balls to make enemies that were truly hard. Granted this is partially because I'm doing the no yellow or purple science achievement but I still had all other tech fully maxed which pretty well crushes Nauvis stuff. Making lasers completely useless was not something I was expecting. It is a bit cheesy that you can just drop items from orbit, like uranium ammo or w/e, when you're clearly intended to do things from scratch. I'll try to stick to the scratch approach for other planets. I did have my ship drop like 50 solar panels and accumulators but that was just quality of life

Also feels great that I can go back to Nauvis with foundries and destroy all the cliffs and stuff. Just writing this as I wait for 6k science to fill up

What's your ships look like? Here's mine

Spoiler

I like how this encourages ridiculous belt spaghetti

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, I've entirely given up on trying to ironman this shit now. Aside from the mod being total horseshit quite frequently, I've just sunk way too many hours in to start over. Optimization could get me back here faster, but a huge chunk of that time is unavoidable busywork doing missions and setting up and tearing down mining outposts.

Main techtree stuff has slowed down, but mostly because I keep unlocking warp stuff constantly now, and it's a drain on my limited science production. My indoor area just got a bit bigger again, so I am planning to retool it and double my basic science throughput (and more importantly, properly automate more of it) but I'm holding off until I get logistic bots, which are about half done. Of course, that ignroes the fact yellow science is a bitch to produce and I've gotten this far by having it drop from the boss biters. I do have a fuckton of blue circuits and the other things stashed though, so I can probably afford to finish it up without a boss, assuming I find some god damned iron. Game is infuriatingly stingy with resources sometimes. The solar I have there is about enough to keep the lights on inside the base, assuming it's daytime and I'm only running half the shit due to lack of iron. I could build more but I'm also getting close to going nuclear. I thought I'd be there by now but again, game being stingy and distracting.

Two major things have improved though- the first is one of the warp techs. Maybe it's a suggested mod? It's the Marvin robot. He seems to have 3 main purposes- he needs to be dragged to new missions to unlock even more advanced shit (urghhh) and he can be ridden as a vehicle. He can fly over water, which is neat. But he can't be stashed in the inventory so it's not that amazing. Maybe once he's a bit stronger; he's got an inventory like power armour so I can hopefully boost his speed and give him some shields. But the third function is what really shines: He can produce science packs ex nihilo. At first just red, but he can do green now as well. The rate isn't amazing but when I get a ton of downtime on a lifeless world it adds up.

The second major thing is Mk2 power armour. People often talk about logistics as being the turning point in Factorio, but personally I feel like it's this armour. Once you've got this thing, there's enough room to slap on a fusion reactor and ~10 or so personal laser turrets. With just a few upgrades to lasers, that's enough to just walk through biter bases while barely slowing down. It marks the point where you can just claim an arbitrary amount of territory as fast as you can walk, without cost. The innate pollution of the warp reactor is insane, but the ratio of perimeter to area is squared. At some point, the cloud is so god damned big even it will settle down and stop expanding. The reactor no longer has a built in time limit (though I can still get kicked off world by shitty random events) so once I find a suitable place (preferably one with lots of trees, lakes, and few nests) I intend to set up a real base, outdoors, and just crank out an obscene amount of resources and science and get the mundane tech tree done all in one go, as well as currently outstanding warp techs. With nothing to do on zones afterwards but complete missions, I can hopefully blaze through the rest of them and finish this up.

 

[Ironmonk]

Well, after (trying 100% vanilla) playing and struggling REALLY hard (all my vanilla blueprints were pretty much deprecated in 1.1... and now, even my extensive railways BP were trashed... this pissed me very much), I must say: I don't like Factorio 2.0

The updated rails aren't symmetrical like before, so you likely will need more space to make something closer to 1.1.

The (potentially awesome) elevated rails is shit, its too bulky and the space between rail-supports are too small, so again, to make a nice and efficient turnaround I needed to increase the space by 1 chunk up+down and 1 chunk left+right... so now I can make a turnaround without a risk of train crashing or jamming (it was pretty rare in 1.1, if built properly), but it takes almost double the space than before [3x3 chunks vs 5x5 chunks].

The railway with interrupts and stuff... I didn't dwell in it but, from what I have read, it fails spectacularly by not implementing a major feature added by LTN: multi-stations... and while 2.0 implemented some of LTN features, to me, this is probably the most important, it makes designing stations much more fun and compact. Besides, this railway system 2.0 looks way more complicated than LTN.

With LTN + Warehouse mod, you could set as many ingredients and its quantities to be dropped on the same station and sort its distribution with filter inserters... IIRC, I had a multi-station blueprints for 1/2/4/6/8 different items.

I'm 90% sure I'm gonna drop this pure vanilla playthrough and wait for LTN to update for 2.0... till then, I will use Creative Mod to tinker with rails, city blocks and other blueprints.

 

[Hellraiser]

I learned you can now remote control tanks and they also now have their own logistics request slots so you can use them to intervene while offplanet

Unfortunately while you can drive and control it outside of radar range, you won't get any vision around it since you rely on radar/remote view the whole time.

Still that's one option to deal with goddamn b*ter migrants moving into your clay while fucking around in space. Guess I need to plop down some forward observation posts/forts to get vision everywhere where the cloud of progress reaches, and that should be enough.

What's your ships look like? Here's mine

Spoiler

First iteration of a minimalistic (read: lazy/impatient) freighter design. I did a test round trip with it to Fulgora and it seems to do ok, still need to b*ter-proof my Nauvis factory before I fuck off to space (and also waiting for enough enriched uranium to start Kovarexing it). Mostly wondering if the yellow ammo production to consumption ratio while it's parked in orbit will be >1, possibly need one more smelter on it since the plates are the bottleneck. I might improve it or build the second freighter with a sushi/baggage claim belt around the hub made of red belts.

 

[Andnjord]

And here is Astronomic Science 4, fully automated!

Decided it was better to split its two components, obervation frames from the satellite dishes and telescopes and the actual cards in two separate areas, made it all a lot easier and prettier to look at.

Tier 4 has a special ingredient though. It needs asteroid probe data, which requires you to lauch probes in an asteroid field. This FINALLY brings us to one of the coolest parts of Space Exploration, spaceships!!

Meet the Kool Kodex Karrier, my first little spaceship. I might go into detail about the circuit logic if anyone is interested, but suffice it to say this little guy automatically loads up with probes and fuel, flies off to the asteroid belt, launches the probes, loads up on probe data and flies back home with its bellyfull of precious cargo.

THE SPACE FACTORY MUST GROW!

 

[Ironmonk]

Sorry to dissapoint you guys.
LTN was designed for Factorio 0.14.
While porting it over should somewhat work, Factorio 2.0 deserves a new design built from scratch.
Since I'm no longer playing Factorio, there's little chance I'll design LTN 2.0.

Damn it... no LTN for 2.0... well, time to try Cybersyn (its updated to 2.0 at least)

 

[Average Manatee]

Warning to people playing on Gleba

Spoiler

Normally you on average get 1 seed back per fully grown tree harvested. I messed up and thought it was 100 product per tree which would mean you'd grow in seed number over time. Problem is that first off its RNG whether you actually get the seed, second if you go AFK and your production chain break down somewhere then you're gonna lose a lot of seeds that aren't produced before the product spoils. Get a few production modules in your machines to produce a seed surplus ASAP

I learned you can now remote control tanks and they also now have their own logistics request slots so you can use them to intervene while offplanet

Unfortunately while you can drive and control it outside of radar range, you won't get any vision around it since you rely on radar/remote view the whole time.

Still that's one option to deal with goddamn b*ter migrants moving into your clay while fucking around in space. Guess I need to plop down some forward observation posts/forts to get vision everywhere where the cloud of progress reaches, and that should be enough.

Damn, that's really useful.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I had forgotten that nuclear fuel crafts in batches of 10 at once. I have 10 times more fuel than I was expecting. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah nuclear fuel is almost inexhaustible even before kovarex. Kovarex is basically just peace of mind.

Is there any good strategy for defending Gleba? The big armored ones just charge turrets and do AOE damage to everything and laser turrets don't have the DPS to kill them, while the ranged ones stay outside the range of bullet turrets. There's also no efficiency modules for Gleba's version of pollution. I'm trying to do the starting planets without advanced tech or airdropping in free stuff.

RIght now I'm pretty sure if I leave my base is toast. And I the major problem is that they destroy my trees if they win which destroys hours of progress getting seed

 

[Hellraiser]

Fulgora is interesting, between turning things on its head with getting advanced components easily and it being a problem to obtain the basic ones, high yield deposits only on small islands and power generation being similar to using solar power but much more space efficient (which is a bit at a premium because it is an archipelago). Got killed by lightning once so far.

I ended up dropping a bunch of gear with me, some assemblers, batteries, belts, drones and roboports (also utterly useless solar panels and a car I never used, nuclear exoskeletons in power armor mk2 go brr). It saved me maybe an hour or so of setting up. Hardest part was finding an island suitable for both mining scrap and building a base. The map gen throws just 4 types at you, big with no scrap deposits (just ruins), big with small scrap deposits, small with nothing and small with vaults (very rich/long lasting deposits with a small area)..

I made a splitter waterfall for all the scrap as a stopgap.

Spoiler

Moving from my foothold/starter base towards a scaled up solution is going to be interesting. Technically I already have all the basics needed to start exporting resources, but it's clear the Holmium rate from the deposits I have is pittiful and I will need to go and claim more islands and scale up everything.

Also nice ambience and synth music.

 

[Average Manatee]

Gleba review (haven't finished but I'm about done and waiting for stuff)

Spoiler

Going to Vulcanus first might have given me a bad impression. There you can build up with OP foundries and mining drills that spits out red belts of stuff with a microbase. A lot of this is because you don't need to do research, but its mostly the foundries and drills. So in Gleba I think I didn't prepare for scale well.

But, there really wasn't enough buildable land for me to work with. Cliffs were everywhere in the normal biome and the swamp is just functionally a bunch of islands. I think the idea (if you don't have cliff explosives from Vulcanus) is that you're supposed to use a lot of landfill on swamps. Problem is that the stone deposits are super small, my starting one could fit like 10 mining drills and it was the largest. Outside starting area deposits are like 40-60k which is a fucking joke. So I was stuck making a bunch of microfactory setups which were a PITA to expand. It doesn't help that you change one thing, your spoilage line gets plugged or something, and everything dies. And certain production lines need to be right next to others or the goods will spoil significantly in transit.

Defensively I still haven't found a good way to kill these enemies aside from plopping down a wall of substations with laser turrets, which still only beats the stompers half the time. Granted I'm kind of limiting myself tech wise, and I'm on deathworld so evolution rate is a lot higher, but its still kind of lame. I get the feeling that the rocket turret is supposed to be the solution, but that involves tech from Gleba. Is anyone actually making a full research lab with all the research packs on new planets? I figured that was a big waste of time and effort and its better to just launch it back home. All that research infrastructure would be a ton of work and a ton of space to plop down. I do have a tank to drive around in but it turns out I can't make ammo because there's no coal here. I don't think I'm missing some kind of process to produce coal.

I am really annoyed by how hard it is to expand production for the first 5 hours or so. Everything feels gated by seeds, and if you mess up and some seeds die you're set back by hours.

On the plus side it is very convenient how resources are 100% infinite once you get things down. Making it so you don't need to go back to planets to expand mining is a good thing, I hope they are all like this. You also only need to defend your tree farms since they are the only thing polluting.

Right now I'm kinda annoyed that you can only have 1 space landing pad per planet. I wanted to beam down all my goods wherever I wanted. I can imagine a factory where its easier to launch products into space and bring it back down across the map than it is to use trains/bots/belts. But no, we can't have fun things...

Spoiler

seriously what the fuck is with these weak ass stone deposits? And the swamps make it impossible to get a train all the way down here unless I spend 100k stone on landfill, which kind of defeats the purpose.

btw, my new favorite power setup is this:

Spoiler

Just throw a bunch of storage tanks and overbuild your steam engines. That's 15 GJ worth of energy banked, and its easy to connect an alarm to a single tank and have it go off if your storage is ever below 90% or w/e. A tank of steam has the same storage as 150 accumulators and can support 2 steam engines for almost 7 minutes even if all the boilers ran out of fuel at the same time. You DO need to overbuild with laser turrets since your peak output isn't unlimited like a thousand accumulators would be, though you can have some accumulators that support laser turrets firing for like 30s or something.

 

[Twiglard]

I made a splitter waterfall for all the scrap as a stopgap.

All inserters are filter inserters now so since you're gonna use inserters at all, you can use a straight belt, and inserter + chest for each item.

 

[Hellraiser]

I made a splitter waterfall for all the scrap as a stopgap.

All inserters are filter inserters now so since you're gonna use inserters at all, you can use a straight belt, and inserter + chest for each item.

Inserters have an arm animation though, splitters are instant. An inserter can miss an item it is meant to grab beacause of this if the belt is fast enough or the chest is full, you would need to loop the items back which increases inefficiency and also pollutes downstream. Also easier to unclog a straightforward splitter waterfall and it's clearly visible which item is causing the blockage since it stops on a particular splitter.

 

[Average Manatee]

Using filter inserters for a situation like that is a disaster waiting to happen. Belts stuck because they've been polluted with the wrong items is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you in this game.

Filter inserters are for when you have to build an abomination like this:

Spoiler

Yeah, 5 inserters working on a single building here

Decided I'd stay on Gleba a bit longer because I wanted to make some decently scaled factories. My self-imposed tech ruleset was to make sure I didn't overpower a planet I've just landed on with uranium ammo and all, but for convenience sake I figure its fine if I start importing tech like Big Drills from Vulcanus and ammo for my tank (pretty much the only thing that can really hurt stompers) once I have the ability to launch rockets from the planet I've landed on. Driving out, placing big drills on stone patches, and coming back 30 mins later to a thousand landfill turns out to really make things better here, now I have space to build and its all much more enjoyable.

Enemy expansion is starting to really get annoying, so I've decided I'll go ahead and get artillery and use that on planets after I've "beaten" them. I don't have time to remotely pilot the tank around to take out nests nor make another huge wall of laser turrets.

 

[Average Manatee]

By the way, anyone finding good usage for elevated rails? The ramps just seem way too big and the support beams too closely spaced to really be useful. Elevating the rails doesn't really save you much useful room if you've still got a line of supports. All I can think of is using it outside the base to make it 100% sure that you never get run over while driving your car around.

EDIT: I guess its good for cliffs. But I got cliff explosives long ago, and they are cheap so no reason not to use them. On the other hand refined concrete is kind of annoying to make and carrying a second set of rails sucks.

 

[Hellraiser]

By the way, anyone finding good usage for elevated rails?

So far I used them for:

Going over cliffs before Vulcanus (or without using nukes, if you really want to destroy a cliff before Vulcanus).

Mandatory for Fulgora because there is no landfill there and elevated trains are the only way to bring in items across islands, at least not before the foundation tech which needs going to Aquila anyway (landfill would make Fulgora too easy, oil ocean lightning harvesting fields go brrr).

Going over water, bypassing b*ter turf.

Speaking of that, anyone know what is a good way to convert electricity to something a train a can carry? Something that doesn't use water? Basically I'm looking to convert lightning harvested on one Fulgora island into something I can easily ship by train to the main one. Shame there's no accumulator wagon or you can't just ship charged batteries, discharge them and go back.

 

[Average Manatee]

So far I used them for:

Going over cliffs before Vulcanus (or without using nukes, if you really want to destroy a cliff before Vulcanus).

Mandatory for Fulgora because there is no landfill there and elevated trains are the only way to bring in items across islands, at least not before the foundation tech which needs going to Aquila anyway (landfill would make Fulgora too easy, oil ocean lightning harvesting fields go brrr).

Going over water, bypassing b*ter turf.

Fair enough. Not sure if other people play this way but for me concrete is basically the last thing I make before uranium/rockets because its just annoying to make and annoying to coat your base with it before you have 10k bots. But I guess you can get it fairly early to deal with cliffs. Haven't been to Fulgora obviously.

Speaking of that, anyone know what is a good way to convert electricity to something a train a can carry? Something that doesn't use water? Basically I'm looking to convert lightning harvested on one Fulgora island into something I can easily ship by train to the main one.

Steam/Coal/Solid Fuel are the other things I'm aware of that you can make and carry on trains. I'm guessing those are not in the cards either. You can grow trees with Gleba tech but I don't think it works outside Nauvis.

If you're really desperate you can put your cargo landing pad there and drop in stuff from space.

 

[Average Manatee]

Foundries are a little OP now that I'm running the numbers. +50% productivity, except you're applying it to two steps of the production process so its really +125% productivity. OK, that's bad enough, but then you can effectively smelt steel for the price of 3 iron plates (+66% productivity, so +273.5% productivity total), and 1 gear for 1 iron plate (+100% productivity, so +350% productivity total). It's so powerful that despite 4 modules slots I don't feel like its even worth my time to do prod 3s and beacon them, before max prod 3s in your chain only gave +44% for steel and +68% for gears. Though a fully beaconed foundry will produce 50 gears/s which is kinda hilarious...

Foundry smelting to copper wire does give +100% productivity much like gears, but at least there the unwieldlyness of transporting copper wire feels like an appropriate drawback.

Can also use foundries on belts, at which point +50% productivity on another potential 5 steps is utterly insane. Not that belt costs are a huge deal though.

 

[Ironmonk]

By the way, anyone finding good usage for elevated rails? The ramps just seem way too big and the support beams too closely spaced to really be useful. Elevating the rails doesn't really save you much useful room if you've still got a line of supports.

I saw on Nilaus youtube channel a trick to extend the length of the elevated rail, but I didn't try it yet and don't know if it works on all directions, this example works on straight rails:

first you build the rail support, then you place the elevated rails on both sides till a new support is build, then you delete the extended support and end with a "T", you copy and paste this "T" and with this, you get a extended elevated rail without a support in the middle.

And yeah, I have been updating/adapting some of my 1.1 rail blueprints and the whole elevated rails isn't easy to build with... most of my blueprints with it got its size almost doubled from previously without the elevated rails and I don't know if there is any relevant benefit.... As I said in my previous rant, I rarely got crashes/jammings with my previous turnarounds in 1.1... with 2.0 I'm certain it will never happen, but the major increase in size is a huge downside.

 

[Jaedar]

Still not reading thread. Saw that there was an achievement for doing a planetery science before yellow/purple, so decided to do that. Went to fulgora. Cool place. Did the primary manufacturing puzzle without even thinking (the things SE does to a man).

I think I did pick up some bad habits from SE though, my space platforms are probably way too minimalistic, and have way too many engines compared to what is needed. Actually got stranded on fulgora, had to remote build another platform to come pick me up (and it was still in a death spiral in fulgora orbit, just a slow one, so I picked up the science and left). The depot addons feel really bad to use, no idea what they were thinking with those.

Then I went back to Nauvis, and set up everything for yellow and purple in like 10 minutes. Probably Gleba next? Or maybe back to fulgora to set up some quality loops and higher SPM?

 

[Ironmonk]

Right now I'm experimenting with the idea of using the elevated rails as default, and only lower to ground on stations and turnaround/junctions (as needed)... well, while it allows to have roads for cars passing below the rails and thus, making it collision-proof and freeing some space to build below the rails, it really isn't that practical and/or compact.... it does allow some ingenious setups, but always wasting either empty space (increasing base footprint) or space that could house more loading/unloading stations (compact unfriendly). =/

Edit: I guess the devs might haven't taken into consideration this increase very thorough... For example, some City Blocks designs are limited by Roboport logistics coverage, and so, increasing the rail system size to fit such setups is really crap... if they had really thought this thorough, they should have also increase roboport coverage and this way, allowing to increase City Block sizes to accommodate the rails changes + elevated rails more efficiently.

 

[Average Manatee]

Then I went back to Nauvis, and set up everything for yellow and purple in like 10 minutes. Probably Gleba next? Or maybe back to fulgora to set up some quality loops and higher SPM?

Well you said you weren't reading the thread, so this might be useless, but...

High SPM on other planets doesn't really seem needed since its like military science, only used for a handful of techs. If you just have a buffer (which in this case should be like 2k research packs), you'll not need more than 1/2 to 1/3rd the SPM of your main base. If you're playing on normal tech prices in fact you probably need hardly anything, by the time you visit a new planet and have learned how to build there you've already produced enough science to research everything available.

I'd recommend doing Vulcanus next, it give the best new unlocks and also has some of the more important QoL techs that used to be easier to get locked behind it. Gleba is another planet like Nauvis with aggressive alien life so once you go there you'll have to keep watch over that base to be sure it isn't picked apart over time, so kind of annoying. Though of course artillery tech makes it simple.

Right now I'm experimenting with the idea of using the elevated rails as default, and only lower to ground on stations and turnaround/junctions (as needed)... well, while it allows to have roads for cars passing below the rails and thus, making it collision-proof and freeing some space to build below the rails, it really isn't that practical and/or compact.... it does allow some ingenious setups, but always wasting either empty space (increasing base footprint) or space that could house more loading/unloading stations (compact unfriendly). =/

Edit: I guess the devs might haven't taken into consideration this increase very thorough... For example, some City Blocks designs are limited by Roboport logistics coverage, and so, increasing the rail system size to fit such setups is really crap... if they had really thought this thorough, they should have also increase roboport coverage and this way, allowing to increase City Block sizes to accommodate the rails changes + elevated rails more efficiently.

Yeah, I've played around with laying the rails out and its always "you can spend more space to not have a 1 in 1000000 chance of hitting a train". It'd be more meaningful if belts couldn't just go under rails on the ground and so putting them in the air actually helped you somehow. And the ramps are just too big.

 

[pakoito]

If we could channel all the autism in this thread towards opensource, we'd have AGI by the end of the month.

 

[Hellraiser]

If we could channel all the autism in this thread towards opensource, we'd have AGI by the end of the month.

My totally planned out and organized, designed to avoid belt spaghetti, Fulgora scrapping outpost says otherwise:

Spoiler

It's far more of a mess than the starter base with the waterfall. Lessons were learned along the way, one that drones make things way easier, the other that holmium is so rare I don't need 3 inserters to load it, batteries become a bottleneck both because of Fulgora science and because you need huge fields of accumulators, ice/water is good to have.

In other news I am done with Fulgora, unless there's some later game stuff that has to be manufactured in the electromagnetic plant that only works on Fulgora and I'll have to go back and expand the factory there to make some late game stuff (or ship more components back to Nauvis).

Tesla gun is kind of meh, stunlocking b*ters is fun but it takes ages to kill nests with it, at least without any upgrades, so kiting biters with it and exoskeleton speed is tedious, better just use a tank (which apparently now can also be outfitted with exoskeletons for extra speed, due to getting an inventory grid, I should slap some defence lasers on it).

Tesla turret is useful though, great synergy with flamethrower turrets (and if Behemoths aren't immune to stun) and just slightly more range than a laser turret. Will be nice to see how well these work against demolishers.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Considering abandoning the Warptorio run. I'm still making progress, but the novelty is wearing off and I'm not seeing much on the tech tree to really excite me. There've been a few more special events (like a dude with a rocket launcher fucking up my base) but a lot of key elements just don't work that well. The randomly scattered chests just get eaten by biters 95% of the time, because they're nearly invisible and have like 50 hp. The missions continue to frequently be outright impossible to finish, now because they'll spawn the building next to a biter nest that explodes like a nuke when it dies (those are super fun btw, totally not complete fucking cancer while trying to clear out nests.) The new warp tech that would really change stuff up at this point all arrives so late in the tree it won't matter by then. The fuck am I going to do with an enhanced roboport after everything else in the tree is finished? Or incredibly hard to make super modules? Really wish they'd put more of that stuff earlier, like they did with the passive boosts and more unique features. At this point the only reason to see it through is bragging rights and I don't think I care.