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

[Average Manatee]

I feel like half my playthrough has been stone-deprived. Yes, I'm hungry for stone. On Gleba you needed it to build on swampland, on Nauvis I need it for this

Spoiler

I think you couldn't do this before? Just place blueprints on the water and have the bots do the landfill? Anyway I find it pretty cool.

Funny moment: I moved my touchdown pad to an isolated tile in the middle of a city block designed so logistic bots could offload anything. When I came back to Nauvis I was stuck out there and had to wait like 20 mins for bots to build a bridge.

Hopefully Fulgora will be conquered today.

Interestingly, I left Gleba once I got tired of defending it, planning to return once Fulgora was done and actually wrap up science. I tore down my pollutors, and it seems the aliens have paused expanding and even evolution isn't going up from time? My base has suffered zero attacks I've seen and should be easy to restart whenever I go back. Food for thought if you're in the same situation. I assume its like a mercy mode if you travel to Gleba early, leave/die, then come back 20 hours later, it'd suck to land in a 100% covered by nests deathworld with 95% evolution.

 

[Average Manatee]

Man, Fulgora's solar power penalty is annoying, my personal bot army is running dry constantly. You'd think with the lightning focus they'd add the ability to charge your suit from the power grid like some mods do.

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.

Uhh... did you not do ice->water and solid fuel to generate steam power?

 

[Average Manatee]

Here's my solution to the Fulgora sushi belt issue. Everything sorted and buffered.

But I just realized I could trivially make the rocket silo. I was already making electric engines for construction bots and have over 200 stocked up on an outpost. By my self-imposed ruleset having a rocket pad and launching a rocket allows me to use logistic robots, so... I think I'm going to tear everything down and just bots for everything. Oh well, it was fun figuring this out but with this done it would have been basically just a normal main belt base with some circuitry to control what is recycled based on what is in excess.

The thing I noticed is that while the belt chain filtering does lower throughput to at most a single belt, you don't really need that much throughput due to the insane efficiency of recycling blue/red circuits.

Spoiler

btw I also only recently realized that I can just have multiple tanks back on Nauvis to cover multiple fronts, rather than driving 5 minutes across the base whenever a disaster happens. Damn that was a lot of wasted time...

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

I'll wait a few months until more patching is done but I still did a handfull of spm on the 2 planets that give the most production power and gameplay options, then there's Gleba that looks like puked crayons and has a bunch of limitations, you build your ore patches which can be considered fun? Filling micro holes everywhere with limited amount of landfill, then there's a time limit on your production and there didn't seem to be any great solutions on the tech tree, conceptually cool but I don't understand why it's so limiting after the previous planets.

 

[Average Manatee]

Bioflux takes 2h to spoil and will last as long as you generally need for anything in your production line, though that time is reduced based on the spoilage of the ingredients so get things upcycled to bioflux quickly. You do have to deal with filtering spoilage out of the end of each production line though which is part of the challenge.

What I don't like is that Gleba's production building is mostly useless back on Nauvis as far as I can tell unless you're gonna deal with all the issues of shipping Bioflux across planets and dealing with nutrients. In exchange the Biochamber is probably the least useful building to your main production chain on Nauvis. The only interesting thing is the research lab bonus but that's basically just there to boost your infinite research.

 

[Hellraiser]

Uhh... did you not do ice->water and solid fuel to generate steam power?

It's quite deceptive despite the inputs being easy to get and clogging up your chests early on. It scales poorly after "early game" on Fulgora once you need to ramp-up production in the electromagnetic plants, as water becomes the bottleneck (both due to being used directly in Holium Solution and due to being needed for light oil cracking necessary later in the chain for superconductors). Ice ended up being one of those things I imported from another island/scrap processing center, as I was running low on it/water.

I had steam power set up to run after batteries drop to 10%, eventually once I started building the electromagnetic production block they provided far too little power and sucked out all the water. I dismantled the pipes, routed everything to industry and just built huge battery blocks in a remote part of the island, as anyway Fulgora science needs accumulators so you'll be making them en masse.

Now that I think about it, one could bypass the water issue with a dedicated orbital ice mining platform in orbit if one doesn't want to just build ad infinitum scrapping outposts on other islands and ship things by train. Fulgora does make it easy to build a new platform with abundant steel and ok availability of copper wire, and while the low solar power is annoying it's definitely doable to make that can be self-sustainable (and you can blueprint it and build more of them if you need more ice, rather than upscale and keep redesigning, I guess).

The thing I am wondering though, is how space efficient steam generators are considering the islands. The day-night cycle is short on Fulgora, a generator would need to produce more energy per tile than accumulators occupying the same space can discharge. Also wondering how that compares to just importing nuclear fuel or later on fusion fuel and the reactors.

At the moment I have 20% my big island occupied by a power bank and it seem to be almost enough to have 100% uptime.

Spoiler

 

[Average Manatee]

Hmm, what exactly are you spending all the power on? You could use efficiency modules although I haven't been. I have been using the big mining drills though. My base is all bots but I'd think that'd take more energy rather than less. It's off atm because I have enough science for a long time and haven't bothered to go back to rebuild some new mining outposts though so can't show it in action. It has a 2.0 GJ battery bank and 48 steam engines as backup.

Spoiler

The thing I am wondering though, is how space efficient steam generators are considering the islands. The day-night cycle is short on Fulgora, a generator would need to produce more energy per tile than accumulators occupying the same space can discharge. Also wondering how that compares to just importing nuclear fuel or later on fusion fuel and the reactors.

Yeah nuclear reactors are probably the best solution to everything once you have them on Nauvis. With a bit of circuitry they can be sized down as much as you want, with fluid mechanics the steam can go long distances to acommodate cramped spaces, and the fuel is effectively infinite with kovarex and you can easily throw a few IRL days worth of it into a single chest.

 

[Hellraiser]

Hmm, what exactly are you spending all the power on?

2.5 times more electromagnetic thingamabobs producing fulgora science than you it seems (actual rate is probably different, since I use prod modules), also tesla ammo and tesla turrets. I needed more electrolyte because of the tesla stuff.

Spoiler

 

[Average Manatee]

Hmm, doesn't really seem to explain the electricity consumption difference. I am using efficiency in the big mining drills, I guess if you were using normal ones w/o efficiency that's a big difference? Aside from that I'm closely controlling how much recycling I need with circuits keeping things in balance, if you're doing much extra manufacturing that may cost a bit of energy.

I am upgrading to prod + beacons though, will see how things go.

 

[Hellraiser]

Hmm, doesn't really seem to explain the electricity consumption difference. I am using efficiency in the big mining drills, I guess if you were using normal ones w/o efficiency that's a big difference? Aside from that I'm closely controlling how much recycling I need with circuits keeping things in balance, if you're doing much extra manufacturing that may cost a bit of energy.

I am upgrading to prod + beacons though, will see how things go.

One thing I didn't show as it didn't fit on the screenshot was 9 level 3 assemblers full of prod 2 modules producing rocket fuel and a few beacons with speed modules to boost things around here and there (mostly the rocket silo and the rocket fuel assemblers).

 

[Damned Registrations]

I've decided to finish the Warptorio run after all. The thing that made me stick around was a super forge I found in a crashed shipwreck. Usually those rewarded lamer unique objects; the special robots were equivalent to like 3-5 normal robots, and just one didn't have much impact. Same with the miner; it's as good as 7 normal miners, but aside from making it marginally more convenient to mine a bit of stone on a small patch, it didn't change much having just the one, and the shipwrecks are quite rare. But this fucking forge.... one forge is equal to 50 electric forges. Throw on the special speed module, and it's pulling duty for 87; enough to basically smelt the entire input of a 50 drill setup with 100% extra productivity. It basically meant an end to hand feeding shit. Plus it's just damned fun to watch a building eat a hundred ores a second.

Game is still a cunt; I lost the special drill to a fucking biter boss spawning basically on top of the outpost, had a bunch more unfair shit like that happen. Many reloads. The missions are getting to be actually difficult again in some cases, mostly due to biter evolution having such a high baseline; escorting a shitty slow drone around for 5 minutes while everything in radar range beelines for it and worms randomly spawn nearby is infuriating. Thankfully, I finished the last tech that should require such a mission. There are more that would, but I don't care about them. The turrets are irrelevant, and so is the bridge size now that the internal floorspace is capped. I'm skipping the other floor improvements as well. God only knows why anyone would need a larger boiler room, mine is big enough to hold hundreds of turbines and steam tanks and you'd need way more space to actually use that kind of power. Maybe if you wanted to make some sort of multi floored spaghetti monstrosity where you make green circuits on one floor and belt them to another, but nuts to that. Giant harvester platforms to plonk onto minerals sounded nice in theory, but in practice I use them to drop tiny forts in place to defend mission objectives, and they need cleared terrain to do that so current size is best. So the only remaining missions are like maybe ~10 or so, and they all involve shoving parts into a building and defending it for ~5-10 minutes. Soon I'll be able to make the rocket silo. There's a tech buried in the tree after that I might go for depending on how annoying it seems to achieve.

 

[Andnjord]

POWER

UNLIMITED

POOOOOOOWER!!!!!

So yeah, you can put a whole bunch of solar panels next to a sun and literally beam the energy on planets to burn bitters with the power of a sun. Nice.


Oh and you can also use it to power turbines, but I only have the basic ones yet (there will be better ones available later to actually make use of all that energy without having to spam thousands of them) so I can't really make full use of it, hence why it's only half built yet.

 

[Hellraiser]

Technically cargo drop pods in the unmodded expansion pack already do damage when they drop and can kill a player, you would only need a slight tweak to that code to and maybe some UI to automate the targeting and item drops somehow to make a rods from God orbital platform to drop tungsten rods on b*ter nests. I mean a "trash item and drop trash on X" option. Currently the drop location is hardcoded to either the cargo pad or the starting/initial spawning location if not cargo pad.

In other news I am nearly done with Vulcanus, which went a lot faster than Fulgora despite being able to get a silo up and running much faster on the latter. On the subjects of Demolishers, maybe I just got unlucky and couldn't run circles in a tank around a small one due to bad terrain but, I manage to get it down to half health with a tank and uranium cannon before it turned its head towards me and the tank blew up. I had IIRC 2 portable nuke reactors and 4 mk II shields in the tank, I'll try again with 1 reactor and much more Mk II shields and some batteries (if it makes sense/math checks out). Basically give the tank enough hit points to outlast the damn worm. Possibly I would need to set up a quality production chain to make higher quality shields with more shield points. You can slap 12 shields inside a tank with 150 hp (base quality) each, while a tank has 2000 hp, so a total of 3800 hitpoints, but ideally you need to charge them (at least once) somehow so it's a shield or two less than that as you need some power (personal solar panels might work better on Vulcanus though, so maybe no portable nuclear reactor needed?).

In the end I lured the only Demolisher I killed into a nest of tesla turrets, but lost 10 out of 34 as it started charging at them and died just when it touched the first of them.


Anyone screwing around with quality modules yet and found some nice bonuses on those? Some of the ones I saw mentioned online seem are very useful, miners deplete deposits slower, power poles have more range, radar has more range (this I got to setup when I get back on Nauvis, to monitor b*ter activity), solar panels give more power (good for platforms).

 

[ERYFKRAD]

POWER

UNLIMITED

POOOOOOOWER!!!!!

Ok Jeremy Clarkson

 

[Average Manatee]

Anyone screwing around with quality modules yet and found some nice bonuses on those? Some of the ones I saw mentioned online seem are very useful, miners deplete deposits slower, power poles have more range, radar has more range (this I got to setup when I get back on Nauvis, to monitor b*ter activity), solar panels give more power (good for platforms).

When I was making my megabase, I switched my old starter base to quality on all the furnaces, filtered out the ingredients, stockpiled them, then used a bot network. It's pretty easy to set up, just one assembler for each item is fine since throughput is so low. If you're interested in quality at all then do it now because it will take a few hours to get the materials and is quite simple to start, it's pretty much free to do so outside of early game where you might care about efficiency modules for power/pollution reduction.

The big thing you want the highest quality for is armor because each level gives +1 to each dimension of your equipment grid. So Power Armor 1 goes from 6x8=48 slots to 8x10=80 slots for blue quality, 66% bigger. This also applies to your tank inventory grid so its useful there (though obviously you don't normally carry the tank with you to new planets so you have to drop it). From there I would do all the equipment in your inventory. Most of them get +60% to their effects. So if your armor and whole inventory is upgraded to blue you have 1.66 * 1.6 = 265.6% the normal power of whatever you put in there. This was really helpful for me to have my personal bot network work on Fulgora.

Spoiler

Aside from that, quality is kinda too weak on anything else atm for me to really find it useful. I did upgrade my weapons which increases the range. Except the shotgun, because the shotgun requires high quality wood which requires a Gleba recipe to make, ironically wood is the hardest ingredient to make quality in the game. But I've never actually used any weapon aside from the shotgun on Gleba, and also ironically the shotgun is the one weapon I'd really have liked some extra range on in Gleba. I guess the rocket launcher probably has some use for higher range, you could snipe nests from behind a wall of turrets, and there's an obvious perk to launching a nuke from further away if you've got those. Funny enough though nukes are "too heavy for a rocket", is that the only thing banned from rockets?

Also you can upgrade turrets for more range which is probably useful at some point. Problem is that if you are using turrets you are usually using them like 20 at a time and 20 quality turrets is way too much material unless you've got a really huge quality setup. Once I get artillery I will probably make a single quality one to lug around as my personal fuck this shit device. Some longer ranged regular turrets for the ship is probably an OK choice too. Aquilo looks like you might want some higher quality solar panels for your ship too if you're gonna rely on solar there.

Of course eventually if you want purple quality I expect the most important thing is quality in your quality modules so you can quality while you quality to have more quality.

 

[Twiglard]

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.

So you're saying that they're not very useful for 4-way intersections?

 

[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.

So you're saying that they're not very useful for 4-way intersections?

If you're at the megabase level and need more throughput on intersections it's good but that's like 1% of players. Personally I really don't feel like tearing up the massive rail system I've already made for it.

I was hoping that the ramps would be compact enough and supports distant enough to integrate trains into compact builds but that's really not the case. Maybe if I'm designing a new city block system I'd find a way to integrate it though

 

[Ironmonk]

Even with the mod linked below, the usage of elevated rails still isn't that much improved.
Railway Reach: Adjustable Supports

Ramps need to be smaller, but that might not be easy to implement or good looking (as dev hoped) and Rail Supports could be easily smaller 2x2, this would improve the usage a lot.

As vanilla stands, unless you don't mind a much bigger railway footprint to accommodate the bulkier size of the ramp+support, then the usage of both will certainly be minimal.

This is my roundabout/turnaround/clover intersection (I still need to optimize the signals):


I squeezed the most I could and I still find it big.

 

[Hellraiser]

My attempts at killing Demolishers are kind of inconclusive on what is better at worm killing it seems a tank with 4 solar panels and rest in Mk II Shields fares kind of worse than a tank with one fission reactor and all Mk II shields? I mean I just barely killed a small demolisher without losing the single reactor tank, while the solar panel max shields one had me die a bunch of times before again the tank barely survived. I guess the extra shield regen offsets the extra shield hp when the damn thing starts erupting lava around you. But a double reactor tank has too few shields to survive so one could be optimal. Maybe I should get one extra cannon damage upgrade research done first.

Wondering if a higher quality tank would get extra resistances or just HP and grid size (latter is still good, more shield, also stack higher quality shield in... hmmm. should try to outfit one uber tank to see if I can solo medium Demolishers in it.

Problem is that if you are using turrets you are usually using them like 20 at a time and 20 quality turrets is way too much material unless you've got a really huge quality setup.

Is that really a problem? Turrets manufacture fairly fast and you should be swimming in gears (they're practically free on Vulcanus).

Also I just started trying to get good quality quality modules going, and I feed back the materials with a recycler which means you should reclaim about 25% of the input materials (here I wonder if prod modules in a scrapper work, curiously the scrapper does allow you to use quality modules).

 

[Average Manatee]

Wondering if a higher quality tank would get extra resistances or just HP and grid size (latter is still good, more shield, also stack higher quality shield in... hmmm. should try to outfit one uber tank to see if I can solo medium Demolishers in it.

Just HP and grid size.

You can see what anything gets from quality. Alt-click an item to go to the factoriopedia. Anything that benefits from quality has a blue diamond next to it that will show you the quality's improvement when you hover over it. Sadly vehicle weapons don't get a range increase from quality like your weapons do, I wonder if that's an oversight? More range on the tank cannon would actually be very useful.

Is that really a problem? Turrets manufacture fairly fast and you should be swimming in gears (they're practically free on Vulcanus).

Also I just started trying to get good quality quality modules going, and I feed back the materials with a recycler which means you should reclaim about 25% of the input materials (here I wonder if prod modules in a scrapper work, curiously the scrapper does allow you to use quality modules).

It's all a matter of scale in the end of course. A small trickle of quality components to build armor and equipment is one thing, a bunch of turrets for personal use is another, then having all your turrets everywhere and eventually everything max quality is the final theoretical goal. My quality setup was only using my initial starter base furnaces, where I had just two lines of standard furnaces, level 1 quality modules and no recycler. Personally I'm waiting until I've unlocked the purple quality level to make a real quality-focused build, a smattering of blue quality stuff is more than enough for me until then. Your armor and equipment being higher quality is a huge QoL improvement.

 

[Average Manatee]

So, some raised rail thoughts.

Here's what I'm using as a city block now:

Spoiler

The good point of this is that there's two rail stations for 2-4 trains on each edge, for a total of 8 potential stops for each block (and since this is a template you can use stops on the adjacent square if you're doing something really big, belting in your product underneath the railroad). The stops also work as a part of the intersection, what would normally be a 4 lane intersection becomes an 8 lane one if the stops aren't used, and most stops aren't being used since most blocks don't need 8 stations.

Here's what I'm thinking for a raised rail city block:

Spoiler

The problem is that ramps are so big that having two per side per block is not practical. That'd require the block to be like 50% larger. But we can sort of "weave" in multiple stops like this. Do the same on the other side, we have 8 potential stops. This does use a lot more room so it won't be practical for big pre-beacon builds. e.g. my current engine build looks like this:

Spoiler

But with beacons you can obviously do this in a fraction of the space, so I guess it's good?

I do still wish the ramps and supports were just a bit smaller though. It feels a bit cramped trying to drive around all of this stuff. 2x2 supports that supports maybe 25% lower rails per support, knock ramps down by 1 width and 2 length, we'd be much better off.

EDIT: Oh man, making intersections and especially multi-lane raised rails fucking sucks though. Check this out:

Spoiler

A totally normal 4 way intersection, ruined by needing those 4 extra supports in the middle to cover the straights. I struggle to imagine how bad a 16 lane intersection will be. If the point of raised rails is to let you drive around complex tracks more easily then normal rail you can see how the frequency of support columns pretty well kills that.

On the other hand when it comes to city block design this looks pretty alright, and gives you some room to make some kind of aesthetically pleasing path to drive on, or have consistent turret coverage or something.

Spoiler

 

[Ironmonk]

Thinking back to some FFF ages ago when they said that rail tunnels would be problematic in case of lack of fuel and not looking cool as the elevated rails... but, if you think about it, probably the size of the tunnel entrance/exit could be really much smaller and this way, be easier to use than what we have currently. A missed opportunity.

 

[Average Manatee]

Playing around with parameterization and scheduling interrupts. Some things:

- Parameterize your station name, you are prompted to select a resource and its put in the name. Very easy and convenient. I named everything "(iron icon) dropoff" "(iron icon) pickup" before.
- Interrupts are nice. I can do "if empty, go to x, wait 240s or until full", then "if iron > 0, go to iron", and "if copper > 0, go to copper". But this needs an interrupt for every cargo type.
- You can use wildcards in dropoff orders. "if anything > 0, go to station named (anything icon) dropoff".
- But you can't use wildcards in pickup orders. "if (anything icon) station available, go to (iron icon) pickup".

The takeaway seems to be that you have to make an interrupt like "If 2x4 pickup station available, go to it" then "if anything > 0, go to station named (anything icon) dropoff". Then have all your pickup stations just named 2x4 pickup while all your dropoff stations are named based on the parameterized resource name. Kind of annoying, I'd like them all to either be unique or generic for neatness sake.

Also you sadly can't parameterize inserter filters. This is problematic because I have trains carrying mixed goods away from the rocket landing pad (can't have 20 loading stations for each individual good) and I want them to visit e.g. blue circuit dropoff first, only have the blue circuits taken out, then visit the red circuit dropoff and have the reds taken out. But this will not work with parameters.

 

[Ironmonk]

Well, I found this video a few days ago, it might help those that want to do something similar to LTN in Vanilla, but without the best feature: multi-stations



follow-up video:



I installed Cybersyn and watched a tutorial, seems even simpler than LTN (now defunct), but I haven't tested it yet... I still need to finish my rail block blueprints (I spent a lot of time back and forth deciding on the block size/model)

 

[Average Manatee]

multi-stations

What's a multistation exactly? Haven't watched the video because I don't like being spoiled by fully mapped out guides to everything in this game, but I'm confident you could do almost anything you want with the current system and interrupts/wildcards, especially with circuitry.