Factorio

I've been putting off getting this for a while but after playing the demo this week can see it's a must buy for me, looking forward to getting stuck in.

Just popped in to see if there were any good tips & tutorials vids that folk recommend... already answered with a quick skim up the page, Katherineofsky series looks like it'll do the trick.

Anything else a new player should be aware of?

Ta

Bubblefuzz wrote:

Anything else a new player should be aware of?

Cancel all appointments and comittments for the next few weeks.
Make sure you have cogs on you at all times.

Don't be afraid of making gloriously messy and complex solutions to simple problems. It's half the fun!

Thanks. I've put it on my work Mac, this may have been an error

Also don't worry about "finishing" and try out crazy things. I like going in fresh and trying different solutions to problems before hitting youtube to find how other players did it.

Here's a tip: Don't play the campaign. Unless it's changed recently it's more like a challenge series. Play in sandbox and take the default settings first. If you KNOW you don't want to worry about the biters, go ahead and turn off their aggression.

You don't need any mods to start with so don't worry about that.

Other than that I'd say don't obsess over tutorials and doing things the optimal way to begin with. Just play, make some awfully inefficient base to learn how things work and start over. When you start over, consider doing it on the same map, so you can train in supplies from the old one if you want to.

The best thing about Factorio is there is zero penalty for putting stuff down other than the time it takes to pull it back up. You never really lose anything. If you make too much, just put it in a cheap chest and get it later. Don't be afraid to experiment, tear it up, experiment again, tear it up again. You don't need to start over on a new map unless you really don't like the map settings you are currently on.

Turning alien aggression off on your first playthough will give you some breathing room. But it may also get boring after a while.

KatherineOfSky is still my favorite youtube series creator. But I also like MangledPork, Aavak, Steejo, and Arumba. Their four player series is great fun, too.

So, I've been rebuilding a new factory on a Rail World, because I was interested in forcing myself to do trains -- the last world I was on had so many mineral patches (by my selection) that it was hard to find room to build anything, never mind rails and stations. I gather there's a mod to improve resource generation for rails even more (very sparsely populated, but extremely rich deposits), but I didn't know about that, and didn't use it.

I've gotten a long way, and was just finally rebuilding my Kovarex cycle. I remembered a SUPER slick design, but I couldn't find it again when I searched, so I recreated it. These ideas aren't mine, but they make such an amazing little machine that I wanted to get them documented somewhere. I didn't see it on factorioprints.com. Assuming nobody spots any major problems, I'll likely upload it there.

Technology requirement: your stack inserters need to be able to grab at least 7. By the time you have Kovarex tech, you'll probably be well past that, but if you somehow skipped that, this design won't work.

This is what it looks like:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/PvtDmm5.png)

Here's a (slightly) annotated version:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/kfnrszQ.png)

U-238 (the crap uranium) comes in at 1. U-235 (the good stuff) exits at 2. The first clever bit is at 1, where the belts use a wire to turn off the input if the "exhaust" has anything on it. This lets the reactor feed itself with its own output, and then backfills from the main supply as needed.

The brilliant part is at 3. The original designer realized that using three stack filter inserters, in parallel, would let you unload more than half the reactor in one grab. This means that, once and only once per Kovarex cycle, the three arms, together, will have at least 21 total U-235 in their little metal grips. By linking the three together with red wires, and then linking those wires to the output grabber, they can trigger that grabber to spit out exactly one good uranium per cycle, by firing only when the total U-235 is at 21 or greater. Voila, a perfect compact tileable Kovarex cycle.

To use it: hook up U-238 at 1. Manually load the reactor with either 40 or 80 U-235. 40 will let you bring it up sooner, but will have some downtime while the arms unload and reload. Putting in 80 will give you full uptime, but this is almost certainly less efficient than loading two centrifuges with 40 each. Watch one U-235 pop out at position 2, each cycle. You'll never lose your seed stock.

If the U-235 output backs up, the centrifuge will first built up excess in its inventory (40 more, basically sitting there uselessly), will then dump excess on its external belts (visibly useless, but otherwise harmless), and will finally stall when it's produced, hmm, probably about 70-80 surplus. I haven't tested it that far. Once it has surplus, it has no mechanism to get rid of it, so you'll have to manually extract it. AFAIK, clearing the output will immediately resume production; the centrifuge will just permanently have more U-235 than it needs. I have not, however, tested this, and it's possible it might need manual intervention to start working again.

Here's the blueprint string:

Spoiler:

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

major edit: This was broken for awhile in the 15.22 patch; they changed how inserter arms worked when controlled by the circuit network. Suddenly, this original design was accumulating U-235, only dumping about half what it should. I didn't realize that the behavior had changed, thought I'd missed a catastrophic bug, and was quite embarrassed.

I posted a bunch of edits as I noticed that it was breaking, and worked around the problem by switching to 'hold mode' on the inserters, and tried to use careful timing to drop one and only one output U-235. This was working well, but it was fragile, and prone to easy breakage.

Now that they've reverted the change, I returned the design to pulse mode; this is now how it was originally posted. It seems to work gorgeously, as long as you don't use it in 15.22.

And here I was still tickled that I made a factory that made other factories!

Most impressive Malor. Thank you for sharing.

Thanks for the tips. I was playing the campaign, but yeah might skip reading the above. Cheers.

Aha! This is why my original (copied) design broke:

Reverted change that made Inserters no longer drop what they are holding when disabled by the circuit network. (https://forums.factorio.com/49170)

Well, that's what would fix it. The change reverted was what broke it.

Now I'm not sure if the updated version will still work right. Gonna keep an eye on it for awhile. It was perfect before, but now the timing might be off.

edit: I returned the design to working on pulse mode, as it's more reliable than trying to perfectly time hold mode. (which is inherently fragile.) The trigger condition is now the three inserters having >=21 ore, so as long as your grab size is 7 or greater, it should work flawlessly.

You should post ypur design to the Factorio Subreddit. They love this stuff and are quite friendly.

That's not my design, and they've probably seen it before. I just couldn't find it in a quick search, re-created it from memory, and wanted to get it documented somewhere.

edit: plus, I just wanted to show you folks that clever, clever machine. It's so elegant, compared to the sushi belt cycle I'd made for myself, that I love just watching it go. My design worked, and was perfectly reliable, but this design is beautiful.

Some random thoughts, after getting my Railworld factory up to the same size as my last one:

1. Nuclear power is awesome. It's really well-designed, in that it takes a lot of study, and a hell of a huge material and infrastructure investment, but then your power problems are solved permanently. You can scale to absolutely stupid amounts of power in quite a small area. I look at my two nuclear plants (one 480MW, one 1.2TW) and consider just how many acres and acres and acres of solar panels and accumulators that would take, and it makes me smile. Solar and coal both take a ton of ongoing attention, and you're constantly having to revisit and expand your fields. Once nuclear is up, power is cheap and always on. If you've got 480MW of production, you've always got that much, and you don't need batteries. Further, there's some automation you can do with 'waking up' more and more of your plants as your steam head decreases, but I don't bother with any of that. I'm running ten reactors, and it takes so little uranium that I don't even care about waste. With full Kovarex and fuel recycling, I'd guess, I dunno, less than a thousand raw ore per hour, maybe? I'd have to actually sit and watch and figure the numbers, but it seems like it barely consumes anything.

2. There had been dev notes about a repeatable tech to increase the amount of ore you could extract from the ground. I thought they meant productivity, in the sense of constantly expanding the amount of ore you could dig up. From their dev notes, I thought a field of, say, 7 million ore would steadily increase in richness as you researched the ongoing tech. So I didn't properly read the actual tech they implemented, which is speed. The ore fields don't get any bigger, you just get +2% speed boosts. Much, much less interesting; you still have to constantly make new fields, which is annoying. As I understood it, the whole point of the repeatable tech was that so you didn't have to do that, and what they've actually given us means you have to do it more often. Argh.

3. On a related note: you can put productivity modules in your rocket plant. I felt so damn dumb when I realized that. It has four module slots, so suddenly I was getting +40% more rocket science for free. I just beaconed it to increase the speed back to normal, and voila, a ton of extra rockets going out. Of course, it takes a heck of a lot more power (something like 20 megawatts total), but with nuclear power, who cares? I'm only running 750MW out of 1.7TW.

4. Build a main bus, even in your starter base. It's worth it.

What's a main bus?

UMOarsman wrote:

What's a main bus?

I had the same question. It's basically putting all materials needed for assembly on a parallel set of belts with them being pulled off to perpendicular assembly lines

IMAGE(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/492403625774602541/725C0E9C036E9B23FEE573724011435EA10D03F3/)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...

Right... for your starter base, it doesn't have to be huge, but you want room for copper, iron, green circuits, and probably a lane each for plastic, coal, and advanced circuits. If you're planning to just make your final base where you start (if you got a good setup), then going 8-wide for copper and iron ore, 4-wide for green circuits, a couple lanes of advanced circuits, and at least a couple full lanes of steel and plastic would all be very good ideas. (I tend to block out 4 lanes each for everything but iron and copper, just in case.) Devoting a few lanes to fluids is also a good idea.

If you are going that big, setting up train stations ahead of time that can handle at least three cars would be a big time-saver. This can take pretty substantial amounts of room, which is really painful early on, which is why I tend to build a small base and then a second, larger one.

I didn't build an early bus this last time, thinking I would abandon my first base and switch everything to the secondary one. So I just did a spaghetti snarl, thinking I wouldn't be using it long. This turned out to be a terrible idea, for two reasons: scaling up to starting the second base ended up being much harder than it should have been, and then I never felt like reimplementing solutions in the new base, so even now, many hours later, that original snarl is still mostly functional. That's one of the worst ideas I've had in Factorio.

Awesome, thanks both!

A general observation: you may think you are making enough green circuits. This would be incorrect.

Malor wrote:

2. There had been dev notes about a repeatable tech to increase the amount of ore you could extract from the ground. I thought they meant productivity, in the sense of constantly expanding the amount of ore you could dig up. From their dev notes, I thought a field of, say, 7 million ore would steadily increase in richness as you researched the ongoing tech. So I didn't properly read the actual tech they implemented, which is speed. The ore fields don't get any bigger, you just get +2% speed boosts. Much, much less interesting; you still have to constantly make new fields, which is annoying. As I understood it, the whole point of the repeatable tech was that so you didn't have to do that, and what they've actually given us means you have to do it more often. Argh.

It's both. The mining productivity research adds a productivity bonus to miners, which is precisely the same bonus that productivity modules provide. It just provides this bonus without the additional speed penalty that productivity modules also have. So, if you have a +10% mining productivity bonus, you get a free, extra piece of ore for each 10 ore you mine. This increases the speed at which the miner produces ore, yes, but that extra ore is free, and the ore patch is depleted at the same rate.

Purchasing this may have been the worst decision I make all year. I was hooked after playing the demo about a year ago and this weekend I couldn't hold out any longer.
I've already spent hours just tinkering with conveyors and furnaces and simple automation just to get red science going and I love it!

Welcome to Cracktorio. I'll tell you how to find our meetings right after I finish upgrading to electric smelters and adding another iron outpost.

I think my catch-phrase for this game is "This time I'm going to do it right!".

For this particular "this time", I'm building up a full KoS-style mall from scratch. I'm learning so much about the relationships between products.

What a fantastic game. Pretty sure it's on my top-ten now.

Jarpy wrote:

...What a fantastic game. Pretty sure it's on my top-ten now.

I wholeheartedly agree! KoS mall, eh? I've not watched her feed lately. Love her vids!

Jarpy wrote:

I think my catch-phrase for this game is "This time I'm going to do it right!".

For this particular "this time", I'm building up a full KoS-style mall from scratch. I'm learning so much about the relationships between products.

What a fantastic game. Pretty sure it's on my top-ten now.

I love the KoS Mall, too. And her recent new series on Beginner to Mega-Base is excellent. She starts with a Red & Green science mini-mall to boot strap, then goes bigger and bigger. Most of her blue prints are in a Google Drive folder that she links too.

I've put about 50 hours into this in the past month. I finally decided to hunker down and play out a game - I usually stop when I need to build railroads because "I know of a way to do everything better." This time I just disassembled and reassembled my base.

There are always things to optimize.

I did the disassemble/reassemble last time too, the only problem was storage. You need a LOT. It gets so easy once you have robots to pick up and put down stuff. The blueprint system in the game really makes it shine. I can't picture playing without it.

Robots, can't live without them. I built my giant 200 smelter array one spot too far over - blueprint, disassemble, reassemble - it is magic!

Nice! Glad you're sticking with it this time. Looking forward to your rocket launch post!

Mixolyde wrote:

...her recent new series on Beginner to Mega-Base is excellent. She starts with a Red & Green science mini-mall to boot strap, then goes bigger and bigger. Most of her blue prints are in a Google Drive folder that she links too.

I'm watching and greatly enjoying this one! I have resisted the temptation to import blueprints from others, though. I get so much pleasure from making my own (lesser) designs for everything. Watching KoS build her stuff is sufficiently spoilery/inspirational.