Unlabelled Factorio Weekly Question Thread

8/14/2018 10:13:00 am
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Factorio Weekly Question Thread

Weekly Question Thread

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 11:05 AM PDT

Ask any questions you might have.

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At the airport. Pushing for science pack 3 before take off :)

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 08:33 AM PDT

Some guy made a minecraft inserter mod

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 02:24 AM PDT

New mod - pipe highlighter! (Highlight all the connected fluid objects)

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 01:57 PM PDT

Screenshot

Recently I asked if there is such a mod, there wasn't one so I decided to make it myself. The mod adds a key to highlight all the connected fluid entities, it also shows underground pipe paths. Should be pretty useful for debugging pipe problems. Please report bugs on Reddit (in this post's comments or private messages) because I rarely visit the mod portal.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pipe-highlighter

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A checkbox to toggle the logistic slots

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 02:33 AM PDT

This graph looks amazing

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 09:08 AM PDT

Simple UPS optimized reactor (465/558MW)

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 12:46 PM PDT

One of my favorite things about new factories is to watch solar power production slowly overtake the boilers

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 04:38 AM PDT

Factorio is not a "steampunk" game.

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 06:49 PM PDT

I see it a lot around here (as well as on the official Factorio forums and various places on the internet); people misidentify Factorio as a game with a "steampunk" aesthetic, when in reality, it is something else entirely.

Now, let me first say that I can understand where the idea that it is steampunk comes in. There's lots of gears, and everything is very industrialized - and that's without mentioning the actual steam engines in the game, the tier 1 power. However, steampunk carries with it a sort of expectation that everything will be clean and shiny; steam power tends to lubricate itself with water, and most gasses released are... well, steam. Also, lots of steampunk settings are Victorian-era themed, so there's typically grandiose overtones, and mechanical designs inspired by Leonardo da Vinci.

Factorio is not a steampunk game.

We need a different approach to describing Factorio. Well, not unlike steampunk settings, Factorio is all about industrialization, there are lots of moving parts in the building models, and the steam engines themselves are quite complex. I'd imagine most of us understand that. Check. But, it's not shiny or glitzy like a steampunk game would be. It's darker, dirtier, and grimier. Your materials and tools are crude, but effective. Pollution is a prevalent factor. And - perhaps most importantly - there's oil.

If we look at the oil refineries, the fluid tanks, the pipes, the chemical plants, and even the steam engines themselves, we can see the oxidation of the metal. In a steampunk game, this either wouldn't exist, or only show in small quantities. Brass doesn't rust, and in a steampunk world, everything seems to be made out of brass. Factorio, on the other hand, is full of nothing but iron and steel - and oil.

Oil everywhere. The vehicles (cars, tanks, trains), despite accepting "anything that burns" for fuel, very obviously have combustion engines. Even though you only get to oil about halfway through the game, every building design from the assemblers to the effect transmission beacons just SCREAM "OIL!"

But it's not just oil - it's diesel. See, if steampunk is inspired by late-1800's to early-1900's industrialization where everything runs on steam, then what we're looking for is industrialization spanning the loose time period around the mid-1900's. It would span from pre-war to post-war era. This would have been the time that industrialization involved lots of specialized machines, iron and steel working, and most of all, the humongous thirst for oil as the combustion engine was on the rise. We have a term for such a thing:

Factorio is a DIESELPUNK game.

It makes sense - the ultimate goal, launching a rocket into space, is not unlike what mankind dreamt of doing in the 50's and 60's. The chemical thrusters, though inefficient, are more than enough for Factorio's purposes. What do they need? Oil. How do the gun turrets or flamethrower turrets operate with no power? Oil, of course. What do we need for blue conveyor belts? Oil. For the lubricant.

Factorio revolves around the discovery of oil. Half of the craftable recipes in the game require oil, oil products, or oil byproducts. It's abundantly clear to me that not only the game's lore and mechanics - but also the art style - draws nearly all of its inspiration from diesel. I think it's fantastic. I also don't quite enjoy steampunk as much as I do dieselpunk, because despite being prettier, it just doesn't look as good to me. It's almost as if the grittier and grimier something gets, the more aesthetically pleasing it becomes. It may sound like a paradox, but to people who want a break from pristine visuals, it makes sense.

And of course... blood for oil. Biters be damned.

submitted by /u/KoblerManZ
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So i tried to make a mall that makes everything i don't need constantly

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 09:34 AM PDT

Best modular rail setups?

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 06:39 PM PDT

For some reason there seem to be a lot of blueprints missing key components, including stations, and stackers.

Any links to your favorite setups?

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I was envious of the Razer folks having LED effects with Factorio. So I reverse engineered the driver of my Clevo LED Keyboard ...

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 05:29 AM PDT

... Just so I could integrate it with Factorio :).

Proof of concept video (18sec).

Still a lot of work to do before I can get Razer kind of effects, but it's a start!

PS: For those who haven't heard of Clevo before, it's a company that makes laptop shells for custom gaming laptops Ex: XoticPC uses Clevo shells. They're generally good value for money, but the drivers are a bit lacking.

submitted by /u/harekrishnahareram
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Just finished (somewhat) automating red, green, and grey science. Need Advice

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 09:14 AM PDT

Wondering if I should buy Factorio?

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 04:45 PM PDT

I've been watching a metric shitload of videos about this game hoping to buy it when I get paid on Wednesday but if I do it'll be the only game I'm able to buy until December. What are the pros and cons of the game in you guys' opinions?

submitted by /u/harambe_was_innocent
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[Seablock] 100MW Power Farm

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 11:46 AM PDT

How do you effectively get ore on a railworld?

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 02:34 PM PDT

I am a few hundred hours into a railworld map (at ~15 SPM) and still having problems finding ores. The main problem is that biters are absolutely everywhere and if I even manage to build the long railways to have outposts far enough to still get some ore, they get disabled rather often by random biters that destroy some power pole somewhere. How do people manage to fix the biter problem? I am reading a lot about artillery on this sub and I am wondering whether I am doing something wrong. It doesn't seem useful to build it, because the trains get attacked, so it has to be surrounded by turrets. That is just impractical to clear any large area.

The fastest way I found so far to clear bases is to run around on foot with ~100 destroyer robots, exoskeletons and shields. It is faster than in a tank and quicker than building train tracks to supply artillery.

How do you people manage to get the number of miners required to run a base at 100 SPM or more? Do you just play at higher ore frequency or am I missing the magic way to build artillery effectively?

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Minimalistic Artillery Art

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 01:16 PM PDT

While playing around in Factorio and bombarding a few biter bases I got a little bored and started to paint a little. There was a happy little tree, now there are only happy little splinters.

I wonder what someone with artistic talent and some skill could make

https://imgur.com/gallery/0shmnj3

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New series - SpaceX, LTN, RSO, and more!

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 02:00 PM PDT

4x4 into 2x2 T Junction

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 12:39 PM PDT

I have an idea

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 01:46 AM PDT

Concept : battery wagon

could be a smaller wagon in size (2x2 instead of 2x6)

submitted by /u/YuriEdkillers
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Next Step - UPS Measuring and Optimization

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 06:33 AM PDT

After 700 hours of gameplay some smaller and one megabase (3000 spm bot/train based) it's time to step deeper into ups optimization. The first things I have to understand are where i can get the needed Information and what tools are there for optimization.

I already took a look at the debug informations but there are a lot of things I dont understand how to use those informations properly.

A couple of questions:

  1. railway pathing:

How can I measure the influence of pathing in ups to find the most heavy areas to optimize them?

Does anyone have results in comparing ltn based vs own circuits based railwaysystems? In other words: how smart is ltn in questions of ups-friendliness

  1. Bots

How much do bots affect ups? Where do I find the data for it (debug or something else)?

  1. Entities

How and where do I read the ups relevant information for radars, roboports, inserters, assemblers, miners out?

For all the entities:

Are there some guidelines/benchmarks what you should aim for for those entities?

Thanks in advance.

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Would power usage be better represented with a stacked area chart?

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 06:47 AM PDT

Currently, power usage is measured with a simple line chart. Considering a lot of power consuming objects use a similar amount of power, it makes it very difficult to read without filtering for the object(s) you're most interested in. Similarly, if you're using several sources of power (eg solar-accumulator and steam), the power production is tricky to read. You can train yourself to see patterns in it (for example, if the solar line is a full trapezium, then your accumulators won't fully charge in a day), but it's not very intuitive.

I think it would make a lot more sense to use a stacked area chart, like this:

http://www.java2s.com/Code/JavaImages/JFreeChartStackedAreaChartDemo.PNG

Essentially, instead of each variable's magnitude being its distance from the x-axis, it's the distance from the variable below. That way, the total height of the chart is the total power usage (or production, for the other side).

I don't have any Factorio data to produce a mock-up, and I don't know of a way to export/extract it from the game. I'd appreciate any feedback you all can give, particularly if you could get me a (say, 10-minute) data set for power usage, or - even better - produce a mock-up stacked area chart from it.

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Is there a mod like the advanced logistics mod

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 04:15 PM PDT

Some days, I just can't find where I am building something :p

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Factorio has changed my life!

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 11:50 AM PDT

I've been playing computer games for 20yrs. It's my hobby. It's how I escape from a bad day. It's how I connect with my rl friends. I can put in a 8hr session with my eyes closed. 3 months ago I started playing Factorio. As with most people the addiction set in full force. Somehow somewhere something went wrong and I now have carpal tunnel/strained wrist. First time in 20yrs. I now haven't touched my computer in a month trying to heal up. I am a bit worried.

I'm posting this for two reasons. First is kind of a friendly reminder to all my fellow gamers. Watch that posture with your wrists! Take care of that wrist! It can happen to you! Second reason is have you had carpal tunnel or wrist strain from gaming? What worked for you to heal up. There's lots of advice out there on prevention but not a lot on how to heal up.

Thanks in advance.

submitted by /u/utfart
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Fluid Flow Calculation Idea

Posted: 13 Aug 2018 03:35 AM PDT

First off, I know the devs are working on it, and likely have a better handle on this than I do. However, I wanted to get it out of my head and get opinions on it for my own curiosity. If it turns out to be helpful to the devs of this awesome game, all the better!

Right now, liquid flow is big cause of computational load, it is also highly unintuitive. It uses floating point calculations on each segment of pipe to calculate flow rates. Which leads to the mass of weirdness it suffers.

A better way of doing it would be pressure, fill and flowrate. The prime mover would be pressure. A pumpjack, or pump creates a pressure, as would a storage tank. Pipes, and other impedences create a counter pressure. The sum of these gives a net pressure. The advantage of this is that it can be calculated in segments, just like the update to belts does. It also only needs to be done in full when a pipe is updated, not every tick. A long, 500 pipe run becomes a single object with a particularly high counter presser value. It is akin to voltages in a circuit.

Once you have the pressure balance, you can calculate max flow rates and fill. Flow rate is akin to the current flow. Purely a function of available pressure. In game it is more of a maximum than a current. If the pipe is full, and the pressure can push enough fluid, then you get full flow, otherwise fill comes into play.

Fill is the buffering of the pipes. It is done on a segment by segment basis, rather than pipe by pipe. A pipe with a fill below max will absorb fluids and pressure to full up, ie more flows in than out. As a counter, if demand exceeds inflow, then the pipe will drain down. In the circuit analogy the pipe is a capacitor. It buffers pulses, but, as it reduces so does outflow. Potentially, storage tanks could just be slightly modified pieces of pipe with a huge internal capacity.

End result of this is that pipe segments will have 3 values to monitor. Net pressure, content volume and flowrate. These are a lot quicker to calculate than the current system, are closer to real life than the current, and are a lot more intuitive to the user.

One slight problem could be chunkyness. 3 Pipes joining could be at significantly different pressures. This would look slightly odd. The easiest solution would be to treat the change as linear over the pipe. You know the values at both ends of a segment, you can do a linear scaling over the length of the segment. (As you mouse down the length of the pipe, the pressure drops off/increases till the next joint.) This could even be done only at mouse over, rather than every tick. A lot more CPU efficient.

The final problem is residuals. This is likely the most CPU intensive problem, but generally not a large scale issue. If 2 fluids meet, then the pipe is initially split based on the volumes of each. The one with the higher pressure displaces the other back until it reaches max fill on it's pipe segment. At this point, it can either be left for the player to deal with (delete pipe segment etc) or the higher pressure fluid can 'degrade' the lower pressure ones. This will have the effect of the higher pressure fluid slowly working it's way up a pipe until a pressure balance is reached, or the other fluid is destroyed. This creates realistic effects both for residual fluid in a pipe, or for 2 different fluids meeting.

As I said, previously, I'm fairly sure the Devs have something better in mind that me, but I wanted to get this out there and see people's opinions on it. Even if it's just to get it out of my head. :)

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