Factorio

Tuco · May 18, 2024

Tuco said:
Behold, Arco Balancer Mk. I

View attachment 526778

It uses a rules based system ( Rule-based system - Wikipedia ). Basically for each of the 10 balancing machines,

If output too low, we want to run this machine

If input is too high, we want to run this machine

If we want to run this machine and have enough of the input, then run this machine by requesting its inputs.

It works well but I haven't really seen what other people have built so I don't know how other people have solved this. It also seems like the balancer has to run a bunch of cycles every time the other factories that Naquium Tesseracts or sciences run and disrupt the natural order. The one thing I wanted to integrate was some logic to defer running a given machine if it has too much of the output.

The other idea I had was to use a score-based system that would score the inputs and outputs and run if it exceeds some threshold. I think I'll let this one run and continue building my factory.

I redid the Arcosphere Balancer using a score-based system, which after reading what other people do is generally the "right" solution. There's a ton of craaaaazy shit people have come up with to solve this including linear alegebra ( arco linear algebra ) a sushi looking belt thing ( Space Exploration, combinator-free arcosphere handling... ) some kind of flowchart thing for producing a tesseract, ( Space Exploration Arcospheres: The Overengineered Flowchart Solution ). I also saw another one that used like, 200 hundred Gravimetric Facilities, which is crazy.

I wanted to repeat the look of concentric rings with a core that the Gravimetrics Facility has, and I kind of got it. I lucked out in that I can just barely fit exactly 16 gravimetrics facilities around the provider warehouse, which serve as the core of my balncers. Them being able to access the arcospheres with an inserter makes the system very responsive.

The outer ring of gravimetrics facilities isn't as lucky and the size of the wide beacons is just a bit toooo small to respect the ring shape, plus the amount of fluid makes it cumbersome. The outer ring is composed of the circuits for each recipe, which is transported via wire. This enables a significant amount of compression which is useful for shortening the logistic bot travel distance. I've seen a few dozen arco balancers and haven't seen anyone build anything like this. I'm tempted to go further and use decorative platforms for the first time ever to further frame the concentric ring design, but I probably won't. The usage of Bob's Inserters makes this design possible, without it I'd have to spread out a bit more and use 4 beacons instead of 2, which isn't a huge deal.

This is a super fun puzzle, easily the best factory puzzle in any game I've played. Even once you have a working solution, the difference between it working OK and good is significant, and because the number of arcospheres you get decreases logarithmically, simply scaling up isn't a great solution.

Tuco · May 20, 2024

meStevo · May 25, 2024

I can't get over the hump now that I have the space elevator unlocked. Hoping one of my friends starts to do some in-orbit building as we start to re-architect all that. Adapting the ground base and the orbit base to work via trains is just so much to take on at one time in my head that I have difficulty taking it piece by piece. I start to do some things and then just end up logging, then we chew throught a bunch of resources keeping an unused elevator up and aren't getting much/any research done. Blah.

Cataclysm Classic launch was a nice break, but I need to sit down and work through the initial foundations of the orbital base and supplying it so we can move forward. More of a rant at myself than a cry for help or anything. If I was playing solo this is where the game would probably end, if it wouldn't have already.

Tuco · May 25, 2024

meStevo said:
I can't get over the hump now that I have the space elevator unlocked. Hoping one of my friends starts to do some in-orbit building as we start to re-architect all that. Adapting the ground base and the orbit base to work via trains is just so much to take on at one time in my head that I have difficulty taking it piece by piece. I start to do some things and then just end up logging, then we chew throught a bunch of resources keeping an unused elevator up and aren't getting much/any research done. Blah.

Cataclysm Classic launch was a nice break, but I need to sit down and work through the initial foundations of the orbital base and supplying it so we can move forward. More of a rant at myself than a cry for help or anything. If I was playing solo this is where the game would probably end, if it wouldn't have already.

For me, this is year 3 of this save. The first yearish long break I took was when I chose to integrate city block rails into Nauvis. The second was when I unlocked space elevator.

The most common reason I see people quit SE is when they unlock space rails or space elevators (and are probably like me and ignored rails until this point), because it's sooo much work to redo everything. It's a shame because the most interesting stuff in SE is near the end with spaceships and arco balancing. My bet is that if you don't finish now you never will, because Space Age will be out soon and in a few years (at a guess...) Space Exploration based on Space Age will come out, and who knows what life will be like then?

Tuco · May 25, 2024

Tuco said:
So I toyed with the idea of compressing trains even further and tried adding multiple inputs to my train. I just built my Matter 1 science using this idea and am pretty excited about it.

There are three train stations that have three inputs each and one that has two inputs, letting me directly feed these complex recipes without a bunch of stations.

View attachment 524488

This was one of the rare times where I built too small. I didn't realize those Material Fabricator facilities aren't modified by the beacons and can't have modules, so they don't scale at all even if their base production is high. This meant they are a bottleneck.

I just redid my entire matter factory. Redoing it ended up not being tooooo big of a deal because I also merged it with a new scrap and matter production facility. I now handle scrap on the right side and turn it into matter (except for Stone...) and then turn the Heavy Oil into Anti-Matter fuel. I'm toying with juicing that further and using that scrap to create material testing packs for the antimatter facilitiy and lithium.

full res: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53746291668_eb84ab0dde_o.jpg

Tuco · May 25, 2024

So one of the endgame capabilities granted by Krastorio2 is matter production, like I used in the above factory. This is synergistic with the Core Mining you use on outposts where you get a bunch of random stuff. In my outposts I used that random stuff to build ingots, circuits, stone stuffs etc instead of shipping it back to Nauvis, which is probably a mistake given how much time it takes to carefully handle all those resources, but whatever I enjoyed it. This approach has been improved moderately from the matter production, where I can turn stuff I don't need that much into stuff I do need. Here's an example on my Holminite planet:

This one turns excess coal, iron, rare metals and stone into oil, copper. I'm not sure if the transmutation of coal->oil through matter is better than coal liquification, but whatever.

I'll do this differently on my Vitamelange planet, and turn just about everything into Stone so I don't have to ship it in. I did this on my Imersite planet which is waterless to bolster my mineral water, water, and rare metals.

meStevo · May 25, 2024

Are you taking your screenshots and stitching them together or is there something that can do that for you?

It's harder to take a break when im paying for a dedicated server and have friends playing, heh. Love your screenshots though. Doesn't quite translate because we're not using some of these mods (man, just the space those inserters save is insane for things like train stops) but it's nice to see non-blueprint 'must be mega compact and use every square' style layouts. Reminds me that I don't have to do everything in as confined a space as I rework stuff.

My initial approach was that on the south side of orbit I'd provide from the surface, and have a train network at the north end moving materials produced from one block or another. Of course, I then setup a group of stations to receive basic fluids and then... set up space science to receive materials on the west side of a block and im already starting to spaghetti one block in. Torn between trying to do some kind of fluid bus or just doing foundational processing at the initial receiption block and then processing that as needed on site (as re-processing the byproducts would be necessary, so essentially just keeping those processes topped off with fresh stuff). Obviously the latter is the play there 99% of the time.

I'll spend a lot of time thinking about it, log in... start to approach doing some of it and just feel overwhelmed and need to step away. Fucking adhd man, game makes it never feel so clear and apparent that it's just hard to keep thoughts together and stay on top of a thing.

Another pain, scaffolding. Are do you have blueprints of a lot of common elements w/ scaffolding under them to develop stuff like in some of those screenshots? Or are you placing/removing chunks of it and cleaning it up after your elements are down? Feel like that'd be a good mod, automatically including scaffolding in the building if there is empty space below an object and the surface is orbit.

Tuco · May 25, 2024

meStevo said:
Are you taking your screenshots and stitching them together or is there something that can do that for you?

It's harder to take a break when im paying for a dedicated server and have friends playing, heh. Love your screenshots though. Doesn't quite translate because we're not using some of these mods (man, just the space those inserters save is insane for things like train stops) but it's nice to see non-blueprint 'must be mega compact and use every square' style layouts. Reminds me that I don't have to do everything in as confined a space as I rework stuff.

My initial approach was that on the south side of orbit I'd provide from the surface, and have a train network at the north end moving materials produced from one block or another. Of course, I then setup a group of stations to receive basic fluids and then... set up space science to receive materials on the west side of a block and im already starting to spaghetti one block in. Torn between trying to do some kind of fluid bus or just doing foundational processing at the initial receiption block and then processing that as needed on site (as re-processing the byproducts would be necessary, so essentially just keeping those processes topped off with fresh stuff). Obviously the latter is the play there 99% of the time.

I'll spend a lot of time thinking about it, log in... start to approach doing some of it and just feel overwhelmed and need to step away. Fucking adhd man, game makes it never feel so clear and apparent that it's just hard to keep thoughts together and stay on top of a thing.

Another pain, scaffolding. Are do you have blueprints of a lot of common elements w/ scaffolding under them to develop stuff like in some of those screenshots? Or are you placing/removing chunks of it and cleaning it up after your elements are down? Feel like that'd be a good mod, automatically including scaffolding in the building if there is empty space below an object and the surface is orbit.

I use screenshot toolkit for the screenshots:

Screenshot Toolkit

* Snipping: Screenshots a selected area, similar to programs like the Windows Snipping Tool or Flameshot.

mods.factorio.com

The key advantage it has over just using the /screenshot command is it will take screenshots in "daytime", even in space.

For scaffolding anytime I work in an area I just big dick drop an entire sheet of scaffolding over the entire thing (which can be like, 20k scaffolding for those double wide blocks I use for science) and then clean it up with a delete blueprint that only deletes scaffolding.

However, for precise copy-paste stuff I use Ghost On Water which lets you place buildings that require landfill or scaffolding in one go.

Tuco · May 25, 2024

meStevo said:
I'll spend a lot of time thinking about it, log in... start to approach doing some of it and just feel overwhelmed and need to step away. Fucking adhd man, game makes it never feel so clear and apparent that it's just hard to keep thoughts together and stay on top of a thing.

I have a task list for this. Here's my current set of tasks. I'll add to it while not playing Factorio, then loosely reference it as I play. I used to have warnings turned on for my trains so I could keep everything running, but turned all that off and primarily focus on one task at a time, then come up for air and check that stuff is generally processing. Factorio, especially SE, really rewards multi-tasking in that you should build something and let it run while you focus on other stuff, then come back to it later to use the output.

Tuco · May 31, 2024

Friday Facts #413 - Gleba | Factorio

IntroductionAlbert Making a new world in Factorio is relatively "easy", just create a new set of tilesets for the ground, add some new models of trees, create a bunch of new decoratives, some decals (optional), a new skin for the cliffs (optional), and bam! you get a new planet. Well, to be...

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Tuco · Jun 1, 2024

Upgraded SE, which changes all kinds of things. Most notably it changes the vitamelange production to include a bajillion greenhouses. Here's what I came up with, produces about 300 vitalic reagent a minute.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53761032587_bf883ce82d_o.jpg

Tuco · Jun 8, 2024

Redoing my vulcanite planet. It served me so well this year, but it still feels great to go back and use what I learned to create really dense, efficient factories. This particular one condenses 3 different factories together to get vulcanite blocks from vulcanite core fragments and raw vulcanite. After this I only have my Iridite outpost to redo with core fragment -> finished product approach.

Vulcanite processing is similar to uranium processing in that it uses centrifuges that outputs its own inputs. Previously I solved this by independently handling outputs into storage containers with circuits that set priorities, which worked great but has higher UPS cost, is less dense and more complicated. Now I handle this challenge using loaders which have the critical property of overstuffing factories, effectively taking priority over inserters. Because of Bob's Inserters this is strategy is opaque in this factory, but each centrifuge uses a filtered inserter to extract the crushed vulcanite and enriched vulcanite and place them into different sides of the loader to keep it stuffed. Excess enriched vulcanite from the pulverizers is then diverted into a chest near the smelter, which circuits that prevent enriched vulcanite input if that chest has over 200 enriched vulcanite. The end result is that the centrifuges will fill their outputs, keep their inputs filled and the pulverizers will keep pulverizing.

Watching this factory churn out over a blue belt of vulcanite blocks while train after train comes streaming in and 4 core miners are pumping in is super satisfying.

Tuco · Jun 10, 2024

One of the latest late game entities is the Arcolink Storage which is a 10 slot container that shares inventory like a Minecraft shulker box. This is obviously extremely powerful and makes significant challenges in SE obsolete. It's so powerful I was honestly a little disappointed when I unlocked it and saw what it did. It makes the incredible feat of Factorio engineering that is my naquitite pipeline a waste of UPS and antimatter.

However, after using it, it's kind of a cool challenge that's new in SE and I've automated enough spaceships that I'm ready for something new. The interesting challenge with the Arcolinks is that it has an ID set to the surface it's placed on, so in order to link two different surfaces you need a spaceship that moves the placed entity around like a good, which is pretty neat and the first time I've done that. Building spaceships really is fun in SE, I wish it was integrated earlier in the tech tree because you spend so much time using Cargo Rockets and so little time using them to move significant amounts of goods. The only good most players (including me) will move with them is Naqutite, which most of the usages being the space research stuff or some fluids, both of which have infrequent utilization.

The below image shows my Arcolink Spaceship with the Arcolink and after it's been deposited on Nauvis

Tuco · Jun 16, 2024

Iridite is the last raw resource to get this kind of all core frag -> complete product in one quadrant treatment and it might be my favorite one just because it produces hydrogen chloride onsite and uses iridite to do it, while being slightly rock negative. The line of centrifuges in the center worked out perfectly, which is more luck than anything since I didn't check to see if I could get the balanced number of centrifuges before building the whole thing. I currently have two quadrants of this, each one produces ~200 iridite ingots a minute.

Tuco · Jun 19, 2024

I'm expanding to my first off-system planet, Tarturus. It's a massive vitamelange planet super far from the Calidus star system.

To build a new base I'm using Arcolink technology to create a wormhole factory pipeline. Here's the sending side on Nauvis.

On the right is the factory sender for Piccard, my in-system Cryo planet. All the resources get requested and sent to that Signal Receiver, when the rocket gets full it yeets over to Piccard. On the left is Tarturus, which sends requests the same way, but instead feeds to an Arcolink that transmits it to Tarturus into this staging area.

My receiver for Piccard looks like this:

and my receiver for Tarturus looks like this:

I also have a mod, Ghost Scanner, Ghost Scanner , that can send ghost structures (so, structures I've requested to build) to the signal network and use that to drive requests from Nauvis. I found that I want the storage chests with each item anyway to store any destroyed structures, so I'm actually not using Ghost Scanner.

meStevo · Jun 29, 2024

We shelved our run. I couldn't get out of my own head and get through my rail problems as we tried to transition and nobody was really interested and picking that up and running with it.

I may start a vanilla or lightly modified game just to pass the time as I've got the itch just not for the K2DE stuff, or tinker with other larger conversions because shiny/new is interesting and motivating to tinker with. Just a lot of other things going on atm, so the time wasn't there to justify paying for the dedicated server anymore.

Related to shiny and new:

Friday Facts #417 - Space Age development | Factorio

Hello, we usually show finished stuff in Friday facts these days, but I personally always liked to have a peek behind the curtains and see the (temporary) mess there. This motivated me to do some kind of overview of how the overall expansion development felt from my perspective. If you are...

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"Since things are getting stable and I'm starting to be pretty happy with the state of the game now, we are ready to give a specific date of the Space Age release... Which we will tell you next week

"

Mountain Biker · Jun 30, 2024

I'm hoping for September but I'm guessing October is more likely. Either way, can't wait!

Tuco · Jul 1, 2024

I'm hoping it's not August because I won't be done with my run in time!!!

Kaines · Jul 5, 2024

2.0 Expansion release date: October 21, 2024

Friday Facts #418 - Space Age release date | Factorio

Hello, Today we want to share some exciting news!

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Tuco · Jul 5, 2024

Looks like I've got a few months to finish K2SE, lol.

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