While more detail in sound design is really nice, I remember there are moments where sound becomes noise. I'm playing and designing some production line and thinking really hard if I should put that to the left or to the right, or I'm debugging why this line doesn't have full throughput. Suddenly th...

The fact you don't have a reason to use circuits don't mean nobody else hasn't a reason as well. From the functions you posted, I only use the oil refining thing - to balance cracking. What I find essential is active balancing of chest filling on loading and unloading station, so trains are loaded a...

The train/elevated train sounds somewhat remind me of my toy train in my youth. For a real world simulation, it's a bit hollow in my opinion. It really sounds as if a toy train is moving over sheet metal, mounted on a plywood panel. Couldn't you add more bass, more low frequency vibration? If a real...

Very early in my base development I decided to provide refueling via logistic chest in every unloading station, and ever since I'm wondering why people make a kind of rocket science out of it instead of choosing that most simple approach. At least I have roboport coverage everywhere in the main base...

It's difficult to follow your post. What's your point?

The game can help you diagnose ingame issues:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Diag ... nce_issues

The tracks connecting the waiting area with the station area is one big block, and the space right before the stations where you expect one train to wait for each station also belongs to this one block. Since one block can only be occupied by one train, only one train can wait in this area instead o...

For example I have made a setup where a supply train automatically supplies all outposts with generic building materials and keeps them topped off. Most of the time it sits at base waiting for a outpost to request supplies. With this change it would be a constant blinking warning hazard and require...

My final contribution to this thread

I like your explanations i'm always learning a lot, but i thought you were being too harsh saying adding +1 or -1 is a sign of something not done right, potentially discouraging players to use a trick. I seek beauty in creating circuit setups. Adding an 1 as workaround to make some signal not vanis...

The issue is that I no longer get a value of 4 to signal that the train should leave because one of the values cancels out and is not included. I think I can use the everything wild card though. If I say everything must be greater than 0 then if the value doesn't exist the train can still leave. Th...

Having to add +1 or -1 to have a value instead of no value is a sign of something not done right. Isn't that what you are doing with the constant combinator that adds 4x -1 on the right side ? Yes and no. The -1 is used to mark a signal, not to increase or decrease a value so it isn't zero any more...

If you want 50 items and have 50 items, why is canceling out both signals an issue? You don't need to do anything with that material, you have neither demand nor surplus. If you want to control an inserter, material > 0 as activation condition is false if material = 0. Having to add +1 or -1 to have...

Well, just the other day I expanded the area of my base with artillery and attracted huge amounts of biters, and sometimes they got lost in a forest. It may be they attacked single trees to open up a path that otherwise was blocked completely, but they took great lengths to cross a dense forest. Som...

Wow guys. Thanks very much for your long replies. They obviously took some time to compose. It's much fun to work out a solution for an interesting question. Especially your question to boil down your long expression was much fun. Using negative values one way or the other is an important tool for ...

You have a target quantity (usually stored in a constant combinator), you have items already present (usually read from a chest or from the logistic network), and you have items available in the source (usually read from a train station). From all this, compute the amount of items to unload. Take th...

Growing trees has severe gameplay impact, because enemies are blocked by trees. Trees are not attacked by biters. For game mechanics, they work like indestructible, non-attackable entities. Biters are slowed considerably in dense forests, so you can fortify your base with an indestructible forest yo...

@Roaders How will the complete picture of your unloading station will look like? You asked one isolated question, but as long as we don't see the complete picture, we might be unable to give answers that are directly helpful for you solving your problem. We might even try to solve an X-Y problem ins...

I don't understand this part, i had it the other around for most of the time i tried fiddling, it was checking if some materials where under some threshold. The 4 inner OR conditions are always "Bsomething>value OR Tsomething=0". I interpret the Bsomething>value term as "something ab...

(Bammo > 500 || Tammo == 0 ) && (BOil > 20000 || TOil == 0) && (BRobot > 50 || TRobot == 0) && (BRepairPack > 50 || TRepairPack = 0) It seems you have 4 items to handle: ammo, oil, robots, repair packs. The expression should evaluate to true, if each of the materials either ...

I guess there isn't a real (automated) use for wood, because there isn't an automated way to acquire wood and wood isn't growing back. Mines last their time, but as soon as you harvest wood, it's gone. A bit strange, because wood accumulates anyway, but that's the game mechanics. You can use it as f...