it feels like research for the sake of research. But it's not research for the sake of research. It's research to win the game. The campaign walks you through it, but even if you start with free play, the very first dialog you get is "your task is to launch a rocket to explore space. You will ...

Between playing the campaign - and yes, I did play through the campaign - and lots of real games, I learned to anticipate that even if I wasn't seeing biters now, I would eventually, and I wanted decent defenses before they showed up. I had a terrible time with the campaign before I learned to focus...

That's interesting stuff. I should point out that you should be able to replace the smart chests and inserters with combinator setups. That's why you see discussion of combinator-based memory cells, they're the basic building blocks for more interesting projects like this. You only need one memory c...

If you look at the intermediate products you're likely to use routinely, that's Iron plates, copper plates, steel bars, gears, electronic circuits, advanced circuits, and pipes. That's 7 items. Most other intermediate products are things that craft quickly and disappear (iron sticks, wood planks), y...

And I should always carry around an entire stack of underground pipes and pipes for the case that I need them? I dont think so. So that's the tradeoff you've decided to make. Instead of giving up one inventory slot for pipe, you choose to wait around while hand-crafting them. Your choice, but somet...

but saves a lot of waiting around when waiting for underground pipes to be made. Which is a signal that you should automate those, rather than waiting around. Those are certainly a staple that I normally automate as soon as I can afford to. Frankly, the only things which don't justify automation ar...

200 out of 100k is not very much if you ask me. Relevant would be e.g. comparison with number of downloads of Marathon or No Hand Crafting mod. Which points out something I find a little worrying about a semi-official poll like this one. Whatever the results, it's a small sampling (45 votes as I wr...

Sure, there have been people who have downloaded all sorts of mods which make the game easier. Because some people like easy. Similarly, there have lots of people who have downloaded mods which make the game harder. Some of those mods increase crafting time, such as the Marathon mod. Because those p...

"Diesel" specifically refers to a particular kind of internal combustion engine. You can't run one on any of the fuels in Factorio, wood, coal, or solid fuel. The locomotives and "burner" items all need mechanical work, using various Factorio fuels. That means they must have exte...

I know for a fact that small pumps block fluid movement when they don't have power. I've used them extensively in 0.12 as on / off switches, now that they'll take conditions like smart inserters. Mainly I do this with the steam engines (the topic at hand) and chemical plants (to control things like ...

It's true that oil cargo volume is much, much smaller than iron or copper ore. The "only one inserter" comment was a bit of a knee-jerk response, though I stand by the big difference between a basic, single-box buffer and direct loading. You could theoretically need high oil volume if you'...

Uh, i just use assembly machines on both ends, unload empty and full barrels straight into them. That's fairly inefficient for a variety of reasons. It limits train loading and unloading significantly. You can't load / unload any faster than the assembler can process, and you lose most or all of th...

On 2: Can't you just use combinators to calculate the amount of (empty) barrels needed at the outpost ? There are a few issues. Combinators can only see things in chests, so you'd have to avoid belts. Spock's oil outpost doesn't use belts, but I usually do, and it's much simpler moving train output...

The issue of wanting to go full solar and use steam as a backup to accumulators, rather than accumulators as a backup to steam, is so well known that there are a variety of solutions to disabling steam power production until accumulator power runs low. They all work by creating an isolated section o...

it's always possible to re-design part or all of a base. Tearing stuff up does mean the stuff you pick up does nothing for a little while, as you re-build to your new layout, but there's no real cost to doing so beyond downtime. Except for fluids - those can be a pain because picking up a storage ta...

Yeah, I don't want a tank following me around like an eager puppy and smashing all my oil pipelines.

I usually consider "feature X should be like this" posts to be a complete waste, but I can't help myself. At a bare minimum, the tank should be comparable to power armor, which means shields, whether they're built in or added via shield modules. Given how useless it is against swarms of at...

First off, I consider the train system a mess. Loops, roundabouts, vertical stations, less than max inserter count stations, all of these things I consider sub-optimal. ... and which no one else consider sub-optimal. Well, except for vertical stations. Vertical stations don't allow as many inserter...

I've experimented with using a tank extensively. They're ridiculously vulnerable to swarms of aliens if you don't have a wall of turrets backing you up. They're not even very good compared to similar-tech modular armor, because they don't self-repair like shields, they need active repair and repair ...

You might find my earlier thread discussing signal-block options for two-way track of interest. For a single two-way track, it's pretty straightforward, and I have an example passing block in the first post. It gets more interesting if you want to mess around with two-way double track, instead of th...