Yeah, refining all 3 products (heavy, light, gas) into solid fuel is what I do initially. I keep a unified fuel belt, which runs to my steam engines, stone / steel furnaces, and trains. It's initially coal, but anything that will burn (wood, coal, solid fuel, small electric poles) can go on that bel...

Interesting article on the current state of fusion: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/2015/08/27/how-close-are-we-to-nuclear-fusion/ I'm surprised that article makes no mention of Lockheed's compact fusion reactor program . It's magnetic confinement, but not a Tokamak. It's a cylinder rather ...

I've actually mixed the two. That is, I've create a train network that was primarily single-track, two way traffic, and the stations were more conventional one-way with either right or left hand signals depending on what was more convenient for the location. In general, though, I prefer right-hand s...

I'm assuming you're deliberately avoiding belts because of lag / frame rate issues. And that you must have a mega-mega base, because generally speaking, even one level-3 assembler unloading oil barrels produces oil at a tremendous rate. Personally, I've never had a need for more than 1 train hauling...

roman566 wrote:It is present in the form of the Portable Fusion Reactor

I always assumed that was one of these.

To be honest, I've always just added plants until I reached equilibrium without doing any calculations. At least in part because I was usually quite short of oil, so investing heavily in extra refineries and chem plants for light oil cracking was pointless. When I played with the Marathon mod, I fou...

and they are moving much faster than the plastic Chemlab with gas coming directly from the Refinery. Yeah, running anything directly from the refinery without a tank to act as a buffer is almost always bad. You've mentioned "4 tanks" several times now. Generally, that's not helpful. If yo...

The red Deconstruction blueprint for construction bots works as well, but only if you select only stone or concrete paths. If you drag-select anything else it will ignore the paths.

No, there's no concept of priority in Factorio's signals or chain signals. Neither type of signal has any controls, you place them and they do their thing automatically.

And 2) - I have several refineries all processing plastic (3 chem plants of it and 2 refineries supplying them, both with a ton of oil each), and the 1st one is hardly producing it, the other two are producing it just fine. All the chem labs have 4 tanks as well as producing solid fuels from the ta...

Technicly it's not useful as the game is already adjusting fuel and water usage to the needs. Right, so you already know it does nothing useful, while introducing unnecessary brownouts when the currently enabled stages get overwhelmed. You asked for suggestions on how to improve this - the obvious ...

I gather the point of all of this is to effectively reduce the priority of steam engines? So mostly they're off, but they gradually turn on when you aren't getting enough power from accumulators and solar panels? There are a lot of solutions centered around turning on steam engines when accumulators...

- "0.5 * Yield^2 * 7500 - 375" isn't right. Perhaps it should be "0.5 * Yield^2 * 7500 - 37.5". The difference is small. Yeah, I left out a factor of 10% when computing the square during integration. Current yield / second = initial yield - time in seconds / 7500, with a minimum...

It's much like putting down any other placeable item. Pick the stone bricks or the concrete up from your inventory, and right-click. Or shift-left-click if you want constructor bots to put it down. Default is a 2x2 square, but you can increase the size of the placement area with the +/- keys, down t...

In vanilla, the bottleneck in advanced circuit production, accumulators, and laser turrets is largely petroleum gas for plastics and sulfur. In Marathon, it's mostly copper for electronics. In vanilla, 1 Blue science pack = 16.4 iron ore, 16.5 copper ore, 1 coal, and 6 gas, when you include the sulf...

Solid fuel is unlike most of the other things you're talking about altering, because it's an energy source. It's balanced against coal, not copper or electronics. As such, it's about right as-is, and shouldn't change. If you say you've never made any solid fuel, ever, you have no experience with the...

For longer blocks, just chain another signal to them (i.e. between your current chain signal and the longest block). That way the signal can be propagated all the way to the entrant signal. Propagating the signal, as you put it, is not the problem, or even required. My experience is that chain sign...

I limit the number of trains for each ore/station to the number of parking spots. Last time I had this issue, I went with a unified waiting area. Instead of each platform having 2 waiting stations, I had 5 parallel waiting stations that any type of train could use. Which could theoretically overflo...

So, kindly go away if you're just gonna min/max everything? While Zuri was being Zuri, that doesn't justify dismissing good designs as "min / max" as if doing something well in Factorio were somehow wrong and something at which to sneer. This is particularly true because your own motivati...

DerivePi wrote:Just for comparisons, this is what the receiving train station for all of the Bobs ores can look like -

Why such long lead areas for each platform? For future expansion for longer trains?