RTGs are a bad fit. Main reason they're loved is for simplicity - they work and don't have moving parts and are pretty decent in terms of power per mass and size when you can't use solar power. They'd be a terrible fit for body armor on a solar-rich planet like Factorio. Fission reactors run hard in...

Hmm, the Bob's mod greenhouse here says 60 seconds without fertilizer and 45 seconds with. And I read something about the yield being somewhat random, but that might not apply to Bob's greenhouses. Not sure about randomness as I've only dabbled with the recipes. Was only reading the recipe, and did...

Math time: greenhouses to start produce 15 wood at the cost of 10 seedlings, taking 80 seconds. 2 of the wood is used to make more seedlings, so it's 13 wood per 80 seconds, or .1625 per second. A miner mines coal at the rate of .525 per second, and remembering that wood has half the fuel value of c...

Now, how do you deterministically decide how to divide them? I don't have an automated answer for that. In fact such a system is pretty dependent on the threads being divided up manually, by the end user. The end user defines what parts of the factory they want being totally separate, and manually ...

Haven't seen it be too much a problem for early players. The default difficulty is easy enough that it's hard to get screwed by the biters, even in a desert start. It does give an advantage to keep the trees around and like them, which I consider good. As otherwise I'd hate all trees too much. I nee...

speed of .5 means you double the time, not multiply by 50%. It takes 12 seconds per pack, instead of 9. 60/12*5 is 25.

Wait, what happened to the new UI guy? I must have missed that news.

The beauty of having boilers be 50% efficient is that it's similar to how every other burner works. Realistically you'd expect some heat loss (and therefore efficiency loss) from storing liquids in tanks, but as that is non-trivially difficult they haven't added it in, nor seem to care to add it in....

Hmm, did a test in Freeplay mode (wow, so useful for things like this) and found the main issue with your setup was the fluid rate. Shortening the amount of pipes between the heat exchangers and turbines resulted in more energy produced. Adding on more heat exchangers in the line also increased pow...

Hmm, did a test in Freeplay mode (wow, so useful for things like this) and found the main issue with your setup was the fluid rate. Shortening the amount of pipes between the heat exchangers and turbines resulted in more energy produced. Adding on more heat exchangers in the line also increased powe...

Fluid isn't the same word as liquid, both gases and liquids are fluids. "noun: a substance that has no fixed shape and yields easily to external pressure; a gas or (especially) a liquid." So steam works as a fluid, same as petroleum gas has worked fine as a fluid for a long time now. Why w...

The tradeoff is pretty simple: more complexity means more time and resources to set it up in the first place. Beyond that, why would the game really need a tradeoff for it?

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=19851 Describes how liquid pressures work with math. The relevant bit for your question is that entities share liquid based on pressure, but tanks do not get increased pressure, just more capacity. So a full tank transfers as much liquid in an abs...

Could also make copper ore act like rock where you need 2 ore per plate. Help solidify copper as the "expensive" resource compared to iron. At least resource gathering-wise.

But I had a hard time getting enough iron plate, iron gearwheels and green circuits into a assembler 2 for producing assembler 1. Actually an assembler 2 needs 44 iron plates per second (!) to produce assembler 1, far more that even two normal full compressed belts could ever deliver ... Break it u...

My answer to OP's question is definitely "No I wouldn't use less Underground Pipes"... for several reasons that have been pointed out already. The way pipe mechanics work it is best to have the least amount of pipes so not to lose pipe pressure/throughput. Regular pipes autoconnect to eve...

Assuming you're not using the expensive option, having a 3-2 option for cable-circuit assembly machines works well. Easiest layout is to have the three cable machines output directly into the two circuit machines, because having a belt inbetween mucks things up. So, one fast inserter for each of the...

Expensive research doing anything was pushed back till later, as they didn't have the time they wanted. They wanted to leave it in though for modders to potentially use.

I certainly would. There's a good time for when they're very useful, but I've very much gotten into the habit of using them wherever possible, purely due to wanting to block myself less. They're still technically better to use anyway due to pipe mechanics, but still ugly and wasteful for materials. ...

Well, if the Roboport is full you don't really need any more robots :D You mean when the 1(!) roboport that I insert the robots into is full? My current network are 762 roboports .... It is not the "need" part. More then "can" part :D "Anything worth doing is worth overdoin...