I'd like to see how it works, too. Especially the component generating the pulses.

I am red/green color blind and I have always found the map difficult to use because of the color choices. Does the map show the spread of pollution? I've never been able to tell. Does it show where I can mine rocks? I see the creeper nests, I see oil patches, I see coal patches, I see iron patches,...

Ah it's not a technical reason but an aesthetical one. A good one :D. Actually I hate building atop ore patches, too. I'd really like to hear from Lutz_Scheiter why he builds the big train station buffer islands. They are just impressive. Edit: @MeduSalem & doxsroxs How do your smelting areas lo...

Why do you buffer up so many ores instead of using them directly? The buffers I see here are very deep but they have limited throughput. It looks like it takes a lot of time to buffer/unbuffer when you could just have used the material directly and use the ore patches themselves as a free large-scal...

It took me a while, too, at first.. Balancing turns out to be a very complex topic with many things that are easy to overlook.
Maybe it would be a good idea to write a balancing cookbook or extend the wiki to list the known pitfalls.

What do you mean with centennial buffer?

The second design (by Daniel34) works fine. Because of the splitter, both lanes of the input belt can be sideloaded onto either lane of the output belt as space allows. Try feeding it a single lane and watch it balance things out. On the other hand, that example by Rose there will be capped at a si...

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not. Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogou...

Oh great I was thinking about doing the same! Thank you!

Edit:
Your 12 by 12 balancer seems interesting. Do the loopbacks prevent throughput loss when output lanes are blocked?
Can you share the blueprint?

I use these buffer modules for belt storage. It prefers giving resources to the main line and buffers/unbuffers only on demand. One module can store or output two full blue belts and has a capacity of 38400 items, enough for 8 minutes. There's an explanation here, but I have improved it since then: ...

Yeah I'd also appreciate automated warfare. Cleaning hundreds of biter bases manually spoils the fun in a game about automation. I am against automatic merging of damaged items in my inventory, although the possibility to merge items itself is a good idea. Maybe it could be done manually. For exampl...

I have removed your output filter section and added a splitter-based filter bank based on XKnights filter design. It only works with blue belts, so I needed to put the two red belts onto two blue belts. After the filter bank I have added four buffers that can each handle two blue belts. You don't ne...

impetus maximus wrote:

hansinator wrote:The version from the link I posted does the same while using less parts:

didn't think this would work like mine but it does. well done.

I didn't do it, it's from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... balancers/

Yip that's what I mean.

Going through the debug symbols it shows you are indeed using Zlib. As I said, Zstd has a Zlib-style API for drop-in replacement. It'll take you a couple of minutes to try using that, including download and compilation. No effort. Edit: I've used the undecorator mod to remove all decorations from my...

I've run some additional benchmarks. My disk can read with 2.8GByte/s and write with ~880MByte/s. Deflate (zlib) achieves around 90MByte/s from RAM to disk when compressing a 1GB file (source code). It reaches only 55MByte/s when I compress ~600MB of raw Factorio savegame data. Zstd reaches 220Mbyte...

Hm. Not against this. But I need to give you the discussion from that time. I think I remember the arguments: 1. Zip is standard. Zip-Standard (ZSTD) is not! 2. Faster plays no role: The unpacking is done by the second CPU in parallel. The serialization/deserialisation is the problem (memory-speed!...

Currently the game state is copied out in one thread while another thread does the compression and writing to disk. 5 seconds for a 50 MB save file sounds like it's waiting on your computer. When I implemented the threaded compression during saving for 0.13.0 I was testing with a 65 MB save file an...

blueprint string plz

Hi, I've got a map that produces a 58mb zip file savegame. It takes around 5 seconds to do this and autosave becomes quite annoying. It looks like you are using deflate already with the fastest setting for compression. Letting deflate run on the raw data with its fastest settings gives me a compress...