I just thought of another way to potentially balance it: It outputs items at a constant rate. They will happily flood any production building with items. If it is blocked from outputting an item (either due to there being no space or because the output doesn't accept that kind of item), it jams, and...

-1 on the loader. I think a better way to push lategame away from robots is to make the stack size bonus apply to belts too. When an inserter gets one item it wants from a belt, it'll wait to collect more items, until either it has collected its maximum stack size, or after some timeout, say, one se...

So I played around with it a bit. It works out pretty well; the issue I keep running into with the controller in general is that games designed specifically around having a large number of binary inputs (like Factorio and most MMOs) tend to overwhelm the controller's limited options, even with mode ...

For a different perspective: I never use solid fuel at all (other than for rocket fuel) -- coal is very common and has little else use of volume, so it goes into my boilers and vehicles indefinitely. Then again, I tend to go solar early and hard (buying precious minutes on that evolution factor cloc...

I feel like you're throwing in the towel too soon on the NAT-not-NAT scenario. It's pretty easy to detect. Assuming A and S are already connected. 1. B tries to connect to S. S handshakes with B and tells B about A and A about B. 2. A sends the handshake to B; at the same time, B sends the handshake...

1. Your original bypass has me all kinds of confused. Did you intend that the train could stop there coming from either direction? Then why isn't there a second train stop? If it's supposed to be one way, why is there a leg going back north? And why isn't the merge on the south end signaled correctl...

I think the best design is a combination of the two. Have a bus with iron, copper, steel... then use modules that are designed around getting the right ratios to run all the assembly machines at 100% duty cycle. Some items don't have close enough ratios to make this work well; you could sub in "...

Distant oilfields aren't as bad as you'd think. You can fill barrels with crude using an assembly machine, at a pretty ridiculous speed, then load those barrels onto trains to bring them back to your base, and empty them with another assembly machine. Similar to mining outposts, but with two extra s...

To clarify exactly what's going on: There are limits to the number of items that an inserter will put into a building that is not a simple container; these limits are much lower (almost always single digits) than the amount the particular input slot can contain, and usually relative to what that bui...

You've built the defenses. Sent the spaceship back to the waiting humans deep in space. Your craft has returned. A small population of colonists have landed. You've brought an invasive species to the ecosystem: your own kind. They're building homes, and will soon be reproducing. Your new task is to ...

For each game I have a particular factory topology in mind before even generating the map, and then I play to the part. I'll make three burners and manually feed them, then get a basic drilling setup going for the two ores plus coal and stone. From there I'll hook up the power plant to the coal mine...

1. anyone have a way of knowing (for the circuit network) that a train is in the station? need this to limit the smart inserters from taking stuff out/putting stuff in at the very last moment the train is in the station (this seems to be a problem in a bunch of the methods i'd like to use). One tri...

The perfect balance between speed and practicality is to make the train track in the station horizontal (so you can fit more inserters), and have 14 inserters to a car, 7 on each side. Then invest in inserter stack upgrades. This setup with all stack upgrades fully loads a car in ~10 seconds and unl...

The rule of thumb is 2:1 (likewise, 1:1 for steel and electric furnaces). As it turns out, it's extremely close to the perfect ratio until you do mining ops of the size that completely swallow ore deposits, at which point you've reached such a scale that you're probably feeding the furnaces by train...

20 fully depleted pumpjacks will still fully load a single refinery. So, your idea is viable, and there's a good upper bound. Keep in mind, however, that the pumpjacks themselves produce pollution on a per-tick basis regardless of how much they produce, which means that as their yield goes down, you...

Enemies will only attack non-military buildings that don't generate pollution if a) their AI perceives the building to be an unavoidable obstacle in reaching their target or b) it's within a certain (variable) proximity to a pollution-generating building. (Fun fact: trees and rocks aren't exempt. In...

When I run into an issue like this, I rebuild the factory in small pieces. If there isn't enough space to build a more appropriate design to what I need now, I'll pick up the whole assembler block and move it somewhere else, the idea being that the things that crowded it out now themselves have room...

Here's a theory: chunk update order. Perhaps the player's position determines in what order the chunks "tick". This would influence the source of the pollution "sensed" by the hives, and therefore the pollution source the attack is most likely to target. To that end, testing in m...

joined -- ssilk OpenTTD has a pretty clever signal system in the form of "path signals", which exploit the trains' own pathfinding algorithm to allow intersections that wouldn't normally be possible, including the dreaded "train circle". A pretty good explanation of how it works...

This is almost certainly a driver bug. Check your Xorg.0.log for WW or EE messages prefixed "NVIDIA"; it's likely some driver internal state corruption that gets progressively worse with each resize. Does this still happen with a 337.xx driver version? How about nouveau? Are you using a co...