If I recall correctly, it's just a convenience factor when you're laying out a bunch of them. An unpowered roboport doesn't show a connection to powered roboports. When you're trying to lay them out so they connect, this allows you to put several on the map with connections without having to wait a...

Perhaps relevant from a different angle, Why do roboports start with power?

Former computer repair here, never underestimate a reboot or component reseating.

I disagree on the hassle level of the smart reactor, it is 2 inserters, power storage for the trigger, and a handful of wire spent cell remover - enabled on accumulator or steam tank level, read hand fresh cell inserter - enabled on spent cell > 0, hand size 1 wire them to the storage and each other...

The neighbor bonus is 100% per adjacent active reactor. 2x2 - 2 neighbors each for 300% efficiency.

Each 235 is good for 80GJ of power, more if you have a bigger reactor core, 1x2 - 160GJ, 2x2 - 240GJ. This can go a long time at your current use (more than an hour at minimum reactor size)

are ghost poles meant to prevent real poles from connecting? They are in range and not maxed out for connections, but the no triangles rule seems to be in play even with ghosts.

Let's get back to the actual use case for the topic, rather than the worst case scenario that falls outside of the reason to ask for such a feature. I believe this would be for signalling long stretches of straight rail, by signalling the first block, then hopping into a train and doing high speed d...

by using the spacing to the signal before where you start dragging.

The player and player-occupied vehicles are subject to the special player-proximity ghost checking. Unoccupied vehicles are on the global ghosts queue. This shouldn't make a difference for low counts of pending bot operations as described earlier in the thread. I removed all ghosts with an decon pl...

from the descriptions in this thread, a couple questions pop into mind.

Do equipment roboports have player-avatar bound checks?
Do they start working if the player gets near while they are being sluggish?
Is Spidertron basically a remote controlled player?

secret spiders hidden behind menu

Advanced Tin Smelting 1 is the tech you seek, pretty sure it is the dark green icon in the top row of your screenshot.

When opening the chemical plant, the sound is that of the electrical interface.

The confusing part in this case was the sub 5 hour time frame from experimental posting to stable distribution on Steam. Was caught off guard by the update, then found the post for the same version as experimental had *just* been released. Not that I distrust the actual stability of the game, only t...

This seems to have been put out on Steam as a stable release, but the post reads as experimental. Intentional?

Do I like the oil change? yes. Why? It changes the way I play petroleum. not trying to twist words, but this part struck me This is at the heart of the issue as I see it, with the current recipes, the entirety of the refinery setup is for the production of one fluid instead of each fluid having a v...

The solid fuel in 0.17.0 did not really work. The science only consumed miniscule amounts (especially since you could make it from light oil) so it was still just a matter of time. If sulfur was on HO, then that would change the amount of SF produced to be more in line with consumption, as well as ...

The "there are too many things on petroleum gas" point is really dangerous to change - if for example we would put sulfur into heavy oil, it could very easily happen that your refinery would deadlock because you only want to produce batteries/acid, say for mining uranium and laser turrets...

I feel that this change is playing into the issue rather than the essence of the game. doesn't 'feel' Factorio The source of the problem I see is that there is far too much PG demand relative to the others. leading to the whole refinery complexity dedicated to one fluid essentially. an alternative f...