I really like these graphical ideas. This offers an opportunity to fix one of the problems with belt graphics. If a belt is fully loaded with certain types of item it can be very hard to see the colour of the arrows on it and see what speed of belt it is. The extra graphics could be used to offer an...

Construction robots must be earlier, but logistic robots must be later for balance. Using without roboports, just equipment roboport for first power armor. While logistics bots are available early, they aren’t particularly useful until requester chests are unlocked, which are behind yellow science,...

Grumble grumble. When the splitter filtering was announced I was just about to start building a new smelter array. I thought great, I can make use of this filtering to do a mixed iron-copper smelter with splitter filtering of the output. My smelter is sitting in a half built state with hacks to get ...

Perhaps people had gameplay videos they recorded over the holiday period that they’ve been posting, and are now back at work with less time to make videos?

One of the things I found most irritating about biters in the past was trying to expand later in the game and having these huge biter nests to fight through. While nukes solved the problem to an extent, I felt they were just a bit too powerful. Artilery is the right balance, and I absolutely love it...

I’ve been thinking a bit about the issue of game progression with regard to this topic. A lot of the support for bots comes from the megabase builders who recognise that scaling up to massive production rates without killing the game performance is only possible with bots, and removing them would el...

My personal feeling is that bots are not bad per se, and eliminating their use is not necessarily the objective. What annoys me is that bots enable a single uniform base construction where there is no thought required to optimize tasks. For maximum production you want to maximize your beacon coverag...

This is actually not the fault of bots, but rather of beacons and modules and how they currently work. The result of their current mechanics is that there really is only one optimal layout for endgame production blocks: and that is the alternating rows of beacons and assemblers with prod modules in...

I had a quick search to see if this idea has come up before but didn’t find anything, apologies if this is an old idea. One of the challenges with large robot use, either construction or logistics, is keeping them charged. You end up with tons of roboport sand circles of bots waiting for charging. H...

I have used the fluid separation feature, and while it was useful I’d certain situations, I don’t see it’s loss as a huge problem. I think fluid wagons do need a more general rebalance, though. My feeling is that the fluid wagons as they are have both too much capacity and too high a weight. The rea...

If you’re doing something like a ratio-perfect science build then for most things, provided you use the same type of assembly machine for all steps, the time scaling factor is the same and you can ignore it. The place where it’s most awkward is mixing chemical plants with assembly machines as they h...

Good point, I guess we'll have to wait until the bugs with the buffers are sorted to figure out how to use them for this kind of task.

I've finally had some time to play 0.16 (with the benefit of a few bug fix patches before I hit the ground, thanks devs), and I'm rejigging my current factory to adapt to the changes. One of the tasks on my to-do list from before 0.16 dropped was to set up belt recycling. I personally don't like &qu...

You can use the multiplayer permissions tab to deny yourself crafting permission. I’m pretty sure doing that won’t disable achievements.

Biters are not supposed to be rewarding, they're supposed to be a PITA and add a dose of challenge. If you want moar challenge, add moar biters. If you don't wan extra challenge, disable them in your map settings. And this is exactly the kind of logic and wrong design philosophy which make so many ...

On the topic of construction bots pulling the last of an item out of your hand, I’d like the option to prioritize base network bots over personal roboport construction. So if I’m in the construction zone and the network has the items available, then the network will build items first, and only resor...

A couple of points worth remembering for more experienced players when it comes to the newbie experience. One is that the progression, particularly with building out oil, has changed a lot in 0.15. Now, for blue science, the only oil based product you need is plastic for red circuits, the need for l...

The other huge nuisance with regular pipes is the inability to prevent them from connecting when next to each other. You can put belts right next to each other without cross contamination, but the only way to run pipes closely spaced is with underground’s.

I think Kerbal Space Program, Factorio and other things like it, is basically like crayons. I can eat the crayons or create pictures and tons of other stuff, but it's not a game. That’s quite a narrow definition of “game” and not one widely recognized in either the computer game industry or communi...

I've been playing the expensive recipes in.15+ Gotta say that while my iron needs are fairly well served by one 4-lane red bus, the copper kills me around purple and yellow science. I ended up with 8lanes of copper to feed the maw of science. In terms of raw smelting capacity, yellow science certai...