FYI, a beacon durning brownout will only output a fraction of the strength of its modules. This may explain the 5K slowdown, as every beacon is likely updating the status of its surroundings every tick. You can get some really odd behavior when a beacon starts losing energy. For example when efficie...

Oh hey, this thread got bumped back up? Time to chime in. Efficiency modules are OP, but not because of electricity savings. A key feature of game progression is the struggle between biter evolution and player research. Efficiency modules short out that difficulty curve, allowing the player to swing...

AI models are incredibly difficult to model in a satisfying way. The current system is pretty damn simple as it only incorporates 3 major behaviors. The first is to attack the player on sight. Easy. The second is to send out waves as hives absorb pollution. That's pretty simple. The third is to expa...

In general, whenever something is clogged up it will cause the factory to stall. Look for the little flame above the refinery. If it is not burning then something is wrong.

Refineries could use better visual cues when the outputs are backed up. This question gets asked very frequently.

The most brutal part of starting out is getting those first few hundred or so resources. There is a minor hiccup rushing to blue assemblers, since you need them to make circuits very early. Beyond that, hand crafting is no big deal. Anything that you need a lot of can be easily mass produced, and if...

players tend to create too big logistic networks.

Logistic coverage has ONE large size, so fine tuning network coverage is difficult. Bots will still rush towards tasks they can not complete, even with a modestly sized network.

Ain't nothing wrong with wanting smarter bots. It is a bit weird how they'll take on a job that very predictably will force them to recharge, but don't stop to recharge along the way.

Idle robots are either waiting to recharge, or have panicked because they've run out of yellow chest storage. There is no warning sign when a logistic system is out of space. Be careful of having TOO many bots waiting to recharge. Once the bots in line run out of energy they take longer to reach the...

OP, you can already merge lanes by running into a belt T-intersection. Both lanes will merge into the crossing lane. line splitting is impossible to make. False. An underground belt T-intersection only allows one lane to move, which gets pushed sideways. Set up a splitter and 2 underground belts, on...

Mine is, that floats are really practical, if you want to measure something and keep the relative precision small. You can keep relative precision exactly the same way by using integers. Instead of storing whole number values, you simply shift the decimal point. Now 17 becomes 17.000 and adding one...

It's not really useful. Everything worthwhile needs some combination of every type of resource. You can't take a pure copper base and build much, nor a pure coal base, and you can't transfer refined oil either. The only really viable independent outposts are: - A pure iron base for making steel - A ...

Bah, floats are way overused. Pretty much every relevant number can be best represented with an integer or decimal shifted integer. No rounding errors, no magic glitches, no weirdness at extreme ranges. Just good solid numbers from start to finish. Managing inventory values? Use an integer. Dealing ...

To be fair, each world should have its own save folder.

It is common in games for fast weapons to suffer from an "integer rounding" glitch. What I mean is that the game counts each frame until a weapon is ready to attack, and then the counter is reset, eliminating the overflow. What you get are weapons that "round down" their attack s...

Give the player a 100x100 zone to crash land on (aren't you supposed to be in a crashed ship?). Problem solved.

Gun turrets have some lag when switching between targets, since they use simulated swivel turrets.

Make sure it's fully unloading on a big'n before recording.

You don't have to detect EVERYTHING. You just have to detect the temperature of the water inside the engines right now. If the temperature is at 100, the engines have 100% of their capacity available. If it's lower, they have less capacity. EZPZ. Display that percentage and players will be able to t...

That's the manual way, yes. But you can't automate item destruction in the traditional way. Biters have to get involved in some way, at which point you can either let them have the chest, or force the chest's destruction by planting some land mines in the path next to one.

Want a vanilla solution? Grab a requester chest, fill it with overflow, and place it directly in the line of biter raids. Bonus points for using combinators or smart inserters to NOT complete ly empty yoir system. More bonus points to auto replace it and clean up the test of the mess they make.

Biters can only become so powerful before they turn into base flattening monsters. If they can puncture your defenses they can definitely destroy all the defenseless stuff inside. Along this line I think it's important to include more passive, "lossy" forms of defense. For example electric...