Underground Belts allow you to move items across small (4 squares or less) channels, but otherwise you have to detour around the water. Belts work independent of power though, so you can use them to transport ores even if you are using burners.

Terraforming would require that biters become able to traverse water, even if it slows them down tremendously. Otherwise you can just create some channels between biter bases and exterminate everything that's on the newly made island and be secure until you need to expand again.

Yes, we were thinking of something like a connectable pipe. However this (fluid wagons + loading pipes) will not be in the 0.9 to keep things simple in the beginning. Right. Just a few questions: Do we have to create tanks, barrels or drums and ship them out to processing plants to fill them up? Ar...

But instead of the barrels beeing items, they could be like a barrel item, that can be moved with inserters, and belts, because small item on ground barrels would look weird You've never seen steam engines moved by belts, have you? That's even sillier. You can stack something like half a dozen stea...

i must concur. if we follow this logic, there wouldnt be any justification for improvements. i accept that it may be necessary in the current development state. But in long term i would like to see the belts cost electricity as well. its just silly that the main transportation "vehicle" i...

The belts don't cost electrical energy to facilitate gameplay, even though logically it should cost energy to run them.

Basically, it's an acceptable break from reality.

Just a question, but exactly how much material would a line of fast inserters move compared to the belts if we stick chests between them and max out the inserter stack size bonus? We presume of course that the the stacks being moved around are at the max for the inserters to handle at minimum.

That still doesn't mean that you need to consume 15k iron ore to produce 1.3k iron plates though, that should be a 1:1 conversion.

20 kJ actually, at 4 kJ per piece of wood. The problem is that you need to supply twice as many pieces of wood per second in a production line compared to coal, which means you need twice the number of belt lines or logistics bots to supply the boilers and you can only store half as much fuel in a s...

Placing pipes the same way like transport belts seems really to be a very neat idea. Problem is the current pipe handling system, which connects adjacent pipes no matter what, which makes for easy splitting and fusing of lines. The belt system is rather more complicated and requires specialised equ...

I'd certainly appreciate it if Radars would 'rediscover' old chunks once they've discovered every chunk in range. Right now chunk discovery is worthless when it comes to estimating enemy positions and forces, as biters, spawners and worms can easily hide in already discovered chunks that were declar...

I have actually, I just find that it both takes too long and that it's a waste of resources; you could use all that wood to fuel the boilers for one.

At minimum we need a way to automate clear cutting. I don't want to have to spend a lot of time on deforesting to get some space.

Does anybody know how much ore an electrical mining drill mines every minute under optimal conditions? It's not a stat shown in the production statistics, although consumption of raw ores is. Well, except for coal and wood used to fuel boilers and vehicles. From the behaviour of ore smelters it look...

How do you take screen caps in this game? And how do you manipulate them, although I take that is an independent program.

? Evey pipe is equal length (1 tile). That's a pipe section . Just for an experiment create two powerplants going full out, each with 18 steam engines supplied by 2 pumps through a pipeline one section wide. The difference would be the distance between the powerplants and the pumps, one with as sho...

*snip* You missed my main point stated in the OP. Flow through of units is not equal in pipes of different lengths, while with belts it is equal and the main capacity difference lies in belt speed. Some way to spot, identify and correct the resulting supply issues that come with long pipelines is n...

Hm. What would it bring to see discrete units of water flowing through the pipes, instead of seeing how fast the water flows, as currently? I don't see there a big difference. And for the system the included energy is much more important, than the volume or any other single unit. And because of pre...

Pretty much the most important thing for Factorio would be ways to determine the amount of material flowing through the pipe system at any one time. Pressure and temperature can generally be either discarded or abstracted away. That's really my major issue with the current system really, there is no...

You can be more space efficient than that. Substations have a line reach just long enough that it's possible to make it possible to cover a field without overlap or blind spots. Because of this you can stack 18 accu's, 56 solar panels and 3 substations in a single, self contained block, which can be...