First entry: 669 MW net production (681 calculated, maybe it needs more time to get there...)

Perfect ratios aren't that bad if you stop caring about hitting them all at the same time. Here's my 1.1GW plant that supposedly wastes 31 turbines (had to look up the numbers ;p), but has "perfect" heat exchangers. The real limit here is pipe throughput. If you use one-sided input you ne...

Everyone can run a belt of coal to X boilers to produce energy. But what is the maximum net energy you can get from a blue belt of coal? Rules: - creative mode: you get one matter source of coal, as many water fluid sources as you want - goal: maximize sustained net electricity output, e.g. producti...

Just realized that one tricky aspect of the design above is that it assumes you can get water from both sides. It's also not very belt friendly since you can't pass a belt under the reactors. Here is a version that takes water from the side, also making it easier to use belts if you want as there is...

Inspired by DaveMcW's thread on compact reactors (https://forums.factorio.com/posting.php?mode=reply&f=208&t=68885#preview), I wanted to see what would happen if we stop caring about perfect ratios, but go for a simple design instead. Start with a 2 reactor 160MW design: https://i.imgur.com/...

This reminds me of the 6 stages of debugging: 1 That can’t happen. 2 That doesn’t happen on my machine. 3 That shouldn’t happen. 4 Why does that happen? 5 Oh, I see. 6 How did that ever work? 7 Now it's working. Why the hell is it working? 8 Whatever. Push. 9 Opps. That broke something else. 10 GOT...

Hydra wrote: ↑

Tue May 07, 2019 5:54 pm

I did use the Landfill mod to add landfill to it. [..] I know about FARL but have never used it. I'm one of those die-hard vanilla fans.

Or you have a mixed coal / ore input belt and put the furnaces next to each other so they both draw from the same belt. You get very long smelter lines this way, but it has the same width as other smelters which can be an advantage.

Sounds fun, I'll have a try when I get game time again

Couldn't you even place some 'tripwire' lasers a bit further out, and rely on mines + flames for real defense? Somehow I dislike lasers, they feel too cheaty...

Land mines sound cool :) Are there good ways to detect an attack? I guess you could use oil use from flamethrower (tank level goes down), ammo use by gun turret (belt moves), laser turret accumulator draw. Do people use anything like this, or is "once every 10 minutes" fine, and replace th...

I used to be a walls guy, but as said, artillery outposts are a dramatic (and good) change in expansion and defense. In my current game I'm using artillery outposts with artillery turrets plus flame and gun turrets for defense. The resupply train has one wagon (with ammo, repair packs, barrels, etc)...

Well I agree that that suggestion is a great idea, but it seems that my fellow Dutchman wants to improve on overall factory balancing and throughput, whereas my suggestion is aimed at optimizing single designs... (also, his suggestion seems like quite a GUI challenge, while my suggestion should be a...

When designing plants in creative mode, I generally want to ensure optimal production for some configuration. For low numbers, you can check whether production matches the statistics in the [p] screen. However, for numbers >1k it goes into scientific notation, meaning we can't see whether we're prod...

@OP cool design, interseting way to approach it. I think you would need to put more than one offshore pump on each water pipe as 16 exchangers need over 1600 water per second, which is more than a single offshore pump can provide. I also have a tileable solution per 4 reactors here: https://forums.f...

Cool!

See also the discussion over here: viewtopic.php?f=208&t=69428

But I also say that my way may or may not suit your playstyle. If you mastered automatic supply trains and the entire infrastructure behind it then you might be a lot more happy with that. The way I set it up is relatively simple: 1- All stations of the same type (mining outpost, defensive outpost,...

@MeduSalem

Very interesting, I thought it would be hopeless, but you've convinced me to go and try as soon as I get back home in a couple weeks. I use automatic supply train to outposts, so I guess they could actually double as buffers.

I could see (unupgraded) Artillery made weaker : shorter ranged (and worms longer-ranged, so that behemoth worms can duel with it, at least on automatic fire), moved to late blue / early yellow science ; and rocket-launched, unlimited-range ICBM's added as an end-game weapon : I think artillery is ...

But for Vanilla the way I am doing it is that I use roboports in parallel of the railtrack. Basically blueprints of straight/interseciton/curved railsections that also contain roboports and also radars... making it possible for me to expand the railnetwork remotely over the mapscreen without having...

I think two elements are important: 1) Really big ore patches. Get those sliders all up to max, and explore primarily in one direction to get distance 2) Semi-Automatic building of outposts. The best I got was driving there with FARL, then setup a 'bare bones' outpost myself which contains the train...