Factorio Forums

I want to get ammunition to turrets when he gets low on
- how to read the actual content of ammunition within a turret with a wire in order to fill em up when needed?

The gun turret itself can only be fed ammo with an inserter (or manually), so most people put a chest+inserter next to their turrets and read the content of the chest.

Inserters only add ammunition when a turret is below 10 magazines. Do you really want to go any lower?

If not then simply put an inserter next to the turret and a chest or belt to feed from.

Gun turrets autofeed itself, but only like 10 rounds fixed as the other said.

What I have done is use one chest next to your ammo crafter and have it feed to a belt. put another chest next to your turret. To make this even easier you can use requester chest next to turret and an passive provider next to ammo crafter. simply link both with wire and create a circuit condition. I also have rows of turrets separated by a inserter. If the turrets are separated by a inserter it can and will pull from the closer turret and insert into the farther turret all the way down the line. If you do this correctly you can have turrets all the way around you base/outpost and have the turrets auto feed them selves with ammo. When a clip is used it will automatically reload. Let me know if you need some pics of this.

That sounds problematic. When aliens attack the first line will fire and use up ammunition. The inserters then refill the gun turrets from the second line and that from the third line and so on till you have a belt or chest.

But what about a prolonged battle? The first line of turrets will use up all the ammunition and the remaining lines will be empty and then everything gets destroyed.

Or when aliens get near enough more than the first line fires and ammunition won't be moved to the front fast enough to keep all lines supplied.

You can run multiple rows of turrets this way with just normal inserter throughput. If you're running 4-5 rows or more, just make sure the first few rows have fast/stack inserters moving ammo. It's quite similar to chain linking boilers, albeit at a faster rate of consumption. Also, remember that you generally don't need to keep the ammo throughput sustained (unless you're using a seriously nasty enemy mod), just long enough for the incoming enemies to die. And upgraded gun turrets will chew up even behomoth packsat a good rate.

Mehve wrote:You can run multiple rows of turrets this way with just normal inserter throughput. If you're running 4-5 rows or more, just make sure the first few rows have fast/stack inserters moving ammo. It's quite similar to chain linking boilers, albeit at a faster rate of consumption. Also, remember that you generally don't need to keep the ammo throughput sustained (unless you're using a seriously nasty enemy mod), just long enough for the incoming enemies to die. And upgraded gun turrets will chew up even behomoth packsat a good rate.

Yea, fully upgraded Gun Turrets shooting Piercing ammunition magazines do 48.4 Physical damage per shot, and shot at a rate of 26 shots/sec, and each mag is 10 shots. So Gun turrets will chew through any amount of biters in a hurry, even Behemoths die pretty fast (effective DPS is still about 2/3 of raw, and that raw is just over 3x what a fully upgraded Laser turret has).

mrvn wrote:But what about a prolonged battle? The first line of turrets will use up all the ammunition and the remaining lines will be empty and then everything gets destroyed.

Higher-throughput inserters. Stack Inserters can move a dozen mags something like three times a second, would take quite a few gun turrets to chew through that.

Deadly-Bagel wrote:

mrvn wrote:But what about a prolonged battle? The first line of turrets will use up all the ammunition and the remaining lines will be empty and then everything gets destroyed.

Higher-throughput inserters. Stack Inserters can move a dozen mags something like three times a second, would take quite a few gun turrets to chew through that.

Except you have to get all those mags into the last line of turrets and that quickly drains the belt. Usually you have more than one turret shooting so multiple stack inserters will draw from the same belt. I had problems in the past with the belt running dry with just one line of turrets and a belt running around my base.

That's why you should feed turrets from a chest, not from the belt directly. Chests feed from the belt and accumulate a reserve between the fights, and then expend the reserve when a large attack comes. Hook them to wires, calculate average load across your defensive line (putting a single wood in each chest and dividing total ammo by total wood is probably the easiest method), and only allow your chests to feed to average + 1 or something so they load more-or-less equally.

A belt all the way around the base is too long. Even with behemoths normally I have a single line of turrets with belts of limited length, and put a requester chest at the end nearest the supply (shorter distance so logistics bots will respond faster so need less buffer stored there). Two sides of an express belt is a lot of ammo, so should only be a problem if the belt is long enough you have multiple separate attacks at the same time.

Or just put a chest per turret, but you need a lot of ammo initially to fill that buffer, or extra effort setting up some circuit/logistics system to fairly distribute an insufficient buffer. At the point of considering a double turret line you should have 1000's of magazines to fill the chest with.

In theory if you did want a long belt (no logistics game perhaps) feeding the turrets from the belt directly, but have a buffer chest occasionally (say with 200 magazines) would work as well.

Flamethrower turrets are worth remembering about as well in places you get lots of attacks, they dont use much fuel, although the inability to barrel light oil (without mods) is a bit annoying.

Flamethrowers will take any type of oil, so just barrel crude - divert a small amount of crude oil to defenses via requestor chests and a single local storage tank (and active provider/requestor send the empty barrels back the same way). I don't use flame turrets a lot though, they're a friggin' friendly fire hazard that tend to hurt my walls more then biters do, but putting them in the front turret row prevents the second row from being used. It'd help to have them have a minimum range to prevent that...

As for gun turrets: Requestor chest or production -> inserter -> Belt - inserter > Chest -> inserter -> Turret (-> inserter -> Turret if more layers). But this becomes a liability with very large biter groups, since turrets can run out of ammo fast. A row of Laser turrets at the front helps with that, and also acts as a bigger meatshield since laser turrets have more hitpoints. Finally long range flame turrets can do some heavy AOE damage. So the defense would then become:

yeah, in vanilla barreling crude is the best, its just annoying to loose that 10% damage bonus over it. Either way its simple to have say "requester->assembler->active provider" near the turret line. You need to put them right at the front against the wall so that no part of the firing angle can hurt you, and while they do have a minimum range (6 tiles I believe) its not in-game editable and the angle brings that right to the wall on either side.

Never had the need for a large number, so front line ends up being say 8 gun turrets then 1 flamethrower. If I am using guns I skip laser turrets entirely normally. Only issue is gun turrets have low HP, but I still find it rare for even behemoths to kill one, normally a corner, and construction bots can replace it.


If using lasers anyway, just a solid 2 to 4 lines would seem optimal for DPS, better range and dont loose lots of turrets for belts, inserters, etc, plus more HP so massed spitters dont kill them.