Development and Discussion

[Broskev]

Hello,

For some reason I am unable to mine some of the new Crawler trains. It gives an error. Might be that I have some conflicting mods, but I don't know how to identify them.

When mining the locomotive or the locomotive wagon:
http://imgur.com/a/7PKOa

When placing a construction wagon:
http://imgur.com/a/vLpo0

The only thing working fine is the robot wagon.

Your problem seems to be related with the "trains reader mod", all of the stuff I have in the mods are using base game mechanics and definitions so there shouldnt be any crashes while playing coming from them.

Thank you, that was it. The message about "Cannot update id" stays the same, but I suspect it's because I don't have some entities built in game.

[Zyrconia]

There are two routes to get oxygen: one from electrolysis, the other from compressed air. If you want solid fuel and oxygen so badly I suggest you setup a hydrazine plant to process your excess hydrogen and nitrogen, which you then can turn into solid fuel. The point is that you should not rely on a single process to produce all your oxygen for example, because of this and this is the same in a few other cases, where you are expected to do a mix of processes or suffer the consequence of having to much of one byproduct. But I will look into it and maybe move a solid fuel recipe up to be available earlier in the game.

I don't want solid fuel at all. I just need oxygen. Have you created a setup using Smelting that creates steel? It eats up oxygen like free candy! And there is a lot of byproduct, be it hydrogen or nitrogen.

Converting it to solid fuel was just a quick hack to prevent the machines from getting stuck that also solved a non-issue: how to feed things that need fuel. There are tons of ways of feeding them, but solid fuel resulting from hydrogen was a "free" solution.

But I guess I found a better way: I ideologically (like to RP my bases) find it objectionable to burn hydrogen in a flare stack. But there are vents I think in Bob's. I'll just vent the extra hydrogen into the atmosphere.

Also, the liquid dispenser buildings are good, but, for RP reasons, I need to get my hands on a reverse offshore pump mod: one that only consumes water based products when connected to a lake. This would be a nice circle of life thing, taking impure water with a pump and giving back extra purified water.

The same is true for refining, slag is the main source for mineral sludge, if you do processing with only the non-slag recipe you either have to produce crushed stone in large quantities or bring in huge amounts of mineral water to keep it running. For the mineral catalyst problem: fissures and thermal water conversion to mineral sludge, or geode processing and convert that to mineral sludge.

Thanks! Didn't know about that recipe. I'm starting to see a pattern here for successful bases with you mods. Have setups that make use of 100% of waste products, but sometimes that is not enough. You need to add a backup system for each and use circuit network to keep things in balance.

I have yet to come up with a system to make the smelting mod more interesting and variable, at the moment you do the one thing I do not like: You setup things in the same way over and over again, without any options to do it differently or match it to your situation.

The problems is that Smelting is big! It has inherent around 85% productivity bonus (not my math), which I like again from RP point of view, but they are about 4 time larger than vanilla smelting setups. In the same space, I could get not a 85% bonus, but 200-300% bonus, albeit with 200-300% raw ore use too.

It is an issue of infinite map with infinite resources. With RSO, you'll have trains anyway. Setting up 1 extra train is easier that setting up Smelting. Smelting is huge, power inefficient, a pain without bots, and worse for all, I think ratios change slightly as you upgrade from T1 to T4.

Personally, I would make setups at least 25% smaller, make sure ratios are the same as you upgrade from T1 to T4 (I'll do the math once, but once per upgrade tier is too much), make T1 to T4 unlock at the same rate (now you can get T2 with ease for most things, but T2 of one of the buildings, the one with 0.75% crafting speed is one tier behind for a while), make higher tiers use less fuel and secondary resources and somehow diversify recipes. That will be hard, but weird and diverse recipes maybe are better that huge chunks of straight lines of smelting buildings?

And yes that is the goal, to provide processes that can be combined in different ways to get the same result, but the way to get there is different depending on your preferences and playstyle. There are some patterns in setting up a refining factory but each time I see screenshots the creator would do something different.

Well, I want to create a base that goes on forever (barring you running out of raw ore under your miners). This is not very conductive to Refining, where sorting gives multiple outputs and getting backed up in one output, possible one you don't need, will stop the production for something you need.

[hoho]

That's a 500W engine according to the discription. You'd need 120 of those to power your first lab.

Considering we have solar panels that are orders of magnitude better than the panels we have on Earth, I don't think it's too bad to scale up wind power in similar scale.

considering there is no such mechanic as wind in factorio while sun at least partialy is (fixed cycles of light/darkness), how exactly it will work?

Uhh, there is wind. Ever noticed how the way steam clouds move in different directions at different speeds depending on wind direction?

[mexmer]

That's a 500W engine according to the discription. You'd need 120 of those to power your first lab.

Considering we have solar panels that are orders of magnitude better than the panels we have on Earth, I don't think it's too bad to scale up wind power in similar scale.

considering there is no such mechanic as wind in factorio while sun at least partialy is (fixed cycles of light/darkness), how exactly it will work?

Uhh, there is wind. Ever noticed how the way steam clouds move in different directions at different speeds depending on wind direction?

i'm talking about mechanic, not animation effects. as for smoke and steam, it would be boring, if it go straight up, would not?

if there was wind mechanic, you would see also different spread of smog area, depending of wind, not just linear spread from center of source (well is partially blocked by trees, but you get idea - make clear area, with one pollution source, and it will spread to all direction with same speed)

[The Draf]

There are two routes to get oxygen: one from electrolysis, the other from compressed air. If you want solid fuel and oxygen so badly I suggest you setup a hydrazine plant to process your excess hydrogen and nitrogen, which you then can turn into solid fuel. The point is that you should not rely on a single process to produce all your oxygen for example, because of this and this is the same in a few other cases, where you are expected to do a mix of processes or suffer the consequence of having to much of one byproduct. But I will look into it and maybe move a solid fuel recipe up to be available earlier in the game.

I don't want solid fuel at all. I just need oxygen. Have you created a setup using Smelting that creates steel? It eats up oxygen like free candy! And there is a lot of byproduct, be it hydrogen or nitrogen.

Converting it to solid fuel was just a quick hack to prevent the machines from getting stuck that also solved a non-issue: how to feed things that need fuel. There are tons of ways of feeding them, but solid fuel resulting from hydrogen was a "free" solution.

But I guess I found a better way: I ideologically (like to RP my bases) find it objectionable to burn hydrogen in a flare stack. But there are vents I think in Bob's. I'll just vent the extra hydrogen into the atmosphere.

Also, the liquid dispenser buildings are good, but, for RP reasons, I need to get my hands on a reverse offshore pump mod: one that only consumes water based products when connected to a lake. This would be a nice circle of life thing, taking impure water with a pump and giving back extra purified water.

The same is true for refining, slag is the main source for mineral sludge, if you do processing with only the non-slag recipe you either have to produce crushed stone in large quantities or bring in huge amounts of mineral water to keep it running. For the mineral catalyst problem: fissures and thermal water conversion to mineral sludge, or geode processing and convert that to mineral sludge.

Thanks! Didn't know about that recipe. I'm starting to see a pattern here for successful bases with you mods. Have setups that make use of 100% of waste products, but sometimes that is not enough. You need to add a backup system for each and use circuit network to keep things in balance.

I have yet to come up with a system to make the smelting mod more interesting and variable, at the moment you do the one thing I do not like: You setup things in the same way over and over again, without any options to do it differently or match it to your situation.

The problems is that Smelting is big! It has inherent around 85% productivity bonus (not my math), which I like again from RP point of view, but they are about 4 time larger than vanilla smelting setups. In the same space, I could get not a 85% bonus, but 200-300% bonus, albeit with 200-300% raw ore use too.

It is an issue of infinite map with infinite resources. With RSO, you'll have trains anyway. Setting up 1 extra train is easier that setting up Smelting. Smelting is huge, power inefficient, a pain without bots, and worse for all, I think ratios change slightly as you upgrade from T1 to T4.

Personally, I would make setups at least 25% smaller, make sure ratios are the same as you upgrade from T1 to T4 (I'll do the math once, but once per upgrade tier is too much), make T1 to T4 unlock at the same rate (now you can get T2 with ease for most things, but T2 of one of the buildings, the one with 0.75% crafting speed is one tier behind for a while), make higher tiers use less fuel and secondary resources and somehow diversify recipes. That will be hard, but weird and diverse recipes maybe are better that huge chunks of straight lines of smelting buildings?

And yes that is the goal, to provide processes that can be combined in different ways to get the same result, but the way to get there is different depending on your preferences and playstyle. There are some patterns in setting up a refining factory but each time I see screenshots the creator would do something different.

Well, I want to create a base that goes on forever (barring you running out of raw ore under your miners). This is not very conductive to Refining, where sorting gives multiple outputs and getting backed up in one output, possible one you don't need, will stop the production for something you need.

I just finished setting up my smelting for all the mid-game ores(not silver, gold, tungsten, titanium). The smelting area is really big but I would not say it is very complex to setup compared to ore refining. I personally love excess hydrogen which can be used to create solid fuel. In my current play through coal is the least common resource(only found 3 patcher including the one in the starting area) and something that gets used a lot for all kinds of production so refining it adds a lot value.

Water and gas voiding is something I learned to live with, but I wish I could do something with the three silos full of sulfur I managed to acquire. Maybe they will be useful endgame or is there something I missed early game?

[Zyrconia]

Is Butene there only to get Benzene?

[chadsteam]

@ridesdragons
The big problem with arguing like that is that space is infinite, if you dont have enough space you planned poorly The other point is that of course it's nice to have a higher compression per tile with chests, but there is a limit to that set by the game engine, if you want to see that in action try the "Warehousing mod" and place down a couple of storage warehouses, they have 2k inventory slots and then watch your UPS drop when a few hundred bots and inserter interact with them. Also warehouses have the big advantage of having an unified storage with can be accessed from 6 tiles per side, so it will make some tricks like equalized loading/unloading of a row of chest superfluous.

In short my warehouses are the way they are because of game limitations and my feel of what would fit.

Hello Arch666Angel, I've just recently reached purple science (pack 4) on a small, not mega, base layout and my FPS/UPS has crashed down to about 5 FPS. I've been trying to figure out what might be the root cause, because I've never had FPS issues before, though my laptop is also not a super machine. I use your warehouses and your passive provider warehouse. Are you saying that these should improve FPS over mass chest storage? Or are you saying the fact that some of mine have 100k resources backlogged in them is the source of my FPS woes?

Also, I should mention that I do not use inserters to interact with my warehouses. They all use the loaders to move resources in or out (with filters on some).

[kinnom]

Warehouses are worse than chests, as each time something wants to insert/extract items it has to look through all slots.

[hoho]

Uhh, there is wind. Ever noticed how the way steam clouds move in different directions at different speeds depending on wind direction?

i'm talking about mechanic, not animation effects. as for smoke and steam, it would be boring, if it go straight up, would not?

And still one of the devs of the game has created a windmill mod that is MP compatible and doesn't give 100% stable output. Apparently, there is something in-game that allows for relatively good windmill mechanism.

viewtopic.php?f=93&t=16734

[mexmer]

Uhh, there is wind. Ever noticed how the way steam clouds move in different directions at different speeds depending on wind direction?

i'm talking about mechanic, not animation effects. as for smoke and steam, it would be boring, if it go straight up, would not?

And still one of the devs of the game has created a windmill mod that is MP compatible and doesn't give 100% stable output. Apparently, there is something in-game that allows for relatively good windmill mechanism.

viewtopic.php?f=93&t=16734

you can look into sourcecode, powerfluctuation is created artificialy by script. although since all wind turbines are controled by single script, they will have fluctation in same time (Which makes sense, map si not large enough to have local wind, unless you explore like 10k+ chunks, then maybe).

factorio has powerfull enough scripting, so you can even artificialy create weather (if you care about making graphic), or year seasons, including shortening daylight in winter. but that doesn't mean, it has year season mechanic or weather mechanic.

mind, every script affect performance.

so if there was "wind" mechanic, you will have probly generator, that as input uses "wind force", that is already built ingame, and you can tune it's efficiency, like you can do with steam generators.
tbh. would be nice, if there was more types of generators, or generators that accept different media for power conversion, but that will require change in game mechanics.

[Zyrconia]

Oh, and Angel: this map is my first try with RailTankers. It is a much more elegant and natural solution than barreling and they will support something similar in 0.15.

So you should add to the task list a "Crawler" themed liquid wagon...

[Sedar]

Hello.
Today I have updated all Angels mods. The Angel cargo bots is amazing!

But sadly i cannot play with this cool new stuff because i have the migrations error. Exactly previous version of angelsrefining is 0.5.4 but in current version of this mod is not existed migration files for this version. So technologys for Water Treatment is not updated, and i losing all fluids stored in barrels. I tried to fix it, but unfortunately my efforts are unsuccessful. Please add the migration file for angelsrefining 0.5.4.

ps: forgot, i tried to use the actual version of angels refining 0.6.4

Thank you.

[Sedar]

Today i was checking and sorting all my mods and found the thing from which I really miss. There is a Directional Actuator:

Description

Directional Actuator
The Directional Actuator is capable of toggling objects that it is pointing at. What toggling means depends on the targeted object, but in most cases it will toggle between activating and deactivating the object. The input is again any input signal that a smart inserter can work with. This works on a number of structures, such as miners, assemblers, etc. A few special cases include:

• Trains - Toggling manual mode, temporarily preventing them from continuing on their schedule.
• Belts - Flipping their direction, making it possible to block or redirect the contents on the belt.
• Gates - Makes a gate unresponsive to nearby movement, instead reacting exclusively to the actuator's input signal. This will require building the complete gate first, before attaching an actuator.

from this 0.12.x mod

It was very convenient instantly and directly stop/run any asemblers/mashines. Without "dirty tricks", like pumps or distable electricity, which may have a large delay.

It would be cool if Angel's Logistics mod is contain this useful thing.
Thank you in advance.

ps: all others things from this mod(+-) is existed in vanilla 0.14

[AlNeaera]

Water and gas voiding is something I learned to live with, but I wish I could do something with the three silos full of sulfur I managed to acquire. Maybe they will be useful endgame or is there something I missed early game?

Sulfur needs to stack by 200 !

[Nexela]

Today i was checking and sorting all my mods and found the thing from which I really miss. There is a Directional Actuator:

All of this can be accomplished with the circuit network now.


for assemblers, wire up the input or output inserter
for miners and belts, wire up the belt
for trains wire up a signal
for gates wire up the gate

[Durabys]

Today i was checking and sorting all my mods and found the thing from which I really miss. There is a Directional Actuator:

All of this can be accomplished with the circuit network now.


for assemblers, wire up the input or output inserter
for miners and belts, wire up the belt
for trains wire up a signal
for gates wire up the gate

I still think that wires (green, red) should be attachable to Assemblers, Chemical plants and other constructor/resource using buildings like Labs. Giving those buildings network connections and have them be controllable would be a godsend.

[Sedar]

All of this can be accomplished with the circuit network now.

for assemblers, wire up the input or output inserter
for miners and belts, wire up the belt
for trains wire up a signal
for gates wire up the gate

Not, it is not.

For example all machines with liqid input/output:
in current version factorio you should put the pump, connected to circuit network, per every one machine, that is material cost and additionally power drain without direct prifit. Or one pump per all machines BUT then all system will have huge latency, thats is pain.

Example

that pump work if plastics in the boxes less than needed ammount, but after reach it all machines is continue to work because in the pipes already is a lot of methanol. So this factory actually produces things that I do not need right now.

There are also many things that consume a lot of electricity, like modules beacons. But they should not be enabled always but activated by the signal. Yes you can switch the electricity on the poles around the radars, but sometimes it is VERY inconvenient.
And many other things wich i want to manage directly and instantly.

Yes, you can play without such a tool, but this is exactly dirty tricks.

I still think that wires (green, red) should be attachable to Assemblers, Chemical plants and other constructor/resource using buildings like Labs. Giving those buildings network connections and have them be controllable would be a godsend.

That solution would be the best way to solve this problem.

[Zyrconia]

Angel... Please...

[Arch666Angel]

I see shit-tons of plastic and rocket fuel @Zyrconia

[Light]

Water and gas voiding is something I learned to live with, but I wish I could do something with the three silos full of sulfur I managed to acquire. Maybe they will be useful endgame or is there something I missed early game?

Certain mods may make good use of sulfur, some are even quite demanding for it, which leads to more of a deficit late game.
I used to stack warehouses of sulfur until I had installed some useful mods that required them. Certain angel or bobs setups can burn them a little faster, but it's doubtful you'll be able to avoid voiding in some form of another given how many things give acid.

If you're using any biter mods to increase their threat, or just want to see their bases blown out 200-500 tiles away, the howitzer from this mod will suck your sulfur deposits dry very rapidly. Other weapons use the sulfur up rather quickly too, but the costs are high and are mostly late game. Fun though.

I still think that wires (green, red) should be attachable to Assemblers, Chemical plants and other constructor/resource using buildings like Labs. Giving those buildings network connections and have them be controllable would be a godsend.

That solution would be the best way to solve this problem.

Perhaps this is what you're looking for?

Crafting Combinator