Factorio Forums

Resource Piles

Information

• A large storage for nothing but ores, coal, and stone. Derived from the former F mod's stone and salt pile.
• Name: F-ResourcePiles
• Latest Release: v1.0.0, August 3, 2015
• Factorio Version: 0.12.0 and above
• Download: Mediafire Download no longer available due to bugs.
• License: CC BY-NC
• Author: ficolas, Kajanor

More information
Large piles to store resources. If you put something else in it, it will be turned into waste. Waste is nearly useless but you can burn it for a small energy output to get rid of it.
The mod contains 4 basic piles, one for each resource except wood and oil. Remember: You can only store the ore given in the pile's name!
If you want to store multiple resources in one pile you can use the mixed resources pile. It is a bit smaller but it has an automatic sorting mechanism!


How are they exactly working?
Check out this video!

Pretty cool.

I had always expected F-mod to add these other resource piles. Seems like a really useful mod.

I tested it out and think that its a very useful mod

1. Can you make a Pile container for Solid Fuel too? It's going to be needed in large quantities in the alpha 12 end game, so being able to store a lot of it would be nice.

2. It's not at all clear to me if the Pile gives any visual indication of how much of the item is stored in it, or if it's always the same size of heap regardless of whether it's almost empty or nearly full. The former would be much preferable.

3. Can you add Piles with a larger footprint to your mod? It seems as if the current Piles have a 3x3 footprint, which means that a maximum of 12 Inserters, 3 on each of the four sides, can interact with it at once. For Piles with a 5x5 footprint, the maximum would be 20 Inservers, 5 on each of the four sides.

This is really cool looking. I agree with Peter, that if it doesn't do it already, it would be really great if the likes changed depending on how much of the resource was in there.
One for solid fuel would be cool, and maybe even barrels.

I like it alot.
Would it be possible to make a "smart" version to read the content?

looks like a nice idea, but at first glance it doesnt seem to be as space efficient than just putting it in chests

Yacc wrote:looks like a nice idea, but at first glance it doesnt seem to be as space efficient than just putting it in chests

I'm thinking the same, what is the benefit over using passive provider chests?

Talguy wrote:I'm thinking the same, what is the benefit over using passive provider chests?

One obvious benefit is that you have a single large container that 12 Inserters can interact with, so that you can quickly get things into it or out of it, whereas with a normal Chest with a 1x1 foot print, only 4 Inserters can interact with it.

this pile is 3x3 right? then the equivalent, should be 9 chests x4 insertes = 36 inserters. ugly as hell though. if we are going to use 8 long inserters each chest, we are at 72 insertes. heard that 2 long inserters are faster than a single fast inserter.

of course a single chest can hardly load/unload more than two train wagons (left/right). so if we are talking about train loading/unloading the pile could be loaded/unloaded with the same speed as 9 chests would be.

this mod really looks visually way more appropiate than the vanilla chests for handling all these ressources, vanilla is a bit weird regarding this, but sadly this mod seems like an downgrade at the moment it should have atleast 432 slot or more. 432 is the amount of storage slots combined from 9x steel chests or better.

Peter34 wrote:1. Can you make a Pile container for Solid Fuel too? It's going to be needed in large quantities in the alpha 12 end game, so being able to store a lot of it would be nice.
2. It's not at all clear to me if the Pile gives any visual indication of how much of the item is stored in it, or if it's always the same size of heap regardless of whether it's almost empty or nearly full. The former would be much preferable.
3. Can you add Piles with a larger footprint to your mod? It seems as if the current Piles have a 3x3 footprint, which means that a maximum of 12 Inserters, 3 on each of the four sides, can interact with it at once. For Piles with a 5x5 footprint, the maximum would be 20 Inservers, 5 on each of the four sides.

1. Technically can every item be inserted into the pile codes so that wouldn't be the problem. The problem is that I am too stupid for graphics.
2. I could teach myself to create smart containers then you can use combinators to make a visualization with lamps. I don't know a way to change the pile's look without additional entitues and replacement scripts.
3. Technically the pile can be every size but their graphics are made for 3x3 tiles and I am too stupid for graphics. It would take some weeks...

DukeAl wrote:I like it alot.
Would it be possible to make a "smart" version to read the content?

I don't know exactly what you mean but the content of the pile isn't just read, when you put something in the pile is getting emptied, all content stored in variables, the added content added to the variables, and pasted from the variables back to the pile.

Yacc wrote:this pile is 3x3 right? then the equivalent, should be 9 chests x4 insertes = 36 inserters. ugly as hell though. if we are going to use 8 long inserters each chest, we are at 72 insertes. heard that 2 long inserters are faster than a single fast inserter.

If you can place entities over other entities, maybe. I don't think about these things. Fact is that all the piles become 4x4 tiles large with about 70% of the storage slots of 16 steel chests. Just give me time. Thanks.

Fact is that all the piles become 4x4 tiles large with about 70% of the storage slots of 16 steel chests.

whats then the point of the piles when they store less, except for cooler looks?

Yacc wrote:

Kajanor wrote:Fact is that all the piles become 4x4 tiles large with about 70% of the storage slots of 16 steel chests.

whats then the point of the piles when they store less, except for cooler looks?

You see directly what's inside without turning on that (sometimes a bit messy looking) advanced-information-thing on the Alt-Key.
If an inserter misses an item on a fast belt, the next inserter can still insert the item into the pile while the small chest is somewhere behind the item then. That is useful if you want to sort your incoming resources into non-mixed resource piles.
If only one single resource is delivered on a belt you have more insertion points because of the 3x3 (4x4 later) tiles large footprint.
You can put around three (four) times more items on an outgoing belt per pile's side because of the same reason.
1 single pile are less entities than 9 (16) chests. That reduces the lag factor.
You cannot miss them when you search them because they are big.

Kajanor wrote:

Yacc wrote: You see directly what's inside without turning on that (sometimes a bit messy looking) advanced-information-thing on the Alt-Key.

You can directly see what's inside. Cool. But can you also see directly how much is inside? Roughly? You weren't clear on that, when I asked, earlier.

Yacc, you wanted more slots? These are 65% of the storage slots of 16 steel chests (499.2), rounded up to 500. By the way the GUI is scaled down to 85%.

Peter34 wrote:You can directly see what's inside. Cool. But can you also see directly how much is inside? Roughly? You weren't clear on that, when I asked, earlier.

If you ever played Factorio before you should have noticed the GUI on the right expands when you move your mouse pointer over a chest.
Or do you want me to add a replace-the-entity-with-another-entity-just-to-change-the-shown-image-script?

Long awaited mod.

But there is one thing still missing: huge capactity. It should have capacity about 100k - 1M items.

There is simple (as i think) way to do that: when you put in new item just convert it into "item-pile" with stack size of 10000, when you pull out just convert it back.
EDIT: I checked this and it is not simple at all :/ There is lack of function to do it

Im dreaming about automated resorce piles with abillity to take/put items directly from belts, without inserters

Kajanor wrote:

DukeAl wrote:I like it alot.
Would it be possible to make a "smart" version to read the content?

I don't know exactly what you mean but the content of the pile isn't just read, when you put something in the pile is getting emptied, all content stored in variables, the added content added to the variables, and pasted from the variables back to the pile.

I meant a version i can hook to my network with wires. I want to know how much ress my factory got left and right now these piles are kind of black holes...

This is a cool mod and all, but....
The only reason why I don't use this mod, is because if you put something else in the same pile by accident, it will turn into waste.
If it didn't do that, I would be so happy to use this mod for both cosmetic and coolness.
until then ill just keep watching from the sidelines.

I wish there was a simple 5x1 or 7x1 chest for train stations. Storage sizes 2-3x Cargo wagon storage size. Would be so much faster to load trains if the chests were to share the contents.
Also would be nice to have those things on rails as cargo wagons. Is there a mod that adds cosmetic cargo wagons to show their contents?

FalcoGer wrote:I wish there was a simple 5x1 or 7x1 chest for train stations. Storage sizes 2-3x Cargo wagon storage size. Would be so much faster to load trains if the chests were to share the contents.
Also would be nice to have those things on rails as cargo wagons. Is there a mod that adds cosmetic cargo wagons to show their contents?

You can use Rana's Larger Chests mod. It offers Chests with a 2x2 and 3x3 footprint. You can use 2 of the largest chests per train wagon to unload, I think.