Optimized Steam Engine Setup

[Qon]

I've been thinking about rocket fuel in boilers. You lose 10% of the fuel value by converting solid fuel to rocket fuel but otoh you can use productivity modules and with 4x Prod3 module in assembler 3 you get 26% more fuel value - a gross profit of 45MJ of electricity. The net profit is trickier, I think the minimum cost to perform the conversion (fully utilized alternating rows assembler/beacon) is about 15MJ leaving a net profit of 30MJ. Of course, if supplementing with solar power the electricity expense can be further discounted.
Rocket Fuel also saves energy on inserts (for all inserter types, not only burner inserter) but actually increases total factory inserts because the 10 solid fuel had to the inserted into the chemical plant to make the rocket fuel - you're not saving energy on inserts, only changing where those inserts happening and causing more inserts.

I completely forgot about inserts reuired to make the rocket fuel, thanks.

But the last part, did you account for the inserters used to make rocket fuel will not be burner inserters but stack inserters or fast ones? The number of inserts isn't the only thing that determines how much inserter energy is used since different inserters use different amounts of power. The inserters that are working often are more energy efficient/movement and the ones moving the rocket fuel into boilers have no drain.

Also if inserter energy used goes up from making rocket fuel it doesn't matter that much with how much extra is gained by productivity modules. Burners are still the energy efficient alternative at your boilers with rocket fuel now, so maybe people will stop using electric ones for the tiny energy usage advantage electric ones have for coal. Using electric ones is just a big risk and hassle.

But getting rid of overdraw killing your power plant completely requires burner mining drills, burner inserters at coal train stations for un/loading cargo wagons, no bot transport of fuel. For oil it's not possible to get rid of your electric dependence. The most important part is inserters to boilers though since it requires a pretty short overdraw to activate the death spiral. You should also also use burner inserters from your buffer storage at the power plant to belts. If you place stack inserters higher up on the belt then the burners will idle until the stack inserter lose power, so they will only activate in an emergency anyways.

But ultimately inserters are not a big power drain for your factory anyways.

[Qon]

The tech rocket fuel requires though, lol.
Not gonna bother. And changing all inserters to burners would require no change in physical layout anyways.

And 0.13 increasing resource patch density by distance, welp, that's new. Guess it would make steam more viable late game then.

Well if you want steam engine plants that give you 30 engines/row then you probably have pretty beefy energy requirements which impies late game tech like rocket fuel and lots of destroyers to clear the land required for such long strings of steam engines.

The 15 engines/row is more than adequate for a base designed for a single launch.

[Patric20878]

When you can just landfill to maximize surface area of a body of water, what's the point in continuing to extend steam engines per row again? The whole reason I optimized it to 15 per row in the first place was to be able to stack offshore pumps vertically with no spacing in between, as to not waste shore tiles. There's no reason to do more than 15, the bottleneck is the offshore pumps and you're already maximizing space efficiency of that with 15 engines per row.

[Qon]

When you can just landfill to maximize surface area of a body of water, what's the point in continuing to extend steam engines per row again? The whole reason I optimized it to 15 per row in the first place was to be able to stack offshore pumps vertically with no spacing in between, as to not waste shore tiles. There's no reason to do more than 15, the bottleneck is the offshore pumps and you're already maximizing space efficiency of that with 15 engines per row.

Well you could landfill an entire lake (after placing the offshore pumps) and repeat the 15 steam engine blueprint over and over. And I consider doing just that. Makes sense if you have big lakes and lots of landfill. But it requires way more landfills than just straightening the edge and adding a straight line or 2 of landfill and I don't think you can blueprint landfills either. Can you?

Bigger blocks of steam engines requires simpler material belting also since it's all just one straight bus with however many belts you prefer.

And if your lakes can't fit a whole lot of steam engines then you want as many as possible outside the lake, and then 30 is preferable to 15.

Compacted the length of the 30 on a row setup by about 30 tiles.

Same boiler setup as my earlier 30-on-a-row.

SuperSteam2.2.png (1.93 MiB) Viewed 9239 times

Boiler setup as before.

Edit:

Heh. As much as the 30 engines per row thing works, you're fitting pipes between practically every engine. That's gotta be removed in a real design.

For now I'll let yar experiment with the changes that come with 0.13. Maybe once you're more familiar we'll work further on seeing how much advantage this can give over my current design.

Reduced spacing between steam engines by almost 75%. Half as much space between each steam engine and only for half of the steam engines, the second half is your effiecient steam engine layout. And my zig zag interleave used for the first half is fairly compact and somewhat close to your design (about 2 steam engines longer). I think it's good enough and hard to get any better than this if you don't want to landfill entire lakes and deal with all the fuel routing that will be necessary for that. This is blueprintable, which is a must have for any large scale constructions. And twice the power/shore length and almost the same power/square tile (95% as area space effiecient is my guesstimate) makes it an easy choice for big bases. 4 rows (~60MW) is enough to win the game with though so you would probably not use it in base where your goal is to launch a single rocket.

[Patric20878]

Well yeah, I wouldn't fill entire lakes. I'd only straighten the edge of them. How many rows would you want post-launch anyways if 4's enough for launch?

And speaking of, are you using Blake's method of underground piping water over to the middle to solve the water pressure problem? I'd need a map save of a working prototype to see, these setups are getting ridiculously long.

If I thought 15 had an increased likelihood to be too long for a continuous stretch of land, 30 is almost certainly too long to be convenient.

[Qon]

Well yeah, I wouldn't fill entire lakes. I'd only straighten the edge of them. How many rows would you want post-launch anyways if 4's enough for launch?

5000.

And speaking of, are you using Blake's method of underground piping water over to the middle to solve the water pressure problem? I'd need a map save of a working prototype to see, these setups are getting ridiculously long.

I'm using my method. Right click the picture -> view image and then zoom in with ctrl +
Boilers as before with closeups in my earlier post.
What is "Blakes method"? I guess it is fairly similar in some ways to his post but I'm using a lot of tricks I haven't seen anywhere else and it is quite different from his design. I wanted to avoid inserters between boilers, even though the losses are pretty minimal. You could do that and make it a few tiles smaller but with rows this long a few tiles are not a big deal.
Blake should have credit for all that he has taught me about the fluid simulation though. The offshore pump are basically his design + my landfill method to double it up. I did it with only 1 landfill row out in the water too, need to make sure works as well as the one I'm using atm.

The pipes are separate and interleaving all the way until the middle where they merge. Under the electric network view you can see another prototype where the pipes never merge, the wavy interleave extends all the way to the end. It is basically the 1.5/21/15 done twice on the same row. But since the pressure is lower after going through half the steam engines it's safe to merge them to double up the pressure to get the same pressure as earlier. Might be possible to merge a bit more to the left though. I tried to do that earlier but I did other stuff wrong so now that I've managed the merge without efficiency losses I should try again.

If I thought 15 had an increased likelihood to be too long for a continuous stretch of land, 30 is almost certainly too long to be convenient.

Depends on how much power you need. With enough rows, making each row twice as effective gets more convinient. Should be fairly easy with low terrain segmentation (once they fix the bugs in 0.13) to find big lakes with big landmasses ready for some pollution.

[Patric20878]

If you use landfills and underground pipes to carry water to the halfway point, what's stopping me from just pasting a copy of the 1.5/21/15 design right next to the first one? Does the same thing without the extra piping and whatever you need in between to make 30 work.

And lel, 5000

[Qon]

If you use landfills and underground pipes to carry water to the halfway point, what's stopping me from just pasting a copy of the 1.5/21/15 design right next to the first one? Does the same thing without the extra piping and whatever you need in between to make 30 work.

Nothing is stopping you except the limit to the shore length available to you. With 15 steam engines you need twice as many rows as 30. You can use 10 steam engines or 1 in a row if you want to. 30 is just more effective, if you don't want that then use something ineffective all over the place or limit your production.

If you are talking about piping water past all the boilers and steam engines and placing your 15 steam engines to the right of the 15 engines at the shore (assuming shre to the left as in my ss), then you would need some space for the underground pipes. And then each row would use more than 3 tiles or space out your steam engines with 2 spaces between each as I did in one of my earlier prototypes slightly visible at the bottom of last screenshot. If you are aiming for as much power/area and power/shore length then I would chose my 30 on a row design for sufficiently high power needs.

If you don't care about that then the entire thread is a bit pointless :s

And lel, 5000

You won't be laughing when I show it to you. Eh, what do I know, maybe you will q:
Might have to mix in some solar instead so I dont need 15 km of shore.

[Patric20878]

Whatever do you mean, you need the same amount of offshore pumps for x amount of steam engines. Arranging it in 30's isn't going to reduce how much shore you need any more than 15 will. But rearranging it in 15 DOES reduce how much shore you need compared to 10, which was the point.

And I don't need to space the setup out, because I can just put all the underground pipes on a separate row. Or you know, just have like a long 1-wide tile of land and offshore pumps on both sides, which then pipe it over to wherever. I think you're forgetting the original intent of me updating the design to be 15 engines long instead of 10, it has absolutely nothing to do with just making engine rows longer as it does with not wasting any shore tile, which the offshore pumps on a 10 engine row design does.

[Qon]

Whatever do you mean, you need the same amount of offshore pumps for x amount of steam engines. Arranging it in 30's isn't going to reduce how much shore you need any more than 15 will. But rearranging it in 15 DOES reduce how much shore you need compared to 10, which was the point.

I'm using the same shore length with 30 steam engines as 15. It's 3 tiles shore for 30 steam engines. The extra lines in the water gives me the possibility to pump up more than twice as much water.

[Qon]

And I don't need to space the setup out, because I can just put all the underground pipes on a separate row.

All the underground pipes on a separate rows won't take any space?

[Patric20878]

Yes, I referred to that in my section about long 1-wide strips of land. Which still has nothing to do with 30 engine rows.

The underground rows do take space, but it's much more modularized and compact than trying to fit them in between the steam engines. Surely you noticed by now that underground pipes don't stretch between 2 steam engines back to back - why use like 2x the underground pipes?

[Qon]

Yes, I referred to that in my section about long 1-wide strips of land. Which still has nothing to do with 30 engine rows.

I am using the same shore length for 30 as 15 engines on a row and I haven't seen you adress it really. I remember you saying that 50 green science was too high tech for using these long rows which required landfilling to become more than an alternative for the OP. Did I miss something where you adressed this further?

The underground rows do take space, but it's much more modularized and compact than trying to fit them in between the steam engines.

So you say. Can you show me? I don't get it.

[Patric20878]

I said that since you're using the same shore length for both 30 and 15 engines per row (assuming same # of engines), there's no actual point extending engines per row beyond 15. Getting it to 15 was to reduce wasting shore length (to 0 in fact, if a straight shore), not to make it longer per row. And the tech required is on the same reasoning as why my design stopped using medium electric poles. Can thank Aru for that, but my most major point in those long pages of discussion with him is that time is an important, if not the most important resource - in a straight race to rocket launch or any given goal, the person who simply finds another lake like right next to base easily wins over someone who spends time researching that landfill upgrade, landfilling a whole column, then building a 30 steam engine-row setup, which ranks extremely high on the "why aren't you doing something actually useful instead?" mental checklist. And like said, if it gets so late game that engine row length somehow matters, you should be aiming for stacking away from shore way more than just 30. Why stop at 30 when you can do multiples of 15 to as much as you need?

Putting it into clearer perspective for emphasizing low-tech, building my 15 engine setup just requires building the setup. I can obviously build 2 of my setups faster than someone who needs to research, then landfill a whole line, then build an unnecessarily long and complicated steam engine setup just to get a 30 engine setup, when there's no reason at all to stack away from shore like that. Best you read the discussion between Aru and me for insightful perspective (even if it wasn't exactly a pleasant discussion, it was quite productive), but the point I emphasize all the time is that you can optimize your design physically and do whatever all you want, but don't forget that the BIG PICTURE of optimizing the efficiency of anything is to get more stuff done in less time, and making a 30 engine row just to have longer rows is the complete opposite of the whole point. It optimizes nothing, just wastes time - producing more and/or doing other useful stuff is what matters, and even the part about minimizing wasting shore is at heart based around reducing wasting time unnecessarily finding lakes 1.5x more often as much as you should be.

The underground rows do take space, but it's much more modularized and compact than trying to fit them in between the steam engines.

So you say. Can you show me? I don't get it.

Simple to visualize. Each time you add a pair of underground pipes between engines, you're increasing space usage by 2x3=6 tiles, for only occupying 2 tiles. So you get a horrible 33% efficiency on that, plus you need an additional 2 pipes just to link the steam engines. Your trick with alternating engines like that places a hard cap of how far it can expand from shore, and even as it is, it's still 66% space occupancy. Compare to just directly stacking columns of underground pipes that extend the maximum 10 tiles distance instead of 6 with steam engines, which is 9 tiles in between. Know what you do with large empty 9-tile wide spaces? Put 2 underground labs in them and their belts/inserters. Or a twin row of assemblers, whatever you want - 9-wide spacing is the natural width for factorizing. You waste much less space and resources modularizing it like that instead. In fact, doing it this way, you get 100% space occupancy with the pipes, and you kinda HAVE to do it this way if you plan on stacking it beyond 45 engines per row, unless steam engines are suddenly 4 tiles high or more now. And below is a pic on how neat and space efficient modularizing the underground pipes into their own section is:

[Qon]

I said that since you're using the same shore length for both 30 and 15 engines per row (assuming same # of engines), there's no actual point extending engines per row beyond 15. Getting it to 15 was to reduce wasting shore length (to 0 in fact, if a straight shore), not to make it longer per row.

Extending it to 30 is reducing wasted shore length. No, the point isn't to make it longer, it's to have more steam engines per row to reduce the amount of rows. If you use more steam engines per row it does become longer of course.

And the tech required is on the same reasoning as why my design stopped using medium electric poles.

I have nothing to say against your aversion to high tech. I don't personally agree and will use end game tech if needed or more convinient. But if you don't want to it's fine.

Can thank Aru for that, but my most major point in those long pages of discussion with him is that time is an important, if not the most important resource - in a straight race to rocket launch or any given goal, the person who simply finds another lake like right next to base easily wins over someone who spends time researching that landfill upgrade, landfilling a whole column, then building a 30 steam engine-row setup, which ranks extremely high on the "why aren't you doing something actually useful instead?" mental checklist. And like said, if it gets so late game that engine row length somehow matters, you should be aiming for stacking away from shore way more than just 30. Why stop at 30 when you can do multiples of 15 to as much as you need?

Putting it into clearer perspective for emphasizing low-tech, building my 15 engine setup just requires building the setup. I can obviously build 2 of my setups faster than someone who needs to research, then landfill a whole line, then build an unnecessarily long and complicated steam engine setup just to get a 30 engine setup, when there's no reason at all to stack away from shore like that.

Agree about time. And low time requires low space usage among other things. I'm not trying to speedrun though, so I guess I fall under "any given goal". Researching the landfill takes seconds and is insignificant when building a megabase where 10k of each science pack is worth doing. Not using landfill for straightening the shore means your steam engine setup is not blueprintable which means you will spend more time building each steam engine. You can't lump in speedrunning with building megabases, they are the opposites of two extremes. What is fast enough or good enough for one is the opposite for the other. The 30 steam engines on a row takes 0.1 seconds of the players time with robots building for you. If you build enough it's going to be worth it.

And you can't really stack more than 30. There's no more space for routing much more water further from the shore without making the design very space inefficient. How would you stack endless pumps from a finite shore? How can you route infinite water through limited pipes? What you can do is landfill the lake so that you can place pumps wherever you need them without having to route any water. But that is very time consuming since it requires landfilling all the area under the steam engines, boilers and belts too instead of just the small amounts required to straighten out the shore. Using the land fill mods flood fill item would speed up the process though.

Yes, if your goal is two lines using low tech is obviously faster. If your goal is 5000 rows then you probably don't want to do each line manually on a non-straight shore.

Best you read the discussion between Aru and me for insightful perspective (even if it wasn't exactly a pleasant discussion, it was quite productive), but the point I emphasize all the time is that you can optimize your design physically and do whatever all you want, but don't forget that the BIG PICTURE of optimizing the efficiency of anything is to get more stuff done in less time, and making a 30 engine row just to have longer rows is the complete opposite of the whole point. It optimizes nothing, just wastes time - producing more and/or doing other useful stuff is what matters, and even the part about minimizing wasting shore is at heart based around reducing wasting time unnecessarily finding lakes 1.5x more often as much as you should be.

Read the discussion a while ago. Even more important than optimizing your time is maximizing the enjoyment you get out of your time. And I enjoy making the best design possible even if I don't really need it. In the end I don't need Factorio at all, but I enjoy it. But I do find uses for my designs in Factorio. But as I've said before, 30 steam engines on a row do optimize something...

The underground rows do take space, but it's much more modularized and compact than trying to fit them in between the steam engines.

So you say. Can you show me? I don't get it.

Simple to visualize. Each time you add a pair of underground pipes between engines, you're increasing space usage by 2x3=6 tiles, for only occupying 2 tiles. So you get a horrible 33% efficiency on that, plus you need an additional 2 pipes just to link the steam engines.

Obviously you didn't look at my design because this is just false. I have a spacing of 1 tile between half of the steam engines. It's 4 times less than what you say. Closer to 92% space efficient.

Your trick with alternating engines like that places a hard cap of how far it can expand from shore, and even as it is, it's still 66% space occupancy.

It halves the cap, not placing any cap. Doubling the pipes means that you can transport more water without hitting the limits of the pipe.

Compare to just directly stacking columns of underground pipes that extend the maximum 10 tiles distance instead of 6 with steam engines, which is 9 tiles in between. Know what you do with large empty 9-tile wide spaces? Put 2 underground labs in them and their belts/inserters. Or a twin row of assemblers, whatever you want - 9-wide spacing is the natural width for factorizing. You waste much less space and resources modularizing it like that instead. In fact, doing it this way, you get 100% space occupancy with the pipes, and you kinda HAVE to do it this way if you plan on stacking it beyond 45 engines per row, unless steam engines are suddenly 4 tiles high or more now.

What is the point of piping the water far away from the shore? What do you achieve? It's not impossible to get some more shore. Space efficiency is still important and every pipe piping the water away is a waste if you can just put the steam engines next to the shore. And piping the water away from the shore would make blueprinting impossible.

And 9 spaces is not optimal if you are using beacons, productivity modules and robots..

[Patric20878]

Extending it to 30 is reducing wasted shore length. No, the point isn't to make it longer, it's to have more steam engines per row to reduce the amount of rows. If you use more steam engines per row it does become longer of course.

Reduces it how? 15 already gets 100% shore usage. 30% gets 100% shore usage. The difference between 100% and 100% is 0, how are you reducing any wasted shore length?

I have nothing to say against your aversion to high tech. I don't personally agree and will use end game tech if needed or more convinient. But if you don't want to it's fine.

It's a resource optimization thing. I prefer medium poles too, but this thread was about making the best possible steam engine setup with consideration to all stages of the game, so the two don't always agree with each other.

Agree about time. And low time requires low space usage among other things. I'm not trying to speedrun though, so I guess I fall under "any given goal". Researching the landfill takes seconds and is insignificant when building a megabase where 10k of each science pack is worth doing. Not using landfill for straightening the shore means your steam engine setup is not blueprintable which means you will spend more time building each steam engine. You can't lump in speedrunning with building megabases, they are the opposites of two extremes. What is fast enough or good enough for one is the opposite for the other. The 30 steam engines on a row takes 0.1 seconds of the players time with robots building for you. If you build enough it's going to be worth it.

Quite frankly, considering robots negates about everything time-related. Of course you'll have landfill by the time you have bots.

And you can't really stack more than 30. There's no more space for routing much more water further from the shore without making the design very space inefficient. How would you stack endless pumps from a finite shore? How can you route infinite water through limited pipes? What you can do is landfill the lake so that you can place pumps wherever you need them without having to route any water. But that is very time consuming since it requires landfilling all the area under the steam engines, boilers and belts too instead of just the small amounts required to straighten out the shore. Using the land fill mods flood fill item would speed up the process though.

My thoughts EXACTLY with the 30 engine design. YES, your optimized version is space (and resource) inefficient with all those underground pipes spacing out the steam engines in the first half of the design. If you really read the discussion between Aru and me, you would get that having so many underground pipes like that per row is absolutely unacceptable, and how I spend days just optimizing designs by like 1-2 tiles, so your optimized variant with all those pipes spacing out the engines is out of the question. There's no need for you to go for efficiency at all if you always look at it from a super lategame perspective where resources don't matter thanks to massive resource patches far away and time doesn't matter because drones do it all for you.

But as I've said before, 30 steam engines on a row do optimize something...

It "optimizes" having longer rows. And what does having longers rows do again? It certainly doesn't optimize shore usage, I covered that already. Now tell me something actually useful it optimizes. You said yourself making it longer makes it less space efficient, so what are you even trying to optimize here? There's a difference between making it efficient and going for the longest possible engine row just to see how much you can push the limits, but fortunately, my thread isn't about setting records.

Obviously you didn't look at my design because this is just false. I have a spacing of 1 tile between half of the steam engines. It's 4 times less than what you say. Closer to 92% space efficient.

I did look at your design, how else would I have said the very next line after that? I'm saying this setup is the only way you have to expand beyond just 30 engine rows and your optimized setup has no way of getting 45 or greater multiples, and so since one isn't just an upgrade of another, I see them as 2 variants.

What is the point of piping the water far away from the shore? What do you achieve? It's not impossible to get some more shore. Space efficiency is still important and every pipe piping the water away is a waste if you can just put the steam engines next to the shore. And piping the water away from the shore would make blueprinting impossible.

...Do you not realize your 30 engine setup ALREADY pipes water far away from the shore?

Been trying to point out this whole time, your design is just taking a bit of this and a bit of that but not particularly good for anything. It isn't space efficient like a 15 engine setup and it can't be stacked on itself efficiently like one either. This is like you trying to design one giant blue science module instead of doing it via main bus.

[Qon]

Extending it to 30 is reducing wasted shore length. No, the point isn't to make it longer, it's to have more steam engines per row to reduce the amount of rows. If you use more steam engines per row it does become longer of course.

Reduces it how? 15 already gets 100% shore usage. 30% gets 100% shore usage. The difference between 100% and 100% is 0, how are you reducing any wasted shore length?

Been trying to point out this whole time, your design is just taking a bit of this and a bit of that but not particularly good for anything. It isn't space efficient like a 15 engine setup and it can't be stacked on itself efficiently like one either. This is like you trying to design one giant blue science module instead of doing it via main bus.

I'm using 200% pumps, or 6 pumps per 6 tiles of shore length compared to your 3 pumps. The rest of your post is you not getting this so no point in responding to it.

And designing a blue science module is much better than doing it on a main bus. A main bus is really not that good and it's extremely time inefficient, material inefficient and resource inefficient. At the early stages of the game you really can't afford doing something that wasteful.

[Patric20878]

1 pump per tile? Picture please. What 200% pump, it outputs 2x more than normal?

[Qon]

1 pump per tile? Picture please.

I've told you to look at the pictures many times already. viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8854&start=170#p174356
Are you finally going to look at it?
I even included closeup pictures.

[Patric20878]

I looked at that picture long ago. Where is there anything about 200% pumps and 1 tile per pump? If you think artificial shore length doesn't count as shore length, you're totally missing the idea. Every pump is still taking the normal space. You really actually trying to say you got 200% pumps or saved any shore when all you did was just double the shore length with landfill and use that instead? We really ought to just use the term "shore perimeter" instead to emphasize that it's about USEABLE shore, including from landfill, not the literal length of the original shore.

So no, you still didn't save any shore. All you did was make the engine setup wider instead of longer.