Factorio Forums

Good evening everyone,

I am running into major FPS / UPS problems in my game I am at 27/27 currently

When I look at my time usage using the F4 menu, Game updates are taking 33.4 on average and the biggest eater of the updates are the entity updates which are sitting at 24.4

When I started the game I turned biters off but had pollution on, recently I cleared pollution from the map and turned it off entirely via a console command that got me around 3-4 FPS.

a detailed dump of whats going on can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

I thought maybe a mod was causing the issue but looking at the script updates I am at 0.80 so that is nothing overall for performance. My thoughts are that I need to go over my whole base and convert it to bots entirely and ditch the belts for everything. I have also attached my saved game, and I know I have some rather insane sections with belts, Ie. a mining base for coal that is rather stupid. (no excuses I actually don't remember why I did that with belts...) and I know my green circuits setups use more belts than they need, I just started fixing those before I got distracted by power, and fixing rail network issues. I am planning right now to rip apart my smelting setups, green circuits, and literally, everything that uses belts and switch over to bots as I have for my mining bases, but before I undertake that task I would like it to be confirmed that 100% it is the sheer number of belts / other entities tanking things before I dedicate about 10-12 hours doing this.

Thank you,


*Ooops * Saved game can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qhbste ... sp=sharing

Mods Here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O1UbVE ... sp=sharing

With that many mods I doubt you'll find anyone who knows enough about the relative ups impact of all those parts to really weigh in, which leaves an opening for old farts to talk about generalities:

Inserters and bots are *by far* the largest time sucks on your map, and you've got about 65K inserters and I didn't count the bots. There's a 20KSPM vanilla map out there that uses about 88K inserters and I didn't count the bots, it gets better UPS and FPS (*much* better UPS and FPS, like pushing double) than your map. Its 88K inserters use less than half what your 65K inserters use, its bots use an even smaller fraction, because belts aren't used for high-volume traffic. That's what trains are for.

As a rough guide I'd say when you're going for UPS belts are for low-to-middling volume, middle-distance traffic. Bots are for low volume or very short range traffic that can't be simply eliminated with direct insertion, trains are for high volume traffic that can't be simply eliminated with direct insertion or short range (basically beacon-hopping) bots. Green chips and steel and plastic count as high volume in my book. Purple science is a direct-insertion-and-bots puzzle.

Note that inserters and bots are still the largest time sucks on that 20KSPM map too, but it's a contest, they're leading the pack but they're not so far in the lead that they're separate runaways.

B_Type13X2 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 2:04 am My thoughts are that I need to go over my whole base and convert it to bots entirely and ditch the belts for everything.

Nooooo
Belts are very optimized nowadays. It's the question, how you use them
I didn't look at your base, but if you use lots of balancers/splitters, they are sucking a lot of UPS.
Also, you should try to get fully compressed belts. Long sections of fully compressed belts incl. undergrounds are treated as one piece, if you don't have splitter/inserters or similar.
Instead of balance equal amounts, it could be good, to compress the amounts to a minimal amount of belts. Esp. useful for mining where it's unrealistic to have full belts all the time.

Like quyxkh said, bots are great for very small distances, but suck more the bigger the distances are getting.

jodokus31 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 6:55 am

B_Type13X2 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 2:04 am My thoughts are that I need to go over my whole base and convert it to bots entirely and ditch the belts for everything.

Nooooo
Belts are very optimized nowadays. It's the question, how you use them
I didn't look at your base, but if you use lots of balancers/splitters, they are sucking a lot of UPS.
Also, you should try to get fully compressed belts. Long sections of fully compressed belts incl. undergrounds are treated as one piece, if you don't have splitter/inserters or similar.
Instead of balance equal amounts, it could be good, to compress the amounts to a minimal amount of belts. Esp. useful for mining where it's unrealistic to have full belts all the time.

Like quyxkh said, bots are great for very small distances, but suck more the bigger the distances are getting.

I figured bots were sub-optimal after I converted blue and purple science over to bots and immediately tanked another 8FPS/UPS. So I reverted saves to before I decided to try that.

I also built my own assemblies / area's using belt saturation checkers to make sure I am only using fully compressed belts everywhere but in my main base. Every other area such as smelting, circuits ETC is designed to only produce full belts.

I am currently using trains to haul Green, Red, and Blue chips, all the ores, Engines, batteries, the fluids. I can swap strategies and produce all the raw materials needed for the sciences off site for sciences and just train those in as well. one thing is abundantly clear that I don't quite understand, and that is how a factory making 16X's more science than I am is only using 25% more inserters than I am, that almost seems mathematically impossible when considering input requirements unless they are using bots literally everywhere, but bots are UPS/FPS sinks too.

Basically, I think I need to start entirely over. cause attempting to fix the base/ troubleshooting it is going to take more time than starting again. That and I really regret committing to a 2-8-2 train scheme, I think doing 1-4-1's and having more trains that can get up to speed faster and clear intersections faster without ques would be infinitely more efficient.

This was my first attempt at a true megabase and I tried to build all my science assemblies myself and wherever possible also attempted to improve on designs (read make them more compact and utilize more direct insertion) other players had made so I wasn't just wholesale copy and pasting blueprints, all in all, I learned a lot with this base and on round #2 I'll take those lessons and see if I can get 2.5k and 60/60.

thanks to both of you for your advice.

Starting a new round is not faster, unless you use editor mode.
But it might be more fun to evolve better. Personally I'm mostly stuck in the pre rocket game and don't get much into megabasing. Its more fun for me

Regarding trains. Bigger trains are usually better for UPS, because you can use less and path finding gets quite expensive UPS-wise. Of, course your train layout should support the big trains.

I assume you use productivity modules and speed beacon like crazy? Otherwise, that's a big way to increase production and reduce entities.

jodokus31 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 8:03 am Starting a new round is not faster, unless you use editor mode.
But it might be more fun to evolve better. Personally I'm mostly stuck in the pre rocket game and don't get much into megabasing. Its more fun for me

Regarding trains. Bigger trains are usually better for UPS, because you can use less and path finding gets quite expensive UPS-wise. Of, course your train layout should support the big trains.

I assume you use productivity modules and speed beacon like crazy? Otherwise, that's a big way to increase production and reduce entities.

Everywhere I can has speed beacons and production modules. I installed some additional mods for better furnaces so that I could cut down on the quantity used for full belts. I used rail loaders to dump full ore trains in 2-3 seconds, used miniloaders to cut down on inserters needed to load and offload trains. I can think of a few area's that need improvement in my train yards cause I am using a crap ton of inserters there just in case I have cross-contamination on trains.

I loaded the base and I have several points:
- the mining operation seems to be quite long distance for bots. Also, there are very many bots charging. It guess, you should increase amounts of roboports
You could use direct mining into trains, which is quite viable with high mining productivity. Esp. with those big drills
- nixie-tubes are nice, but use 0.5 updates, which is not little.
- steel smelting could be direct from ore with direct insertion of iron plates. Or at least not loaded and unloaded into train.
- smelting layout could have double beacons (8 per furnace), if you use the row layout. 12 if you surround a single furnace/assembler
- green circuits for blue circuits could be direct inserted. It saves quite a lot traffic.
- i love the radar belt and the 91k in stock
- the nuclear setup seems to save fuel, by checking steam levels. At least there are lots of steam buffers. I think, that's not good for UPS. You should rather overproduce a bit, since nuclear fuel is quite cheap. Or try to use the solar as variable part of the power and let nuclear run all the time. However, I might be wrong, because fluid and heat manager are quite low with updates
- BTW: transport lines only takes 0.5 - 1.0 updates. That's not much