Factorio Forums

So you rather have piles of trains "everywhere"? They require much more resources and space/storage.

Not exactly. I usually only have a couple of large ore trains in waiting. With about one train per patch. It varies, but usually doesn't back up.

chuz wrote:lategame, a single tile of ressource can be over 100K while a single chest can only store up to around 2.5K raw ressource. it make the inability to properly store the ressource lategame due to a lack of space. So yea chest fail to accomplish their mission.

Given that we can't store more space efficiently than ore patches, perhaps it's best to store our ore in the ground.

I would say it depends. And that might be also the reason why this isn't in vanilla yet (cause it was requested more or less from beginning).

It is definitely one of the biggest errors to store much items in the early or middle game. Hm. As long as you don't have logistic robots.
Why?
Because of the induced pollution. In a normal game this doesn't matter much. But currently I play a very hard game and with that anything I currently don't need increases the pollution so much, that my pollution cloud reaches the nests and increases their evolution. I need to optimize my factory so that it produces a constant amount of pollution.

With a storage I would produce more than I need, the pollution increases too fast, evolution would be faster increasing than my technology and I would be overrun.

Similar mechanics is valid for simpler difficulty: if you are producing 10 steel chests full of raw ore in the early game you are doing something wrong.

You should not store large amounts of raw ore. That is super inefficient it costs a lot of energy to put so many items in and out and the stacks are so small.

You should have a small buffer for most types of bulk items. Small! Especially the iron/copper plates to guarantee, that the ores are used and to keep the mines and furnaces flowing, cause they produce the most pollution (and so they should produce constantly). Their size depends on the above said: if you just produce to fill the storage and don't care about pollution you are overproducing. It is much better to bring all into a balance, make a constant flow, where any part is constantly producing. With the mining and smelting that is really possible.

So in short:
- in the early game just a small storage, big enough to suit you needs for personal crafting. The belts should be buffer enough.
- later on the buffers of train transport or similar must be enough for the raw ores. The furnaces should be under constant load instead.
- You might store larger amounts of bulk-items (plates, steel, wheels, circuits... not wires!), cause they are already compressed or have bigger stacks.
- But the more items are compressed into another the less need you have to store it. It's eventually much more clever to built a more flexible (bigger) production, instead of storing unused items.
- take the belt as storage into account. One belt stores about 7 items. https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_belts/Physics One Processing Unit circuit takes 40 copper, 24 iron, and some amounts of oil and a bit coal. So one belt of Processing Unit stores about 280 copper and 168 copper, larger amounts of oil and noticeable amounts of coal. It's useful to use only one lane of the belts for longer belts... (I saw factories with 500 belts of processing units, both lanes...)
- big storages other than the plates and some bulk items disguise the real needs of your factory. Everything works fine, until the storage is empty and then suddenly your factory slows down which isn't good cause you need THAT as fast as possible.

If you don't care pollution this picture changes of course, then storing much amounts of items makes suddenly sense, or in the late game when you are able to kill enough nests so that you can spread your pollution over larger areas. But in my eyes that is not so difficult and also not so fun.

Seems like there are a lot of misconecptions around here.

"Storing items costs a lot of energy"
-The early game version of my 100k storage consumes 40kw to 400kw. That's a couple of assemblers. Come on...

"Stored items disguise demand"
-Oh really? That's the point! I don't want to set up 30 processing unit assemblers and their supply just for my personal handcrafting needs. Instead, I set up a single one with a storage (capped at let's say 1k) and let time work in my favour. All the time I don't need processing units for handcrafting that is.
More on that below.

"With a storage I produce more than I need. Pollution increases too fast"
-Wait, do people actually artificially hold back in production to decrease evolution rate? Like do you shut down your science every now and then out of fear of being overrun? I am pretty sure pollution and evolution were balanced in such a way that your factory can run around the clock wihout putting you in dangers you couldn't face.

"if you are producing 10 steel chests full of raw ore in the early game you are doing something wrong."
-That's been said a couple of times. I answered that already but what exactly do you even mean? What exactly am I doing wrong?

Mine production fluctuates a lot with the amount of active drills. If you don't take ore off the mines some belts will clog and some drills go offline while others continue working. The same effect happens with fluctuations in your ore consumption. The result are holes in your ore patches which reduce the amount of active drills even after the belts are freed up again. Since the amount of ore/minute you mine is the main throttle on your factory keeping that high should be a #1 priority.

With storages in place all mines can work at a steady rate and consume their patches evenly. Trains can be loaded / unloaded at constant speed increasing the efficiency of your railnetwork. Your furnaces can be fed at constant speed nomatter the hickups in your active drill count. And you have a local warning should production and / or total available ore deplete so it's easier to react.

The result is more active drills at any given time. The alternative:
Hooking up more fields than you actually need. However, don't claim that doesn't consume energy / produce pollution. I don't believe you babysit your mining bases all the time removing empty drills.

Here is a nice example of how storing items can give you more time to react and expand your mining operations should production fall short:
(Relying on steam engines and steel furnaces in this factory)

Solid fuel belt will open up as soon as the coal storage drops below 5%. Until then I keep the oil where it is needed more.

That storage is the work of 2-3 chemical plants. Setting up a back-up solid fuel production which produces fresh solid fuel in large enough quantities at the 5% event would consume A LOT more space, energy and resources. It would also collapse should I accidently exceed my oil production at that point.

this is not fair, when you realize fuel have their own storage house, but ore didnt.

Escadin wrote: snip

Whilst buffering can be handy and is a good enough solution to most problems, the 'disguised demand' issue does get in the way of creating perfectly efficient logistics. Sure, such perfection may sound over the top in practice, especially in a game, but then that's the entire concept of Kaizen and JIT.

Concerning throttling production to control pollution... I admit I do it on death world games when I don't have enough turrets built.

Escadin wrote: "if you are producing 10 steel chests full of raw ore in the early game you are doing something wrong."
-That's been said a couple of times. I answered that already but what exactly do you even mean? What exactly am I doing wrong?

Resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be. Increase production and spend it!

I think the most obvious resource that needs stockpiling is energy, either in chemical fuel (coal, solid), nuclear fuel or U235, or full accu's or steam tanks. Having a brownout/blackout can be catastrophic (as defenses shut down - laser immediately, guns when they run out of ammo) and is often annoying to fix as you often need energy to create energy. When your coal plant stops because it runs out of coal, your coal mines are also stopped.

Thus, you generally want to stockpile enough energy to let your factory run a couple of hours, and a warning system to alert you if the buffer is below a threshold, so you have time to fix it (build more mines, fix supply issues, whatever) before a catastrophic blackout.

The most obvious resource that you might as well stockpile is ore. In a sense, ore fields are also stockpiles that just haven't been mined yet. Whether you stockpile them in the ground, in trains, or in chests doesn't matter that much and is mostly a matter of convenience.

Pollution concerns regarding large-scale stockpiling aren't completely unfounded. In a balanced game, you create pollution as you expand and improve, with the goal of being capable enough to deal with the consequences of that pollution. But stuff sitting in a warehouse represents pollution that DIDN'T help you expand or improve - you could easily wind up strengthening the biters more than you strengthened yourself. How much of a danger this actually represents depends on your skill level and the scenario that you're playing in. Obviously this is going to matter differently between a rail world and a deathworld.

Wait, biters are dangerous?

Maybe I should do a death world with minimal minerals some day. Can you make it so you have really low minerals nearby but really large (10M+) fields further away? I like the initial challenge of needing to expand before it's easy, but I don't want to make 500 outposts later on...

Found the thread. Here's a warehouse from vanilla logistics chests.

Marza wrote:Found the thread. Here's a warehouse from vanilla logistics chests.

that roboport.

Warehousing does have another, overlooked advantage: Buffering resources for factory expansion. The "structure factory" part of your plant will likely be producing stuff in bursts, as you add on new and different types of production, so a continuous flow of resources into it won't really work. Having some buffers of raw materials (copper/iron/steel/stone/circuits) prevents you from having to wait forever on stuff being produced. I agree that in a steady production chain, big buffers are unneeded, but they can be (and are) useful at:
- Portions of the factory that have slow continuous production, but incidental spikes in consumption (structures mainly, sometimes rocket too)
- Mining facilities, especially those intended to rapidly stripmine a smal spot, and ore transfer points.
- Any kind of railway usually needs at least a small buffer.
- Energy buffer (storing solid fuel or coal for a chemical plant, to catch fuel shortages). Less important now due to nuclear power though... a single standard chest of nuclear fuel has an insane energy density.

I can't remember where, but I'm sure that in the past the Dev's have stated that they didn't want to provide a single object that completely solve a problem, but rather provide tools to solve them.

I think it's clear from the discussion so far that there are

• Differing opinions on where buffering stops and warehousing starts
• The requirements of the warehouse (Size, Throughput, Number of Materials store-able etc)
• Trade-offs depending on the above requirements (Map size for larger storage, energy and complexity for dealing with multiple materials)

The point is that there are many many different scenarios where some level of storage may be the correct solution, and each scenario could be solved with multiple designs. Why should the Dev's implement a single "warehouse" object that simplifies and removes the trade-offs if the player wants to buffer a larger amount of materials for whatever reason? Seems to me that designing the perfect warehouse just offers another design challenge.

Escadin wrote:The result is more active drills at any given time. The alternative:
Hooking up more fields than you actually need. However, don't claim that doesn't consume energy / produce pollution. I don't believe you babysit your mining bases all the time removing empty drills.

It is actually true that having more mining fields than you actually need doesn't consume energy or produce pollution. Mining drills use 0 energy and produce 0 pollution when their output is blocked or when they've run out of resources to mine - unlike most other items in the game they have no idle drain. The only reason to remove empty drills is to place them somewhere else - leaving them there doesn't cost anything.

Escadin wrote: "With a storage I produce more than I need. Pollution increases too fast"
-Wait, do people actually artificially hold back in production to decrease evolution rate? Like do you shut down your science every now and then out of fear of being overrun? I am pretty sure pollution and evolution were balanced in such a way that your factory can run around the clock wihout putting you in dangers you couldn't face.

Indeed. I think I made my current map a bit too difficult.
There was a phase after I created the first smelting line, where I grew too much and I was just overrun, cause the mines where producing too much and the storage of the mines was too big. I need to restart from 2 hours before and reduced the throughput just by removing miners.

"if you are producing 10 steel chests full of raw ore in the early game you are doing something wrong."
-That's been said a couple of times. I answered that already but what exactly do you even mean? What exactly am I doing wrong?

Well, I try: A storage can be ok or not. It depends on, how many resources you use to build it and how much of that storage is really used. The more the storage is "used", the better. By "using" I mean: If you make the storage so big, that it will be never emptied, you make it too big. If you build the storage so, that it is nearly always empty, it is too small. In both cases you're making it wrong.

For Factorio this insight means, that a storage or warehouse is not a constant. It changes it's size depending on your current game-situation. If you think you can create one warehouse in the game and you are done with storage, you're doing it wrong.

Mine production fluctuates a lot with the amount of active drills. If you don't take ore off the mines some belts will clog and some drills go offline while others continue working. The same effect happens with fluctuations in your ore consumption. The result are holes in your ore patches which reduce the amount of active drills even after the belts are freed up again. Since the amount of ore/minute you mine is the main throttle on your factory keeping that high should be a #1 priority.

That depends on what game you're playing. If you play a game like my current with that strategy you will loose. With such sensitive natives around you, you need to look, that your mines do constant pollution and are not fluctuating much, cause the main pollution comes from the miners.

With storages in place all mines can work at a steady rate and consume their patches evenly.

You don't need storages for that. You can do a lot just by clever usage of splitters and belts.

And well, the situation changes a bit until you get the power suit, robots and loco. But see above: If you just store and never use that, you build the storage for nothing.

Shouldn't have to rely on mods for this. Warehouses should be standard!

Factorie wrote:Shouldn't have to rely on mods for this. Warehouses should be standard!

long live warehouse.

(i use warehouse to clear ore patch anyway.

I and a friend use a train-based "warehouse" with crazy storage space and high throughput (vanilla). Maybe this will interest you. See this topic here. It will hold a few million of whatever you put into it.

vanatteveldt wrote:

HurkWurk wrote:use mods! its the way its meant to be played after you get done with the basic game.

What mods do you show in the screenshot? It looks pretty

BigBags (changes stack sizes)
Bobassembly
Bobinserters
Boblibrary
Bottleneck
Concreep (roboports automatically call for robots to place concrete around them)
Factorissimo2 < this is the factory buildings... pocket spaces.
Squeak Through (allows you to walk past/through almost everything)
textplates
Warehousing v15 < thats the big storage buildings

and about a dozen others not shown.