Challenge: Build the fastest glider (and win something!)

[canidae]

The one thing I learned from all this: Bots are SOOOOOO annoying. I don't want to deal with them at this level of detail ever again. I like inserters and belts better, they are fully deterministic at least.

Indeed! I got so tired of bots that decided to leave empty handed from the previous roboport while bots in the next roboport went back to pick up some random crap.
5.9 m/s is quite a respectable score. When I submitted my first glider at 4.0 m/s and got the #1 spot I had two thoughts:
1. The others contestants haven't figured out that roboports and burner inserters start with a little bit of juice (mwuahaha, the victory is mine!)
2. 4.0 m/s is probably as fast as you can make these gliders.

Then just by tuning the placement of the entities I could increase the speed up to 5.2+ m/s, which also became my final submission (barely beating Dave's score, but not item count). I never thought about reducing item count until Dave ended up on the spot above me (at that time I had fewer items than Yoyo who briefly took back #1 spot, so tuning speed was more important than tuning items). When I eventually was told the item count in Dave's design it was too late to tune item count, I figured out how to reduce it to 22 items (possibly 20 items), but I just didn't have the time.
Was a good race, but I'm glad it's over now. I've been having nightmares about conbots lately

I wanted to submit an untethered biter/tree/rock-eating glider too (backronymely named Bertha: Biter Exterminator, Rock & Tree Harvester/Annihilator), but the race competition was too stiff so I didn't have the time to finish it. It wouldn't be fast nor effective, though.

[justarandomgeek]

So when do we get to see all the glorious monstrosities you guys have made?

(Sorry, I'm just excited that someone other than me is finally doing fun stuff with auto-blueprinting :p )

(Edit: also, if anyone wants The Wall in it's current state, hit me up for a blueprint!)

[DaveMcW]

Tricks I discovered during the competition:

1. Roboports and burner inserters make the nighttime requirement trivial. Instead of trying to optimize power and solar panel count, we are simply banned from using advanced combinators and inserters.

2. Fully upgraded robots travel faster than express transport belts, even if you add a return trip.

3. Parts needed for deploying blueprints can be transported at the same time as blueprints, this greatly reduces item count.

4. You can run a red wire through your entire glider to ensure it doesn't construct/deconstruct until all the parts are in place.

5. Roboports can send a construction robot signal, and a constant combinator can cancel this signal with a negative construction robot count.

6. 1-part builds (setup) have a speed limit of 12.1.
2-part builds (2 roboports 50 tiles apart) have a speed limit of 5.3.
3-part builds (3 roboports 25 tiles apart) have a speed limit of 6+.

7. Blueprint deployers can remotely build wires.

[NiftyManiac]

Congratulations to Yoyobuae, with a final average-of-3 score of 5.484 m/s! Since the scores are so close, I'm allowing 24 hours before awarding the prize for any challenges in case someone believes I made a mistake in scoring the entry they submitted.

Winning submission

First place Blueprint A. Then load storage chest and roboport (left one) with:
http://imgur.com/a/gvUps

To launch put Blueprint B into storage chest.

Blueprint A:

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Blueprint B:

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An honorable mention goes to justarandomgeek, who provided the only non-race entry with his biter-killing monstrosity.
The "close but no cigar" award goes to Nemek, who came out of nowhere on the last day and only lost first place to Yoyobuae in the average-of-3 rescoring.

It became clear pretty quick that this contest wasn't going to look like what I'd envisioned, with the top half of the leaderboard taking advantage of the initial energy of roboports and burner inserters to make power-free gliders. When designing the first version I'd thought about this use of roboports, but completely forgot about burner inserters which made all of these shenanigans possible. Still, it was a lot of fun to watch you guys eke out the last bit of performance from your gliders, and I hope this contest has sparked some people's interest in recursion and self-replication in Factorio. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Final standings are in the legend below. The entity-count tiebreaker came into play in the final standings between DaveMcW/canidae and between nielskool/thraxxaldor.

Graph of scores over time

gliderrace.png (43.98 KiB) Viewed 8547 times

[DaveMcW]

Here is my blueprint:

Air Mail

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Items:
11 construction robot
2 roboport
2 requester chest
2 storage chest
2 blueprint deployer
1 constant combinator
1 burner inserter
1 blueprint

[nielskool]

congratz Yoyo & Nemek

I couldn't stand not having crossed the 5 m/s barrier during day time so i had to continue.
best score during daytime now : 5.7
no burner inserters used and the blueprint is transported on a chain of inserters xD

I didn't know the burner inserters started with some energy. Would definitely designed something else than what i have now.

This contest made me aware of the recursive blueprint mod and made me love it.

PS
What where the highest day scores you guys got? I am guessing 6 to 8?

[mattj256]

Holy cow. Congratulations everyone who submitted. I never saw that trick with roboports and burner inserters, so I was messing around with trains, boilers, and steam engines. I never got mine totally working and I never felt like it would be competitive so I never submitted it.

Now that the contest is over, one of my ideas:
1. Allow a mod that lets you transport water. (Rail Tanker, Tank Wagon, or Fluid Barrel).
2. Allow fuel to be consumed in boilers, and water to be consumed in steam engines.
3. Make a glider that will chop down trees and stick them in the boilers. It won't win any contests for speed, but it will be a TRUE glider and leave nothing behind. (It will still eventually run out of water, though.)

[Nemek]

Congratulations to Yoyo and every fellow and proud owner of a racing glider! Even if I joined the competition late, I can say that it was intense and filled with dedication, passion and care. Now I'm looking forward to the next competition

4. You can run a red wire through your entire glider to ensure it doesn't construct/deconstruct until all the parts are in place.

Cool, this is a simple but very smart trick that I totally missed, it could have made the designing process so faster.
Also, I never thought that you could use more than one blueprint.

If you want to take a look, here is my glider:

Instructions: place the blueprint. Remove every tree on the left of the glider until around X=-50. Place 20 construction bots into the first/leftmost roboport. Place 20 construction bots and 1 logistic bot into the third roboport. Place 2 blueprint deployer, 2 roboport, 2 constant combinator, 2 storage chest, 1 requester chest all into the right storage chest. Open the leftmost blueprint deployer, start the scoring script, place the blueprint.
Note: after you place the blueprint, you have around 3 minutes to start the glider, otherwise the roboports power will deplete and you'll have to replace them.

Code: Select all

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[canidae]

Congratulations to Yoyo, well done!
Could you upload a picture of your glider (of all the unique segments)? I won't be able to try it out myself the next few days and I'm curious how it looks.

4. You can run a red wire through your entire glider to ensure it doesn't construct/deconstruct until all the parts are in place.

I did this too, but it resulted in a score reduction, so I dropped it from the design. Although making the glider more unstable, ordering the previous segment to be deconstruct still gave you half a second to finish the next segment before the stuff was actually removed by the conbots. I should've used it more for testing, though. It probably would've decreased the amount of time I spent on building the gliders by quite a bit.

5. Roboports can send a construction robot signal, and a constant combinator can cancel this signal with a negative construction robot count.

Negating the signal I didn't think of, though. Neat! In my last attempt (not submitted) the idea was to use Available conbots signal to build blueprint and Total conbots signal to move deconstruction area to include more entities. I think this could make it possible to get get rid of a deployer chest from the design.

It became clear pretty quick that this contest wasn't going to look like what I'd envisioned

This was pretty much my first thought when I submitted my first glider, but it still turned into a great contest. Thanks again for the effort you put into this!

[Zulan]

Great job guys (both contestants and organizer)! I wanted to go for it but didn't find the time though. Turns out my idea with a long blue underground belt wouldn't have been very competitive.

[NiftyManiac]

Here's a video of the top four contestants' gliders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weBhlrY52Rw

[amax3002]

Does anyone have an update blueprint of this that I could use?

[sparr]

I am very sad that I missed this competition.