I've been enjoying the heck out of 1.1 so far, the train changes alone have made upscaling much more practical, since you can create many-to-many systems (including staging yards) for heavily used resources. However, there are a handful of production issues that continue to annoy me.
First and simplest, that stone production isn't in sync with the other resources. Why not make all the raw refining the same, so the user can smelt them in identical setups?
And second, there's a couple resources that are WAY more annoying to produce in bulk than they need to be, and that's gears and landfill (ESPECIALLY landfill). Between the subsecond production time, and the large material input, you eat up even blue belts in just a few machines. I'm not sure it's even possible to run a SINGLE landfill machine without it being starved at least some of the time (three independent blue belt stone feeds maybe?). Adjusting crafting time to one second with the same input might help once you've got decently upgraded stack inserters, but even then, it's just hard to make lots of these resources.
I can see leaving landfill the way it is just to make it hard to pave the world, but gears needs a good look I think, since you need lots of them almost immediately.
Re: Landfill, Stone, gear production issues
Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2020 3:44 pm
by Serenity
Gears are only really an issue for belt production. Otherwise they aren't needed that much anymore. It was worse when you needed gun turrets and mining drills for science. Those needed huge numbers. Now the needs for science are very modest.
Stone brick can mostly be done with the same layout as plate smelting. Just needs two more tiles in width:
StoneBrick.jpg (245.57 KiB) Viewed 2486 times
Maybe if you put coal on the outside line you could underground another stone belt through the inserters
I'm not sure it's even possible to run a SINGLE landfill machine without it being starved at least some of the time (three independent blue belt stone feeds maybe?).
It is possible. Here's a setup using speed modules and 7x speed beacons (video):
In my latest game, Iād decided to make several stone mines. Each fed 3-8 train station.
I had one train bringing stone back to my base for production purposes (rails, science, stone brick). I had another 3-8 train that fed 16 Landfill makers directly, each one outputting to a Passive Provider.
You could probably (assuming your stone mines are outputting enough) have 4-5 trains, maybe more, just to keep those landfill makers fed.
As far as Stone Brick is concerned, its half the length. So what? That just saves you on some furnaces. You can use the same blueprints as iron/copper smelting if you want to, also - though half the furnaces are not used until some of the initial furnaces are stuffed to the gills. Or just remove, either the ghost or the constructed equipment, half of the smelting column. Its not a big deal.
Re: Landfill, Stone, gear production issues
Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2020 11:19 pm
by 5thHorseman
It'd be boring of all the smelting was the same.
Having a 0.5s crafting recipe input starved half the time is identical to having a 1 second recipe full all the time, except the first one uses a smidge less power and has an additional set of optimization paths.
For non-critical things*, it's okay if the assemblers don't run 100% of the time.
*Essentially, science production.
Re: Landfill, Stone, gear production issues
Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2020 3:10 am
by foamy
If my landfill needs grow beyond the abilities of an unbeaconed assembler, I'll just put down another. It's a helluva lot cheaper than trying to push one as far as possible, although I guess that's a neat engineering challenge. You can even just have a train unload directly into 'em; three stack inserters will push 75+ stone a second, which is enough to drive a L3 assembler at +50% speed. You can hang four of them off a train car, which gives you ~43,200 landfill per hour per car. I struggle to imagine requiring more than that, to be honest :v
