What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

[Drakken]

You can't liquefy coal if you don't have heavy oil firsthand. At that point, you can do blue tech science.

That was my point. Coal liquefaction is "impractical" because it would be much more useful if you didn't need oil to research it.

[Koub]

One doesn't only need heavy oil to research it, but also to produce it. That was my point.There is no need to remove blue science from the research, because you'd still need blue science to get heavy oil to be able to liquefy coal.

[xZippy]

Shotguns. The submachine gun is just so efficient. The shotgun is just slow and mediocre. Not the worst weapon ever, but not worth using.
Water barrels. It seems the sole purpose for their existence is for fluid consistency, which I get. Still, useless item.

[HadesSupreme]

Pistol. Even if you have to fight before unlocking anything else, it's better to unequip it and just melee with much better DPS. I'm not sure what the difference is but it's very noticable, especially on spawners with armor. Considering the pistol also costs a ton of expensive ammo to kill anything relevant, it's a trap to use.

Efficiency mk 2 and 3. Just not worth it in any reasonable scenario.

Steel furnaces is something I always skip. Electric furnaces unlock immediately afterwards, you HAVE to mass produce them for science while steel furnaces are dead-end, and steel offers no real efficiency improvement to offset the investment. I get that there's probably a speedrunner argument for using it since it upgrades in place for 100% more throughput which is quicker to build than a new line of stone furnaces though.

I will defend Iron boxes for DW Marathon games. Wood boxes mean cutting trees which increases your pollution significantly. Steel becomes very expensive and also polluting on Marathon to mass produce.

[Silari]

steel offers no real efficiency improvement to offset the investment.

It's literally 100% more fuel efficient since it's twice as fast and uses the same energy - 90kW. In the part of the game you're using them, stone furnaces are the single largest energy user a base has, though people don't realize it since they're not using electricity so don't get on the graph with everything else. Replacing them with steel halves that cost.

[HadesSupreme]

steel offers no real efficiency improvement to offset the investment.

It's literally 100% more fuel efficient since it's twice as fast and uses the same energy - 90kW. In the part of the game you're using them, stone furnaces are the single largest energy user a base has, though people don't realize it since they're not using electricity so don't get on the graph with everything else. Replacing them with steel halves that cost.

Coal never runs out so who cares. I've specifically played entire games relying on coal power and you'll run out of iron and copper long before coal. Even if you take into account that it halves the amount of mining drills you need and therefore their coal/pollution cost, it's not economically efficient due to the start up cost of replacing all your stone furnaces with steel furnaces. If you're trying to be efficient then you immediately go to electric furnaces and put efficiency modules in them, which blows steel furnaces out of the water.

[FuryoftheStars]

Pistol. Even if you have to fight before unlocking anything else, it's better to unequip it and just melee with much better DPS. I'm not sure what the difference is but it's very noticable, especially on spawners with armor. Considering the pistol also costs a ton of expensive ammo to kill anything relevant, it's a trap to use.

From what I can see, melee does 8 damage at a rate of 2/sec, whereas the pistol is 5 damage at 4/sec. So that's a 16 vs 20 dps, respectively. You also can't melee and move at the same time.

Regarding spawners and their armor (2/15%), that makes it (effectively) 5.1 at 2/sec and 2.55 at 4/sec, or 10.2 and 10.2 dps. You'd need to be up against an armor of at least 3/x% before melee actually has the better dps.

All of that said, I would probably still agree the pistol is not that useful, but for other reasons than what you stated.

[HadesSupreme]

Pistol. Even if you have to fight before unlocking anything else, it's better to unequip it and just melee with much better DPS. I'm not sure what the difference is but it's very noticable, especially on spawners with armor. Considering the pistol also costs a ton of expensive ammo to kill anything relevant, it's a trap to use.

From what I can see, melee does 8 damage at a rate of 2/sec, whereas the pistol is 5 damage at 4/sec. So that's a 16 vs 20 dps, respectively. You also can't melee and move at the same time.

Regarding spawners and their armor (2/15%), that makes it (effectively) 5.1 at 2/sec and 2.55 at 4/sec, or 10.2 and 10.2 dps. You'd need to be up against an armor of at least 3/x% before melee actually has the better dps.

All of that said, I would probably still agree the pistol is not that useful, but for other reasons than what you stated.

I checked and you are correct in your facts, but wrong on some of the conclusion:

Biters automatically heal. Stage 1 biters have 15 health, but effectively have 16 due to this immediate healing. 3 pistol shots does 15 damage and will never kill a biter, but 2 melee hits do. So effective pistol damage vs. them is actually 33% lower than you think.This also means that trying to shoot while running becomes vastly worse in DPS, because with multiple enemies all of them are healing at the same time. So melee with a stack of fish (and light armor) is definitely the better strategy even discounting ammo cost. Both these combined is probably what I was feeling

I'm also not sure on this but it appears that melee is at least a little faster than 2/sec. I clocked 125 hits in 60 seconds. But that's a fairly marginal difference.

[FuryoftheStars]

Biters automatically heal. Stage 1 biters have 15 health, but effectively have 16 due to this immediate healing. 3 pistol shots does 15 damage and will never kill a biter, but 2 melee hits do. So effective pistol damage vs. them is actually 33% lower than you think.This also means that trying to shoot while running becomes vastly worse in DPS, because with multiple enemies all of them are healing at the same time. So melee with a stack of fish (and light armor) is definitely the better strategy even discounting ammo cost. Both these combined is probably what I was feeling

I'm also not sure on this but it appears that melee is at least a little faster than 2/sec. I clocked 125 hits in 60 seconds. But that's a fairly marginal difference.

Well, even taking the healing into account, that still makes them match in how fast they can kill. I’ve also found that running while shooting is better (for me. I suppose ymmv). It puts the biters in a (close to) single file line, allowing me to take out the first few biters at range and it limits how many can be hitting me at once when they do close in, as well as makes it so their attacks have pauses between them (they actually stop moving when they attack, giving me time to move away and then they need to catch up again). Of course, with too large of a group, none of that matters.

I can’t say the material cost matters to me, though? 1 iron plate for 10 shots. Seems pretty cheap for the advantages.

As for the rate of attack for melee, when I looked into the character entity, there wasn’t anything directly listed for it, so my assumption is that it uses the mining speed of 0.5, seems everything else related to the character uses that. That’s 120 in 60, so 125 could be a margin of error? (Otherwise that’s a value of 0.48.)

All of this said, melee with fish vs running with a pistol I feel is pretty subjective. That may even have been the dev’s intentions from the start….