Factorio Forums

Yes, I know the feeling, if you are running against a wall
There are some kind of tool mods, which might help you: Helmod, What is it used for, etc.
Here you find out, which recipes exist, and how to get them running.

If I understand you right, you need fuel for boilers. There are several possibilites:
- Use coke pellets, They give more MJ per coal.
- Upgrade boilers. Each tier give more efficiency, which is quite significant. Same for other machines, which use less energy per product.
- You can dive into Angels Bioprocessing. You can basically create Wood Bricks out of crushed stone using a bit less energy. The modpack seablock is based on that.
- Use solar to save fuel during daytime.
- There are enriched fuel blocks from light oil, which are much more efficient, but i think they are blue science.
- If you are totally desperate, you can use greenhouse. (Dont know, if you get more energy out from running the greenhouses. I think, in marathon mode, it doesnt work out).

doppelEben wrote:What am I missing or doing wrong?

Those mods make things a lot more complicated to figure out, so you may not be missing anything, just working through a difficult process. It's much harder to understand than vanilla.

I find http://factorio.rotol.me a useful website to navigate all the different ways to make things and all the different ways to use them. The "what is it really used for" mod also does the same thing from within the game. Seeing the web of connections between different products really helps to figure out the best way available to you for making them. Those sources just provide basic information about recipes in a different form, so there is still a lot to figure out on your own though.

I would prioritize producing solar panels and accumulators as early as possible, to wean yourself off of a limited resource like coal for electricity as soon as possible. You have to burn coal for energy at the very beginning, but it's like a ticking clock. As you grow your electricity consumption will accelerate, and if you don't switch you're likely to run out of coal in your starting area before you're ready to get new coal sources. Once you have enough solar panels and accumulators to stop running steam engines, your remaining coal should last a long time, and it's running out of iron ore that you need to worry about next. You need to make sure you get ready to expand to a mining outpost before that happens.

You can make solid fuel out many of the refined oil products, and burn those, and unlike coal, oil doesn't fully run out. So that's another way to go. You probably also need to set up oil processing to make the batteries needed to use solar full time, so you can kill two birds with one stone. There is more than one way to make coke from coal, so make sure you research the process that results in sulfuric waste water that will help you make battery acid.

Instead of mining coal to crack into heavy oil, mine oil and process it properly.

Other than that, even further down the technology tree you have rocket fuel, my mod changes it to be made effectively from just water, and air.

Sure you have to filter it, and process it in quite the long chain, but there is a net gain in the end.
There's also a half way point where you can make the enriched fuel blocks from Hydrazine too.

Hi Bobingabout, where we an read changelog for bob's revamp and modules?

aklesey1 wrote:Hi Bobingabout, where we an read changelog for bob's revamp and modules?

yeah, was wondering about that as well

jodokus31 wrote:Yes, I know the feeling, if you are running against a wall
There are some kind of tool mods, which might help you: Helmod, What is it used for, etc.
Here you find out, which recipes exist, and how to get them running.

If I understand you right, you need fuel for boilers. There are several possibilites:
- Use coke pellets, They give more MJ per coal.
- Upgrade boilers. Each tier give more efficiency, which is quite significant. Same for other machines, which use less energy per product.
- You can dive into Angels Bioprocessing. You can basically create Wood Bricks out of crushed stone using a bit less energy. The modpack seablock is based on that.
- Use solar to save fuel during daytime.
- There are enriched fuel blocks from light oil, which are much more efficient, but i think they are blue science.
- If you are totally desperate, you can use greenhouse. (Dont know, if you get more energy out from running the greenhouses. I think, in marathon mode, it doesnt work out).

The greenhouses from the greenhouses mod is a energy loss, at least with mk1 boilers and steam engines and no fertilizer. I think the greenhouses, boilers and steam engines even out to zero but you also need some inserters driving you into the red.

The greenhouses from bioindustries on the other hand are a major energy plus. For one thing they produce more (8) wood from each wood you input. The other thing is that they are solar pannels. During the day they actually produce energy. Worst case put them on a separate power system and only run them during daylight.


As to the original problem isn't there a path to make fuel from hydrogen without coal? Might be too advanced so you haven't researched it yet.

>> Instead of mining coal to crack into heavy oil, mine oil and process it properly.

Bob, did you address my question about coal -> heavy oil cracking vs vanilla coal liquefaction? From the looks of it, you get far more out of the simple cracking process than if you do the liquefaction routine from vanilla. I haven't run the numbers yet, but at a glance it seems like you get lot more with your recipe, potentially eclipsing the vanilla procedure.

Regarding trains, I'm wondering if there's any disadvantage of the Armored trains over the regular. I noticed they are two completely separate tech tranches, so I'm not sure how to tell what to choose. It's clear the armored trains are less vulnerable to biters. Though I do wonder if they still get gummed up by plowing into a large herd of behemoths. The other trains are progressively faster and higher capacity, up to Mk3 but the armored trains (up to Mk2) I don't know how how their stats compare to the regular line. If armored trains are superior on all counts, then doesn't that shortcut the regular line? Or is this a situation where you basically have to choose speed and capacity over durability?

Top tier equipment is crazy fast!

Experimenting with different configurations for a megabase.
Imagine how much space something like this would take just using vanilla equipment!

thanks guys; I very appreciate your help. Especially the link factorio.rotol.me - a very clean, nice tool.
And because you guys mentioned it, I realized that there is a mod-category "helpers".
Now playing with FNEI. The What is it used for 0.15 doesnt work correctly for me - the "mined from" and "dropped by"
are always empty. But with the FNEI its ok. Tbh, the website > all.

Now I already managed to get plastic; get sulfuric-acid and atm I'm build up my "solarcells" and accumulaters.

Really, thanks for the help! and bob: keep up your awesome work! <3

T2k3 wrote:

aklesey1 wrote:Hi Bobingabout, where we an read changelog for bob's revamp and modules?

yeah, was wondering about that as well

All change logs are on the first post of this topic. They're in a spoiler filter, so you have to click on it to see it.

mrvn wrote:The greenhouses from the greenhouses mod is a energy loss, at least with mk1 boilers and steam engines and no fertilizer. I think the greenhouses, boilers and steam engines even out to zero but you also need some inserters driving you into the red.

They're not supposed to be used as a power source at this stage of the game, they're basically there to get you out of the "I need wood to make electronics" hole that you start in.

mrvn wrote:As to the original problem isn't there a path to make fuel from hydrogen without coal? Might be too advanced so you haven't researched it yet.

You can't make fuel out of ONLY Hydrogen, but there are a few routes to making fuel using Hydrogen. You know about the Coal route already. There's also Hydrazine to make enriched fuel cells, made using Nitrogen. It's literally fuel from Air and Water (Hydrogen from water electrolysis).
Then further down the line you use Hydrazine and something else to make Rocket fuel.

Each step you get more energy from the process.

Quick question: Do bob's boilers in 0.15 work on the assumption that 100% efficiency = vanilla efficiency of a standard boiler? I.e. will one basic bob's boiler only power 1 steam engine due to having a 50% efficiency?

Now that I'm working with all the highest tech stuff in the mod, I have a question related to something I've noticed.





What we've got here is about 2200 ore per minute going in, and 12,000 alloy plates going out. It's because of all the Raw Productivity Mk8 modules. They multiply production at nearly every stage, and the result is that you actually need very little ore to get the final product. I'm just wondering if this is intentional, because the effect is that once you've upgraded all your equipment with top tier stuff, you use barely any ore, relatively speaking, in a megabase. I've been building some 10k SPM layouts with the high-end Bob's equipment, and it's amazing how much you can produce with very little ore.

The result is that you don't need to set up new mines very often at all. The miners themselves can have productivity modules, meaning those ore patches are able to provide an incredible amount of additional material in the late game than at all in the early to mid game. Was this how it was intended to be?

XartaX wrote:Quick question: Do bob's boilers in 0.15 work on the assumption that 100% efficiency = vanilla efficiency of a standard boiler? I.e. will one basic bob's boiler only power 1 steam engine due to having a 50% efficiency?

base game's boiler efficiency is 50%. And no, the efficiency actually only effects how fast it consumes fuel. if you have a 50% boiler vs a 100% boiler, it will consume fuel twice as fast to produce the listed energy output.

Recon777 wrote:The result is that you don't need to set up new mines very often at all. The miners themselves can have productivity modules, meaning those ore patches are able to provide an incredible amount of additional material in the late game than at all in the early to mid game. Was this how it was intended to be?

I've honestly never thought about it before, but you're right, probably shouldn't need productivity after the first phase. But then again, I probably put them on the list because you're allowed to do it with steel.

bobingabout wrote:I've honestly never thought about it before, but you're right, probably shouldn't need productivity after the first phase. But then again, I probably put them on the list because you're allowed to do it with steel.

Another example. You know how batteries go through the lead. Well if you set up all the machines to have 2 Mk8 speed modules and 4 Mk8 productivity modules (in other words not nearly as productive efficient as it could be) here's some interesting stats:

Making 10,300 batteries
Costs 7800 lead plates
Which are made from 3000 lead oxide
Which in turn is made from only 1100 galena.
And that galena is probably only pulling 600 or so from the ground if you put the modules in the miners too.

This just keeps going. You can put more productivity modules in the blue science assemblers, getting probably 15000 or so science packs from that 600 galena subtracted from the ore patch. Because of the sheer number of steps involved in making anything advanced, and the fact that these modules ALL stack, you can see how only very rarely will new ore patches even have to be secured and mined.

bobingabout wrote:

XartaX wrote:Quick question: Do bob's boilers in 0.15 work on the assumption that 100% efficiency = vanilla efficiency of a standard boiler? I.e. will one basic bob's boiler only power 1 steam engine due to having a 50% efficiency?

base game's boiler efficiency is 50%. And no, the efficiency actually only effects how fast it consumes fuel. if you have a 50% boiler vs a 100% boiler, it will consume fuel twice as fast to produce the listed energy output.

But boilers don't have a listed energy output, though?



But do you mean that a boiler will always supply two steam engines no matter it's efficiency?

XartaX wrote:But boilers don't have a listed energy output, though?



But do you mean that a boiler will always supply two steam engines no matter it's efficiency?

I forget the exact mathematics behind it but the 50% efficiency and 3.6mw energy consumption and the 900kw power output of the steam engines is involved. Iirc it's something like 3.6mw of energy consumption at 50% efficiency results in 1.8mw of usable energy. And since steam engines make use of 900kw that means one boiler can support two steam engines.

Alice3173 wrote:

XartaX wrote:But boilers don't have a listed energy output, though?



But do you mean that a boiler will always supply two steam engines no matter it's efficiency?

I forget the exact mathematics behind it but the 50% efficiency and 3.6mw energy consumption and the 900kw power output of the steam engines is involved. Iirc it's something like 3.6mw of energy consumption at 50% efficiency results in 1.8mw of usable energy. And since steam engines make use of 900kw that means one boiler can support two steam engines.

...So a 100% efficiency engine would support 4 engines according to this logic? Now I'm a bit confused

XartaX wrote:...So a 100% efficiency engine would support 4 engines according to this logic? Now I'm a bit confused

If it still has an energy consumption of 3.6mw, yes.

what the game reports isn't the same as what the code says.
The code says it's a 50% efficient boiler that generates 1.8MW of heat power.
1.8 / 0.5 = 1.8 * 2 = 3.6MW.

So the boiler consumes 3.6MW, and gives 1.8MW (50% efficiency) as heat power, which can power 2 steam engines at 900kW each.

If you changed the efficiency to 100%, the change would be that it now only consumes 1.8MW of fuel.