Request for better recepie production information

[doxsroxs]

Hi

I have found that most issues I have with recepies and setting up a new production chain is related to understanding how and where a certain material/product is produced.

A huge improvement would be if all recepies where available in the crafting menu (on the right when pressing e), even if they are not hand craftable. Today they are not and I find myself placing chemical plants and all sorts of facilities just looking for a material. That is a huge time drain that is ultimately frustrating for a beginner when setting up a complex production chain.

The second part of this issue is that many materials/products dont state where they are produced. This is another large contributing factor creating unnecessary frustration.
If it would be clearly stated what facility is used to produce a recepie it would save huge amounts of time. This is stated for some, but not all recepies.

The above is extra frustrating when what you are looking for is a byproduct and hard to find since it is sortof hidden in another recepie and you end up going through all your production facilities without finding the recepie.

[TzwenxD]

Hey there!
First of all, i know that feeling! my first bob's game is now on 23h i guess, and i did not even see the rocket in science tree

I', not in game right now, but im pretty sure you can watch all reciepts in your logistics order, and filter inserter should show a lot in there options

for your second part, i believe, when nothing is shown, you can produce it only in normal assembling machines 1-6
all kind of electronic parts for circuts are able to be produced in the electronic assembler
chemical smelters are used for non metal + metal, and the other one (i dont know the english name, in german its Mischmetallofen) is for multiple metals

you will get a feeling for this, but sometimes still build the wrong thing.

hope i could help you at least a little

ps: you will get Sulfur dioxide in lead smelting

[doxsroxs]

Thanks for the tips, actually this is not a major problem any more since I have played a bit further.

Also, today when I reviewed the materials tab today I noticed that most of them indicated where they where made, this was not the case a while back.
So I guess it has been updated without me knowing it.

That only leaves a few items without production building designated. And the issue of how to make it clearer regarding byproducts

[Ratzap]

One of these days I'll finish the spreadsheet I'm making. I like to be able to list by ingredient so I can optimise belt layout. Like everything using basic circuits down this line.

[eformo]

I design a Bob's factory very differently from a vanilla factory. Bob makes me give up on spaghetti, and I end up grouping by zones to help minimize flight times for bots (though once I've got the Logistics Bot 4 fully upgraded, that's a moot point!).

I end up with a huge zone for assembly machines, which can be rather boring. But then I have the large area devoted to gas production (getting the production limiting down on is not easy, or else you just add on arbitrarily large numbers of storage chests) liquids, and the blends in between. I end up with distinct builds that can be easily blueprinted and reproduced to enable scaling up the factory with relative ease.

[bobingabout]

If I had more time to play the game, I'd try and get a full factory working with belts, just because.

I used to have a file that listed what was made where, and every item, recipe, technology and entity added by the mod... but then the mod got too big for me to want to keep track of it all, and the file got outdated as things changed over time, so I just removed it from the mod. (not that people actually look in the mod folder any more now that you don't have to extract the archive)
But, yeah, Most products will tell you where they are produced, if they don't, then usually it's because they can be made by hand, and if that is the case, an assembling machine.

On that note of what is made where though... there is a significant difference in the layout of the bob's intermediates tab between the crafting menu, and the item menu (used by filters, and requesters etc), the item menu is arranged by what type of item it is, EG a chemical powder, solid, or fluid, a resource, metal plate, alloy... in the crafting menu, items are instead listed (where possible) in order of what crafts them, so if you look down the list, there'll be 3 lines for furnace... Furnace, Chemical furnace, and Mixing furnace. Without checking, I'm not entirely sure of the order, but that's what I tried to do anyway. Some other things like Batteries will be on a general intermediates line, and things like bearings, electronics etc have their own line (and are simply organised the same as the items menu).

Hopefully, that helps clear some things up.

[Ratzap]

I build in several phases. The first base round the starting area is "organic" to put it politely but I get all green tech researched there. Then I use the output of that to build the railheads, furnaces etc of a new, actually planned base. Bobs builds best in modules based on circuit or metal tech (we did do a fully bussed, belt only type factory once as MP but it was super wide and very messy) leaving buffer boxes everywhere for logistics. Because it doesn't require earlier models in later ones (mostly) modules works well. Dytech always uses previous items in the next one and it's a whole different level of awkward fun.

On the recipes note, we're supposed to be a community. Is there no spreadsheet or flowchart nerd out there that wants to go down as the man/girl/pronoun of choice that tamed Bobs?

[jcranmer]

I did build a large document for the production steps and how to segment into different areas, but it's already out of date.

Building a main bus with these mods is insanity. All the metal products alone come out to around 40-ish items on the bus, plus you have 5 kinds of electronic boards and both gears and bearings that probably ask to be bussed. The alternatives I've considered are a tiered main-bus design, where each tier (defined by which electronic board it uses) gets its own main bus and items are shipped off via a smart factory network between tiers, or some sort of rail network-based bus.

The hard part with putting this stuff in a single spreadsheet is that the information is just way too large (there's something like 700-1000 recipes at play), and there's just enough inconsistency to make generalization hard (most notably, what pipes are used in various tiers).

[bobingabout]

Plus there's also the fact that I sometimes change recipes of entities at what could be called a whim. Adding an item here, removing one there, changing quantities etc... It's rare, but occasionally it does happen.

I do try to document these changes in the change log, but it becomes awkward keeping a database up to date, which is why I gave up.

[Daid]

I just threw together this, maybe it helps:
http://daid.eu/~daid/factorio/

It's rough and unfinished, and currently uses all of bob's mods enabled. The data used is generated directly from the game files. So it is quite easy to update.
You can click on any object to see what is used to create that object and what it can be used for. It does not yet show which factories can be used to run the recipe.
It accounts for technologies, so anything that cannot be researched is also not available as items, this removes the loaders and some other odds and ends that would otherwise show up.

I was thinking of adding a mod selection, so you can select exactly what mod combination you want to view.

I made it because I couldn't see if I needed a lot of something, or just a bit. For example, ceramic ball bearings are only used for bots. And sodium-hydroxide is a huge waste product right now, which is starting to pile up. cobalt plates seem quite useless, while cobalt oxide is an important ingredient for science 4...

[bobingabout]

cobalt plates seem quite useless

Cobalt Plates are used in the Cobalt steel recipe, and that's about it. Cobalt steel is also an under utilised material, I think it's only used by some of the things in the bobmining mod.

[Daid]

cobalt plates seem quite useless

Cobalt Plates are used in the Cobalt steel recipe, and that's about it. Cobalt steel is also an under utilised material, I think it's only used by some of the things in the bobmining mod.

Cobalt steel is only used for the axe and a heavy armor. Which are both pretty useless IMHO. As the armor isn't a power armor, and the axe is harder to make then the titanium one and less strong.

(The rest of the mod is really cool! So see it as constructive critisism!)

[Nexela]

Re Cobalt armor

This is also a pain because to get cobalt oxide from copper it requires one of the higher tier furnace machines and typically by this point you already have titanium production going.


Sodium Hydroxide, Cobalt (in general), and now sulfur/sulfur dioxide. Really need some additional uses.

Such a pain to switch my refineries from dioxide production to regular production because dioxide doesn't get used fast enough. (this is my fault though for not balancing the refineries )

[jcranmer]

I just threw together this, maybe it helps:
http://daid.eu/~daid/factorio/

It's rough and unfinished, and currently uses all of bob's mods enabled. The data used is generated directly from the game files. So it is quite easy to update.
You can click on any object to see what is used to create that object and what it can be used for. It does not yet show which factories can be used to run the recipe.
It accounts for technologies, so anything that cannot be researched is also not available as items, this removes the loaders and some other odds and ends that would otherwise show up.

I wrote some code that does basically all this, and it's on Github here: https://github.com/jcranmer/factorio-tools. Current iteration also includes which machines may make the recipes and which technology(s) unlock it (and some localization of names, but actually computing l10n(item/recipe) is surprisingly annoying). All of the conversion from the game Lua files to the requisite JSON format is written in Python, but once the JSON files and the images are served, all the actual logic is in the HTML and JS files. Since the files work by reading $HOME/.factorio/mods/mod-list.json, it's not particularly amenable to hosting anywhere, and I'm somewhat nervous about the IP regulations about mass-extracting the icons for static hosting possibilities.

I was thinking of adding a mod selection, so you can select exactly what mod combination you want to view.

It shouldn't be hard to have it extract from mods on the mod server directly, there is a direct set of APIs for querying the server directly.

[Daid]

and I'm somewhat nervous about the IP regulations about mass-extracting the icons for static hosting possibilities.

I'm not. I do strip the final raw data json from stuff that I do not need, so I host less data. And I only copy the icons, nothing else.

http://daid.eu/~daid/factorio/

I noticed that my game wasn't on the latest version, so I just updated it, and added the new bob's vehicle equipement mod.
I've also added that it shows which tech unlocks a recipe, and which ammo is used by which weapons (the warfare mod adds quite some ammo which I wasn't sure how to use)
Also fixed some sorting bugs, and improved some other minor things.

[ukezi]

you probably want to take a look at this http://factorio.rotol.me/pack/bobmods-f13/ it's a greate tool to get the productions rates right.