Factorio Forums

do you decide belts are way too much of a hassle?



I guess one more belt item would fit easily (the other lane of the plastic), but beyond that it's getting tricky

Once i had researched drone tech.

I researched drones long ago, decided I wanted to see how far I could get without first

Robots ruin the game. The logistical fun of creating a factory with mechanical arms and belts moving massive amounts of material, sorting and storing items is ended when all you have to do is put down 2 chests, robots and a port. Robots need to be penalized, otherwise, engaging in belt tangles doesn't make sense. Yet, figuring out the belt tangle is the fun.

In this playthrough it looks like I'm headed for a tangle that would deeply honour the flying spaghetti monster.

I'll admit, when I designed most of these recipes, I had realistic construction methods more in mind than ease to ferry around with belts.

On that note, I havn't actually built a fully automated production system for my electronics without drones yet, I've come close, but then get to the stage where I carry something from one factory to another by hand, just to get the items in production, then finish it off later by using drones.

Unfortunately, my time is limited, and I'm spending a lot more of it modding factorio, rather than playing it.


Though, you are forgetting that drones already are penalized.... Belts do not cost power, Inserters don't really count to the formula, because you have them in both systems, but the Roboports have not only a reasonable power drain for the roboport, but also the drones need recharging too. so the penalty is that it uses power.


*Goes back to modding more Roboport things* (or that's what I'll be working on when I'm modding next)

bobingabout wrote:I'll admit, when I designed most of these recipes, I had realistic construction methods more in mind than ease to ferry around with belts.

I realize that, I wasn't complaining So far I like what you're doing and very much prefer it over DyTech's over-the-top approach. Very much looking forward to your ideas for warfare.

I finished my green electronics last night (forgot the name, the Processing Unit equivalent) using just belts. Only used them for manual crafting of some compression chests though, haven't been feeding them anywhere yet. I'm afraid any further belt-based development will require quite extensive refactoring of the factory though, especially when I move into modules Mostly notably, on the input side I'll need to improve things a alot. Right now (using my combined special-ores resource) I have one incoming belt with a load of smart inserters next to it feeding into chests. That won't do for long term...

If there's any interest, I'll post some more pictures when I get home tonight.

i would be interested in seeing your design actually, I don't think mine is really worth showing, because I was basically like... okay, there's a patch of Galena here, stick a mining drill on it, feed that into a furnace, etc... there's a pond, put an electrolyser there, there's some tin, more furnace there... and they were close enough together that it turned into one big mess producing silicon wafers, ferric chloride and solder. it was fully autoamated, I had to put wood in one end, but it isn't even finished yet.

I won't claim that my base layout is anywhere near well organised But here is a Factorio Maps tour:
http://www.boogieman.eu/FactorioMaps/Fa ... -20141111/

I don't know what to say, other than "Me gusta!" aka "I like it!"

I wish I could produce something half this good. I have huge problems with analysis paralysis and end up taking days to do anything.

Thanks.

Don't think though that all this came to pass through careful planning, most of it ended up this way entirely by accident Also, this game is about 20 hours in and I have yet to even begin work on module production. Right now I'm in urgent need of oil though, the few wells I had inside the base have run out, so I started converting some of the coal in the base into heavy oil to at least keep my plastic production going. There's quite a few juicy wells a bit south of the coal operation, so I just finished chasing off the residents and building some railway track there (and then it was way past bedtime, as always when playing Factorio)

DerivePi wrote:Robots ruin the game. The logistical fun of creating a factory with mechanical arms and belts moving massive amounts of material, sorting and storing items is ended when all you have to do is put down 2 chests, robots and a port. Robots need to be penalized, otherwise, engaging in belt tangles doesn't make sense. Yet, figuring out the belt tangle is the fun.

Yet robots have a HUGE drawback, since they cannot carry items as fast as belts, they need a lot of resources to do so.
Second, robots have a power requirement that's pretty big.
Third, robots fail to transport items through a large distances, you always need belts or trains in the end for that, or you'll end up with a very inefficient system.

Although I understand your anger against robots, not everyone sees as you see, that they have no drawback. Most players like to get things done, and robots allows just that.

Robots are great for small things that require lots and lots of different parts to craft.

cpy wrote:Robots are great for small things that require lots and lots of different parts to craft.

Yeah, some people were complaing that my more complex recipes with 6+ ingredients are impossible to automate without log bots. They are actually possible, but such a nightmare of a puzzle I wouldn't even try, other than to prove a point that it can be done.
but what of mine requires more than 4 ingredients? Mostly the high end stuff, Modules above level 4, or merged modules, some of the factories above steel level, though I don't think any require more than 7, and even more than 6 is very rare. Even my T4 electronics only requires the etched board, solder, integrated electroincs, and CPUs, which is 4, for something of that level you could easilly justify 5, or 6 components.


Another annoying thing I ran into recently was a stack size limitation. Inesrters can pick up a stack of up to 5 items when transfering from a box to a factory for example, what if the stack size is 5, such as a roboport? it picks up 5 roboports and triesb to dump them in the factory, that already has 1 in there (because it tries to stock for 2 runs), the internal stack updates from 1 to 5, and your inserter is left holding one item it can't drop, stalling production. I had to increase roboport stack size from 5 to 10 to solve this issue, though technically if you had one inserter only for the roboports, and another for everything else, it would work. You wouldn't actually have this issue with belts though, since belts can only carry 1 item per stack, because there are no stacks when dropped in the world.