Factorio Forums

TL;DR

It would be very helpful if machines listed the items per second throughput information for all of their inputs and outputs.

What ?

In either the sidebar you get when mousing over a machine or somewhere in the machine info window you get when clicking on the machine it would be very useful to have for each of the inputs and outputs how many will be produced / consumed per second if it's fully supplied.
This is similar in principle to the throughput info on the belts.
These should be the all in numbers including, number produced / consumed by the recipe, recipe time, machine speed, the speed and productivity impacts of any modules and beacons.

Why ?

These numbers are fundamental to working out good ratios of machines to each other or to belts.
How many red circuit factories can I feed from my copper cable factory?
With this info you could put one of each down, see that for my current build the cable factory can output 7.5 per second and the a circuit factory needs 0.2625 per second so the answer is 28.
And yellow belts already say they are 13.3 per second so we're all good there as well.

Without this info you have to work it out every time, all the time, with spreadsheets even.
Cable is 2 per run, 0.5 seconds per run, and I have it in a speed boosted lvl 3 assembler so... 2 / 0.5 * 1.875 = 7.5 per second.
Red circuits are 1 per run, 6 seconds per run, I have them in speed and productivity boosted lvl 3 assemblers so... 1 / 6 * 1.125 * 1.4 = 0.2625
I couldn't even begin to count the number of times I've messed this up.

Incidentally the inspiration for this was watching Xterminator mess it up in his latest series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3igiUF8xeqk

P.S. I see now that the numbers above are wrong, I cause I messed it up again :/

TL;DR: Toloma never liked math class .

Anyway - I see how it could be useful in some cases, but I don't think it's quite as needed as you seem to think. For example, level 1 assembler has a speed of 0.15, gears have a crafting time of 0.5, so if it takes twice as long then you will get a gear every second. And you don't even need to go quite that complex - if you're using the same type of assembly machine throughout that build, then you don't need to multiply the speed. For example, a piercing rounds magazine requires 1 regular magazine. Piercing rounds takes 3 seconds to craft, while regular take 1, so you can easily decide that you have a ration of 3:1 assemblers piercing rounds to normal. You don't need to consider what speed your assemblers are crafting at. Obviously this can get much more complex, and I've never had much of a problem with math, so I see how it could be useful, but personally I don't need it.

@Jap2.0:
I'm eager to see how you do all that math in a mixed setup though. Chemplants are 1.25, furnaces are 2.0, i usually keep some Mk2 (0.75) assemblers even during transition to Mk3 (1.25). And then beacons add random tidbits. And then productivity modules mess up the whole thing even more. And then enter: mods! So... having the pre-calculated per-second numbers ready to be read in the assembler GUI so i can concentrate on the math after that? In these times of GUI-rewrite FFF's i say:

+2

I'm not sure, in some ways I would find this useful in other ways it breaks the puzzle aspect by just giving the numbers.

right now I don't worry too much about perfect setups if it's obvious I do accurate ratios if it's not I overkill the inputs.

Yes there are people who want everything perfect and no waste but I see that as a waste of effort, spend 20 seconds doing the math to be perfect on every ratio, after 60 recipes it's 20 minutes of play time I could have added for the sake of a few assemblers, belts and inserters used that are instead lying around unused in chests.

If this were say a Rubik cube having the numbers in the tool tip are kind of like having a step by step guide to solving it in front of you, yes it's easier but there's zero reward in finishing it because it was just identify situation do the things in the manual.

Like I say useful but might in effect ruin the game/puzzle because the answers are prescribed rather than have to be figured out.

eradicator wrote:@Jap2.0:
I'm eager to see how you do all that math in a mixed setup though. Chemplants are 1.25, furnaces are 2.0, i usually keep some Mk2 (0.75) assemblers even during transition to Mk3 (1.25). And then beacons add random tidbits. And then productivity modules mess up the whole thing even more. And then enter: mods! So... having the pre-calculated per-second numbers ready to be read in the assembler GUI so i can concentrate on the math after that? In these times of GUI-rewrite FFF's i say:

+2

Umm... I guess there are a few things you could do:

• 1. Spreadsheets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets galore!
  2. Use a calculator.
  3. Cry a river, build a bridge, and get over it.
  4. Make a mod
  5. Do all the math in your head anyways
  6. Suggest it to the developers in the middle of a GUI reewrite... wait...
  7. Whenever you see a bottleneck, build more.
  8. Magic.
  9. Copy blueprints from the forum

I don't think it should be visible by default, but if the devs want to add it, maybe when you open the assembler and hover over the recipe, the tooltip popup could show the items/s info in brackets.

Jap2.0 wrote:Umm... I guess there are a few things you could do:

1. Uhm,..
2. Erm,..
3. I'd rather,...
4. Wait? I'll write that down for later.
5. I could do all the math in your head :evilgrin:.
6. Yess! Perfect. Why didn't i think of that.
7. When the bottle is necked it's already half empty though. :sadface:
8. Second best option.
9. How rude.

Just to be clear, i wasn't complaining that i absolutely need this. I just wanted to say that i think it's a useful idea and i don't think that "doing the math" is what makes the puzzle so interesting. Or that some numbers in a gui somewhere would remove a majority of the math that needs to be done. There's still belts, tubez, serters, etcpp that need to be considered. Oh and hey. Belts recently started to tell you how fast they are too. And nobody complained.

p.s.: It's basically almost easter. So i've hidden some sarcasm in this post for you to find

Very much +1.

Though if there was an option to switch between items/second and items/minute that would be even better.

+1 too.
I thing compelling the player to continuously do the same math (but with different numbers) has no gameplay value, and is not really part of the "puzzle".

Am I missing something here? The crafting speed after accounting for all modifiers -- beacons, modules, research, whatnot -- is already shown, isn't it? The input rate is crafting speed / recipe time * ingredient items and the output rate is crafting speed / recipe time * productivity multiplier * result items, all of those are shown already.

quyxkh wrote:Am I missing something here? The crafting speed after accounting for all modifiers -- beacons, modules, research, whatnot -- is already shown, isn't it? The input rate is crafting speed / recipe time * ingredient items and the output rate is crafting speed / recipe time * productivity multiplier * result items, all of those are shown already.

Yup and you get some intuition of all these things after a few hundred hours of working out perfect ratios too. Like I say I think it's part of the solution to the puzzle having the results just handed to you, there's prediction/anticipation lost by just having the numbers handed to you. If it were added I'd use it but if it weren't I wouldn't consider it a loss.

OK You have an electric mining drill on coal. How much coal per second does it produce, knowing you have 10th productivity researched, and you have stuffed your drill with level 3 prod modules ?

My initial instinct would say underestimate at 0.4ish coal/sec and I'd use that to guess 100 ish to fill a blue belt because a little overkill never hurts.

Productivity research is 2% boost per level with no speed cost
prod 3 modules are 10% productivity for a speed reduction of 15% each
Base speed is 0.5ish coal per second (from instinct)
0.5 * 0.55 * 1.50 =0.415
A little more than I thought 97/98 miners to fill a blue belt, I'm still happy with a little over kill.

Actual formula is: Productivity boost * (Mining power - Mining hardness) * Mining speed / Mining time = Production rate (in resource/sec)
1.5*(3-0.9)*(0.5*0.55)/2=0.433125
93/94 needed to fill a blue belt, not even 10% out I'm really happy with that guess

Instinct saved me 5 minutes of looking up formulas and using a calculator for the cost of a fraction of a blue belt's output from an ore field (right now) that will be returned later when the field begins to deplete probably with more mining bonuses, long term the module, miner, belt and powerpole cost doesn't factor into it for me.

JohnyDL wrote: Actual formula is: Productivity boost * (Mining power - Mining hardness) * Mining speed / Mining time = Production rate (in resource/sec)
1.5*(3-0.9)*(0.5*0.55)/2=0.433125

This is exactly what I'm talking about : there is no puzzle in applying a formula again and again and again. Because your calculations should be redone with stone, and with uranium (and if you have mods, there can be any number of ressource with different hardness and mining time).

Once you know the algorithm there's no real puzzle to Rubik cubes I consider the puzzle aspects of these numbers to be discovering an adequate formula not applying an existing formula.

Instinct and having played the game for 2500 hours told me ~0.4 I hadn't ever looked up the exact formula because to me it was never necessary. But it giving me the answer to the formula from the wiki is exactly the same amount of puzzle ruining to me as looking up the formula on the wiki. Having to discover that for yourself is the puzzle for me at least.

Koub wrote:applying a formula again and again and again.

To me it seems there's a point to not showing it: there's no need to apply that formula even once. Until you're into a an engineering-and-planning effort that's going to take a spreadsheet, an eyeball metric along the lines of "if the outpost buffers aren't full, build another outpost" is not just enough, it's by far the best use of your play time. It's difficult for me to even imagine the kind of construction planning you'd need to be doing to make that not work well. Anybody who _wants_ to calculate the minimum number of miners necessary to meet some exactly-prespecified resource need is already voluntarily putting in vastly more than the paltry few minutes needed to do a handful of once-for-all calculations. Coal, iron and copper baselines are 0.525/s/miner, uranium's half that, stone's (3-0.4)/4 = 0.65, all multiplied by bonuses the game already shows you for the price of a mouseover. I can enjoy getting all OCD on things, I was very happy when the power-out warnings stopped cluttering the maps because I like shutting off even inserter drain for factory sections I don't need, and shutting off unneeded beacon drain is Not Small. But mining outpost expense? That's not worth any effort budgeting. Mining's a ploppable blueprint. Trying to get more precise than "enough/not enough yet" is a trap I think the game does very well to steer players away from.

Well if you are playing something like Bobs + Angels where to make circuits you need to make 6 other things, that you probably don't want to on your bus, then it would be very useful to be able to open an assembler for each recipe to check that they are making enough to feed the next set of assemblers in the production chain. Yes you can calculate it, either in your head or with a calculator or spreadsheet, or use a mod like bottleneck, or just eyeball it, but being able to check input and output/sec on the assembler's recipe tooltip in game would be convenient.

+1
I don't think doing the math is part of the fun.

I have a friend who "can't play Factorio" (he bought it but won't play it anymore) because he's that kind of guy. He wants to optimise everything, and since he knows he'll have to calculate everything from the ground up, he's bored before it happens.

It wouldn't need to be anything more than the number of item per minute IF the entity is fully fed too. (could show numbers of part "consumed" too) No need to keep track of anything. I also think that a number simply added the info already displayed wouldn't be too much added. Could even be an option you can turn off. (if you really enjoy doing all that math by yourself)

Not to bring it up but that friend enjoys Satisfactory because they give him the numbers. o,.o'

I'm still playing WAY more Factorio than anything, but it would be a very good addition I think.

Years later I start another play through and googling for this feature brings me back here I don't suppose there's a mod somewhere?

tolomea wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 2:10 pm Years later I start another play through and googling for this feature brings me back here :roll: I don't suppose there's a mod somewhere?

I've never used it myself, but this mod claims it does. For me personally Factory Planner has made the knowledge of what individual assemblers do irrelevant.