Let's see your clever builds

DOSorDIE · Post by **DOSorDIE** » Fri Jan 22, 2016 10:25 am

I have design a Multismelter for Iron, Cooper, Stone Bricks and Steel ...
Its all in one. You need a signal to limit the steel production.
Works great!
No problem when Output get sucked.

: Big_Smelter_System.jpg (668.79 KiB) Viewed 17561 times

MeduSalem · Post by **MeduSalem** » Sat Jan 23, 2016 2:33 am

DOSorDIE wrote:I have design a Multismelter for Iron, Cooper, Stone Bricks and Steel ...
Its all in one. You need a signal to limit the steel production.
Works great!
No problem when Output get sucked.

Well, looks neat.

A little bit too much space used for my taste because it uses 54 squares for 2 furnaces and it doesn't support beacons efficiently.

It seems to work though as long as the inserters grabing stone from the belt stop after putting 2 or 4 stone into the chest and the inserter inputting from the chest to the furnace only working when there are 2 or 4 stone. The same mechanic basically works for steel as well just that is 5 iron places.

I came up with a similar thing a year ago... I don't remember anymore if I already showed it on the forum or not and I am... too lazy to check:

: Smart Furnace with Belts.jpg (206.95 KiB) Viewed 17500 times

It uses only 45 squares for 2 furnaces and allows for a row of beacons between the furnace rows. That's why I wrote "uses too much space" xD

The loops necessary to bring back the resources that weren't used the first time around aren't implemented on my picture. It was more of a design study back then. But if I would have adapted it then I would have controlled the entire thing with 2 storage systems:

One would have been after the smelting, which would have controlled what items are to be smelted and the amount.
The other would have been before the smelting to control the saturation of the belts leading to the furnaces. The excess resources that didn't make it into a furnace the first time would have been recollected there too so they don't block the belts.

Both the storage systems would have worked in tandem with the smelter banks without hard wiring between them but rather using the wireless logistics system for easier expansion because I wouldn't have bothered connecting 1000 storage chests.

I am speaking of Beacons because I actually calculated in an excel sheet that using Beacons with Speed Module 3's and putting Productiviy Module 3's into the furnaces would be more efficient than using no beacons or modules. Using Efficiency modules can't be beaten anyways but for me they are also a wasting raw resources and cause huge fields of furnaces rather than the compact solution of a furnace pushed by 6-8 beacons each which are also creating additional items out of thin air thanks to productivity modules. I know that they cause a lot of idle energy but with the upcoming power switch that wouldn't be an issue anymore as I would have easily shut down the entire smelter bank depending on demand. Can't beat that efficiency, not even Efficiency modules. Also there is nothing more satisfying than watching a furnace on drugs. The speed at which a furnace smelts ore when pushed by 8 beacons with SM3s is just ridiculous, even with the countereffect of PM3s. It's like 9-10 times the speed of a regular furnace. One needs actually 2-3 fast inserters for Iron/Coppoer ore to keep up with that when grabbing from belts.

And yeah, the wiring is still back from the days when it wasn't possible to connect chests with inserters directly but rather when it had to be done over an electric pole. Nostalgia.

DanGio · Post by **DanGio** » Sun Jan 24, 2016 9:42 pm

Hello ! First time posting something in this subforum, big day for me ! What I propose here is not really "clever", as I didn't find anything unknown by the community, but I put love into it, so why wouldn't I share it ? That's a power plant running on solid fuel. And you know what ? It requires ALL YOUR OIL.

Before I go into explanations, please note, if you don't know it already, that powering your factory via solid fuel is LESS efficient than powering it with coal, because oil processing demands a lot of energy. I made that build because I always play long games which require energy for hours, and I wanted to avoid solar arrows, a "no brainer" solution, as seen on the forum.

So, cons :
- less efficient than coal powering (we'll see later that there's a 5.528 points gap between efficiencies of coal and solid fuel setups, that's quite big)
- much more expensive to build. (we'll also see later that it requires something like 0.8 pumpjack for every MW you want to generate)

Pros :
- much simplier transport belt setup, no need for fast or express ones, not even a single splitter.
- therefore, this build can be expended easily to a create really big power plant.
- once built, this provides energy FOREVER, without needing to regularly find new sources of fuel. You'll need new outposts only if you want to expand the power plant or if you want more Crude Oil for production.
- and as it provides energy forever, you won't get a total blackout because you didn't notice that your coal outpost was dried out...
- did I mention that it provides energy forever ?

So, are you ready to give ALL YOUR OIL ? Here it is, there's 2 blueprints :

one for the train station,

and one for the steam engines.

The blueprint strings are at the end of this post.

How does it work : I place the Station blueprint only once, and the Steam Engines blueprint several times. See the last picture of this post to see how they're placed. Then I send all my Crude Oil to the station (middle track) in cargo wagon filled with barrels. Small pumps with no red wire do the usual job : Crude Oil gets refined, Heavy Oil gets cracked, Light Oil becomes "LO Solid Fuel" for boilers, Petroleum Gas becomes "PG Solid Fuel" for the train station (left track). I'll use that PG Solid Fuel to fill all the locomotives of the train network. Now, small pumps connected with red wire :
- the top one sends Petroleum Gas to become PG Solid Fuel for boilers if PG > LO. Because trains do not consume a lot of fuel, Petroleum Gas tends to stock up, and could block the entire thing. So, if PG > LO, the excess PG becomes Solid Fuel for boilers, and of course, you can see in the "Steam Engines" part of the build that PG Solid Fuel has priority on the belts. As a result, we'll end up with PG tank and LO tank filled up to 2.5k, and a small part (between 0 and one third) of the boilers running on PG Solid Fuel.
- the bottom one sends Crude Oil into the train station (right track) to be filled into barrels if CO > 2k. This excess Crude Oil will feed the factory (plastic, acid, etc...)

To sum up : all the Crude Oil transit in the power plant, fuel it, and the excess crude oil can be picked for another use.

Now, a bit of calculation, because it needs it to work properly :

how many pumpjacks do we need

40 pumpjacks for 100 Steam Engines. Hey, I said ALL YOUR OIL, you knew it would be painful

. Well, consider that these 40 pumpjacks will also probably fill all your needs for Crude Oil into your production line, because there's a lot of factors that generates excess oil : Diesel Locomotives not consuming every Solid Fuel, pumpjacks running at more than 0.1 CO/s, Steam Engines working at less than 100%.

Let's check the build :
10 Steam Engines requires 0.204 Solid Fuel per second. 1 Chemical Plant produce (1/3)*1.25 = 0.416667 Solid Fuel per second.
20 Steam Engines requires 0.777 Crude Oil per second. 1 Refinery gets 2 Crude Oil processed per second.
So, in my build, 1 Chemical Plant for 10 Steam Engines and 1 Refinery for 20 Steam Engines get the job done quite easily. In fact... I could almost redo it with fewer machines. Well, maybe I will someday.

Now, just for fun, I'll try to calculate power efficiency of the setup, compared to coal powered boilers. Let's assume that Diesel Locomotives don't consume fuel at all (so all Petroleum Gas gets into PG Solid Fuel for boilers), because we're only looking at power production. Also, I won't include energy drain...

Solid Fuel setup

Let's sum up : to generate 51MW, I consume 0.67473+0.35343+0,05355+0.5355+2.295 = 3.91221 MW, or 7,671% of the generated energy.

Coal setup :
100 Steam Engines require 51 MJ/sec. 1 coal is 8 MJ. So the setup requires 6.375 Coal per second. 1 Electric Mining Drill produces (3-0.9)*0.5/2 = 0.525 Coal/sec. So we need 6.375/0.525 = 12.143 Drills, which consumes (6.75/0.525)*0.09 = 1.093 MW, or 2.143% of the generated energy.

You can see the difference, coal power is much more efficient. On the other hand, note that filling all the machines of the Solid Fuel setup with Efficiency Modules II would reduce its power consumption to ((3.91221*0.2)/51)*100 = 1.5342% of the generated energy.

Here's the Blueprint strings :

Station

Steam Engines

Oh... if you like it and want to use it, please consider naming the train stops "Asimov Power Plant". I like to give SF authors names to my Factorio train stations, and Asimov got the power station

Conclusion :

a setup with 400 steam engines.

Thank you for reading, see you soon !

DOSorDIE · Post by **DOSorDIE** » Sun Jan 24, 2016 10:53 pm

I think i must explain how it works ...
There is how to build it ... (you need Inserter Item Bonus Stack 2)

: Multismelter Explained.jpg (43.4 KiB) Viewed 17390 times

And it wont stuck or else ...
Its only a good idea to limit the steel production ...

MeduSalem · Post by **MeduSalem** » Sun Jan 24, 2016 11:04 pm

DanGio wrote:- we don't put any speed or productivity module into this build, because we want to get maximum power efficiency.

I strongly recommend you to put SM3's into the Pumpjacks and even boost them with Beacons where "reasonable". It may cause a little more overhead to get the Crude oil, but you get twice as much out of each Pumpjack, if not more, effectively reducing the amount of needed sources.

DanGio wrote:You can see the difference, coal power is much more efficient. On the other hand, note that filling all the machines of the Solid Fuel setup with Efficiency Modules II would reduce its power consumption to ((3.91221*0.2)/51)*100 = 1.5342% of the generated energy.

Don't know if you saw that thread from a while back, it's strongly related to the efficiency of using Solid Fuel:

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/viewtop ... f=8&t=7052

Not using EM2's in such a setup verges almost on madness. No offense intended. xD

I am using Steam Power with Solid Fuel all the time because I just hate how boring (plop down&forget) and cheating (because of no upkeep) the Solar Panels/Accumulators are.

But I would never think about using Solid Fuel without putting EM2's in all of the Refineries and Chemical Plants. It wouldn't be anywhere near to being realistically sustainable, especially not if you need additional oil products for manufacturing stuff.

Here is one of my approaches for a solid fuel power plant from about a year ago (with some "out of date" focus on calculating the oil demand):

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/viewtop ... 540#p79540

An other thing I would suggest is that you should put the Light Oil->Solid Fuel chem plants BEFORE the Petroleum->Solid Fuel Chem plants for the output to the belt. Because when the Light Oil Soild Fuel gets inserted first to the belt it automatically takes priority like it should. The Petroleum Solid Fuel would only get used when Light Oil Solid Fuel isn't sufficient to meet the demand and causes "gaps in the belt". Then, and only then, the gaps would be filled with the Petroleum Solid Fuel.

The way you have it now the Petroleum Solid Fuel enters the belt first, which means it will try using up all Petroleum Solid Fuel first and with it ALL of the Petroleum Gas until there's no Petroleum Gas in the buffer before it is even considering Light Oil Solid Fuel. This introduces an inefficiency factor because the plant is always trying to work on the worse conversion ratio. You might not notice it because you intend to burn all the crude oil anyways, but it's there.

If you would like to increase the amount of excess Petroleum gas for manufacturing stuff then giving priority to the Light Oil Solid Fuel via belt-priority is something you might want to consider. If one is able to avoid burning Petroleum Gas one should do it, at least that's one of my golden rules. That's also why I tend to calculate my Power Plants to be able to run from sole Light Oil nowadays. All of the Refinery Petroleum Gas is available for manufacturing items without causing a performance hit on the power plant. The only case where some Petroleum Solid Fuel is burned is when my entire factory is idle and that's only to gurantee that Refineries don't get stuck with Petroleum Gas. The belt-priority-trick is a real good trick to handle exactly that without the need for any circuit logic.

Sometimes I wish we were able to convert Petroleum Gas back to Light Oil and Light Oil back to Heavy Oil. For Steam Power plants using Solid Fuel that application might actually even be useful, even with the additional overhead. (And no I have no intention on using a mod if there is one)

That put aside I really like your layout DanGio, and I might adapt it with some minor modifications because it looks clean and neat. The common problem I suffer from is just that in all the maps I created I never found a lake with a shore geometry "good enough" to line up all of my steam engines in one location without causing an utter mess with the Water Pipes and Water Pumps. A reason why I really would like to be able to do some little terraforming without having to rely on mods. That's why I favored producing the Solid Fuel in one centralized spot instead to reduce the amount of logistics needed to get the crude oil processed and rather use belts to deliver the finished Solid Fuel to the various Steam Plants located at various lakes.

Mion · Post by **Mion** » Mon Jan 25, 2016 3:21 pm

DOSorDIE wrote:
teenusa wrote: I've worked a Little bit with jackilope's design and with time I improved some Things.:
-I made it a Little bit smaller in lengh and width
-I made it easyier to expand
-I mad three different Versions (Normal, "faster", kompatibl with more modules)
-I tried realy hard to reduce the amounts of belts with making the undergound Belts longer
-I made it Cheaper with using less Fast inserters
-Now the Design has some buffer Chests
-Now it is fully modular
-I added pumps so you can build more modules in one row
-I tried to make it cheaper
-I tried to Balance the stuff on the Belts even
What a mess

»Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add,
but when there is no longer anything to take away.«

Keep it simple!
So i would make it like this:
1 Side
Red 1 Side.png
2 Side
Red 2 Side.png

What program do you use to draw this?

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/downloa ... hp?id=7096
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/downloa ... hp?id=7097

DOSorDIE · Post by **DOSorDIE** » Mon Jan 25, 2016 3:45 pm

Mion wrote: What program do you use to draw this?

Microsoft Visio 2010

DanGio · Post by **DanGio** » Tue Jan 26, 2016 10:47 am

Cool ! Thank You MeduSalem for replying.

Efficiency Modules : I wanted to propose a build that is "open", or "free". I mean that I didn't want to say "you have to fill all Refineries and Chemical Plants with 2 EM's II", to avoid people feeling that this setup is too expensive. Of course, when I'm using it, I often fill it with EM'sII if I can, but if I can't, it still works : 93% power efficiency is "ok", it just needs a bigger setup.

Speed Modules into PumpJacks : I thought 1st that EM II would be the best, but it is right that reducing by half the oil well that you need to find is a really good thing. I end up using SM3.

PG Fuel has priority over LO Fuel : In fact that's exactly what I intended to do. Remember that there's a pump with red wire which sends PG into Solid Fuel for boilers only if PG>LO. The thing is I consider this station to be isolated of the rest of the factory, to keep freedom of placement. So I have assumed that I can't "export" the Petroleum Gas, I need to get rid of it. So Locomotive Fuel at first. I forgot about Sulfur, which doesn't need any new ressources (we already got water and petroleum), so I could add some Sulfur processing chemical plant somewhere, and a new track to load it into trains. But anyway, if the factory consumes not enough Sulfur, I need to get rid of this extra Petroleum, so it has priority on the belts. If I invert LO Solid Fuel and PG Solid Fuel priorities, the result would be in fact exactly the same, except that LO Storage Tank would be always empty while PG Storage Tank would be always full, it's just a difference in buffers.

BTW, I found the 1st bottleneck : I put 900 Steam Engines, and saw that the one pump for Crude Oil isn't enough. I made it 2 pumps, and it works better.

I'll do the new efficiency calculation with SM3 in pumpjacks and EM3 in the rest later

vanatteveldt · Post by **vanatteveldt** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 11:07 am

There were some earlier "smelt it where you mine it" threads, with designs to interleave miners and smelters. These were aimed at post-green science, i.e. using medium poles.

I just started a new game and didn't want to make a traditional smelter line, so I used underground belts to allow small poles to be used.

Also, I wanted to smelt steel "in place" as well, so I built the steel smelting at the edge of the field with a fairly compact design:

smelt it where you mine it

On researching medium poles, the poles in the bottom can be replaced easily. Also, with stone furnaces the mines are working at 50% efficiency, but I don't really care as mines are pretty cheap, and it immediately sets you up to double the production once you get advanced material processing:

upgraded with steel tech

(note that I intentionally left a gap between the two steel 'units' in order to make it easier to get to the oil later...)

I tried to get a more compact design for the steel (ie without a gap between the two iron mines), but I couldn't really think of one without outputting steel to the bottom, so comments welcome!

DaveMcW · Post by **DaveMcW** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 12:39 pm

Fully tileable steel mining/smelting.

vanatteveldt · Post by **vanatteveldt** » Wed Feb 03, 2016 3:35 pm

Heh, clever

And I guess you can side-load the coal+steel belt onto a underground exit to easily separate the two.

(Now all I need is to find a new coal deposit...)

DanGio · Post by **DanGio** » Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:11 am

Nice ! Plus, with the upcoming circuit update, it seems that spacing your drills without overlapping of drilling areas will be useful. Less ore/sec, but ability to read amount of ore remaining more precisely... I think. I'll try your build as soon as 0.13 comes out !

vanatteveldt · Post by **vanatteveldt** » Thu Feb 04, 2016 9:25 pm

Thanks to DaveMcW, proud to present the productive mining outpost "Iron N1":

Iron, steel, and trains

~~(in retrospect I should have started the iron mines at the northern edge of the ore field, so it is easier to expand the steel operations... but that will have to wait until I get blueprints )~~

Edit: updated screenshot to png and also the new design, with 4 rows of steel smelters and 2 rows of iron smelters. You might need to download the image to see the right hand side (http://i.amcat.nl/iron+steel.png), apparently the width of spoilers is capped?

Station is removed from the screenshot, but included below for backwards compatibility.

Completely boring train station

HammerPiano · Post by **HammerPiano** » Sun Feb 07, 2016 1:52 pm

Nice design!
Look awesome

Bart · Post by **Bart** » Sun Feb 07, 2016 5:09 pm

vanatteveldt wrote:Thanks to DaveMcW, proud to present the productive mining outpost "Iron N1":

Iron, steel, and trains

(it continues a bit to the right, download and right-click + show image in new tab to see the extremely innovative coal unloading)
(in retrospect I should have started the iron mines at the northern edge of the ore field, so it is easier to expand the steel operations... but that will have to wait until I get blueprints )

Due to terrible jpg-compression I have no idea what I'm looking at / what I'm supposed to see...

vanatteveldt · Post by **vanatteveldt** » Mon Feb 08, 2016 5:23 pm

Bart wrote:Due to terrible jpg-compression I have no idea what I'm looking at / what I'm supposed to see...

Post updated!

Jackalope_Gaming · Post by **Jackalope_Gaming** » Thu Feb 18, 2016 7:40 am

Hm, that definitely is a clever way to combine mining and smelting. However, keep in mind it's one electric miner to two stone furnaces, or one electric miner to one steel furnace. That setup would have full throughput for the miners if it had steel furnaces, but it only has half because of the stone furnaces.

vanatteveldt · Post by **vanatteveldt** » Thu Feb 18, 2016 10:08 am

Jackielope wrote:Hm, that definitely is a clever way to combine mining and smelting. However, keep in mind it's one electric miner to two stone furnaces, or one electric miner to one steel furnace. That setup would have full throughput for the miners if it had steel furnaces, but it only has half because of the stone furnaces.

I'm pretty sure the only reason DaveMcW used stone furnaces is because I started by presenting it as an early game (pre-steel) solution. In my later screenshot I use steel smelters. The nice thing about the stone->steel transition is that they are the same size, so it's a drop-in upgrade. (It's annoying that the recipe for a steel furnace doesn't consume a stone furnace like many other upgrade paths do (e.g. belts, assembly, inserters). On the other hand none of the steam -> electric upgrades do, so maybe there is some sort of bigger design decsion).

A second advantage of coal-fired smelting is that you can easily create energy-independent outposts, and don't need to plant big poles everywhere (unless you depend on laser turrets, of course..)

apriori · Post by **apriori** » Wed Feb 24, 2016 10:58 am

My favourite topic is smelting

Classic scalable setting

Scalable setting for boxing

Neotix · Post by **Neotix** » Fri Feb 26, 2016 8:28 am

It can be more compact
https://gyazo.com/cee9ca4e4f3e0d0b350dc4c49a8fc673

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