Tips, Designs, & Tricks

[The Lone Wolfling]

Have you tried using accumulators with boilers? They work quite well covering most sudden jumps in energy consumption in my bases.

Unless you are using solar power, it's generally cheaper just to add more boilers / steam engines.

[roman566]

Have you tried using accumulators with boilers? They work quite well covering most sudden jumps in energy consumption in my bases.

Unless you are using solar power, it's generally cheaper just to add more boilers / steam engines.

Not really, 400 accumulators does not cost that much and can cover for about 60-100 boilers for short amount of time, like for example couple hundred turrets firing at once. Then if you decide to switch to solar you already have some tiny amount of accumulators ready. Win-win.

[The Lone Wolfling]

Except that, assuming you are using steam power, 235 steam engines can supply the same amount of power as those 400 accumulators while using only copper and iron, and can do so continuously. (For the record: the standard 1 pump / 10 steam engines / 13 boilers arrangement produces 5.1MW for a total of 5 + 10*20 + 13*1 = 218 iron, 3 copper, and 13* 5 = 65 stone, for a total of ~42.75 iron / MW, ~0.59 copper / MW, and ~12.75 stone / MW. Whereas a bank of 48 accumulators + substation can release power at 14.4MW and uses 48*9 + 20 + 10*5 = 502 iron, 5*48 + 25 = 265 copper, and 15*48 = 720 petroleum gas, for a total of 34.86 iron / MW, 18.4 copper / MW, and 50 petroleum gas / MW. So boilers work out to ~1/2 again the amount of iron, but pretty much negligible on the copper front, and doesn't use crude oil at all. Again, unless you're going solar, it's generally not worth it to put in accumulators, as it's easier just to add more boilers / engines)

[roman566]

That's... nice, I guess. Did you take into account the fact that a player with a base requiring 200+ steam engines just to power turrets will simply not care about paying more iron etc to build stuff? At that point in the game it's 'how easy and fast is to set up 400 accumulators' vs how 'easy and fast is to set up 200+ boilers'. In that scenario, accumulators win hands down.

[Skellitor301]

That's kinda the point of the accumulators in the scenario that was originally given. The accumulators would act as a buffer of power so when your lasers went off, it would not shut down your factory because you had the spare power stored up. By the time the accumulators ran dry the attack would likely be over, unless of course it was a big wave of Biters, then there might be a bit of a slowdown in your factory from a lack of power.

[Skellitor301]

Updated:

• Added XKnights Splitter Item Sorter
• Minor edit to text that was bothering me

[Koub]

Btw regarding your before-last post, you can always use tanks as hot water accumulator to "store" some energy, instead of accus, if you're full steam powered.

[Skellitor301]

True, but who wants to limit themselves when one can use both? If one or the other isn't up to snuff with keeping lasers powered during a bitter wave, it's not a bad idea to keep both at the ready

[Targa]

I think I've come up with something close to the ideal furnace setup, but it's too difficult to take screenshots, so I'll just describe it. Someone else is welcome to make a screenshot and share it (it's not as if an idea can be copyrighted anyway).

Many furnace setups have two Belt lines, in between two rows of Stone Furnaces or Steel Furnaces, one Belt carrying Iron Ore (or Copper Ore, or Iron Plates, or Stone) and the other Belt carrying Coal (or some other fuel). Then each Furnace has both a Long Inserter and a Normal Inserter to use to take from each belt.

But I think that's suboptimal, since the ideal ratio of ore-to-Coal isn't 1:1.

Instead, I think you get a better furnace if you have one Belt be pure ore, e.g. pure Iron Ore, and the other Belt be half Coal and half ore, e.g. Iron Ore, but otherwise the same setup. This way, you get 1/4 Coal and 3/4 Ore, meaning you can get pretty good throughput.

It might be possible that 1/6 Coal and 5/6 Ore is even better. To get that, you must have 3 Belt lanes, and now the middle one must be half Coal and half Ore, with the 2 outer ones being pure Ore. But my setup can probably already keep 24 Steel Furnaces fully fed, so... I'm not sure that 5-to-1 isn't overkill, even though some early tests I did in October or November last year actually suggests to me that close to 5 Iron Plate are made for each 1 Coal (and each 5 Iron Ore) furnaced.

A steel furnace can smelt 25 iron ore for each 1 piece of coal it burns, so the correct ratio would be 25:1 in this particular instance. In practice, quite impossible to set up, I would think. However, if you want maximum buffering of ore for peak usage times, this screenshot is a good place to start:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =646117252

That setup won't work with an electric furnace, of course, since they're 3 tiles and the underground belts won't span far enough. In a copper plate line, I suppose you could even add ore to the inside of the belt that holds the copper plate (couldn't do that with iron, because the inserter may grab iron plate if there's no ore on the belt, mucking up your line by adding steel in. Another way you could do it if you really wanted a HUGE buffer is to add an inserter pulling ore off the line, putting it in a chest, then another inserter grabbing from the chest to put in the furnace (or 4...lol). Of course, all this at the expense of using more space, more resources, and more electricity to run the inserters.

[Skellitor301]

One of the things to also keep in mind for efficient furnace layouts is not just speed, but also the size of the footprint it takes, and the resources it takes to make it. Compact and fast are usually the better ways to go because you can use the resources you would've used for the thicker layout for something else, not to mention the energy it would use to power everything.

[Dysan27]

On the furnace discussion, here's what I use

Click to see image

Furnace Setup

Factorio furnace setup.jpg (273.14 KiB) Viewed 10509 times

Everyone else I've seen says they have the ore and coal down the center, but I ask why have the coal in the center? when you upgrade it will be going away, so have the ore and plate in the center so that doesn't change.

It does take a little bit of work to upgade to Electric furnaces but not much, remove all the small electric poles from between the furnaces, and replace with a single line of medium poles next to the center belts. Then remove the furnaces and outside inserters and plop down your electric furnaces.

[Phribos]

On the furnace discussion, here's what I use

Click to see image

Factorio furnace setup.jpg

Everyone else I've seen says they have the ore and coal down the center, but I ask why have the coal in the center? when you upgrade it will be going away, so have the ore and plate in the center so that doesn't change.

Good point, thanks for this idea!

[Skellitor301]

Updated:

• Added Targa's max buffer speed smeltery setup
• Added Dysan27's upgrade friendly furnace setup
• a couple minor grammatical and placement fixes

[Aru]

I detailed my steam engine backup here, to turn on steam engines when power gets low. I made it with big laser turret arrays in mind. It has a 0.20s activation delay triggered by even a slight power drop, and a configurable minimum run duration.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6008&start=320#p148688

I am gradually developing a personal repertoire of blueprint strings, for smelting setups, power, and I have one for all research.

[Neotix]

This can be useful to balance buffers (chest, tanks) equalize distribution etc.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23125

[Skellitor301]

Updated:

• Added Aru's backup steam power build using combinators
• Added Neotix's buffer balancer build using combinators

[Aru]

Keep in mind, part of the mechanics behind this limit the sorting to two items, any more and the sorting will not work quite like it's meant to.

You can sort any number of items with splitters. To sort out n item types, you need a minimum (n-1)*2 splitters.

[Aru]

Everyone else I've seen says they have the ore and coal down the center, but I ask why have the coal in the center? when you upgrade it will be going away, so have the ore and plate in the center so that doesn't change.

I have two designs with steel furnaces, both designed to accept a saturated yellow belt of ore, and put out saturated yellow belt of plates. My logic says that there are only two ways to get a fully compressed belt: transition from a faster belt, or merge with a splitter. (edit: It looks like there *might* be something fishy with underground belts that lets you compress.) So, that's why it's nice to have the outputs on the sides, because you can merge them. But in the end, my transition design that has plates in the middle is cheaper, and 1 tile smaller in each dimension. Because, it doesn't need red inserters, and it doesn't need the furnaces to be spaced to cover inserters with small poles. Instead, this transition design has a setup of splitters and underground belts at the entrance (included in the size), and requires higher research for 2 red belt pieces. But, the research can be done later, it still gets ~85% compression without the last 4 furnaces.

My electric furnace design has outputs on the sides, however, and merges for compression.

[Aru]

I have a compact steam setup too, I put it in Patric's thread. It's all small poles, yellow belts, yellow splitters, yellow inserters, and I think slightly smaller, but lacks the tanks on the end.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8854&start=10#p155195

[Skellitor301]

Keep in mind, part of the mechanics behind this limit the sorting to two items, any more and the sorting will not work quite like it's meant to.

You can sort any number of items with splitters. To sort out n item types, you need a minimum (n-1)*2 splitters.

Really? because from what I've seen in the splitter sorters it works on a "everything that isn't the item running in the filter can go through" sort of deal. Which isn't really a good way to filter out 3 or more items.