Friday Facts #222 - Christmas avalanche

[doppelEben]

What about nerfing standard train car storage too? It always struck me as odd that most trains in Factorio only have 1 or maybe 2 cars. Real life trains can have 100+ cars easily! Making the player have longer trains matches better what a train should be, IMO. Right now they're sorta like semi-trailer trucks on tracks.

I use 8-wagon trains, but going higher has diminishing returns 'cause it gets more difficult. IMO, long trains are rare for three reasons:

• Factory section too small. (player can fix this )
• Out of good options for station/track design
• Penalty for using locomotives in both directions

Could be make the view of trainstation even more complex. like a train with 10 wagons; and a station only 1 wagon wide; with settings on the train that he fills up the first one; then start and place secon wagon on station to fill up and ff
and maybe small wagons aswell, 1/2 odr 1/3 of the current size; or large ones. more variation would be possible

[ManaUser]

Regarding compressing inserters, here's a random Idea, what if it was a research? That way people who miss the crazy stuff you need to do to compress belts without it, would still get to play that way for a certain stage of the game, or indefinitely if they want to forgo researching that as a voluntary challenge.

[Triaxx2]

I find large trains are only useful for hauling ore because of it's small stack size. And even then it's only double the size of the plate trains. (2-4 and 1-2)Though I did end up with a 3<8<3 hauling iron from a bunch of far distant deposits.

[TurboJetXII]

I hope barrels don't get the hammer too much! A fluid capacity of only 100 would be difficult to deal with. Barrels are more difficult to work with than fluid wagons because you have to setup the empty barrel return so they should be more powerful. My cargo wagons are split half and half for water barrels/empty barrels. If capacity was only 100 then I would only get 20k for half a wagon.

How about barrels are 200 capacity? Also, do fluid wagons need to be 25k? How about 50k capacity?

[SeigneurAo]

Fluid wagon and barrels balancing

[kovarex]

I hope barrels don't get the hammer too much! A fluid capacity of only 100 would be difficult to deal with. Barrels are more difficult to work with than fluid wagons because you have to setup the empty barrel return so they should be more powerful. My cargo wagons are split half and half for water barrels/empty barrels. If capacity was only 100 then I would only get 20k for half a wagon.

How about barrels are 200 capacity? Also, do fluid wagons need to be 25k? How about 50k capacity?

Barrels are going to be 50.

[Bilka]

Barrels are going to be 50.

I still hope you'll consider the suggestions I posted on the commit, since they seemed to be rather well received.

I understand that the intention was to reduce the cargo wagon capacity for fluids. The drastically reduced capacity of barrels now however means that barrels provide much less usefulness in general. Their throughput using belts and bots was literally devided by 5. One barrel now never holds enough fluid for more than 2 recipes of anything. This means that there are no longer gameplay reasons to use barrels. The only things that speak for using barrels are: The wonky fluid system and its huge performance impact. The latter is basically negated by the need for 5 times as many belts and bots than before. Furthermore, both things should not be reasons to use one mean of transport over another from the players' perspective, because they are not gameplay reasons, they are ways so circumvent technical limitations.

Because of this I propose that instead of lowering general barrel capacity, you should lower barrel stack size. Setting the stack size to 2 will have the desired effect on transport using cargo wagons. It will however keep transport by belts untouched, and only slightly affect transport using bots. This would mean that there would still be an advantage to dealing with barrel logistics.

[Tricorius]

Barrels are going to be 50.

Ugh!

[Malachite]

Barrels are going to be 50.

Nope, not OK with this. Would much rather see the stack size change proposed above, please.

[Zavian]

Well if you consider 10 fluid to be roughly equivalent to 1 plate, then even with barrels holding 50 fluid, one bot could move the equivalent of 20 plates, and a belt could move the equivalent of 200 plates/sec.

[kovarex]

Well if you consider 10 fluid to be roughly equivalent to 1 plate, then even with barrels holding 50 fluid, one bot could move the equivalent of 20 plates, and a belt could move the equivalent of 200 plates/sec.

Yes, that is the point behind that.

[Lubricus]

About fluid handling balance! I think fluid handling is less satisfying to deal with than when you see stuff moving around on belts and inserters moving. The reason is probably just the lack of animations and information on what is going on. So it is good that fluid handling is less important in the game.

[Koub]

I guess this (and alike) will need some serious refactoring

[Zavian]

kovarex: Are you going to also consider rebalancing pumps? Atm a pump can pump 12000 fluid per second, provided it is connected directly to a tank/tanker at both ends. If players can still use 3 pumps with a fluid tanker at (I'm guessing) 25k, then they can empty a fluid tanker in less than 1 sec. Add a couple of piece of pipe and throughput drops to around 3000 (or 1200 for around 17 piece of pipe). Personally I think rebalancing pumps to around 1800-2400 fluid/sec would be reasonable.

[agmike]

kovarex: Are you going to also consider rebalancing pumps? Atm a pump can pump 12000 fluid per second, provided it is connected directly to a tank/tanker at both ends. If players can still use 3 pumps with a fluid tanker at (I'm guessing) 25k, then they can empty a fluid tanker in less than 1 sec. Add a couple of piece of pipe and throughput drops to around 3000 (or 1200 for around 17 piece of pipe). Personally I think rebalancing pumps to around 1800-2400 fluid/sec would be reasonable.

Pumps and pipes are used not only for fluid wagon and oil processing. Reducing pump flow rate would affect power plants, nuclear power especially. Would be fine if only fluid wagon to pipe/tank flow is changed though.

[zebediah49]

I'm going to jump in on the question of inserters and belts as well, and ask for a bit of a compromise solution:

Inserters, and side-loading belts moreso, should have a threshold for compression. As of this update, quite a few of the designs I was using stopped working, because the yellow->red->blue speed ratio seems to be slightly less than 1:2:3.

For example, a fully compressed yellow belt transitioning to a red belt should have enough space to add items. However, I've found that it often ends up so that -- despite what looks like item-wide gaps between items -- no new items can be loaded on. Similarly, attempting to turn a yellow belt into a single lane of a red belt used to just consist of routing the yellow belt into the side. Since the two yellow lanes have (had?) the same throughput as a red lane, they would cleanly merge together. Now, they don't -- instead, the upstream lane fills the belt at slightly more than 50% capacity, and the downstream lane is unable to put any items on.

Hence, I lobby for a threshold -- say, 90% for inserters, 80% for sideloading belts -- where if there's a gap that large, the item will be inserted triggering some belt compression. This still means that creating a perfectly compressed belt will requires cleverness and/or splitters -- but will seriously help prevent pathological situations in which item gaps are just slightly too small, and (in the worst case, which I have seen in person), a red belt has identical performance to a yellow.

[BHakluyt]

You Factororio guys rock! Thanks for releasing v16 before the holidays. It feels like I have awakened from hibernation after playing the past week straight 24/7 almost. Since final release of the game didn't happen as anticipated earlier this year, I hope there is still hope for the spidertron.

You guys keep awfully quiet about it. Its such a unique thing please add it. Even if animation looks a little funky. I was thinking if its difficult to animate stretching legs or if legs look like they are stretching, you could incorperate pieces thats totaly clean and silver, like hydraulic pistons.

The new cliffs and terrain is so awesome, I now actually find it interesting to fly around with the chopper and do some sight seeing or biter hunting. Also adding choppers and boats would be neat because of large water masses possible in the new mapgen. Like a simple craftable canoe from the start and then something late game which use white science packs. Have more things require white packs by the way. Transport requests just for the player, not mass moving of items.

Also I miss having a fuel guage on cars, tanks, choppers etc. It would be nice if the total fuel can be displayed in a guage next to where the battery is shown for the roboport. And please add next to that an on/off toggle switch for the personal roboport and exo suit. A small square button showing the item and being greyed out when deactivated.

Please keep the FFFs coming, they continue to be the highlight for the week. Merry Christmas to you all and I wish you guys a prosperous, Factorio filled new year.

[rldml]

kovarex: Are you going to also consider rebalancing pumps? Atm a pump can pump 12000 fluid per second, provided it is connected directly to a tank/tanker at both ends. If players can still use 3 pumps with a fluid tanker at (I'm guessing) 25k, then they can empty a fluid tanker in less than 1 sec. Add a couple of piece of pipe and throughput drops to around 3000 (or 1200 for around 17 piece of pipe). Personally I think rebalancing pumps to around 1800-2400 fluid/sec would be reasonable.

This problem can easily fixed with another change of the fluid waggon: just let them connect only through one pump.

edit: And please don't forget, you can connect more than one pump to a standard tank also, so i really don't see the problem here

[rldml]

So, there's two things to consider: First, it's a lot faster to unload from a tanker, than from a cargo wagon. Not only do you have both inserters and belts moving to deal with, but then there's the time the factory takes to empty and eject the barrel.

Nonsense.

I can unload with 12 inserter per waggon, 12 barrels per load, meaing 144*250 liters per second practically (euqlling 36k/s versons 36k per sec for three pumps).

It just takes a littel more space.

You have to measure up the time until your load of fluid is in your pipe-network. If you unload the barrels with stack inserters you have just that: barrels on a belt. You can't use them until they`re emptied into a tank or found its way to your fluid-using-industry in some way.

If you use the pipe waggon you`ve max 12k per pump, but directly in your fluid-using-industry or tank or whatever.

Greetings, Ronny

[walterwoj]

I like the updates and 16.x is awesome, but I would protest AGAINST removing the fluid wagon separation mechanics. I have found many, many uses for the divided tankers. Most importantly they are very compact! I do think they are too big though. I think a full undivided tanker should be the same size as a storage tank. Either just make the tanker smaller in capacity or make the tanker into 3 tankers that take up the same space as the originals (much harder i think). Thanks!