Development and Discussion

[mrvn]

My new base based on 1 to N (1 saph => iron, copper, slag) sorting is going real smooth, but I have reached the point where I am can no longer handle the copper ore I'm getting. There is nothing to do with it.

I don't want to switch to N to 1 sorting, because this is the whole point of the base, but what to do with all that copper. Is there some late game copper drain?

Or should I switch to saph+jiv only for Iron and keep 1 to N for the rest of the base?

First you have to stretch your iron and waste your copper then. Process the iron to make it more efficient but don't process copper. Next you can add manganese or silicon to the iron to make it go even further.

Second you can use crystalization using slag, crushed stone and geodes to make ore as needed.

Thirdly consider the new ferrous ore. It gives you iron and manganese which you can turn into iron plates to make up any shortfalls in iron without any waste products. No more iron problems.

[Frost]

So is Molten Concrete the Angel's intended way of getting concrete? Like with algae for wood instead of greenhouses?

And I suppose this is your primary quartz dump, together with steel smelting?

Sure appears that way. But why dump? Just sort as needed.

[mrvn]

So is Molten Concrete the Angel's intended way of getting concrete? Like with algae for wood instead of greenhouses?

And I suppose this is your primary quartz dump, together with steel smelting?

Sure appears that way. But why dump? Just sort as needed.

Dump as in use up all the quartz you get as side product from sorting but don't need.

[DjangoFett]

in v0.16, im on that stony road currently and just got all 4 of the main ores (red, brown, light and dark blue) to the full Purified crystals sorting stage, and soon to set up full geode processing and crystallisation. (with basic maths and at first glance, it looks like processing geodes into stone and dust, is better than melting them with sulfuric acid, since the crushed stone can become mineral sludge and still create specific ores as prefered, but time will tell).

Thanks for this hint. I have a base with all 6 ores (Angels and Bobs) and the latest sorting stages. Because uranium ore can only be sorted using the new violet catalyst which uses a lot of the mineral catalyst I was runing out of crushed stone to produce mineral sludge. I was looking for ways to get more slag or crushed stone. Since recently I had a direct "geode to crystal sludge" setup where I had a liquifier per geode type. I now switched to a stone crusher per geode type to create crytal dust which is converted to crystal slurry to create the crystal catalyst. The byproduct of this is crushed stone which then feeds the mineral catalyst. Which then gave me uranium ore again. I never thought of this as I had lots and lots of slag and crushed stone from the time before I needed mineral catalysts which was all depleted now that I needed lots of uranium to feed my power plant.

[Zyrconia]

It looks like my woes with using 1 to N sorting and overproduction of unwanted undumpable ores and preference for N to 1 sorting is even in a worse place than I thought: I was playing 0.15. In 0.16 Angel made recipes like "Iron Ore" Sorting more complicated: not only must you research trains and explore to find Jiv and Crot, even base ores require a catalyst now. That means you need to get sulphuric acid started asap, but if you have no slag, it won't help you.

I need to research this more, but It looks like in 0.16 it is not possible to go pure N to 1 until blue science, unless you set up dirty water electrolyzers to get slag and also a setup sulphuric acid. Or go 1 to N.

[Termak]

Why people need so much slag? You can make catalysts from crushed stone.

[TheBreadbird]

Why people need so much slag? You can make catalysts from crushed stone.

Its a way better ratio. 5 slag compared to 25 crushed stone. Its also about compactness, its easier to get 5 of something somewhere than 25. If you have it laying around and, the crushed stone that is, sure turn it into slurry but keep in mind you need it for most tier 1 machines. I usually use the leftover stone I get from crushing the ores to pave my entire factory with concrete.

It looks like my woes with using 1 to N sorting and overproduction of unwanted undumpable ores and preference for N to 1 sorting is even in a worse place than I thought: I was playing 0.15. In 0.16 Angel made recipes like "Iron Ore" Sorting more complicated: not only must you research trains and explore to find Jiv and Crot, even base ores require a catalyst now. That means you need to get sulphuric acid started asap, but if you have no slag, it won't help you.

I need to research this more, but It looks like in 0.16 it is not possible to go pure N to 1 until blue science, unless you set up dirty water electrolyzers to get slag and also a setup sulphuric acid. Or go 1 to N.

If you struggle with sulfuric acid early you can get it from coke production which is what I usually do to get started. Its easy to get the basic ores set up before blue but for everything else you need modules. Why are you reluctant to use the dirty water recipe? Seems like the way to go since you only need coal & sulfuric acid in and get sulfuric waste water + mineral catalysts out, the hydrogen and oxygen you can vent after turning some into purified water for the filtering and your good to go.

[foodfactorio]

the Electrolyser is good in that way for making slag.... i often get more slag than i can use, from 2 dirty electrolyser recipes making slag, hydrogen and oxygen. (i only have 2 liquidisers making slag slurry, 1 using slag which is brought in by robots, and 1 using crushed stone which is belted in, and from a compact point of view, slag is better for robots than carrying 25 crushed stone, even before carrying capacity is increased)

also i now realised that you have way more copper than me (i just have a few chests full of copper ore, ingots and plates so far in this playthrough)

can you help me understand what is meant by N to 1 or 1 to N? is that 1:1?

[Zyrconia]

Why people need so much slag? You can make catalysts from crushed stone.

Crushed stone is a very finite and in much need resource.

In various points of the game you need a ton of it and in other you don't, but you need to handle it for the entire duration of the game. Early game you need tons of it, late game it is a nuisance. But for the first 40 hours I could do with 2-3 times the crushed stone production, so you can't spare it for catalysts. Doing it like so will fail because there isn't enough input.

So I use it in a priority system. First dips go to wooden boards, then to a finite stone and stone brick buffer. Everything else gets dumped to plastic. On top of this plastic you get your petrochem plastic side loaded, so this one gets used first. But when your plastic and plastic buffer gets full, the stone goes to a secondary circuit enabled dump, where it can become landfill or more brick.

Slag is useless and how I used to play, not produced, so you can set up a small isolated section producing slag and voiding byproducts.

[mexmer]

the Electrolyser is good in that way for making slag.... i often get more slag than i can use, from 2 dirty electrolyser recipes making slag, hydrogen and oxygen. (i only have 2 liquidisers making slag slurry, 1 using slag which is brought in by robots, and 1 using crushed stone which is belted in, and from a compact point of view, slag is better for robots than carrying 25 crushed stone, even before carrying capacity is increased)

also i now realised that you have way more copper than me (i just have a few chests full of copper ore, ingots and plates so far in this playthrough)

can you help me understand what is meant by N to 1 or 1 to N? is that 1:1?

you get more slurry from slag, than from crushed stone, so slag is always better, but if you have too much crushed stone and nowhere to dump it ...

mind you can make crushed stone from slag ... but you will loose so much doing so (in terms of efficiency)

[Zyrconia]

can you help me understand what is meant by N to 1 or 1 to N? is that 1:1?

Sure!

We need an official name for these. Angel? Can you name your creation?

The first category of sorting, what I call 1 to N, is sorting where you take 1 input and you get multiple outputs, one of them slag. Example: you take crushed saphirite and sort it to iron, copper and slag. These recipes upgrade, but there is only one input. Next level you take saphirite chunks and get iron, copper, silicon, nickel and slag.

This is what I tried the first time I played with Angel's. It was a total failure and I abandoned the map. Not only couldn't I find ways of manage all the excess ores, but once I reached the flotation cell phase, that was inherently extremely unsatisfying. You needed like 40 flotation cells for what felt like a drip feed of chunks and in the end yous till got a lot of undumpable side ores. I don't like buffers that end up being destroyed or grow infinitely.

Now that would have been it for me and Angel's, but I started using N to 1 recipes and those "saved" the mods for me.

With N to 1 you take multiple inputs, always two ores, and sometimes 1 catalyst and you get one single output. Example: you sort crushed saphirite and jivolite into iron ore. Later, you add a catalyst and get higher rank ores. This is a very satisfying output, with 6/8 buildings saturating a side of a belt.

This is the only way I have ever successfully played Angel's. This approach has advantages: it is more in line with Factorio style, where you have your production stabilize due to backed up lines and you can scale up an individual ore without caring about the others. It also has disadvantages: you have exactly zero slag, you can be crushed stone starved, a full on setup with all ores is larger and much more complex that 1 to N when it comes to ores that you barely need and you are starved for some acids. you are crushed stone starved so you need to electrolyze for slag and you need a thermal water train. When you run out of thermal water, your whole base dies, but thermal water is infinite and plentiful.

Later Angel's Smelting added new recipes to take care of side ores, what I call "mixed metal" smelting. These are fine and fun additions, but if you use N to 1, they are not needed. Iron Ore Sorting, the N to 1 for iron is all you need and is the smallest and less complex one of all, with great output.

But now in 0.16 Angel added catalysts to T1 ores in N to 1 sorting, like iron. This means that you need slag and need sulfuric acid super early game. Like by hour 4-5. Which makes N to 1 less advantageous. And if you switch to 1 to N, you no longer need acid nor early trains.

I guess the two methods are now more balanced. N to 1 was so much better than 1 to N.

The reason I go on about iron all the time is that while Bob's and Angel's add a ton of complexity, the only 3 things you actually need incredible amounts of is iron, plastic and by end game, tungsten. The rest is almost fully ignorable. Wow, I don't have enough aluminium or silver. Let me put down one extra sorter. Done!

But I can't play Factorio without 12 red belts of iron by early mid game. 4 of them go into gears anyway so you are left with 8...

[Termak]

I know you can make all kinds of useful products from crushed stone and i know slag gives more slurry but you get soo much of it and most of the stuff crushed stone is used for is just lowlevel dump (plastic, boards).
As soon as you get oil/gas going you can get much more plastic than you get with huge stone->methanol farm, also you can make syntetic wood for boards from oil.
Angels new bioprocessing is also great way of making near infinite amounts of plastic products, so in the end "only" real need for stone is production science packs.
Also there are the new Angels tree farms and the good old thermal water.
I do ofc pave my base with stone bricks in the beginning but later i usually start to replace it with concrete, which is made with Angels cement process and doesnt need that much of stone.

Acid is crazy easy to make and get early pure iron going and later you can easily stretch it with all that nickel/cobalt/silicon/manganese you start to get extra.
I play with expensive recipes and marathon settings so i know you need tons of iron. I do however mix all types of ore production so i get kinda mix of everything and im used to having to feed the leftover ingots into alloyed iron/titanium production.

[foodfactorio]

you get more slurry from slag, than from crushed stone, so slag is always better, but if you have too much crushed stone and nowhere to dump it ...
mind you can make crushed stone from slag ... but you will loose so much doing so (in terms of efficiency)

thats true mexmer, i wasnt sure what was best at first, so made one of each for the slurry process, but can revisit it but i try to keep 1 chest full of each for later use, as mineralised water is also used by algae and crushed stone works great for making more. (the mineralised water can also become mineral sludge if urgent required, but i try to only make enough to keep the Algae Farms running smoothly for now)

[foodfactorio]

thanks Zyrconia for the explanation. (i think i get it now, as in my mind i can see it as (x+y+z=a) = your n to 1
"Tier 1 Ore Sorting" to "Tier 4 Ore Sorting" seems to make sense for naming. (from Crushed, Chunks, Crystals, and Purified)

Termak its funny, i thought i had lots of it, but in the last few sessions my base ran out of Sulfuric Acid at least 3 times.... usually when i was making lots of Batteries for Accumulators, but also now with several small infinite ore patches having Drills on them, continuously using it up, as well as making crystals.

i think it is mainly because my base seems to always be low on Oxygen, it is like i never have enough of it lol, but often have tons of Amonia, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Chlorines

[Termak]

thanks Zyrconia for the explanation. (i think i get it now, as in my mind i can see it as (x+y+z=a) = your n to 1
"Tier 1 Ore Sorting" to "Tier 4 Ore Sorting" seems to make sense for naming. (from Crushed, Chunks, Crystals, and Purified)

Termak its funny, i thought i had lots of it, but in the last few sessions my base ran out of Sulfuric Acid at least 3 times.... usually when i was making lots of Batteries for Accumulators, but also now with several small infinite ore patches having Drills on them, continuously using it up, as well as making crystals.

i think it is mainly because my base seems to always be low on Oxygen, it is like i never have enough of it lol, but often have tons of Amonia, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Chlorines

Thats what Factorio is, you run out of something, fix the problem, go do something to expand and then notice something else is running low, its endless loop
Just make sure you have flarestacks and overflow valves and controls for your gases so your tanks wont fill up. Ofc you dont want to have them all flaring all the time so you may want to install some circuit controlled pumps. Usually you want oxygen and flare the other stuff but there are situations where you need the other stuff and oxygen backs up instead.

[foodfactorio]

ahh i've only used a few logistic wires so far, and have just been building more and more storage tanks to not flare or waste anything so far
(luckily im also using Yuoki in AngelBobYuoki+ game, so am able to make some 500k underground storage tanks, which the Angel tanks and some PyIndustry tanks flow into...

i keep thinking that i will unlock something later on (or find a way later on) to utilise the gasses that have been building up, and will then be really good at producing other things with it

actually i made a note before that someone said to keep syngas for methane in the late game, and that will use a lot of hydrogen too, but i can probably work some more on balancing the water flows (with saline, and purified water, which also uses hydrogen)..... just 1 more type of Seed to find with angels BioProcessing, and i can post a blueprint of a nice self-sustaining farm setup and crop processing

[Termak]

Theres little point of storing the infinite stuff what you get from air and water (H, N, O, Cl,water) but i do make couple tanks for butane since its yellow science and takes a while since i dont really rush it. Syn/residual is pretty fast to get into since they are just blue science.
Im really loving the farming stuff, i do actually have enough oil/gas around me but i love to try the new stuff, tree arboretums feel bit cheaty though since you can get so easy early plastic from them.

[foodfactorio]

oh ok, i will try not to collect as much if low on materials for those ones.

it is true that you can get some plastic from an Arboretum, but with 1 tree that gives 2 Bio Plastic every production cycle, it only seems to equate to 5 Liquid Plastic (which in the early game, you need 40 Liquid Plastic, before you can make 4 Plastic Bars).... in my current game, Plastic production was even lower than my iron/steel lol (before i upgraded to using Iron Pellets)

i had to wire up 1 Inserter, with a Logistics Provider chest, so that it always kept 2.5k units of yuoki Unicomp, and then whenever any spare unicomp was made and placed there, it got moved into a yuoki Cimota machine, which converted it into about 8 Plastic Bars.... and this only happened about once per minute if i was lucky

so the quick summary is that i dont think an Arboretum with a BioPlastic-producing tree is too powerful at all, and finding them is hard and i really do welcome the fun way to make a bit of extra plastic.... cant wait to unlock more Tech for it, because a low plastic is really slowing down science packs, mostly due to Transistors i believe...but soon i will set up proper oil and coal processing, with creosote cracking too.

[Termak]

You can make methanol from plain wood which turns into propene-> plastic super easily, granted the amounts arent huge but its super easy. Im not far into the game yet since i had to restart the map due to some bugs, but im actually getting plastic for my accumulator batteries currently from just plain logs
Need to set up the petrochem next, and get blue science going, It funny how much the amount of piping increases when going from green to blue science.
But ye you will have some plastic issues until you get yellow science and get the plastic3 with butane going, the new farm stuff helps a lot though with pure bioplastics and getting extra ethylene for plastic2 recipe.

[Light]

Im really loving the farming stuff, i do actually have enough oil/gas around me but i love to try the new stuff, tree arboretums feel bit cheaty though since you can get so easy early plastic from them.

You could always get early plastic from just cutting trees or using algae farms, which are arguably sooner than when arboretums produce reliable quantities of wood. They also lose their value pretty quickly when petrochem takes center stage for high yield plastic, unlike Bob's greenhouses which generate enough wood to remain relevant even for infinite science. (They're insane)

Something that would be nice to see is a comparison on how useful the bioprocessing plastic recipes are to their petrochem counterparts, since it looks like more of a pain in the ass for little to no gain. Especially considering farming is very RNG based and inconsistent whereas oil processing is not. I'd love to hear the experiences of someone who has explored into that.