Friday Facts #276 - Belt item spacing & Script rendering

[Mike5000]

That said, do you bother to use red, or at least blue, belts as expressways to feed yellow belt assembly machine lines, using splitters to move stuff onto and off of the higher tier belts?

I typically use cost-effective red buses. Most of my assembler machine lines are yellow. There's one place - local steel smelting for low density structures - where I tend to use blue smelter lanes fed from the red iron main bus.

[5thHorseman]

Why did you guys use 8 lights for each belt instead of 1?

At a guess, I'd say the lights are "Are there more than 0?" "Are there more than 1?" "Are there more than 2?" and "Are there more than 3?"

If there was only one light, all you'd know is if there are more than 3. Which is all you probably want to know, but hey this game's mantra is NOT "All I really need is this little bit so why bother with the rest?"

[steinio]

Why did you guys use 8 lights for each belt instead of 1?

It's not 8 but 2x4 - 4 for each side of the belt.
I interpret the lights as the amount of items on the side.
The lamps are probably programmed to shine with items = 2, 4, 6, 8.

That's why the 0.16 lamp flickers because it recives 7 or 8 inconsistently.

I'm also missing some description of the pictures.

[Light]

As someone who also creates perfect ratio designs, I'm actually not that upset about the change whatsoever.

Having to redesign everything may seem like a major pain in the ass, but revisiting old blueprints and updating them with some potential design improvements just means doing more of what made me love the game in the first place. Striving for perfection in all things.

[jphill4life]

As someone who also creates perfect ratio designs, I'm actually not that upset about the change whatsoever.

Having to redesign everything may seem like a major pain in the ass, but revisiting old blueprints and updating them with some potential design improvements just means doing more of what made me love the game in the first place. Striving for perfection in all things.

I'm looking forward to remaking blueprints actually. I got in the habit of pulling from others, which is fine, but it became very copy/paste. This gives a perfect excuse to bring some of that joy back with creating something from scratch. Plus, everyone likes to do these perfect ratios and it made all the belts look empty. I like having phat stacks on my belts. Then I immediately know if something is actually under-producing.

[H8UL]

There’s a mod for that. There’s another mod for five new tiers of belts that are two to six times as fast as a blue belt, though these belts can be pulled from directly.

That said, do you bother to use red, or at least blue, belts as expressways to feed yellow belt assembly machine lines, using splitters to move stuff onto and off of the higher tier belts? If you’re not doing that already, why would you want to have to do it? If you are doing it, hows it working out for you in the areas that you’d benefit from feeding the machines with higher tier throughput?

I’ve never seen anyone take two yellow belt stone furnace columns and feed one red belt of plates. I have never seen anyone take three red belt steel furnace columns and feed two blue belts of plate. Both of those are possible as the game currently works, yet people are more likely to just have one column per belt, with enough furnaces to fill the belt with Plates. Only allowing you to merge onto/off of higher tier belts isn’t really necessary. Things work fine as they are.

Coincidentally, I've been playing Cities: Skylines recently and it's very important to have street hierarchy. Which is sort of the same concept as you describe, where low-traffic routes merge/split with higher traffic routes.

Having always preferred to use all 3 belt tiers (economcal, pretty colours), I might do my next base in the way you describe.

Belt hiearchy!

[Serenity]

I have never seen anyone take three red belt steel furnace columns and feed two blue belts of plate.

This can be useful if your plate main bus only has 4 belts and you need to fit more materials. The length of a furnace column to fill a blue belt is unreasonably large without beacons. It's easier to just fit more 48 furnace arrays

[Matthias_Wlkp]

IRL for high throughput of bulk items over short distances we use pallets on rollers. As well as realism it'd have the advantage of still having an open belt animation and seeing what's "on" the pallet (really just an inventory with alt).

Optionally there could be the logistics challenge of packing/decanting the pallet, or pallet wrapping machines, which are kinda cool.

Or just simply direct insertion.

Cars on belts basically already do act like pallets with direct insertion, so technically it'd just be a quality of life/cosmetic version of something belts already do. But it'd look way more sensible. Cars on belts are ingenious, but I don't think many players can bring themselves to do it. As long as it's balanced vs trains I'd be well up for it.

But does that give any advantage over a train? How would that be different?

[Serenity]

But does that give any advantage over a train? How would that be different?

Trains take up more space for the rail track and especially the stations

[PrimeFactorio]

I personally like the change of transport belts moving at an integer rate with a fixed number of items for a full belt.

This comment sparked an idea for me:

Dear Devs

What have thou done?!?
I fear you're on a really dangerous way. Even though my brain really likes the idea of 8 Pixels a lot more than 9, i fear you're breaking the game more than you think.
When i started playing factorio i quickly realized that there are different ways to build a production line:

Quick and dirty: f*ck ratios, i need it NOW!!!
Advanced: ok, i need about this many assemblers to compress a belt
Overengineered: so i spent additional 200 belt, 2 beacons and 4 Stack filter inserters to increase this assemblers throughput by another 4.78%, this just took me about 2 hours to figure out. Lets make a blueprint!

What i want to say:
By dampening the ratios to fit to each other you might kill the need for the last level.
The better everything fits to each other, the less effort it is to get it perfect.
This sounds nice first but i really think it's the charm of the game, that you never really get it perfect but get closer the more effort you put in.

A single change should not be that bad but i warn you not to slowly change this game into a clicker-game!!!

Maybe what would be good would be to set some things (like transport belts) to nice integer numbers or neat ratios. And other things (such as recipes) to wackier ratios.

At first glance, that might sound weird but bear with me. Recipes could be tweaked so that there are multiple ratios close to the ideal that get closer as the build would get larger/more advanced.

You could make it so that an ideal ratio for something like pumps:boilers is 17:100 (I'm just throwing numbers out for an example). Then there would be a level of progression built in as people increase their bases size and steam requirements. A build could start at 2:5, then move to 3:20, then 9:50 then 17:100. Each level would get closer and closer to the optimum build and could lead to multiple different arrangements that each player could come up with to minimize space usage.

If the numbers are picked especially carefully, there could be multiple pathways to the ideal and each one might have strengths and weaknesses such as upgradability vs space savings.

Belts and Inserter would probably be best left at nice ratios because otherwise optimal builds could that would likely turn into more of a headache than anything.

[Matthias_Wlkp]

But does that give any advantage over a train? How would that be different?

Trains take up more space for the rail track and especially the stations

You still need a track or a conveyor for the pallets (very similar to tracks) and the pallets themselves are nothing more than a vessel, like the train cars. You also need to circulate pallets, like trains.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of pallet handling (I quote IRL projects like that at work), but in Factorio, I just don't see that as different enough to trains.

One alternative would be to make pallets like you do barreling, but then you will compress the pallet to the size of individual entity (the same happens with in-game vehicles) - I think I even saw a mod for that. Doing it that way doesn't appeal to me either... Unless you could have variable belt item spacing on the conveyor (just looking a way to get back on topic...)

[H8UL]

But does that give any advantage over a train? How would that be different?

Trains take up more space for the rail track and especially the stations

You still need a track or a conveyor for the pallets (very similar to tracks) and the pallets themselves are nothing more than a vessel, like the train cars. You also need to circulate pallets, like trains.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of pallet handling (I quote IRL projects like that at work), but in Factorio, I just don't see that as different enough to trains.

One alternative would be to make pallets like you do barreling, but then you will compress the pallet to the size of individual entity (the same happens with in-game vehicles) - I think I even saw a mod for that. Doing it that way doesn't appeal to me either... Unless you could have variable belt item spacing on the conveyor (just looking a way to get back on topic...)

Well, I'd expect that the belts would just be the three belts we already got, no need for more tiers in vanilla. Since the point is to circumvent the need to speed up belts to increase throughput (buff conveyors).

Belts have splitters and undergrounds. Pallets would move like cars on a belt, except maybe smaller collision box. Belts are different enough from trains already.

I mean literally just make a car prototype that looks like a pallet and that you can't enter as a vehicle. Tune inventory size for balance. Done.

There are pallet mods already, I wonder if there's a mod that does it this way? I'm tempted to make it if not as a proof of concept.

[Unknow0059]

Why did you guys use 8 lights for each belt instead of 1?

It's not 8 but 2x4 - 4 for each side of the belt.
I interpret the lights as the amount of items on the side.
The lamps are probably programmed to shine with items = 2, 4, 6, 8.

That's why the 0.16 lamp flickers because it recives 7 or 8 inconsistently.

I'm also missing some description of the pictures.

Huh. I didn't know circuit could read separate sides of a belt.

[ThaPear]

It can only read separate sides when both sides hold a different item.

[EntroperZero]

Can I also propose modifying the heat exchanger to heat steam to 515 C? So that it makes 100 steam per second instead of 103.whatever, and turbines can still consume 60 steam per second, but produce 6 MW instead of 5.82, and also make nice 5:3 ratios with exchangers instead of 97:60?

I would appreciate both of these changes.
Thanks for the FFF, looking forward to see what this buff will do to change my setups.
The sprite rendering was something that I'd always hoped would be released, and now it's here!

I was secretly hoping for a release date this week. Oh well, we'll see next week ^^

The belt change is pure genius. Integers for speed AND spacing AND throughput. Sometimes best ideas are the most simple ones.

About the possible furnace buff, whatever you do please don't forget to test beaconed setups. But...

Can I also propose modifying the heat exchanger to heat steam to 515 C? So that it makes 100 steam per second instead of 103.whatever, and turbines can still consume 60 steam per second, but produce 6 MW instead of 5.82, and also make nice 5:3 ratios with exchangers instead of 97:60?

Rounder steam ratios sounds appealing.

Hey guys, I went ahead and made a mod to try out this change: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Fahrenheit959

If you're too impatient for 0.17, or if the devs in their infinite wisdom decide not to incorporate this change, you can try it out anyway.

[Zanthra]

Is it not 256 units (pixels) per tile? The slowest speed a belt functions at currently is 0.00390625 or 1/256, and the throughput is 1.666... That means that the current 0.03125 or 1/32 for yellow belts is already 8 units per tick, and belt spacing is 72 units. Not that I would disagree with reducing the spacing to 64 units, but is there something I am missing here?

I hope that with 0.17 that belt speeds can still go down to 1/256 as I make use of this to get accurate speed scaling for high refresh rates along with other speed changes and game speed adjustment. Right now 120hz is 1/64 belt speeed, 160hz is 3/256 belt speed, and 240hz is 1/128 belt speed, and match close to 120, 165 and 240hz of HFR displays.

Looking at it some more and reading the FFF again I think I understand. The 32 pixels refers to the 32 animation frames of the belts. So in order to have an object move in sync with the belt animation, it has to move in a multiple of 1/32 tile increments. I was confused initially since I thought it was referring to the minimum belt speed, which is different (but is also a power of 2 per tile).