PyBlock (alpha)

[BlueTemplar]

Phosphate mine and acid production from it is relatively easy to get (at least in 0.16 - rushed iron2-copper2-aluminium2 there - I think that you might only need basic electronics tech outside of that path?).
The longest part of setting it up was the addition of titanium to my list of extracted minerals (though I think that was for one of the Al2 buildings?) - oh, automating it also would require automating ash production, but the Burner also needs titanium !

[Hratt]

Yeah it seems somewhat likely in default settings PyBlock to not have phosphate or rare earth mines around and then you're stuck with following small byproducts to a large scale through the animal rendering haha

Finally got over the finish line for laying out 2 circuit 2 per second though it's still got some pretty serious raw material bottlenecks to tackle after I eat through some buffers.

[Szentigrade]

just updated pymods and now i am missing belts, inserters, boilers, steam engines, power poles, pipes and prob more than i can think of

[kingarthur]

just updated pymods and now i am missing belts, inserters, boilers, steam engines, power poles, pipes and prob more than i can think of

well quick fix is to type

Code: Select all

/c for _,player in pairs(game.players) do
   player.force.reset_recipes()
   player.force.reset_technologies()
   player.force.reset_technology_effects()
end

into the console

otherwise weight a day or so while I deal with a not so great migration script being used by someone

[mrvn]

Hi, I've recently started playing PyBlock and only (already? advanced to green science. Got started with building trains now.

I've noticed a few things though that seem to make no sense or are annoying:

1) All the burner buildings use steam.

They really should be renamed as such. It might also help adding a little steam icon overlay on them, too, to make them look different from the regular buildings. I always have to double check which one I build. I think the sorting is off on a few too, mixing them in between electric buildings while most are grouped together in a burner group.

2) Some burner buildings are as efficient as the electric buildings. Only difference I can see is that pollution for burner buildings is several magnitudes more. Do I care? I haven't seen any aliens yet. So does pollution have any affect at all?

Add to that that steam (60°C) is a waste product that really has no use there is a strong incentive to actually prefer the burner buildings over the much more expensive electrical buildings. I also had problems venting steam but I might have places the gas vent wrong. Can you vent steam or do you have to wait for the cooling towers to get rid of excess? Sorry, I didn't try hard because I quickly had to add boilers to get enough steam to run everything.

3) 60°C steam, seriously?

At 60°C steam turns into water. Rapidly. Under pressure like you need to move any noticeable amount of it that would happen even faster.

Steam engines won't accept 60°C steam (or anything too cold). This makes mixing steam problematic. In reality there is something called wet steam, which is around 100°C. It's called wet because water condenses as you loose some heat so you get water droplets in the steam. 100°C steam should be the coldest you produce.

My suggestion would be to add a new fluid "wet steam" that comes at 100°C. That way cold steam waste can't me mistakenly connected to a steam engine or other entities that need hot steam. Then possibly two recipes:
A) steam + water = wet steam. Sprays water into the steam to increase the volume at the cost of temperature.
B) wet steam + fuel = steam. Uses fuel to heat up the steam to useful temperatures.

Option A would allow boilers to supplement wet steam needed for burner buildings. I think that is required at the start. At least I didn't have enough steam. Option B would allow using wet steam for steam engines with less fuel requirement than boiling cold water. I realize option B somewhat conflicts with the cooling towers.

4) Excessive pollution in burner buildings?

What exactly causes all that pollution in burner buildings? They run on steam. 60° C steam at that. So after use they should vent mildly hot air and water. Hardly something the warrants the magnitudes more pollution. Makes no sense. Also do I even care about pollution?

5) What to do with the burner buildings when switching to electrical?

I think it would be nice if the old buildings could be recycled (get some resources back from dismantling them) or upgraded. The better buildings could even require the burner buildings as the only recipe to build them.

6) Hot stones without fire?

Why isn't there a recipe to heat stones using fuel? The stone furnaces burn fuel and then I magically jump to the hot air recipes and everything is completely fuel free. Seems like too big of a jump. Maybe require fuel to heat the stones for hot air as the first step.

7) Asphalt vs. limestone tiles

From memory asphalt has a walking speed of 140% and limestone tiles a walking speed of 200%. WTF? Shouldn't the more complex asphalt be better?

[otakushowboat]

Hi, I've recently started playing PyBlock and only (already? advanced to green science. Got started with building trains now.

I've noticed a few things though that seem to make no sense or are annoying:


3) 60°C steam, seriously?

At 60°C steam turns into water. Rapidly. Under pressure like you need to move any noticeable amount of it that would happen even faster.

Steam engines won't accept 60°C steam (or anything too cold). This makes mixing steam problematic. In reality there is something called wet steam, which is around 100°C. It's called wet because water condenses as you loose some heat so you get water droplets in the steam. 100°C steam should be the coldest you produce.

My suggestion would be to add a new fluid "wet steam" that comes at 100°C. That way cold steam waste can't me mistakenly connected to a steam engine or other entities that need hot steam. Then possibly two recipes:
A) steam + water = wet steam. Sprays water into the steam to increase the volume at the cost of temperature.
B) wet steam + fuel = steam. Uses fuel to heat up the steam to useful temperatures.

Option A would allow boilers to supplement wet steam needed for burner buildings. I think that is required at the start. At least I didn't have enough steam. Option B would allow using wet steam for steam engines with less fuel requirement than boiling cold water. I realize option B somewhat conflicts with the cooling towers.


6) Hot stones without fire?

Why isn't there a recipe to heat stones using fuel? The stone furnaces burn fuel and then I magically jump to the hot air recipes and everything is completely fuel free. Seems like too big of a jump. Maybe require fuel to heat the stones for hot air as the first step.

7) Asphalt vs. limestone tiles

From memory asphalt has a walking speed of 140% and limestone tiles a walking speed of 200%. WTF? Shouldn't the more complex asphalt be better?

These specific points pertain to the pY suite itself and not specifically PyBlock.

3) For steam at 60 C, the intention, generally, is to use cooling towers to form closed loops of water and steam so that you don't have to keep feeding a bunch of water into the system (combustion mixture production is an example of this, thus why cooling towers tech immediately follows the energy production tech, but there are many others). You may notice that the amount of 60 C steam produced is 1:1 with water as an input in many cases. The cooling tower converts the steam back to water at 1:1. If you feed the water output of the cooling tower(s) back to the machine producing the 60 C steam and fill the loop with water, you can remove the initial water connection entirely and not have to worry about that system "draining" your water anymore.
I do like the idea of wet steam instead of 60 C steam. There's already variations of steam used in fusion energy, so making the steam designed to be cooled back to water a different type of entity from standard steam isn't too much of a stretch.

6) You can make hot stones using standard furnaces already. Just throw a stone brick in a stone furnace. The advanced foundries are electric with the disadvantages of being expensive to build and having a huge footprint.

7) I agree that tiles are incredibly variable in their speed bonuses for their requirements. It seems they're meant more as dumps for excess materials than anything else, especially the asphalt tiles as the gravel/tar recipe is exclusively made with common early game production byproducts. Aluminium tiles are also incredibly easy to make (aluminium plates + solder) and have 210% speed bonus.

[mrvn]

6) You can make hot stones using standard furnaces already. Just throw a stone brick in a stone furnace. The advanced foundries are electric with the disadvantages of being expensive to build and having a huge footprint.

Oh, I think I missed the part about throwing bricks in stone furnaces. Or it was just that I tried the advanced foundry and saw that it needs no fuel.

You basically get hot stone bricks for free. The electric requirement for a advanced foundry is rather small compared to the number of advanced foundry you then power with hot air from it. It's much smaller than what a stone furnaces burns as fuel too, isn't it? Same reason I applied to the huge footprint. I think I have 12 advanced foundry powered by a single regenerative heat exchanger, 3 compressed air pumps and one advanced foundry to heat stone. Including belts and pipe about 1/16th of the smelter size is for heating stone. So not a huge deal to me.

I'm comparing the advanced foundry with the electric furnace in vanilla. The electric furnace is really late game while the advanced foundry is the first advancement for smelting you make. The first improvement to increase yields on ores and all fuel is eliminated. Way before you even get steel furnaces (is that due to pyblock or always in py?). So it seems like a huge jump in capabilities at such an early stage.

So maybe the hot stone recipe for advanced foundries should come later so you are forced to use stone furnaces to heat bricks at the start? Makes it more of a progression. Just a thought.

PS: is there any way to place the extra resources (not the spaceship, the iron rocks I think it is) nearer to the starting position in the mapgen? I see something on the map but it's still even outside my radar coverage. Takes too much landfill to reach so I haven't investigated yet.

[BlueTemplar]

"Burner" building efficiency :
See also my previous discussion about them just a few posts above :
viewtopic.php?p=441214#p441214
(and hot air above that)

[kingarthur]

Hi, I've recently started playing PyBlock and only (already? advanced to green science. Got started with building trains now.

I've noticed a few things though that seem to make no sense or are annoying:

1) All the burner buildings use steam.

They really should be renamed as such. It might also help adding a little steam icon overlay on them, too, to make them look different from the regular buildings. I always have to double check which one I build. I think the sorting is off on a few too, mixing them in between electric buildings while most are grouped together in a burner group.

2) Some burner buildings are as efficient as the electric buildings. Only difference I can see is that pollution for burner buildings is several magnitudes more. Do I care? I haven't seen any aliens yet. So does pollution have any affect at all?

Add to that that steam (60°C) is a waste product that really has no use there is a strong incentive to actually prefer the burner buildings over the much more expensive electrical buildings. I also had problems venting steam but I might have places the gas vent wrong. Can you vent steam or do you have to wait for the cooling towers to get rid of excess? Sorry, I didn't try hard because I quickly had to add boilers to get enough steam to run everything.

3) 60°C steam, seriously?

At 60°C steam turns into water. Rapidly. Under pressure like you need to move any noticeable amount of it that would happen even faster.

Steam engines won't accept 60°C steam (or anything too cold). This makes mixing steam problematic. In reality there is something called wet steam, which is around 100°C. It's called wet because water condenses as you loose some heat so you get water droplets in the steam. 100°C steam should be the coldest you produce.

My suggestion would be to add a new fluid "wet steam" that comes at 100°C. That way cold steam waste can't me mistakenly connected to a steam engine or other entities that need hot steam. Then possibly two recipes:
A) steam + water = wet steam. Sprays water into the steam to increase the volume at the cost of temperature.
B) wet steam + fuel = steam. Uses fuel to heat up the steam to useful temperatures.

Option A would allow boilers to supplement wet steam needed for burner buildings. I think that is required at the start. At least I didn't have enough steam. Option B would allow using wet steam for steam engines with less fuel requirement than boiling cold water. I realize option B somewhat conflicts with the cooling towers.

4) Excessive pollution in burner buildings?

What exactly causes all that pollution in burner buildings? They run on steam. 60° C steam at that. So after use they should vent mildly hot air and water. Hardly something the warrants the magnitudes more pollution. Makes no sense. Also do I even care about pollution?

5) What to do with the burner buildings when switching to electrical?

I think it would be nice if the old buildings could be recycled (get some resources back from dismantling them) or upgraded. The better buildings could even require the burner buildings as the only recipe to build them.

6) Hot stones without fire?

Why isn't there a recipe to heat stones using fuel? The stone furnaces burn fuel and then I magically jump to the hot air recipes and everything is completely fuel free. Seems like too big of a jump. Maybe require fuel to heat the stones for hot air as the first step.

7) Asphalt vs. limestone tiles

From memory asphalt has a walking speed of 140% and limestone tiles a walking speed of 200%. WTF? Shouldn't the more complex asphalt be better?

1. who cares. like seriously its come up a few times and it was a hold over from .16 when they did actually burn fuel. i forgot to update the locale file for them.

2. the burner building was made a way to start the game before unlocking the later buildings. while some are as good as the electric version they have no upgrades and py mods have several ways to make electricly more efficiently than burning things to make steam.

2.b. only way to deal with steam is cool it or vent it with a tailings pond which will vent gas by the way

3. 60c steam is a base pymods thing and i dont feel the need to change it as youve already stated you could use it in the burner buildings or it can be recycled in the cooling towers or vented in the tailings pond.

4. there are no aliens and it doesnt do anything at the moment. itll be used when pyalienlife gets out. and on the why they make pollution at all. base game assemblers make pollution for everything they make. so idk

5. ill probably make so recipes to recycle them and i have plans to possibly develop the none electric powered entity's more and make a bigger variation to them vs electric ones. but as is there is currently nothing really happening with pollution so it wouldn't mean much at all.

6. base pymods issue

7. also base pymods issue. also doesn't asphalt have a higher driving speed vs walking speed or am i mistaking one of the other asphalt tiles from a different mod?

[kingarthur]

PS: is there any way to place the extra resources (not the spaceship, the iron rocks I think it is) nearer to the starting position in the mapgen? I see something on the map but it's still even outside my radar coverage. Takes too much landfill to reach so I haven't investigated yet.

ill take a look they should be popping up in the dark area between the players active coverage at start and the revealed map area at the start.

[BlueTemplar]

For recycling, there's always :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/reverse-factory

[mrvn]

PS: is there any way to place the extra resources (not the spaceship, the iron rocks I think it is) nearer to the starting position in the mapgen? I see something on the map but it's still even outside my radar coverage. Takes too much landfill to reach so I haven't investigated yet.

ill take a look they should be popping up in the dark area between the players active coverage at start and the revealed map area at the start.

Check with small and large starting aread too. I think I picked large area because that keeps aliens further away in normal games. But also spreads out ores in the starting area because there simply is more area. And ores outside the starting area obviously start much further out too. So might be my fault.

[mrvn]

I've played around a bit in helmod to figure out the best way to make plates with the limited techs I have. With just hot air I found this:

iron-copper-plates.png (137.12 KiB) Viewed 6003 times

So for a huge increase in energy (~30 times more, shouldn't the iron simply evaporate) I get ~6 times more iron plates from iron ore than copper plates from copper ore. That seems off.

If it weren't for steel needing such huge amounts of iron plates I would have a serious problem making copper. You already get nearly twice the iron ore than copper ore from tar. So overall it's roughly 10 iron plates to 1 copper plate from tar.

Intentional?

[kingarthur]

I've played around a bit in helmod to figure out the best way to make plates with the limited techs I have. With just hot air I found this:

iron-copper-plates.png

So for a huge increase in energy (~30 times more, shouldn't the iron simply evaporate) I get ~6 times more iron plates from iron ore than copper plates from copper ore. That seems off.

If it weren't for steel needing such huge amounts of iron plates I would have a serious problem making copper. You already get nearly twice the iron ore than copper ore from tar. So overall it's roughly 10 iron plates to 1 copper plate from tar.

Intentional?

Are you actually lacking copper? Until you get a bit of the way into the tech tree iron usage tends to be a good deal higher than copper.

10:1 is a bit higher than intended though

[mrvn]

I've played around a bit in helmod to figure out the best way to make plates with the limited techs I have. With just hot air I found this:

iron-copper-plates.png

So for a huge increase in energy (~30 times more, shouldn't the iron simply evaporate) I get ~6 times more iron plates from iron ore than copper plates from copper ore. That seems off.

If it weren't for steel needing such huge amounts of iron plates I would have a serious problem making copper. You already get nearly twice the iron ore than copper ore from tar. So overall it's roughly 10 iron plates to 1 copper plate from tar.

Intentional?

Are you actually lacking copper? Until you get a bit of the way into the tech tree iron usage tends to be a good deal higher than copper.

10:1 is a bit higher than intended though

Not yet. Any excess iron goes towards steel and the output buffer for steel hasn't filled up yet. So the iron keeps getting consumed so far producing enough copper.

[kingarthur]

I've played around a bit in helmod to figure out the best way to make plates with the limited techs I have. With just hot air I found this:

iron-copper-plates.png

So for a huge increase in energy (~30 times more, shouldn't the iron simply evaporate) I get ~6 times more iron plates from iron ore than copper plates from copper ore. That seems off.

If it weren't for steel needing such huge amounts of iron plates I would have a serious problem making copper. You already get nearly twice the iron ore than copper ore from tar. So overall it's roughly 10 iron plates to 1 copper plate from tar.

Intentional?

Are you actually lacking copper? Until you get a bit of the way into the tech tree iron usage tends to be a good deal higher than copper.

10:1 is a bit higher than intended though

Not yet. Any excess iron goes towards steel and the output buffer for steel hasn't filled up yet. So the iron keeps getting consumed so far producing enough copper.

Ok. I will be adding a steam copper mine in the next update that will help with that and I believe its green sci to unlock the extractors to allow options for single ores.

I've actually turned copper down a few times as people was ending up with to much of it as it just not as heavily used

[mrvn]

I've played around a bit in helmod to figure out the best way to make plates with the limited techs I have. With just hot air I found this:

iron-copper-plates.png

So for a huge increase in energy (~30 times more, shouldn't the iron simply evaporate) I get ~6 times more iron plates from iron ore than copper plates from copper ore. That seems off.

If it weren't for steel needing such huge amounts of iron plates I would have a serious problem making copper. You already get nearly twice the iron ore than copper ore from tar. So overall it's roughly 10 iron plates to 1 copper plate from tar.

Intentional?

Are you actually lacking copper? Until you get a bit of the way into the tech tree iron usage tends to be a good deal higher than copper.

10:1 is a bit higher than intended though

Not yet. Any excess iron goes towards steel and the output buffer for steel hasn't filled up yet. So the iron keeps getting consumed so far producing enough copper.

Ok. I will be adding a steam copper mine in the next update that will help with that and I believe its green sci to unlock the extractors to allow options for single ores.

I've actually turned copper down a few times as people was ending up with to much of it as it just not as heavily used

I would bet that most people will go iron ore -> iron plate and then iron ore + hot air -> iron plate. Which produces as much iron plates per ore as copper. It's the side tour that changes the ratios, drastically.

Note: I'm playing PyBlock so miners won't help me. I will have to balance recipes to get the ratio I need. E.g. research and build a more efficient copper smelter first. Or just burn some iron ore if I have too much.

[kingarthur]

Note: I'm playing PyBlock so miners won't help me. I will have to balance recipes to get the ratio I need. E.g. research and build a more efficient copper smelter first. Or just burn some iron ore if I have too much.

Ya I kinda assumed you was or we wouldnt be discussing it in the pyblock thread.

You should be able to use the ground bore ( I think that's the name I dont remember) to get a single ore type with lube and coal gas after you get to green sci.

But yes it was intended to lean somewhat heavy into using the different tiers of raw ores to help off set the balance of ore ratios. Or burn it is good can always use the ash for something.

[mrvn]

Note: I'm playing PyBlock so miners won't help me. I will have to balance recipes to get the ratio I need. E.g. research and build a more efficient copper smelter first. Or just burn some iron ore if I have too much.

Ya I kinda assumed you was or we wouldnt be discussing it in the pyblock thread.

You should be able to use the ground bore ( I think that's the name I dont remember) to get a single ore type with lube and coal gas after you get to green sci.

But yes it was intended to lean somewhat heavy into using the different tiers of raw ores to help off set the balance of ore ratios. Or burn it is good can always use the ash for something.

Yeah. Still have to research that something useful for ash. Currently I burn ash to less ash. I should separate it but that produces Iron Oxide. (see iron/copper ratio above so that didn't seem a smart investment so far.

I will look into the ground bore too. I also need to balance tin and aluminium, lead and chrome, raw bro..something and something other. The basic ore recipes in PyBlock all come in pairs and I highly doubt their use is perfectly balanced. But finding ways to balance them through advanced recipes is half the fun.

[theblindironman]

I've actually turned copper down a few times as people was ending up with to much of it as it just not as heavily used

Prior to pyPH and the introduction of small parts, I imagine copper was not used as much. But with small parts, I seem to be waiting on copper quite a bit.