Overproduction of sulfur

[DaveMcW]

Most chemical plant recipes are limited to avoid building up excess inventory.

Fluid recipes are output limited. The chemical plant only holds 2x the output of the sulfuric acid recipe.

Solid recipes are input limited. If you have too many batteries or plastic bars in the chemical plant, the inserter feeding ingredients will stop.

But the sulfur recipe is a problem. It has no solid inputs, and no fluid outputs. So the chemical plant will keep producing until it fills with 50 sulfur. This means each sulfur plant has a hidden cost of 75 petroleum gas, making it more than twice as expensive as it should be!

[darkminaz]

just limit your sulfur with a logistic network. i kinda like how efficent it currently is. With 1 you can power 6+ battery creating buildings.
in the end most things got this "slight overflow" problem. But that's only a issue in the beginning.
At my current state i got 1,7million iron and chopper. Hadly see a way to get rid of that ever.

smart inserters are your friend to stop overproduction of stuff.

in the end, sure part of it is "stuck" in the building, but thats with quite a lot factorys.

[micomico]

At my current state i got 1,7million iron and chopper. Hadly see a way to get rid of that ever.

Just send them over. My factory burns through 2k-3k iron/copper plates per minute making sweet capsules, modules and everything between. With all research done. The inserters that feed the ore to belts should receive some kind of commendation.

[darkminaz]

if only i could
my trusted shotgun is all i need, solar, walls etc is all autobuild by robots, i got 10+ cars in my base that i never did touch, i got 2 trains in case i wana go to my outposts since walking is a pain.
1 rocket defense that is useless afaik.

guess limiting everything to the point of "how mutch do i need at any given time" just lets you have way to many resources. Well until they add an airforce or nukes .. even if that would probably be a bad idea since we all know godzilla was made with radiation .. fighting off godzilla would be wicked though.

is there a way to see how mutch you produce? / how mutch you need per min?
that would be rather usefull. I think i use around 1k of both per minute, maybe more .. 203 electic furns are in my current setup idk how mutch that creates per min.



on topic: just checked my chemical plant to create acid currently has 0 sulfur in it.
but the one that creates sulfur has up 50 stored + the set limit. i guess i see the problem. Setting that to like 4-5 would save a bit of resources. I mean i only got 700x4 gas left. (thats mostly since my lube never gets used currently and i'm to lazy to destroy the tanks and rebuild them)
somehow most of the oli refine things could use a bit rework or atleast a "in case of tank x got over xy create other oil"
e: nevermind about the oil part, i was just stupid again^^

[Mangledpork]

is there a way to see how mutch you produce? / how mutch you need per min?

P.

[darkminaz]

awesome
thanks

i create over 4000 per min :O and currently use around 1k
+ 3k and use 60 .. no wonder i got so mutch chopper if i never use it xD

[Align]

You guys are missing the point; all factories produce like 2-3 spares of whatever they're set to produce even if it's not being taken out of them, but sulfur is produced until the slot is filled at 50, which is inconsistent. Probably more of a bug than balance issue though.

[Turtle]

You guys are missing the point; all factories produce like 2-3 spares of whatever they're set to produce even if it's not being taken out of them, but sulfur is produced until the slot is filled at 50, which is inconsistent. Probably more of a bug than balance issue though.

This is incorrect, smelters smelt until max stack.

[Align]

Smelters aren't factories though. Chemical plant recipes work like factories, except for sulfur.

[Turtle]

Smelters aren't factories though. Chemical plant recipes work like factories, except for sulfur.

What do you define as factories? Do you mean assembling machines?

[Align]

I'm really not interested in getting bogged down in semantics...

[Align]

Although, come to think of it it's not just sulfur - solid fuel is the same, and all liquids (I think? Not sure how big a "stack" of liquid is), so I'm not sure which recipes are the odd ones.

[darkminaz]

water stops at 20
sulfur acid at 6.5
battery at 6
Assembly machine at 2-4
lube at 19.8
sulfur at 50
biowaste at 100/100
light oil at 3
gas at 2
heavy oil at 3

so yeah sulfur is kinda the big one in the room (biowaste is from a mod)

[bobingabout]

My breakdown of the oil chain as I understand it.

Heavy oil is for lube
Light oil... is useless for anything other than cracking down to gas, or making fuel blocks.
Petrilium gas is for Sulfur.


Lube is relatively low use, it's used for express belts and electric engines, neither of which is used in extreme proportions, I rarely use the belts because by the point I get around to building them, I'm already well on the way with my logistic network, so most of my lube goes into the engines.

Even with the advanced oil recipe, I find myself cracking a lot of heavy oil down to light oil.

My mod on the other hand would leave you with a heavy oil shortage, since it is also used to make Resin (which can also be made from wood, a balance recipe added later to make it cheaper), and in an unreleased mod, Petrolium Jelly. To be able to keep up with these extra demands I added a Coal to heavy oil cracking recipe.


Light oil... I find gets used either for solid fuel blocks, or cracking to petrilium gas, since there really isn't anything else for it in base game right now. (Light oil is actually the cheapest fuel block per oil unit recipe. I'd rather crack heavy oil down into light oil to make fuel, than make fuel from it directly)

My mod on the other hand lets you use it to make Fuel oil, which currently can only be used to make fuel cans (something I foresee will become redundant in 0.13 I think it is, which adds liquid fuel usage for things like burner powered factories), and a currently unreleased Glycerol.


Petrolium gas is actually the biggest sink for me, because it is used to make Sulfur. This is then used to make Explosives, or Sulfuric Acid, which is used for Processing units and Batteries. These are actually fairly large sinks because the batteries are not only used in Science Pack 3, but also Accumulators, plus other things, and I use a lot of accumulators on my power grid, and explosives are used to make weapons and things, which you can burn through quite easily when you go out fighting aliens.

My mod doesn't currenly add anything that uses petrolium gas directly, but lets you crack it down into Hydrogen, which is widely used by lots of things in my mod, but also can be bottled into canisters, which can be burned as a fuel. As such, I find my fuel block factories become obsolete, because my light oil gets cracked into petrolium gas, then hydrogen, which then makes the fuel item that is burned in my emergancy backup power generators, and trains.


So, to the original posters concern... The fact that I have 50 sulfur per factory stuck waiting to be removed is a relative non-issue in my opinion, because... what else are you going to use it for? making it into fuel blocks is inefficient compared to making them from light oil, and unless you're using mods, there's nothing else you can do with it. I'd rather have the sulfur in the factories as a reseve for if and when I run out of oil.

[pyrolytic_tungsten]

For comparison's sake 50 sulfur is equivalent to 15 half full pipes of petroleum gas (no modules). That doesn't sound unreasonable.
50 sulfur * 3/2 gas/sulfur * 1/5 pipe/gas = 15 half full pipes

[DerivePi]

So, to the original posters concern... The fact that I have 50 sulfur per factory stuck waiting to be removed is a relative non-issue in my opinion, because... what else are you going to use it for?

Petro and coal to Plastic. So the concern is that, with limited resources, the 50 sulfur could have been used to produce 50 plastic. Which, I agree, is not a big concern, but it does mess up a "just in Time" inventory mentality.

[n9103]

Not really. Just makes the network to support that kind of production much larger than otherwise, but only a slightly more complicated build, with slightly more latency.
Instead of using a smart inserter to determine when to turn off production, you would be using a smart chest and a boiler trigger system to determine when. By monitoring the output buffer of the product, you can turn on and off a pump when you desire.

[Align]

Or they can just fix the production to be consistent?

[Ranakastrasz]

My understanding is that inserters add enough resources for two recipes. If there are items sitting in the output slot, then they count against that, and won't let the inserters add any more raw materials. Liquids however, do not have this restriction, so will constantly flow in so long as it is available. Hence it will keep filling up due to the recipie being purely liquid raw materials, and keep producing.