What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

[blazespinnaker]

I was trying to think of what I rarely, if ever use:

Water barrels, can't think of a use for them, tbh.
Shotguns, Artillery Cannon / Tank Cannon, Tanks in general. Lots of fun, but I never need them. Easier, safer ways to take out spawners.
Refined hazard concrete. Mostly because I do everything in map mode, so running from one place to another is never required. They can be useful for cosmetics, though.
Discharge Defense Remote, Capsules (though poison capsules are handy)
Gates, fun, but I never use them. Prefer landmines, plus I do everything in map mode. Cosmetically, however, I can see uses.

[NotRexButCaesar]

Gates, fun, but I never use them. Prefer landmines, plus I do everything in map mode. Cosmetically, however, I can see uses.

Gates are the only way for trains to pass through walls.

[Khagan]

I was trying to think of what I rarely, if ever use:

Water barrels, can't think of a use for them, tbh.

A topic that has seen extended discussion.

Shotguns, Artillery Cannon / Tank Cannon, Tanks in general. Lots of fun, but I never need them.

I've never seen the point of the shotgun, and artillery is a luxury item, but the tank is for me the primary offensive weapon system from when it appears until it is replaced by a spider or three.

Refined hazard concrete.

Refined concrete in general. Hugely more expensive than regular concrete for a microscopic increase in running speed.

Discharge Defense Remote, Capsules (though poison capsules are handy)

Defender bots are valuable until rendered superfluous by PDL (the other combat bots are horribly overpriced for what they do).

Gates, fun, but I never use them.

Essential for safe level crossings.

I'll add lamps and speakers to your list. Also substations and power pylons: wooden power poles are insanely cheap, and capable of carrying unlimited current (though I do prefer steel power poles as 'milspec' in places they might get splashed by spitter acid).

[Qon]

Topic title: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Well the topic is not about impractical items at all. Maybe change the title to "What items do you not use?" Or something like that.

Some of the items on your lists are pretty strange, eg artillery. It's one of the best techs in the game and the only real solution for automating offence, expansion and in some cases defence. Natives can expand and build behemoth worms out of range for other turrets while being able to attack your border endlessly.

Capsules become extremely useful when they are deployed from your ammo as you use it. That'swhy I made the mod Capsule Ammo. Throwing them yourself is a bit slow and annoying but slow, poison and distractor capsules have been really useful to take out behemoths with low tech for me.

Discharge defence is too slow and weak and requires a remote to use, I'm skipping that. It's like a capsule that requires equipment space in your armor to use it and has a horrible CD, just use capsules + PLD instead.

[JimBarracus]

The pistol

One of the first researches is military and once you have the machine gun the pistol goes in the bin.
I actually use the pistol sometimes as a token in my inserter based sr latch.

Burner miners

They pollute so much and are really slow.
I usually keep them for a while as a backup source of coal for my power plant.

I think all items that are not part of a higher tier late game option can be named here.
My tank is just parked somewhere because I simply dont use it anymore. By now I have 2 spidertrons.
I think I wrecked my car at some point and never bothered to build a new one.

[astroshak]

I have never used a speaker.
I tend not to make uranium munitions : nuclear rocket, nuclear ammo, nuclear shotgun ammo. By the time I’d invest in these, PLD are on the scene.
I do not automate Burner Miners, but I will (early on) automate assembly of Burner Inserters, Boilers, and Steam Engines.
I never make or use Wood Chests. Iron, Steel, or better yet logistics chests are my go-to.
Modular Armor and Power Armor Mk. I : I skip these. I find their equipment grids too small; I go straight to Power Armor Mk. II and Portable Fusion power generation.
Portable Solar Panels : OMG these suck, I skip these and the armors they are intended to power.

[jodokus31]

The pistol is obviously the death counter

I tried to make the shotgun better in my mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/spice-rack-tweak-military
More near damage, projectiles spread wider, character moves a bit faster while shooting.
It has a bit of AOE damage directly in front and a small pushback.
IMHO, much more fun to use it to get rid of groups of small biters.

Discharge defense. Never used it.

Programmable Speakers are great!! It's basically a custom alert.

Water Barrels: Maybe you want a bot based modular oil refinery...

...

[netmand]

I don't get the point of this topic. assembling-machine-1 becomes impractical after the beginning phase of the game.

[firestar246]

I don't use speakers at all. I find large poles kinda useless.

[BicycleEater]

Just here to say, I really like the discharge defence - I pretty much always include it in any armour I use for combat (this is probably because I'm bad at combat or something).
I find it makes an excellent backup for the point where I don't pay enough attention and get surrounded by like 15 behemoth biters. It stuns them and moves them away instantly which allows you to escape.
Most of the time it has no purpose at all, but it is incredible for allowing you to be a lot more reckless when attacking a base, as you have a backup plan, also, while PLDs are great, they don't kill behemoths quickly enough to save you if you are surrounded. I also tend to prefer more exoskeletons than should really be used for combat, so can't generally survive much of a fight, and can't be bothered removing the PFRs unless really needed.

I also tend to use destroyer capsules late game, as they are so cheap compared to what the factory can produce I might as well. This is mostly for late game post-artillery killing enemies for fun, but they really increase your fire power, and allow you to focus your armour on speed/defence instead of PLDs. They don't have much of a role in early game stuff for me, but in the late game they can make killing bases quite fun really. This is all pre-spidertron combat, as I tend to get that later on, and haven't played with it that much (I tend to play with the aircraft mod now, which changes late game combat anyway).
In late game combat my hotbar is generally: Discharge defence remote, Artillery remote, Destroyer capsules, Fish
(still using fish because they sometimes help a bit...)

Portable Solar Panels are useless for combat, but they are great if you really want nightvision/belt immunity equipment before you can get the power armour MK.2, using the modular armour (you can also get your first exoskeleton this way, although only if you stand still a lot so they can recharge).

[mudcrabempire]

Items i consider useless:
-lamps (except for visual signaling, which i don´t do)
-piercing level ammo (gun/shotgun)
-tanks (and related ammo)
-distractor robots

Items i don´t use due to playstyle/preferences:
-cluster grenades
-slowdown/poison capsules (rarely i use poison for worm sniping)
-destroyer robots
-belt immunity
-uranium ammo

Items i´d like to defend:
-discharge defense: It´s not for damage, its for giving you space from being overwhelmed by biters - letting you get some distance and giving your PLDs more time to do their magic. Always present in my armors.
-shotgun: Much more damage and damage per resources than submachine gun. More difficult to use and usually requires backup (turrets, submachine gun), but i always use it (in the early game).

Barreled anything is of little use in vanilla, since with a good layout fluids can be kept pipes-only. Barrels are still situationally usefull for mods which introduce scenarios where you have to transport fluids but your regular channels don´t work (space exploration is a good example).

[blazespinnaker]

yeah, so obviously this is all very playstyle dependent. using map mode and landmines extensively changes things up a bit, I think.

some comments:

speakers, I need them to monitor power in long running games. i also use them when testing new designs that may suffer from starvation. i get so many alerts i really don't notice otherwise. once I get mass nuclear or solar, it's less of an issue, but until then. surprised that this isn't commonplace.

burner miners, any type of speedrunning they are an absolute must early game. pistol sucks, but is rather necessary when in scenarios you get hit by biters very early game. i play a lot of games for about 50-60 minutes, basically until I get to bots and then stop. it's a totally different game at that point, very fun for sure, but different.

shotgun, a mod is a good idea. it really needs a buff.

uranium ammo, never use either, same with belt immunity.

lamps, sometimes. depends if I'm playing where there is external glare.

i'll have to try discharge defense a bit more, I can see now how it would be useful. mostly tho everthing is a nail and the landmine is a hammer. and turrets, of course. if you're fast, you can run in, drop down a dozen turrets and fill them with ammo, cleaning up a base very quickly before biters can mount much of a counter attack. some grenades are required of course.

longer games, artillery is sort of a game ender PvE wise, especially if you put them on islands with logistics. all the other stuff is just fun ways to tortue biters at that point - imho.

[disentius]

players

[Pi-C]

players

Players are not items. I'm not sure whether they qualify as entities (if they have a character, that would be an entity), but they are definitely not items!

[MEOWMI]

My biggest gripes are with combat robot capsules and piercing tank shells, so about 5 items. They are virtually always bad and fulfill no niche, in any situation there exists a better alternative. They don't even qualify for being useful by being lower tech tier, which is the case for many other items, predominantly early game items. Robot capsules? (Very) Expensive to craft, especially later tiers, providing only a (very) short power boost, which in itself is limited too, and clunky to deploy. Piercing tank shells? Might very rarely do more damage or hit multiple buildings, but explosive shells deal far more reliable AoE damage and usually more damage anyway for almost no extra cost.

Every other item has some time and place, even without being really niche. I was considering listing burner drills, discharge defense and maybe hazard concrete (non-refined) and wood as very niche, but truth be told they do have some real uses. You can perhaps already tell from the fact that burner drills alone still see plenty of use despite electric drills being objectively better in almost every way. Wood poles and chests are perfectly usable in almost all situations and are cheaper (and fulfill a few rather unique niches), and discharge defense is just good because crowd control weapons are so good in games generally.

Everything else is in the category of "can be useful and competitive if used appropriately", including shotguns, land mines, hand flamethrowers, pistols, belt immunity eq, speakers, unrefined concrete, slow capsules, poison capsules.

[ickputzdirwech]

I hesitated to fuel this discussion with yet another controversial opinion, but I couldn’t stop myself.

In my opinion the most useless item in the game is the iron chest. In the early game I use wooden chests since I got plenty of wood anyway and their size is sufficient. And in the middle and end game I just use steal chest everywhere because the resources to build them don’t matter and iron chests would just clock up yet another inventory slot.

[NotRexButCaesar]

In the early game I use wooden chests since I got plenty of wood anyway and their size is sufficient. And in the middle and end game I just use steel chest everywhere because the resources to build them don’t matter and iron chests would just clock up yet another inventory slot.

I am the other way around: I use iron chests early game & steel chests late game, skipping wooden chests.

[Khagan]

In the early game I use wooden chests since I got plenty of wood anyway and their size is sufficient. And in the middle and end game I just use steal chest

I'm exactly the other way around: I almost exclusively use iron chests. I do find the capacity of wooden chests a significant limitation, and they are very fragile; I sometimes make one at the very beginning of the game. Iron chests have enough capacity for almost all purposes, and are still cheap. I rarely if ever place plain steel chests: the only reason I make them is to add the circuitry to upgrade to logistic ones.

[plsrespond]

I'm surprised so many people dislike / don't use the shotgun. It's awesome for getting waves of bugs off you (up until the blue(?) big biters start to spawn) and kills nests and worms faster than rifles if all the pellets are landing.

[jodokus31]

In the early game I use wooden chests since I got plenty of wood anyway and their size is sufficient. And in the middle and end game I just use steal chest

I'm exactly the other way around: I almost exclusively use iron chests. I do find the capacity of wooden chests a significant limitation, and they are very fragile; I sometimes make one at the very beginning of the game. Iron chests have enough capacity for almost all purposes, and are still cheap. I rarely if ever place plain steel chests: the only reason I make them is to add the circuitry to upgrade to logistic ones.

Same here. Iron chests are nice and cheap for any purpose. wooden chest would require more chopping early game and steel is quite expensive IMO for the benefit.
OK, you can recycle steel chest to logichests, which is nice, but ironchests are nice at beltbased train stations, because they hold less without configuration and avoids 25% buffering. So you can recycle the iron chests at the ever growing train network.