What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

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mmmPI
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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by mmmPI »

mrvn wrote:
Mon Nov 01, 2021 8:31 pm
Plus it saves inventory space to store ammunition in the weapon slot at the low price of manufacturing an extra rifle.
no
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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by wobbycarly »

adam_bise wrote:
Mon Nov 01, 2021 5:15 pm
Pistols..

In vanilla, pistols have a recipe for both manual and assembler crafting. But I can't think of a single scenario where either would be used.

Every time the player respawns, they get a pistol. How would you ever actually really need to build another? If you drop it on accident?

What about the assembler recipe? Why is it there? What scenario could ever possibly exist that would require choosing the pistol in an assembler?
Agree with your assessment for vanilla, but I think I've seen some mods that use pistol in a recipe.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by mrvn »

mmmPI wrote:
Tue Nov 02, 2021 3:20 am
mrvn wrote:
Mon Nov 01, 2021 8:31 pm
Plus it saves inventory space to store ammunition in the weapon slot at the low price of manufacturing an extra rifle.
no magic.png
Oh, that's new. The slot used to be red without weapon.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by adam_bise »

It bugged me, so fixed it.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/smg-require-pistol

EDIT: I also made a few additional mods to address what I feel are under-utilized items or items made obsolete by other items.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/car-require-smg
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/steel-che ... iron-chest
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/armor-require-previous

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by ssilk »

I like such changes, it adds not too much complexity to the game, but makes things more realistic.

I think the original recipes don’t include the former items, because the devs think these are items, that need to be produced only once ore very seldom. But even then it makes sense to reuse the items.

Don’t forget to clear the equipment grid, before the armor in a recipe. :)
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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by mrvn »

ssilk wrote:
Sat Nov 06, 2021 9:32 am
Don’t forget to clear the equipment grid, before the armor in a recipe. :)
Or update to experimental for the fix. :)

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by blazespinnaker »

The problem with the fluid wagon I found was that oil patches become practically infinite with speed up modules and pumpjack productivity. So there's no need for something like training in oil from afar.

Maybe someone has discovered something different, but that's been my experience.

Likely the fact that the fluid wagon is so impractical is why the curved rail bug was never fixed (or even documented in game! that was a bit cruel)

I retract anything I said about tanks. I had been playing deathworld expensive, and they weren't practical, but in default I see that they are actually very useful.
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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by GreenTeaKinase »

I would say barrels; there isn't much point in installing the extra machinery and infrastructure to facilitate the transport of barrels. Refined hazard concrete is a good candidate for impracticality as well. Then there's burner inserters: they're not quite useless but it is very easy to skip directly to standard inserters; you just have to manually load your furnaces and burner miners while you get your power plant set up.
Last edited by GreenTeaKinase on Wed Dec 08, 2021 1:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by GreenTeaKinase »

wobbycarly wrote:
Tue Nov 02, 2021 4:48 am
adam_bise wrote:
Mon Nov 01, 2021 5:15 pm
Pistols..

In vanilla, pistols have a recipe for both manual and assembler crafting. But I can't think of a single scenario where either would be used.

Every time the player respawns, they get a pistol. How would you ever actually really need to build another? If you drop it on accident?

What about the assembler recipe? Why is it there? What scenario could ever possibly exist that would require choosing the pistol in an assembler?
Agree with your assessment for vanilla, but I think I've seen some mods that use pistol in a recipe.
I disagree. The pistol is kinda important for initial defense if you spawn nearer to a biter base.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by GreenTeaKinase »

blazespinnaker wrote:
Sat Dec 04, 2021 8:26 am
The problem with the fluid wagon I found was that oil patches become practically infinite with speed up modules and pumpjack productivity. So there's no need for something like training in oil from afar.

Maybe someone has discovered something different, but that's been my experience.

Likely the fact that the fluid wagon is so impractical is why the curved rail bug was never fixed (or even documented in game! that was a bit cruel)

I retract anything I said about tanks. I had been playing deathworld expensive, and they weren't practical, but in default I see that they are actually very useful.
In my experience, oil patches are as finite as ever. Nevertheless, I use the fluid wagons extensively to move the oil to refineries at my base. Regardless of what you do, you'd have to use trains anyway, as oil patches spawn a fair distance away from your initial spawn.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by GreenTeaKinase »

ShyLion wrote:
Wed Oct 20, 2021 9:17 am
tanks are great bulldozers for forest cleaning, when you setup outpost and railroad through the forest, before you have construction bots and appropriate armor with bots station
They are pretty good for clearing a path through a forest, but normally I just gun down the trees; I only drive through trees when I'm transiting through the forest. And, of course, they're pretty good offensive weapons in the midgame, carrying the type of firepower you need.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by GreenTeaKinase »

astroshak wrote:
Wed Jul 14, 2021 10:08 am
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.
Not gonna lie, I rely on portable solar panels to power my equipment while I research the portable fusion reactor.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by ptx0 »

i think inserters are pretty impractical. they only dump on one side of the belt! that's basically useless.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by jodokus31 »

I guess you are kidding unless you got so used to Bobs inserters and/or loaders? :mrgreen:

IMO Inserter mechanics are one of the core mechanics of vanilla factorio. In the grand scheme its of course a only small nuance
ptx0 wrote:
Wed Dec 08, 2021 2:13 am
i think inserters are pretty impractical. they only dump on one side of the belt! that's basically useless.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by GreenTeaKinase »

ptx0 wrote:
Wed Dec 08, 2021 2:13 am
i think inserters are pretty impractical. they only dump on one side of the belt! that's basically useless.
Nice joke!

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by ptx0 »

jodokus31 wrote:
Wed Dec 08, 2021 8:23 am
I guess you are kidding unless you got so used to Bobs inserters and/or loaders? :mrgreen:
lol i don't even know anymore :lol:

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by shopt »

Firstly, I'm assuming that anything that's useful at any point in an unmodded game is practical, some items just get obsoleted by the tech tree or infrastructure scale up. I consider items as impractical if they are already obsolete on arrival.

Top of my list would be cannon shell & uranium cannon shell. Explosive cannon shells have far more utility than cannon shells for only slightly more cost. Ditto for the uranium versions. Also with the uranium cannon shells, they become available around the same time as artillery, which is the superior endgame offensive weapon (along with spidertron), and obsoletes tanks in general.

Up there would also be piercing shotgun shells and combat shotgun. By that point in the tech tree, tank + explosive shells is better for offense, though I can see a niche use case for if you got caught by biters without your tank.

Slowdown capsule, though tbh I have never tried them. Would rather throw poison or grenades.

I'm going to have to agree with iron chest. Steel chests are not costly enough compared to the rest of your infra to make saving the iron on chests an issue, and they can be upgraded into logistics chests, iron chests are a dead end. Until you get steel chests, wooden chests are good enough and lower opportunity cost than iron chest.

Burner inserter also scrapes into my list. They are a dead end, and they become obsoleted by yellow inserters far too quickly to bother setting them up. The niche people often mention is fuelling boilers and the electricity death spiral. The electricity death spiral tends to only hit new players, and can be recovered from by disconnecting your manufacturing and science from the grid until you have recovered, usually by hand feeding a few boilers to get the inserters working. Or a small dedicated solar patch to power your boiler inserters. OTOH burner inserters have many failure conditions including accidentally upgrading the belts feeding your boilers, and then you need to hand feed the burner inserters one by one to recover.

Things I have seen listed that I would like to defend:
* Gates. I make remote artillery bases for expansion that are supplied by rail. Gates close the gap in the wall. Also around midgame, they allow rails out to remote outposts without a hole in your wall.
* Barrels. I like flamethrower turrets in my artillery bases. Oil barrels allow me to resupply using a mixed cargo wagon, meaning I don't need a longer train with a fluid wagon and a perfectly straight station (and therefore much larger base) to unload. Wasn't too hard to have a box in the base to store the empty barrels until the resupply train comes and takes them back to the barreling machine.
* Poison capsules. Around midgame, they are decent to use with a tank. Throw them on worms and let the poison ticks kill them while you wait outside range. Need 1/2/3/3 to take out a small/medium/big/behemoth worm.
* Speakers. Set up alarms for various iusses, for example accumulator charge level dropping too low.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by foamy »

I'm gonna build myself a nuclear plant using burner inserters just for kicks :p

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by Drakken »

I will just put out there coal liquefaction technology which requires oil (blue science) to research. Coal liquefaction research should only require red and green (perhaps black) science to discover so you can bridge your way to oil if it is not nearby.

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Re: What are the most impractical items in Factorio?

Post by Koub »

Drakken wrote:
Wed Mar 09, 2022 12:23 am
I will just put out there coal liquefaction technology which requires oil (blue science) to research. Coal liquefaction research should only require red and green (perhaps black) science to discover so you can bridge your way to oil if it is not nearby.
You can't liquefy coal if you don't have heavy oil firsthand. At that point, you can do blue tech science.
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