Friday Facts #428 - Reactor & Logistics circuit control

[raven2k3]

Hi,

any chances to add something like circuit boards / breadboards where you can virtually place the circuits, so it isn't always a mess (wires) when it gets more complicated?
Would make it also easier to copy / exchange circuite configurations.

Thanks for the hard work and updates!

[Berndie]

With the new fluid system and these changes reactors become a little bit easy. For a „compensation“ could they make booom reaching 1000°C ? Or reducing health at a rate faster than possible repairing?

[Terrahertz]

With the new fluid system and these changes reactors become a little bit easy. For a „compensation“ could they make booom reaching 1000°C ? Or reducing health at a rate faster than possible repairing?

Idk but they were only ever really complicated if you wanted to save on fuel, so what you are asking for would make the game harder for people who don't care about fuel saving (basically making it mandatory) and idk if this is in the spirit of the game

[Dysan27]

Ohhhh, an Idea for a future FFF.

I want to know more about those suggestions from the LAN event.

But that shouldn't happen untill after the release.

[picklock]

In this FFF, things are announced again that I had already missed. This expands the possibilities for controlling my factories again. I'll soon be able to test it myself.

[raven2k3]

With the new fluid system and these changes reactors become a little bit easy. For a „compensation“ could they make booom reaching 1000°C ? Or reducing health at a rate faster than possible repairing?

Vanilla reactors are sadly always not challenging / almost boring tbh..
If they get too hot you can just place more heatpipes to reduce the heat or simply remove the whole reactor.

[Tedstrom]

Reading the FFF has been the highlight of my day every Friday for the last few years. I appreciate the time you guys put into developing Factorio and in writing these articles. I like all of the creative endings to them too. Thanks y'all for giving me something in the week to look forward too, I really appreciate it.

[mmmPI]

In some ways, it feels a little bit too easy. The previous solution of people reading the amount of Steam in storage tanks felt like it needed a bit more brainpower and engineering, but it's hard to justify missing capabilities with this reasoning.

You still need brainpower and engineering to not waste energy, even if you can read the temperature, the storage tanks need to hold enough steam for the fuel cell to burn entirely, and to avoid inserting several fuels cells without risk of clogging. I think this change will make more people willing to try something with circuits and it may still be difficult. Although it is making it "easier" than previously.

Anyway... reading the heat and contents from the reactors may prove to be quite useful when you get to the final planet.

"may" x)

[Berndie]

With the new fluid system and these changes reactors become a little bit easy. For a „compensation“ could they make booom reaching 1000°C ? Or reducing health at a rate faster than possible repairing?

Idk but they were only ever really complicated if you wanted to save on fuel, so what you are asking for would make the game harder for people who don't care about fuel saving (basically making it mandatory) and idk if this is in the spirit of the game

Before we could choose between easy and a bit complicated. Now it seems to be only easy. Is this the new spirit of the game?

[JigSaW]

With the new fluid system and these changes reactors become a little bit easy. For a „compensation“ could they make booom reaching 1000°C ? Or reducing health at a rate faster than possible repairing?

Idk but they were only ever really complicated if you wanted to save on fuel, so what you are asking for would make the game harder for people who don't care about fuel saving (basically making it mandatory) and idk if this is in the spirit of the game

Before we could choose between easy and a bit complicated. Now it seems to be only easy. Is this the new spirit of the game?

While I agree with you that the game gets simplified massively in many of its aspects (which is very disappointing), I'm not sure if this one does:

[From FFF] In some ways, it feels a little bit too easy. The previous solution of people reading the amount of Steam in storage tanks felt like it needed a bit more brainpower and engineering.

I don't seem to get how reading reactors would replace the smart setup with steam reading.

The way stream battery setup works is you put a fuel cell into a reactor, temperature goes from 500 to 1000, reactor produces X amount of heat/steam, then temperature goes to 500 again, reactor shuts down and you slowly consume that steam and repeat the cycle when steam runs out. So it works in bursts and once you started a cycle you can only get X amount of steam over a set period of time.

So how would reading the temperature or the amount of fuel cells let you make the same setup without steam reading? Both values have no relation to the amount of steam being produced and it's always the same amount you can't change or save, only waste.

The combinator conditions shown in FFF don't make sense. You can easily meet them and have more than enough steam in storages so that means you gonna waste fuel cells by producing steam. Stream battery setup isn't about not letting a reactor to go to 500, in fact it's about letting it. It's about letting it run only when needed with any potential downtime and both temperature check and fuel cell amount won't be able to control it.

[Loewchen]

So how would reading the temperature or the amount of fuel cells let you make the same setup without steam reading? Both values have no relation to the amount of steam being produced and it's always the same amount you can't change or save, only waste.

The steam itself was always just an indicator because we could not read the reactor temperature directly. Now the logic is simply insert fuel if reactor fuel is 0 and temperature is <= 500° or something in that range.

[Terrahertz]

So how would reading the temperature or the amount of fuel cells let you make the same setup without steam reading? Both values have no relation to the amount of steam being produced and it's always the same amount you can't change or save, only waste.

The steam itself was always just an indicator because we could not read the reactor temperature directly. Now the logic is simply insert fuel if reactor fuel is 0 and temperature is <= 500° or something in that range.

You still need to account for the thermal mass of your powerplant not being enough to store the energy released by one cell per reactor, so you might still need steam storage and read that out, the real change here might be that you can get away with less steam storage as your logic can now take the thermal storage into account, but this would make the setup more and not less complicated.

On the other hand no matter how complex the system is: You solve it once, make a blueprint and move on, so yeah I don't get what the fuzz is all about.

[JigSaW]

So how would reading the temperature or the amount of fuel cells let you make the same setup without steam reading? Both values have no relation to the amount of steam being produced and it's always the same amount you can't change or save, only waste.

The steam itself was always just an indicator because we could not read the reactor temperature directly. Now the logic is simply insert fuel if reactor fuel is 0 and temperature is <= 500° or something in that range.

But that's not how (smart/lossless) steam battery setup works. It shouldn't restart reactors when they're around 500, it should restart reactors when there's no steam.

When playing the game you have plenty of low consumption moments when let's say your 2GW reactor setup will only have a consumption draw of 200MW and so in a steam battery setup you'll put one fuel cell into each reactor, you get X amount of steam and then you gonna be consuming that steam while your reactors are chilling at 500 not producing anything. So the temperature check does pretty much nothing as reactors are expected to go to 500 and shut down. If you gonna be restarting reactors merely when they're near 500 you gonna be wasting steam, that's not lossless.

[j_matya]

Very nice, so much QoL!

I would only like to re-post the comments we made back in November 23 about the possibility to produce custom values for output other than 1 / Input count, the UI would also nicely allow it like this gimp'ed together image illustrates:

viewtopic.php?p=596235#p596235



"Business case":
At the moment if I want to output "20" "rockets" for an input condition, I'd have to use a constant combinator with "rocket" and "20" and some weird circuit shenanigans for filtering (to not collide with the input part of the combinator), or add literally 20 lines of "outputs" with Rocket valued "1"...

[JackTheSpades]

Since we have a lot of logistic changes, are there any chances of seeing logistic gun turrets?
The main reason why gun turrets fall of in late/post game to me is that supplying them becomes an unjustifiable hassle. Flame throwers just requires pipes and are well worth it. Laser turrets just electricity which is also simple enough

But gun turrets either require a requester chest each or a large belt with some fancy circuit conditions if you want to avoid just having a full belt of "backup" amo... and of course they require electricity too, for the inserters. Which is why they get replaced by laser turrets.

[astroshak]

Hmm. Enable/Disable logistics chests. I can see a potential use for this …

MadZuri bot loading/unloading trains anyone?

[Muche]

So how would reading the temperature or the amount of fuel cells let you make the same setup without steam reading? Both values have no relation to the amount of steam being produced and it's always the same amount you can't change or save, only waste.

The steam itself was always just an indicator because we could not read the reactor temperature directly. Now the logic is simply insert fuel if reactor fuel is 0 and temperature is <= 500° or something in that range.

But that's not how (smart/lossless) steam battery setup works. It shouldn't restart reactors when they're around 500, it should restart reactors when there's no steam.

When playing the game you have plenty of low consumption moments when let's say your 2GW reactor setup will only have a consumption draw of 200MW and so in a steam battery setup you'll put one fuel cell into each reactor, you get X amount of steam and then you gonna be consuming that steam while your reactors are chilling at 500 not producing anything. So the temperature check does pretty much nothing as reactors are expected to go to 500 and shut down.

Granted, I may have designed it wrong, but when I played with reactor setups in AB/Seablock, there was always a delay in maximum power while the reactors ramp up. So in a 2GW setup with cold reactors and zero steam, the immediately available power was lower. To have maximum power always available required to start the reactors with less than, like, 20% steam available.
It also may have been a consequence of quirky fluid system, so with the new fluid system it might work as you expect and describe.

[JigSaW]

Granted, I may have designed it wrong, but when I played with reactor setups in AB/Seablock, there was always a delay in maximum power while the reactors ramp up. So in a 2GW setup with cold reactors and zero steam, the immediately available power was lower. To have maximum power always available required to start the reactors with less than, like, 20% steam available.
It also may have been a consequence of quirky fluid system, so with the new fluid system it might work as you expect and describe.

You designed it right as I had the same conclusion i.e. you don't let the steam amount go to 0% before restarting the reactors, you do it with a 20-30% buffer cos first X seconds reactors are gonna be heating up, producing steam at maximum amount only 80-90% of the cycle runtime.

But that still has nothing to do with the temperatures. You're suppose to let your reactors get down to 500 and "get cold" or something while you consume the steam from previous cycle, otherwise you're gonna be wasting fuel cells on steam you don't need.

[raven2k3]

Since we have a lot of logistic changes, are there any chances of seeing logistic gun turrets?
The main reason why gun turrets fall of in late/post game to me is that supplying them becomes an unjustifiable hassle. Flame throwers just requires pipes and are well worth it. Laser turrets just electricity which is also simple enough

But gun turrets either require a requester chest each or a large belt with some fancy circuit conditions if you want to avoid just having a full belt of "backup" amo... and of course they require electricity too, for the inserters. Which is why they get replaced by laser turrets.

Gun turrets with a full ammo belt works quite fine for me but they work best if you mix them with the aoe damage from the flame throwers.

If you don't want to always provide a full ammo belt but still want some backup ammo you can place a chest with inserters before each turret and
wire circuit conditions (like active when less then 20 ammo in box) there.
Sure laser turrets are easier to place and maintain, but keep in mind that they are also completely dependent on your energy system and
are totally useless if you don't have enough power at the moment of attack or a critical powerpole was destroyed.

[linktothepast83]

Nice changes! I believe that anything that unnecessary complicates things that shouldn't be as complicated, like a missing feature that needs workarounds to deal with, is bad in practice so i like a lot these changes. Factorio is about automating stuff as much as you can progressively, so anything that hinders the automation process for no good reason is not fun at all for me.