Simple Questions and Short Answers

[BlueTemplar]

Right, cars were for some reason really left out of this update..?

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> Having to build a new base (almost) from scratch, but with different limitations (and more starting technologies) is kind of the point.

That... would have been nicer to know going into it. The main base is currently having its face eaten by some biters that broke through while I'm stuck rebuilding a whole base form scratch here

Given that some resources needed for science packs are only found on other planets, I was going into it thinking we just need to set up some miners and a launch facility. Granted, I wasn't thinking properly anymore at 2am when I decided to land there to take a peek without planning out how get back, so I suppose it's on me and I should just make sure I have backups if I want to avoid a mistake meaning you have to start over

Yeah, Wube says that would have been boring, and they're probably right :
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-387

As we've already mentioned, while it's easy to assume that Nauvis would remain to be the location of the main factory for most players, we really wanted to avoid the situation where the new planets become just mining outposts. We wanted the player to build something that feels like a worthy factory on each of the planets.

After you land on a planet, you need to launch rockets again in order to get back into space. At the start this is more of a throwback to again experience the stranded feeling. This time the process is already greatly accelerated since you have all the technologies and your space platform can bring you a lot of construction materials. However, building the rocket infrastructure 4 times starts to feel repetitive, so we definitely aimed to have each of the planet's recipes simplify or completely skip some parts.

The expansion generally puts a lot more emphasis on the stability of your factory, but it's Factorio and some things always go wrong. It's easy to imagine your Nauvis or space platforms aren't having the best time while you're on a different planet. To prevent locking your progress if Nauvis gets cut off or completely overrun, we need to include a way to craft pretty much all of the rocket parts on any planet.

[...]

[Hakalugie]

Is there a way to build plastic on vulcanis before coal liquefaction is researched that im missing? Without importing anything from main base. I need plastic to build the big mining drill, which is a prerequisite for coal liquefaction

[Iratenater]

Noob here with only 8000+ hours of game time ran into an issue on vanilla ver 2.0.11 while attempting to insert equipment into the equipment grid. I created a new scenario in which all science is researched using the console command and starting with power armor, spider, and equipment. Despite the equipment being in my inventory, when I went to insert equipment into the grid, only some greyed out images of the equipment ended up there (see image below). This happened on both the power armor and spidertron. Verified these technologies were indeed researched.

I did have a scenario like this running fine on the last 1.xx.xx version.

Assistance is appreciated.


factorio help.png

you need a working roboport with robot to have a robot put the equipment (that what mean the grey thing), so put a normal roboport on the ground, put robot in it, and drop the item to a logistic chest

That seems odd to me. I have always been able to install equipment into the grid by hand straight from my personal inventory.

I was able to determine the root cause as the build and build ghost both assigned to left-click. This was a carry over from my previous controls configuration (which worked fine). Setting them as different controls resulted in the equipment being placed in the grid as normal.

[anaximagnox]

I'm at my wit's end here trying to get my space platform and landing pad to work together. In a nutshell, I want to set a minimum value for something on the space platform, let's say iron ore, and a maximum value for that same thing in the landing pad. That way, I always have an immediately usable stock of materials in space, and I'm also not flooding the surface with more stuff than I need.

If I use both buildings' requests simultaneously, the space platform's requests get prioritized over the landing pad's. If I only use the space platform's requests, it will flood the landing pad above its maximum desired value. If I only use the landing pad's requests, it will drain the space platform below its minimum desired value. I've seen that the rocket silo can read space platform requests, but that doesn't help when the space platform's requests override the landing pad's.

I know I could do a bit of circuitry and use belts to store items, only putting excess up to a certain amount into the space platform's inventory and have the landing pad request off of that excess. But that solution feels so inelegant that it feels like I must be missing something, not to mention I'd need to redesign my platform to store all its reserved materials on belts rather than using the platform's inventory as a miniature bus.

If anyone knows of a better solution than belt storage, I'd appreciate the help.

[BlueTemplar]

Is there a way to build plastic on vulcanis before coal liquefaction is researched that im missing? Without importing anything from main base. I need plastic to build the big mining drill, which is a prerequisite for coal liquefaction

Checking Factoriopedia by alt-clicking on items can generally tell you the solution to these kinds of issues.

Simple coal liquefaction from Calcite processing.

[Grayhill]

Will the rockets pull from buffer chests to fill a request?

Or only from passive provider and storage?

In other words, will materials in a buffer chest safely stay there for that planet instead of being taken away? Requester chests will not pull from buffer chests unless you tick the box instructing them to.

Context: Say, on Fulgora, I want to make sure there are always enough processing units for making things there, but I want all excess to go somewhere else. Can I set the output of my sorter to dump in a buffer, set planetside assemblers to pull from buffer chests, and then have an active provider's inserter set to only activate when there are more than 4500 in the buffer? So basically it stays almost full.

[luc]

Yeah, Wube says that would have been boring, and they're probably right:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-387

we really wanted to avoid the situation where the new planets become just mining outposts. We wanted the player to build something that feels like a worthy factory on each of the planets.

After you land on a planet, you need to launch rockets again in order to get back into space. At the start this is more of a throwback to again experience the stranded feeling. This time the process is already greatly accelerated since you have all the technologies and your space platform can bring you a lot of construction materials. However, building the rocket infrastructure 4 times starts to feel repetitive, so we definitely aimed to have each of the planet's recipes simplify or completely skip some parts.

[...]

This should be recommended reading before being allowed to drop to a planet then. It makes enough sense but it's a surprise where you feel like you broke the game and got into a stuck state. We were on a call with the three of us and all like actually wtf

[BlueTemplar]

Wouldn't you be even less 'stuck' in multiplayer... unless I guess you all shared the same platform for that very first trip ?

Oh, also, there seem to be special autosaves when first leaving to a new planet, added specifically for players that might have issues like these ?

planetary_autosaves.png (604.35 KiB) Viewed 128 times

P.S.: Yeah, made just as you turn on the thruster - and at that point you can change the target planet to Nauvis again, or even just remove the destination and you'll slowly float back to Nauvis.

[luc]

unless I guess you all shared the same platform for that very first trip ?

Oui, exploring the expansion together as a group makes sense to me ?!

[BlueTemplar]

You're right, for the very first time, it really does !

[Zaflis]

I'm at my wit's end here trying to get my space platform and landing pad to work together. In a nutshell, I want to set a minimum value for something on the space platform, let's say iron ore, and a maximum value for that same thing in the landing pad. That way, I always have an immediately usable stock of materials in space, and I'm also not flooding the surface with more stuff than I need.

If I use both buildings' requests simultaneously, the space platform's requests get prioritized over the landing pad's. If I only use the space platform's requests, it will flood the landing pad above its maximum desired value. If I only use the landing pad's requests, it will drain the space platform below its minimum desired value. I've seen that the rocket silo can read space platform requests, but that doesn't help when the space platform's requests override the landing pad's.

I know I could do a bit of circuitry and use belts to store items, only putting excess up to a certain amount into the space platform's inventory and have the landing pad request off of that excess. But that solution feels so inelegant that it feels like I must be missing something, not to mention I'd need to redesign my platform to store all its reserved materials on belts rather than using the platform's inventory as a miniature bus.

If anyone knows of a better solution than belt storage, I'd appreciate the help.

I don't believe you can set any "Hold at least this many items in hub before sending them to planet". But you say treating hub as a mainbus is elegant, i say it is the opposite Do you not encounter the issue where items flash in and out of the hub storage when it's used as platforms material buffer? I used to store asteroids in hub and it was a complete disaster. I was basically unable to shift-click any item if i wanted to manually send them down with trash slots, because it would be swapping its slot at rate of several slots per second. They were like dodging my cursor...

But more importantly i need all the space i can get to deliver items to other planets. Thousands... of items.

[anaximagnox]

I don't believe you can set any "Hold at least this many items in hub before sending them to planet". But you say treating hub as a mainbus is elegant, i say it is the opposite Do you not encounter the issue where items flash in and out of the hub storage when it's used as platforms material buffer? I used to store asteroids in hub and it was a complete disaster. I was basically unable to shift-click any item if i wanted to manually send them down with trash slots, because it would be swapping its slot at rate of several slots per second. They were like dodging my cursor...

But more importantly i need all the space i can get to deliver items to other planets. Thousands... of items.

On a more complex platform, or one I intend to engage with manually, using the hub as a general bus might be the wrong solution. For my purposes, I'm looking to have my science platform autonomously send down excess iron ore, plates, and steel, as well as maybe carbon that's sitting around. Since I want to prioritize science over the extra resources, the transfer logic has to exist on the platform, since the pad will just drain science's input items indiscriminately.

It's also why I was hoping to avoid belt storage. Routing belts to allow all of this, as well as managing storage by way of controlling belt I/O feels a lot more cumbersome than just "send everything over X amount, so long as the landing pad isn't satisfied." In the latter case, I just have to turn off inserters once the hub gets too full of its respective input item.

In a more general sense, I feel this is an issue with the handling of an upper bound of "infinite" in the logistic requests. If infinite upper bound was treated as "item above minimum is available to the network" rather than "hold on to up to infinite item," that would allow the pad and platform to interact with more nuance... assuming there's not some explicit blocking going on regardless. Of course, it would alter the way a lot of things interact with logistics, obviously, including player inventories.