Molten iron/copper on Nauvis and Calcite demand

[th0]

Hey there,

Having started with SA, I really love the new molten copper/iron recipes. They are neat and give the factory a more industrial look. Also, they provide more freedom, because one can decide to build a factory using molten metals, or the coventional way. On a side note, the recipes are probably also more UPS effective than electric smelting.

But they require insane amounts of Calcite. If you want to built your Nauvis factory entirely on molten metals, you'd need to ship in insane amounts via rocket from Vulkanus. You can gather some in orbit, but it's by far not enough.

So this requirement means all these large-scale molten metal factories are basically not gonna be built because of the logistics overhead. I think that's sad and takes away a beautiful mechanic from the game.

Maybe the amount of calcite could be reduced so that the orbit farming is enough for a larger base?

What are your thoughts?

[SirSmuggler]

AFAIK you can build as many space platforms as you want, and can make them as big as you want. So if Calcite can be harvested from orbit it should just be a mater of scaling up?

[th0]

yep, I also thought of that. Some guy on reddit noticed that asteroid yield from space platforms does not increase much with size (don't have the link right now), so many Platforms is a solution. But I don't think it's a good one, more a workaround.
My point is not that it's impossible to ramp up large-scale ore melting on Nauvis, just that it has rather high indirect costs compared to the classical way, which makes it somewhat uninteresting. Which is sad.
I'd love to have *some* extra complexity (your supply chain gets easier with molten metals after all), but not to the point to render it impractical to do at all.

[DeadMG]

This obviously depends on what you consider a "large" base, but you can supply 1kspm on Nauvis with like 500 calcite/minute which is fairly easily farmed in orbit once you have done Gleba and Vulcanus, and Calcite rockets carry huge amounts of the stuff that Vulcanus has enormous excesses of that is very practical to ship. I don't really understand how you can have a base big enough to need a huge amount of Calcite, and yet too small to handle shipping or orbital farming.

[th0]

Yes of course, I can also do a fairly large base with 0 calcite per minute if I just use smelting. My point is not that it is impossible or even too challenging. I'm just saying that the added complexity discourages this base layout (because you can perfectly produce plates and steel without melting), and there is no real reason for it to be that complicated. It doesn't add substantially to the gameplay, it just makes people use smelters instead of foundries on Nauvis.

[BlueTemplar]

Consider using them for only some products ?

Related :
Space Age - Low Density Structure Casting vastly inferior to Assembler Recipe

[CyberCider]

It's not like calcite spoils or something. Shipping it from Vulcanus is really easy and simple. It's more complex to get the calcite from the landing pad to your smelters, than it is to get it off Vulcanus. And rocket parts on Vulcanus are dirt cheap, especially for someone with a "large-scale" base that has all sorts of productivity boosts.

[mako00]

I'd love to have *some* extra complexity (your supply chain gets easier with molten metals after all), but not to the point to render it impractical to do at all.

I really don't see how this is impractical, or where the sweet spot in terms of complexity would be for you? If an extra ingredient is too much, what would be the right amount of complexity?

One calcite gives you 112.5 plates (150%^2) without any productivity modules), so a full rocket of calcite is enough for 56k of plates. And you already need a Vulcanus shuttle for the science packs.

If you manage to launch and ship one rocket per minute (which isn't hard at all), that is enough for 20 (!) blue belts of plates (and a lot more with modules), which is already well into megabase territory.

[rojcowles]

I'd love to have *some* extra complexity (your supply chain gets easier with molten metals after all), but not to the point to render it impractical to do at all.

I really don't see how this is impractical, or where the sweet spot in terms of complexity would be for you? If an extra ingredient is too much, what would be the right amount of complexity?

One calcite gives you 112.5 plates (150%^2) without any productivity modules), so a full rocket of calcite is enough for 56k of plates. And you already need a Vulcanus shuttle for the science packs.

If you manage to launch and ship one rocket per minute (which isn't hard at all), that is enough for 20 (!) blue belts of plates (and a lot more with modules), which is already well into megabase territory.

Yep, I went all in on molten metal on my Nauvis base transported via rail/fluid wagons from the ore patches with logistic bots delivering the Calcite from the landing pad and rapidly hit the Calcite wall with my starter Vulcanus cycler space platform which was multi-tasking, way too slow and small to keep up with Calcite demand so I just built a much larger, faster nuclear powered single purpose Calcite cycler platform that has one job, fly to Vulcanus, load up with 5k calcite, 10 rocket loads, fly back to Nauvis and loiter in orbit until all the Calcite has been shipped planetside at which point head back to Vulcanus and repeat.

Helps that I now think of rockets in 2.0 as relatively cheap and expendable sort of like Artillery shells so I have no issues expending 10 at a time for a batch of Calcite or earlier in game sending up 1000 U235 in 100 rockets to put 10 nuclear bombs on Vulcanus to help "persuade" the small Demolishers next to the starter area to ... errr ... leave.

Probably the most profligate and wasteful way to go about this but there was a certain satisfaction to placing a nuclear warhead on forehead and opening up a new area for exploitation. All from a nice safe distance.

[Illiander42]

The problem is that imports are rate-limited due to there only being one landing pad.

There's only so much you can pull out of it every second, even with logi bots.

[Tinyboss]

The problem is that imports are rate-limited due to there only being one landing pad.

There's only so much you can pull out of it every second, even with logi bots.

I've seen a lot of people say this is a problem. I haven't seen anyone show that it's a problem.

[Illiander42]

The problem is that imports are rate-limited due to there only being one landing pad.

There's only so much you can pull out of it every second, even with logi bots.

I've seen a lot of people say this is a problem. I haven't seen anyone show that it's a problem.

That's because it's a very large limit, and no-one's megabased that hard in SA yet.

[Koub]

The problem is that imports are rate-limited due to there only being one landing pad.

There's only so much you can pull out of it every second, even with logi bots.

I've seen a lot of people say this is a problem. I haven't seen anyone show that it's a problem.

That's because it's a very large limit, and no-one's megabased that hard in SA yet.

I've seen some testing here : https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... ests_real/
Apparently, 660k items/min is achievable with items that stack by 200.

[Illiander42]

I've seen some testing here : https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... ests_real/
Apparently, 660k items/min is achievable with items that stack by 200.

I missed that. (I stayed away from the internet for the first while so I could play SA "clean")