Factorio Forums

Cribbit wrote:Inexact numbers, but:

It takes about 8 fields using just prod miners (no beacons) to match the output of a single field with beacons. Thus you have 8 times the resources invested for the same output of ore. Your fields will empty faster but you will need fewer of them running at once. If you've got 20 miners each with 3 prod 3's that's 60 prod3s per field. That means you have over 400 prod3 modules in use that you wouldn't need to have if you had beacons. Half a million iron, a million copper, a hundred thousand coal, almost 2 million petroleum. That's how much you're wasting on every 8 fields that could be 1 field, if each field is just 20 miners. It's an astronomical amount of resources that could massively expand your base, allowing you to take advantage of more resources.

Right now you have to keep track of the status of 8 times as many fields as you would have to. Even if that 1 field takes a little more focus it's 1/8th the number of fields.

it takes 2 not 8 because you get a 45% drop in speed or rather a drop of 30% in speed if you factor in the productivity bonus, and the great thing about circuit conditions is you don't need to monitor them you can use speakers to send the player alerts. It's also easier to set up 20 fields/stations in one go than it is to set up 1 field now and then 10 times because you're ready you have the stuff you're in the routine etc. Also a million ore here and there wouldn't do squat for base size it'd go into research and evaporate.

JohnyDL wrote:

Cribbit wrote:Inexact numbers, but:

It takes about 8 fields using just prod miners (no beacons) to match the output of a single field with beacons. Thus you have 8 times the resources invested for the same output of ore. Your fields will empty faster but you will need fewer of them running at once. If you've got 20 miners each with 3 prod 3's that's 60 prod3s per field. That means you have over 400 prod3 modules in use that you wouldn't need to have if you had beacons. Half a million iron, a million copper, a hundred thousand coal, almost 2 million petroleum. That's how much you're wasting on every 8 fields that could be 1 field, if each field is just 20 miners. It's an astronomical amount of resources that could massively expand your base, allowing you to take advantage of more resources.

Right now you have to keep track of the status of 8 times as many fields as you would have to. Even if that 1 field takes a little more focus it's 1/8th the number of fields.

it takes 2 not 8 because you get a 45% drop in speed or rather a drop of 30% in speed if you factor in the productivity bonus, and the great thing about circuit conditions is you don't need to monitor them you can use speakers to send the player alerts. It's also easier to set up 20 fields/stations in one go than it is to set up 1 field now and then 10 times because you're ready you have the stuff you're in the routine etc. Also a million ore here and there wouldn't do squat for base size it'd go into research and evaporate.

And how many speed modules will be in the beacons and how much resources do they cost?

Note that the work you do for 8 fields is 8 times as much but it also lasts 8 times longer. So actually it's the same amount of work. EXCEPT with beacons you don't get the whole patch and have to tear down and rebuild the field at least once. So actually the beacon setup is twice as much work. I guess putting beacons around the ore field where they don't block any miner is an option. But then they only work at the start when the number of miners is usually enough to fill the belts anyway.

Personally late game I want each ore patch to last as long as possible. It's not how many miners you have to place to keep up production but how often. You have a factory to produce more miners and modules and they will fill up buffer chests over time. Late game you just put down a blueprint and get an outpost build without having to worry about the resources. Don't forget you also get miners and modules back from exhausted ore patches. So it isn't 1 million iron ore to make a new outpost but rather 1 million iron ore since the start of the game so you have enough miners total to make the outpost. On an ore per second basis that becomes rather trivial compared to e.g. science production.

The work maybe, but I don't have to reconfigure my inventory, and you'll know if you've done any sort of manual job the first item you make by hand each day takes longer and is of a lower quality than one an hour in, so if it takes me 20 minutes to get ready, have my blueprints set up, requests right, get the items to me, configure my hot bar, etc. and I have to do that once rather than 8 times that saves me 2 hours over all.

... wait are we on the same side this time Mrvn? :O

FasterJump wrote:Lubricant could be used to speed up mining drills.

Yeah, that would be great.
It would make more uses for the stuff, not just for Express conveyer belts.
Oh and do tier 3 assemblers use lubricant in their recipe, I can't remember

JohnyDL wrote:The work maybe, but I don't have to reconfigure my inventory, and you'll know if you've done any sort of manual job the first item you make by hand each day takes longer and is of a lower quality than one an hour in, so if it takes me 20 minutes to get ready, have my blueprints set up, requests right, get the items to me, configure my hot bar, etc. and I have to do that once rather than 8 times that saves me 2 hours over all.

... wait are we on the same side this time Mrvn? :O

Oh, that just means you have to think bigger. Don't just build one mining outpost with a 10 million ore patch. Build 10 of them at a time even if you only need one now. Then you can leave iron ore alone for a few days.

Note: At some point it makes sense to fill a train with the material needed for an outpost, including a few roboports and construction bots. Then just build the train tracks, plant a station, call for the train, place the blueprint and build the first roboport and unloading of material using the personal roboport. No need to have miners and belts and such in your inventory.

olafthecat wrote:Oh and do tier 3 assemblers use lubricant in their recipe, I can't remember

No they need AM2 and speed modules.

JohnyDL wrote:

Cribbit wrote:Inexact numbers, but:

It takes about 8 fields using just prod miners (no beacons) to match the output of a single field with beacons. Thus you have 8 times the resources invested for the same output of ore. Your fields will empty faster but you will need fewer of them running at once. If you've got 20 miners each with 3 prod 3's that's 60 prod3s per field. That means you have over 400 prod3 modules in use that you wouldn't need to have if you had beacons. Half a million iron, a million copper, a hundred thousand coal, almost 2 million petroleum. That's how much you're wasting on every 8 fields that could be 1 field, if each field is just 20 miners. It's an astronomical amount of resources that could massively expand your base, allowing you to take advantage of more resources.

Right now you have to keep track of the status of 8 times as many fields as you would have to. Even if that 1 field takes a little more focus it's 1/8th the number of fields.

it takes 2 not 8 because you get a 45% drop in speed or rather a drop of 30% in speed if you factor in the productivity bonus, and the great thing about circuit conditions is you don't need to monitor them you can use speakers to send the player alerts. It's also easier to set up 20 fields/stations in one go than it is to set up 1 field now and then 10 times because you're ready you have the stuff you're in the routine etc. Also a million ore here and there wouldn't do squat for base size it'd go into research and evaporate.

Speed is additive, not multiplicative. You go from 500% to 455% on the -45% speed from 3 prod 3's. (compared to the 100% to 55% without speed beacons, which comes to 8.27 times faster with beacons)

It's not just a million ores, it's a 1.5 million ores plus 2 million petroleum per 160 miners (approximately). If you're at the scale you claim to be at you should have thousands of miners. It's about 4000 of EVERY science - including space (4 rocket launches). For every 160 miners that you have. So if you have 1600 miners that's 40,000 of every science, including space science.

The issue isn't setup and teardown (which is trivial with blueprints and bots), it's the sheer opportunity cost. That much raw resources could be more assemblers, more outposts. When you have fewer resources doing the same amount of work it's not just the resources saved but what those resources could be doing at the same time.

Koub wrote:I'd rather have a game mechanism like Angel's infinite ores, coupled with a research that would improve the yield of the infinite part, starting very low.

+1 ... I'm all for that.

I hoped the original planned Dirty Mining (before they abandoned the idea in favor of just having Mining Productivity) would have been like that.... where once you are finished mining the surface ore some infinite patches reaching deeper with a certain yield show up. That way you could leave the infrastructure of the outpost in place forever but you'd have to invest on some additional infrastructure to deal with the dirty ore of the infinite ore patch.

Than they wouldn't have had to fiddle around that much with the resource generation... which somehow feels quite weird now because of how it's unrealistic that you are stranded exactly at the spot of the planet with the worst resource yield... while it gets better and better and better the further away you are from your base.

MeduSalem wrote:I hoped the original planned Dirty Mining (before they abandoned the idea in favor of just having Mining Productivity) would have been like that...

I think they delayed it because they wanted to release 1.0 ASAP. They never said they abandoned it.

rail network/plans last screenshot and annotations I made, each target should be good for at least 3 days of continuous play time (I hope, or I need to go much bigger). and still not ready to do blue science at scale fail and thus far I've been using only personal roboport mark one and running back and forth cause I don't want my logistic network stretching everywhere since I only have some hundred bots and I've got them building up the base which is mostly blueprints and time not, frankly, a mess since it doesn't have to deal with world generation

Note that your only connection between the right and left halves of your train network is in the bottmom middle - you should add more in the middle of top, because if you don't later that section of track could become quite congested at scale.

FasterJump wrote:

MeduSalem wrote:I hoped the original planned Dirty Mining (before they abandoned the idea in favor of just having Mining Productivity) would have been like that...

I think they delayed it because they wanted to release 1.0 ASAP. They never said they abandoned it.

Dirty mining. (Way to get more resources from mining posts at a cost of additional industry, logistics requirements and investment)
We decided to not do this, the mining productivity research seems to be solving the problem.

Source

The design is such that I don't expect more trains than I can have in my parking spot out in the world picking up deliveries at once (and I have room for a bigger parking spot). The system is a tree it starts at the bottom middle everything is delivered to the bottom middle so even if I added other connections the bottom middle is where everything ends up anyway. So having connections between branches elsewhere doesn't actually improve anything it just means there are two routes to a few outposts but not all of them, there are a few places where trains will try to repath to other stations using that link right now (copper and coal because the tree is unbalanced and there aren't 2+ of each patch on each side (eventually each major branch needs this)) but as the tree actually picks up all those patches and expands even further out and the near patches deplete it will become less and less likely the closest open train station crosses that connection

I agree with better drill because once you get to the megabase stage outposts get becomes a chore so having a mining drill with a bigger area means less time out posting and more time building
The mining drill mkII Could the same as bobs electric large area mining drill mkII with an area of 7x7 and I think has a speed that is almost double that of the base mining drill

TRUEpicness wrote:I agree with better drill because once you get to the megabase stage outposts get becomes a chore so having a mining drill with a bigger area means less time out posting and more time building
The mining drill mkII Could the same as bobs electric large area mining drill mkII with an area of 7x7 and I think has a speed that is almost double that of the base mining drill

No. The large area drill is (mostly?) just larger area. There is also a faster mk2 drill for more speed.

For speed you want as many drills per tile as possible. So you pack them as dense as possible and then any larger area just means they overlap more. Other than maybe adding a few extra drills on the outside that will be quickly exhausted a larger area gains you nothing. Not unless you space them far enough apart to add beacons and make up the reduced overall speed with them. A larger area would allow placing beacons between miners and mining all ore without moving them.

the base drill has a mining power of 3 and a speed of 0.5 and the large area drill from bobs has an area of 7x7, mining power of 4.5 and a speed of 1 so it is better than the base mining drill

Oh glorious, I'm so happy I found this forum so I didn't have to feel awkward about making this post myself. Quick preface, I haven't read everything so if I'm massively missing the mark, let me know.

So I basically quit Factorio due to the mining issues. I've been waiting for dirty mining and have been incredibly sad to see that it's officially been dropped, as I abhor running modded servers. Usually they're so modded that it doesn't even feel like they're Factorio to me anymore, espeically the ones that just have endless recolors of existing models. Considering that I don't have a choice now (either I won't play Factorio because it doesn't have deep mining or I won't play it because I have to run mods, so I'm just not happy regardless and have to sacrifice /somewhere/), I'll swallow my pride and be okay with mods /just this once/!

Just to be clear, Mining Productivity research doesn't make things better for me because the only thing I enjoy doing in Factorio is setting up mines in the first place, and as of now, that process is overwhelmingly shallow. Stick miners and belts down in the same grid with the same blueprint, stick conveyor belts down, run them to trains, done. With the new blueprint system we have now, it's so utterly trivial that I just feel useless, and the research we've been given feels like one of the most blatant cop-outs I've ever seen.

Anyway, I did about fifteen minutes of research and found these two mods: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Reika/DirtyMining (Spotlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjOPO2Y3AUo ) and https://mods.factorio.com/mods/VortiK/v ... ore-mining (Spotlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtJiC6eGsqI ) . Both do elements of what I think we've all wanted, but neither, by themselves, cover everything. If we combine them somehow, though, I think we'll get pretty much the exact feature we've been looking for since this stuff was announced back in .14 or .13.

I originally imagined it by *all* ore patches turning into "dirty ore" patches once they expire, and *all* of them acting like oil, but each giving such an individually small amount that going for a 1x1 tile is useless. All the Dirty Ore patches'd act like oil and be given a random(ish) starting value. "Deep core miners" would've covered a 7x7-10x10 area and cumulatively produce about 1-1.5x of a single electric mine forever at minimal density once the ore is depleted to its minimum levels. The end result would be that a field originally consisting of 50 or so electric drills producing 50 or so ore per second would now be covered by about ten core drills producing 50 ore per second at first, but trailing off to ten ore per second, and preventing the player from getting more than that would come down to the miners being physically *huge* so you can't physically place a great many of them close together.

Once the dirty ore is mined, it has to be taken to some sort of washing facility that requires water. They'd take a nearly-unreasonable amount of time to process one dirty ore into a clean ore (with no by-products), on the order of three to five seconds, thus forcing the player to construct an absolutely massive amount of the things. This is where the complication comes in; they'd need to make so many and have to have it near a body of water that they'd need to make a new shape every time since their own water supply (be it a lake or a particularly large train) gets in the way. This is what had me so excited!

Even getting the ore in and out of the washing plants would be an epic challenge; I imagine constantly having pipes on both sides of conveyor belts with long-arm inserters reaching over them. All of this stuff still requires electricity, so there'd be power lines everywhere, and everything'd just /barely/ reach. It'd be one of the single most convoluted setups manageable, on par with the kinds of setups commonly seen in the centers of megafactories, except now they'd be scattered *everywhere*!

The electricity requirements would obviously be immense due to the sheer number of entities involved, so it'd even given an excuse to have *dedicated nuclear plants* running 2-3 outposts, but not so immense that that's a requirement; a large installation of boilers should be able to manage one outpost.

So now we got two trains (or one big complicated one with mixed wagons!) bringing liquid in and ore out, something for players like me to do besides just endlessely blueprinting everything and letting construction robots do our jobs for us, and even more complicated-looking factories. I don't see the downside aside from this not being a core game feature.

To be clear, here's a bullet-point list of what I'm hoping to have happen:

* When an ore tile is depleted, it has a 100% chance of spawning a "dirty ore tile" where it was before.
* Dirty Ore Tiles act like oil with a minimum yield that produces ore at 1/100th the speed an electric miner can output.
* Deep Core Miners cover a 10x10 area and can produce the output of a single electric miner once the Dirty Ore reaches minimum yield, assuming the Core Miner's influence is fully saturated.
* Deep Core Miners produce Dirty Iron Ore, Dirty Copper Ore, and so on, with no other by-products.
* The Dirty Ore must be taken to a washing station.
* Washing stations are like Assemblers but only have five recipes: "Wash Iron Ore", "Wash Copper Ore", and so on, which take one Dirty Ore and some water as input and one Totally Normal Vanilla IronCopperCoalWhicheverOre as output.
* Washing stations take at least three seconds to process one ore, which forces the player to build a massive amount of them to handle one mining site.
* Washing stations require *large* amounts of water, making an ore patch located near a lake extremely valuable or making trains with a minimum of 3-5 liquid wagons a requirement to handle 24/7 operation of a typical site.
* The electrical demand of each part isn't too massive, but the cumulative total of all the Deep Core Miners and Washing Stations should be large enough to warrant a dedicated power plant (which is where some of the train-water goes). Solar basically isn't an option except for small Deep Core plants, Steam can realistically power one large plant, and Nuclear should realistically handle 2-3.
* Due to the power requirements, pollution is obviously going to be massive. Make it even worse. This stuff should attract biters up the wazoo!
* If you're doing graphics too, please make all of the new buildings visually distinct and not just recolors of stuff that already exists. I want this to feel like a core game feature, not like Bob's Mods. (No offense meant at him, I get that his playerbase is about game mechanics and doesn't care as much about graphics, but I personally care a lot about graphics.)



Afterthoughts:

* We can make this even more complicated but within reason: We can make it so that, in addition to electricity, Core Miners require gears (or "drill bits" that are basically just made from ten gears or something) and burn them like other entities burn fuel, and they stop operating once depleted. This way we'd now need two conveyor belts running to every miner!
* Should the Deep Core miners require lubricant to be piped to them?
* I personally think having byproducts *with no immediate uses* are a bad idea because in my mind, the water'd just wash all that away in the first place. However, maybe it's worth considering a "dirty water" output that can be recycled back into clean water to help power the outpost, provided the player's willing to invest in yet another layer of complexity by adding "distillery stations". The purpose of those stations would be to feed extra water (and possibly wood and stone now that that's logically easy to scrape off the bottom of a tank) back into that same outpost to reduce the load on the import trains. It definitely shouldn't be enough to make the outpost self-sufficient, but it might take the requirement from five liquid wagons down to four or three, as well as reduce the need for as much incoming coal if the outpost is being powered by boilers. Personally I like this idea, but I feel like it might be asking too much of mod developers on top of everything else that's already here.



So there. Does anyone have any feedback? More importantly, can anyone take what I've linked to and make what I've written up into reality?

Nofew wrote:...

Huge wall of text but it seams you want something that is already implemented in Angel's mods
Namely Angel's Infinite Ores and Angel's refining. Not exactly as you expect but still pretty similar.
And if paired with Bob's mining you can have Mining Drills of different grades.