Factorio Forums

With the recent DyTech updates, it's become rather easily possible to boost machine speeds to incredible speeds. However, my productivity on these machines seems to be quite literally unable to keep up.

The crafting speed of these machines is currently well over 200, though 100+ seems to already be enough to trigger this problem. I've had the problem occur on both Electric Furnaces and Assembly Machines. They had +240% and +200% productivity, respectively. When their speeds are high enough, and their recipe's time is low enough, this makes the machine seemingly work harder than the game can handle. For instance, when I dropped 200 zinc ore, I received 401 zinc plate, NOT 680. This means I was only receiving +100% productivity, not +240%.

When I lowered the machine's speed afterwards though, is when the real problem began: the green bar slowed down properly, but the purple productivity bar kept on going at its fastest speed, churning out zinc like never before, whilst the green bar was just giving me maybe 1 zinc per second.

At first I thought that perhaps the productivity was somehow trying to catch up, to make up for all those bars it had missed when the machine was at 200+ speed. This should mean that eventually, the problem should automatically fix itself. I've tried for quite a while, but it didn't seem to fix itself, and I felt like I had already received way more zinc plate than I originally gave it zinc ore for, even at +240% productivity. Still it does feel like the top speed involves filling one full bar per game update tick.

The only way I have found to fix this, is to replace the machine, and not have it work at these tremendous speeds.

While this obviously is not a problem in vanilla, the possibilities are there for mods, and I feel like this case can at least be handled a bit smoother.

Edit: After further testing it does seem like it's just catching up, and it will fix itself once this happens. Depending on the amount of boost and the time ran, this can take a long time though. Also, more importantly, this can occur between different recipes. If you up the speed on a cheap recipe, and then lower the speed as you change to an expensive recipe, you'll get the missed productivity with the expensive recipe..

Appears to be the same issue as here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 11&t=14005
Changelog for 0.12.3 mentioned this was addressed, though I had not specifically retested it again.

The fundamental issue basically seems to be with actions that take less than 1 tick.
I remember @Bobingabout mentioning a similar issue with gun-turrets with extremely high firing rates will also only fire 1 shot per tick.

The reason here is that with machines with such fast crafting speeds, low time recipies hit cap which is 60 items per second. Cap is present because there can be only 1 action per 1 tick and there are 60 ticks per second. If production time of any item goes lower than 1/60 of the second no matter how lower it gets itll always only produce 1 per tick and wait for next tick to start producing next itme. I doubt there is possiblity to fix that seeing how game code is written and it is basically non existant in vanilla game.

oLaudix wrote:The reason here is that with machines with such fast crafting speeds, low time recipies hit cap which is 60 items per second. Cap is present because there can be only 1 action per 1 tick and there are 60 ticks per second. If production time of any item goes lower than 1/60 of the second no matter how lower it gets itll always only produce 1 per tick and wait for next tick to start producing next itme. I doubt there is possiblity to fix that seeing how game code is written and it is basically non existant in vanilla game.

That is indeed the problem here It can easily be fixed so a machine can produce more than 1 item per game tick if the progress or productivity bar progresses enough.

I'm not sure it is possible to get the productivity high enough in vanilla without doing maths, but in theory if you filled a machine with Productivity modules, and surrounded it by effect transmittion of speed, it should be possible to reach high productivity with insane speeds... so this MAY be an issue that can effect vanilla too.

DyTech and Bob's mods just make it easier with modules that can give +80% speed or +40% productivity on one module.

I took a look at this last night and found something very interesting.

In order to reproduce this the machine needs to have a productivity % so high that it produces > 100% of the needed energy for a single recipe in a single tick. When a machine is running this fast with this high of a productivity bonus the rounding errors throw off the final results by massive margins.

In summary: if you're planning on doing this to an assembling machine - don't expect reliable results from the machine.

For now I'm going to move this to known issues since my original idea on how to "fix" this won't work due to the rounding issues.