Factorio Forums

I was putting together a calculator based on linear programming, and so I figured I'd put it through its paces to tell me how many lines of raw ore it took to make a full belt of iron ore. Joke is on me, because the result turned out that it didn't want any raw stiratite, saphirite, or jivolite. Nope, the most efficient way to make iron ore was to slurp up water and turn it into slag and thence to slag slurry.

Curious, I asked it to do 210/minute of each of the science packs. 2500/minute each of Stiratite, Jivolite, and Rubyite, 9500/minute of coal... and 86 million/minute of water, or somewhere in the range of 1200 offshore pumps. Granted, I did tell it that water wasn't so costly as the ores, but the ratio is 90 water costs as much as 1 Stiratite, which isn't entirely horrible.

Well, 50 mineral sludge makes 16 iron ore with saphirite/jivolite in four seconds or has a 40% chance to create just a single iron ore in eight seconds. This doesn't account for the large field of crystallization buildings consuming dozens of megawatts of power along with the coal consumed for thousands of filters in the hopes you get a full belt of ores from water.

I'd imagine that the Seablock mod buffed it to 100% given those abysmal odds to get anything half decent going on in a normal game.

I'm not running these stats with seablock enabled (I aborted the last seablock playthrough when I realized that Angel's had gotten much more complicated since the last time I played, and thus I needed more practice with it first).

As I said, I started out with a basic preference to minimize input resources, weighting them according to roughly how hard they were to get. If I punch in an objective that seeks to minimize power consumption, the results are more reasonable. Although I think it's now too scared to do anything with the crushed stone--I don't know if that will change when I actually compute mining drills properly.