Factorio Forums

A few ideas:

1: Switches between the power lines
A switch which you can craft for activating/deactivating the power on the power line.
use = unknwon... atm

2: Electric doors
A door you can place betwen walls. The door dan be closed with electrical power (oh... there is the usage for the switch ).

3: An enemiedetector / warning lamp
Something that detects nearby enemys. If enemies are detected it sends power to ... maybe to an electric door(?).
And maybe it's blinking if enemies nearby

4: Electric fences/walls
An electric fence/wall powered by electricity which hurt enemies if touched.

edit:

5: Repair robots which repairs damaged buildings (like walls)

edit 2: (srsly.. this game has so many potential... its soo epic <3)

More ways to get electricity:
6: Wind turbine (if there is wind on this planet...?)

I like all these ideas, especially switches. I would love to be able to cut power or direct power in some fashion without having to break my power lines. I believe wind turbines has already been discussed and is planned for the future. An enemy detector would be cool, or making the radar a detector since it has no use at the moment. Since I put up walls around my factory with laser turrets I rarely see the natives and only know if I'm under attack as I can see a huge power surge for a brief moment.

if there is atmosphere, there is wind.

ficolas wrote:if there is atmosphere, there is wind.

There is wind. It even changes direction, just watch a running steam engine.

I also agree ... especially with switches (maybe even for the factories themselves)...
switching off the power would be extremly useful when I repair or upgrade my production facilities
(for example putting in new types of inserters) or when I build completely new production tracts
always better to have production not runing until the repair/upgrade/building is complete

DexterNemrod wrote:I also agree ... especially with switches (maybe even for the factories themselves)...
switching off the power would be extremly useful when I repair or upgrade my production facilities
(for example putting in new types of inserters) or when I build completely new production tracts
always better to have production not runing until the repair/upgrade/building is complete

I always managed to successfully manage my factory running-not-running state by either not supplying the source materials or not taking products.
Upgrading inserters - I don't see the need for having the factory stopped... Unless it would stop the belts
Removing power kills the light.

I would favor circuit-network-connectable switches instead.
"Software" power management is IMO way better that killing power to something.

I doubt that real-world production lines are stopped by killing their power any time.
I am sure they let them finish the next piece and end up in a clean state (in factorio that would be a smart inserter on the input or ourput)

And more ideas

7: There should be faster spliters (like the red and blue transport belt)

8: compact spliters for single way belts
Sometimes all my items are on one side of the belts... there should be something to put these items to both sides of the belts (like the spliter but only for one belt)

9: An (maybe bad) idea: Trains are atm a bit underpowerd... so my idea was that transport belts should be powered by some source of energy... maybe something like an engien which powers nearby belts (20x20 or 30x30 radius).
This engine can be powered by steam (yeah... another use of water ) and later in the game (with technology) by electrizity.

edit:

10: Inteligent transport belts
Like the inteligent inserter... changes direction if xy is true

11 Filter splitter

You can select one side of the splitter to act as a filter and the filter itself. All items in the filter drop at the filtered side, all others on the other side.

I think this should be ridiculous easy to implement and would enable cool stuff...

That sounds great! Want this in the game!

ssilk wrote:11 Filter splitter

You can select one side of the splitter to act as a filter and the filter itself. All items in the filter drop at the filtered side, all others on the other side.

I think this should be ridiculous easy to implement and would enable cool stuff...

... and make tricky and fun stuff pointless.

It would only act as a hyperspeed filter inserter.
If you really need that, you can put some filter inserters in parallel. 2.5 for a regular belt, 5 for fast one, 10 for the glowing one.
But you should be good with a contraption that blocks one lane and lets the other one though.

(Try running a belt into an underground belt entrance from a side.. Combine with a splitter for a lane splitter)

MF- wrote:It would only act as a hyperspeed filter inserter.

Na, it wouldn't work the same. You can filter out only up to five items. The filter splitter filters that items you want on one belt, and the others you won't on the other. I think this is different...

(Try running a belt into an underground belt entrance from a side.. Combine with a splitter for a lane splitter)

I tried to imagine that. Do you have a picture, how do you mean that?

BTW: Exporting of selectable map-areas as "image" and/or "loadable map" would be a really great feature, because it would enable to really talk about such special things.

Unfortunately I have been playing minecraft till now.
I doubt I'll be able to start factorio today..

Finally.
Note: The setup on the right will eat one item from each lane during initialization and won't survive items in the middle.

Ah. cool. Didn't notice till now, that the underground belt behaves like this.
.... aaaand didn't work as expected, cause my intention was, that it works also, when there is a bottleneck/jam. When the filtered output has jam, it goes into the left/right lane. With a splitter , the input just stops and no output will be done - but that's what I wanted.

Hmmmmm....

Perhaps it could work in another way: Is it possible to measure the traffic on a belt? something like a sensor.

I mean: the following two things:

- Flow (=items per second/minute)
- Densitiy (=items per meter, how much items are laying inside the sensor?)
- and perhaps a divider: Density / Items per second . This can be also called speed, see (*)

For every measurement, a limit can be set so you can put on and off smart inserters.

So, if the Speed goes down, I can switch off the input. Would be really cool and enables something like a storage. if speed is low, the inserters for the storage are turned on, and if Density is low, the inserters for the output from the storage are turned on.



(*) Flow is items / time. Density is items / lenght. The divider is then

Density
----------
Flow

which is

items/length
-----------------
items/time

so items can be reduced and remains as

length
----------
time

which is just speed (think of km/sec).

This accidental underground belt feature was more obvious with the old placeholder underground belt graphics and kept because of it's utility.
When one lane of the lane-splitter setup is blocked, it shouldn't block the other one.

I think it should be possible to detect a "belt almost empty" and "belt almost full" situations with the current smart inserters and smart chests.
One of the threads here also contains designs for logic gates built using the smart technology.

PS: I also needed a device with a similar functionality, so I built an "item capacitor"
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=8&t=745

MF- wrote:PS: I also needed a device with a similar functionality, so I built an "item capacitor"
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=8&t=745

Same concept except you can split up the 2 end and have tons of storage between.
So you do the same thing with inserters facing the other way.
They can easily fill a fast belt and fully upgraded bots easily take care of it.