Factorio Forums

This is probably not really a gameplay question, yet I can't think of any other place to ask. Sorry about that.

And anyway, I should probably first explain what I mean by "integrated production": I noticed that most green circuits go into making red & blue ones. So I've built assembly lines that will make red & green circuits from base materials. Copper iron plastic go in, red circuits come out, and in my mental model, the amount of green chips that are made and destroyed in the process is of no concern. Same for blue circuits.

The problem I'm having: when using a planning tool like factoriolab, I always have to subtract the intermediaries I don't care about. Well, at least subtraction is easy. Figuring out how much iron needs to go into the red and blue assembly line, respectively, is a bit more work. It's getting tedious. I can't believe I'm the first one having that problem... is there some feature or option I'm missing, or are there other planners that will make it easier for me to cope with the issue? I guess I want to add a custom recipe or something along these lines?

Laie wrote: Sun Feb 28, 2021 7:01 pm The problem I'm having: when using a planning tool like factoriolab, I always have to subtract the intermediaries I don't care about. Well, at least subtraction is easy. Figuring out how much iron needs to go into the red and blue assembly line, respectively, is a bit more work. It's getting tedious.

Sometimes you can get the numbers you need by looking at the breakdown of items being consumed. More generally, though I don't know if it really changes the "tediousness", the simplest approach I have found is to plan separate production areas separately. "Ignoring" ingredients supports this - click on the item in the list to toggle.

As a contrived example, say you want a production area that takes in electronic circuits, advanced circuits and processing units to produce level 3 modules. If you "ignore" those three ingredients, the plan will represent a factory that takes those inputs, and the figures will be what you need from production areas making them. You can then use those figures to (eg) plan a production area for each; an electronic circuit production area taking in iron and copper plate, etc.

Of course, you may want a given production area to supply multiple production areas, in which case its plan must be based on the sum of the requirements of production areas that consume the items.